THE LETTERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE, edited by Aldous Huxley and with his perceptive Introduction, was published in 1933. Since then Lawrence has never ceased to be the centre of controversy. As a letter-writer he was no less unusual than he was as a novelist, poet, essayist and critic of literature and morals. This reissue of the letters makes available again a collection which reflects over twenty years the growth of Lawrence’s qualities—profound and charming, or demoniacal and maddening—as a man and a writer.

THE LETTERS

OF

D. H. LAWRENCE

THE LETTERS

OF

Dear Mr. Hopkin,—

Dear Mr. Smith,—

D. H. Lawrence.

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Mac,— ,

D. H. Lawrence.

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Pinker,—

Zu else

Dear Eddie,—

D. H. Lawrence.

D. H. Lawrence.

- 1

My dear Catherine,—

O. H. Lawrence.

D. H. Lawrence.

My dear Pinker,—

D. IL Lawrence.

Deap Rosalind,—

Deaf Curtis Brown,—

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Jack,—

Dear Jack,—

Dear Brett.—

Dear Trigant Burrow,—

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Stieglitz,—

O! Start a Revolution!

Dear Enid,—

My dear Maria,—

White Fox, 704-5, 769 ("this silly W. F. blarney”)

THE LETTERS

OF

D. H. LAWRENCE

EDITED

AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

ALDOUS HUXLEY

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD MELBOURNE if LONDON :? TORONTO

CONTENTS

Page

“WOMEN IN L'OVE”

CEYLON, AUSTRALIA,

NEW AND OLD MEXICO

THE PHCENIX

BACK TO MEXICO

SPOTORNO: VILLA MIRENDA

“lady chatterley’s lover”

THE PAINTINGS, “PANSIES”

BANDOL, VENCE,

DEATH

NOTE

INDEX

589

855

859

D. H LAWRENCE

Frontispiece

A*

INTRODUCTION

“I always say, my motto is "Art for my sake? ' The words are from a letter written by Lawrence before the war. “If I want to write, I write—and if I don't want to, I won't. The difficulty is to find exactly the form one’s passion—work is produced by passion with me, like kisses—is it with your — wants to take.

⁴⁴Art for my sake." But even though for my sake, still art. Lawrence was always and unescapably an artist. Yes, un-escapably is the word; for there were moments when he wanted to escape from his destiny. I wish from the bottom of my heart that the fates had not stigmatized me ‘writer.’ It is a sickening business." But against the decree of fate there is no appeal. Nor was it by any means all the time that Lawrence wanted to appeal. His complaints were only occasional, and he was provoked to make them, not by any hatred ol art as such, but by hatred of the pains and humiliations incidental to practising as an artist. Writing to Edward Garnett, Why, why," he asks, “should we be plagued with literature and suchlike tomfoolery? Why can't we live decent, honourable lives, without the critics in the Little Theatre fretting us?' The publication of a work of art is always the exposure of a nakedness, the throwing of something delicate and sensitive to tl “asses, apes and dogs.” Mostly, however, Lawrence loved his destiny, loved the art of which he was a master—as who, that is a master, can fail to do? Besides, art, as he practised it, and as, at the bottom, every artist, even the most pharisaically pure practises it, was “art for my sake.' It was useful to him, pragmatically helpful. “One sheds one’s sicknesses in books-repeats and presents again one’s emotions to be nla  -

them." And, anyhow, liking or disliking were finally irrelevant in the face of the fact that Lawrence was in a real sense, possessed by his creative genius. He could not help himself. "I am doing a novel,” he writes in an early letter, "a novel which I have never grasped. Damn its eyes, there I am at p. 145 and I've no notion what it’s about. I hate it. F. says it is good. But it’s like a novel in a foreign language I don’t know very well—I can only just make out what it's about.” To this strange force within him, to this power that created his works of art, there was nothing to do but submit. Lawrence submitted, completely and with reverence. "I often think one ought to be able to pray before one works—and then leave it to the Lord. Isn’t it hard work to come to real grips with one’s imagination—throw everything overboard. I always feel as though I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me—and it’s rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.” Conversely, he might have added, one has to be terribly an artist, terribly conscious of "inspiration” and the compelling force of genius, to be religious as Lawrence was religious.

It is impossible to write about Lawrence except as an artist. He was an artist first of all, and the fact of his being an artist explains a life which seems, if you forget it, inexplicably strange. In Son of Woman, Mr. Middleton Murry has written at great length about Lawrence—but about a Lawrence whom you would never suspect, from reading that curious essay in destructive hagiography, of being an artist. For Mr. Murry almost completely ignores the fact that his subject—his victim, I had almost said—was one whom "the fates had stigmatized ‘writer.’ " His book is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark —for all its metaphysical subtleties and its Freudian ingenuities, very largely irrelevant. The absurdity of his critical method becomes the more manifest when we reflect that nobody would ever have heard of a Lawrence who was not an artist.

An artist is the sort of artist he is, because he happens to possess certain gifts. And he leads the sort of life he does in fact lead, because he is an artist, and an artist with a particular kind of mental endowment. Now there are general abilities and there are special talents. A man who is born with a great share of some special talent is probably less deeply affected by nurture than one whose ability is generalized. His gift is his fate, and he follows a predestined course, from which no ordinary power can deflect him. In spite of Helvetius and Dr. Watson, it seems pretty obvious that no amount of education—including under that term everything from the CEdipus complex to the English Public School system—could have prevented Mozart from being a musician, or musicianship from being the central fact in Mozart’s life. And how would a different education have modified the expression of, say, Blake’s gift? It is, of course, impossible to answer. One can only express the unverifiable conviction that an art so profoundly individual and original, so manifestly “inspired, would have remained fundamentally the same whatever (within reasonable limits) had been the circumstances of Blake’s upbringing. Lawrence, as Mr. F. R. Leavis insists, has many affinities with Blake. “He had the same gift of knowing what he was interested in, the same power of distinguishing his own feelings and emotions from conventional sentiment, the same ‘terrifying honesty Like Blake, like any man possessed of great special talents, he was predestined by his gifts. Explanations of him in terms of a Freudian hypothesis of nurture may be interesting, but they do not explain. I hat Lawrence was profoundly affected by his love for his mother and by her excessive love for him, is obvious to anyone who has read Sons and Lovers. None the less it is, to me at any rate, almost equally obvious that even if his mother had died when he was a child, Lawrence would still have been, essentially and Fundamentally, Lawrence. Lawrence’s biography does not account for Lawrence's achievement. On the contrary, his achievement or rather the gift that made the achievement possible, accounts for a great deal of his biography. He lived as he lived, because he was, intrinsically and from birth, what he was. > we would Write intelligibly of Lawrence, we must answer, with all their implications, two questions: first, what sort of gifts did he have? and secondly, how did the possession of these gifts affect the way he responded to experience?

Lawrence’s special and characteristic gift was an extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called unknown modes of being.” He was always intensely aware of the mystery of the world, and the mystery was always for him a numen, divine. Lawrence could never forget, as most of us almost continuously forget, the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind. This special sensibility was accompanied by a prodigious power of rendering the immediately experienced otherness in terms of literary art.

Such was Lawrence's peculiar gift. His possession of it accounts for many things. It accounts, to begin with, for his attitude towards sex. His particular experiences as a son and as a lover may have intensified his preoccupation with the subject;, but they certainly did not make it. Whatever his experiences, Lawrence must have been preoccupied with sex; his gift made it inevitable. For Lawrence, the significance of the sexual experience was this: that, in it, the immediate, nonmental knowledge of divine otherness is brought, so to speak, to a focus—a focus of darkness. Parodying Matthew Arnold’s famous formula, we may say that sex is something not ourselves that makes for—not righteousness, for the essence of religion is not righteousness; there is a spiritual world, as Kierkegaard insists, beyond the ethical—rather, that makes for life, for divineness, for union with the mystery. Paradoxically, this something not ourselves is yet a something lodged within us; this quintessence of otherness is yet the quintessence of our proper being. "And God the Father, the Inscrutable, the Unknowable, we know in the flesh, in Woman. She is the door for our in-going and our out-coming. In her we go back to the Father; but like the witnesses of the transfiguration, blind and unconscious.” Yes, blind and unconscious; otherwise it is a revelation, not of divine otherness, but of very human evil. "The embrace of love, which should bring darkness and oblivion, would with these lovers (the hero and heroine of one of Poe’s tales) be a daytime thing, bringing more heightened consciousness, visions, spectrum-visions, prismatic. The evil thing that daytime love-making is, and all sexpalaver!¹ How Lawrence hated Eleonora and Ligeia and Roderick Usher and all such soulful Mrs. Shandies, male as well as female! What a horror, too, he had of all Don Juans, all knowing sensualists and conscious libertines! (About the time he was writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover he read the memoirs of Casanova, and was profoundly shocked.) And how bitterly he loathed the Wilhelm-Meisterish view of love as an education, as a means to culture, a Sandow-exerciser for the soul! To use love in this way, consciously and deliberately, seemed to Lawrence wrong, almost a blasphemy. 'It seems to me queer,” he says to a fellow writer, “that you prefer to present men chiefly—as if you cared for women not so much for what they were in themselves as for what the men saw in them. So that after all in your work women seem not to have an existence, save they are the projections of the men . . . It’s the positivity of women you seem to deny-—make them sort of instrumental.” The instrumentality of Wilhelm Meister s women shocked Lawrence profoundly.

(Here, in a parenthesis, let me remark on the fact that Lawrence’s doctrine is constantly invoked by people, of whom Lawrence himself would passionately have disapproved, sn defence of a behaviour, which he would have found deplorable or even revolting. I hat this should have happened is by no means, of course, a condemnation of the Goctrine. j he c ame philosophy of life may be good or bad according as rhe person who accepts it and lives by it is intrinsically fine or case. Tartufe’s doctrine was the same, after all, as Pascal’s. I here have been refined fetish-worshippers, and unspeakab. y swinis h Christians. To the preacher of a new way of life the most depressing thing that can happen is, surely, success. For success permits him to see how those he has converted distort and debase and make ignoble parodies of his teaching. It Francis of Assisi had lived to be a hundred, what bitterness he would have tasted! Happily for the saint, he died at forty-five, still relatively undisillusioned, because still on the threshold of the great" success of his order. Writers influence their readers, preachers their auditors—but always, at bottom, to be more themselves. If the reader’s self happens to be intrinsically similar to the writer’s, then the influence is what the writer would wish it to be. If he is intrinsically unlike the writer, then he will probably twist the writer’s doctrine into a rationalization of beliefs, an excuse for behaviour, wholly alien to the beliefs and behaviour approved by the writer. Lawrence has suffered the fate of every man whose works have exercised an influence upon his fellows. It was inevitable and in the nature of things.)

For someone with a gift for sensing the mystery of otherness, true love must necessarily be, in Lawrence's vocabulary, nocturnal. So must true knowledge. Nocturnal and tactual a touching in the night. Man inhabits, for his own convenience, a home-made universe within the greater alien world of external matter and his own irrationality. Out of the illimitable blackness of that world the light of his customary thinking scoops, as it were, a little illuminated cave—a tunnel of brightness, in which, from the birth of consciousness to its death, he lives, moves and has his being. For most of us this bright tunnel is the whole world. We ignore the outer darkness; or if we cannot ignore it, if it presses too insistently upon us, we disapprove, being afraid. Not so Lawrence. He had eyes that could see, beyond the walls of light, far into the darkness, sensitive fingers that kept him continually aware of the environing mystery. He could not be content with the home-made, human tunnel, could not conceive that anyone else should be content with it. Moreover—and in this he was unlike those others, to whom the world’s mystery is continuously present, the great philosophers and men of science—he did not want to increase the illuminated area; he approved of the outer darkness, he felt at home in it. Most men live in a little puddle of light thrown by the gig-lamps of habit and their immediate interest; but there is also the pure and powerful illumination of the disinterested scientific intellect. To Lawrence, both lights were suspect, both seemed to falsify what was, for him, the immediately apprehended reality—the darkness of mystery. "My great religion," he was already saying in 1912, “is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true." Like Blake, who had prayed to be delivered from ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep”: like Keats, who had drunk destruction to Newton for having explained the rainbow, Lawrence disapproved of too much knowledge, on the score that it diminished men’s sense of wonder and blunted their sensitiveness to the great mystery. His dislike of science was passionate and expressed itself in the most fantastically unreasonable terms. “All scientists are liars," he would say, when I brought up some experimentally established fact, which he happened to dislike. "Liars, liars!" It was a most convenient theory. I remember in particular one long and violent argument on evolution, in the reality of which Lawrence always passionately disbelieved. “But look at the evidence, Lawrence," I insisted, “look at all the evidence." His answer was characteristic. “But I don’t care about evidence. Evidence doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t feel it here.” And he pressed his two hands on his solar plexus. I abandoned the argument and thereafter never, if I could avoid it, mentioned the hated name of science in his presence. Lawrence could give so much, and what he gave was so valuable, that it was absurd and profitless to spend one's time with him disputing about a matter in which he absolutely refused to take a rational interest. Whatever the intellectual consequences, he remained through thick and thin unshakably loyal to his own genius. The daimon which possessed him was, he felt, a divine thing, which he would never deny or explain away, never even ask to accept a compromise. This loyalty to his own self, or rather to his gift, to the strange and powerful numen which, he felt, used him as its tabernacle, is fundamental in Lawrence and accounts, as nothing else can do, for all that the world found strange in his beliefs and his behaviour. It was not an incapacity to understand that made him reject those generalisations and abstractions by means of which the philosophers and the men of science try to open a path for the human spirit through the chaos of phenomena. Not incapacity, I repeat; for Lawrence had, over and above his peculiar gift, an extremely acute intelligence. He was a clever man as well as a man of genius. (In his boyhood and adolescence he had been a great passer of examinations.) He could have understood the aim and methods of science perfectly well if he had wanted to. Indeed, he did understand them perfectly well; and it was for that very reason that he rejected them. For the methods of science and critical philosophy were incompatible with the exercise of his gift—the immediate perception and artistic rendering of divine otherness. And their aim, which is to push back the frontier of the unknown, was not to be reconciled with his aim, which was to remain as intimately as possible in contact with the surrounding darkness. And so, in spite of their enormous prestige, he rejected science and critical philosophy; he remained loyal to his gift. Exclusively loyal. He would not attempt to quality or explain his immediate knowledge of the mystery, would not even attempt to supplement it by other, abstract knowledge. “These terrible, conscious birds, like Poe and his Ligeia, deny the very life that is in them; they want to turn it all into talk, into knowing. And so life, which will not be known, leaves them.” Lawrence refused to know abstractly. He preferred to live; and he wanted other people to live.

No man is by nature complete and universal; he cannot have first-hand knowledge of every kind of possible human experience. Universality, therefore, can only be achieved by those who mentally simulate living experience—by the knowers, in a word, by people like Goethe (an artist for whom Lawrence always felt the most intense repugnance).

Again, no man is by nature perfect, and none can spontaneously achieve perfection. The greatest gift is a limited gift. Perfection, whether ethical or aesthetic, must be the result of knowing and of the laborious application of knowledge. Formal aesthetics are an affair of rules and the best classical models; formal morality, of the ten commandments and the imitation of Christ,

Lawrence would have nothing to do with proceedings so “unnatural,” so disloyal to the gift, to the resident or visiting nomen. Hence his aesthetic principle, that art must be wholly spontaneous, and, like the artist, imperfect, limited and transient. Hence, too, his ethical principle that a man’s first moral duty is not to attempt to live above his human station, or beyond his inherited psychological income.

The great work of art and the monument more perennial than brass are, in their very perfection and everlastingness, inhuman—too much of a good thing. Lawrence did not approve of them. Art, he thought, should flower from an immediate impulse towards self-expression or communication, and should wither with the passing of the impulse. Of all building materials Lawrence liked adobe the best; its extreme

plasticity and extreme impermanence endeared it to him. There could be no everlasting pyramids in adobe, no mathematically accurate Parthenons. Nor, thank heaven, in wood. Lawrence loved the Etruscans, among other reasons, because they built wooden temples, which have not survived. Stone oppressed him with its indestructible solidity, its capacity to take and indefinitely keep the hard uncompromising forms of pure geometry. Great buildings made him feel uncomfortable, even when they were beautiful. He felt something of the same discomfort in the presence of any highly finished work of art. In music, for example, he liked the folk-song, because it was a slight thing, born of immediate impulse. The symphony oppressed him; it was too big, too elaborate, too carefully and consciously worked out, too would-be"—to use a characteristic Lawrencian expression. He was quite determined that none of his writings should be ' would-be.’ He allowed them to flower as they liked from the deptlis of his being and would never use his conscious intellect to force them into a semblance of more than human perfection, or more than human universality. It was characteristic of him that he hardly ever corrected or patched what he had written. I have often heard him say, indeed, that he was incapable of correcting. If he was dissatisfied with what he had written, he did not, as most authors do, file, clip, insert, transpose; he re-wrote. In other words, he gave the daimon another chance to say what it wanted to say. There are, I believe, three complete and totally distinct manuscripts of Lady Chatter ley’s Lover. Nor was this by any means the only novel that he wrote more than once. He was determined that all he produced should spring direct from the mysterious, irrational source of power within him. The conscious intellect should never be allowed to come and impose, after the event, its abstract pattern of perfection.                                        .

It was the same in the sphere of ethics as in that of art. "They want me to have form: that means, they want me to have their pernicious, ossiferous, skin-and- grief form, and    on

This was written about his novels; but it is just as applicable to his life. Every man, Lawrence insisted, must be an artist in life, must create his own moral form. The art of living is harder than the art of writing. "It is a much more delicate thing to make love, and win love, than to declare love.' All the more reason, therefore, for practising this art with the most refined and subtle sensibility; all the more reason for not accepting that "pernicious skin-and-grief form" of morality, which they are always trying to impose on one. It is the business of the sensitive artist in life to accept his own nature as it is, not to try to force it into another shape. He must take the material given him—the weaknesses and irrationalities, as well as the sense and the virtues; the mysterious darkness and otherness no less than the light of reason and the conscious ego—must take them all and weave them together into a satisfactory pattern; his pattern, not somebody else's pattern. "Once I said to myself: ⁴How can I blame—why be angry?’ . . . Now I say: ‘When anger comes with bright eyes, he may do his will. In me he will hardly shake off the hand of God. He is one of the archangels, with a fiery sword. God sent him—it is beyond my knowing. ’" This was written in 1910. Even at the very beginning of his career Lawrence was envisaging man as simply the locus of a polytheism. Given his particular gifts of sensitiveness and of expression it was inevitable. Just as it was inevitable that a man of Blake's peculiar genius should formulate the very similar doctrine of the independence of states of being. All the generally accepted systems of philosophy and of ethics aim at policing man’s polytheism in the name of some Jehovah of intellectual and moral consistency. For Lawrence this was an indefensible proceeding. One god had as much right to exist as another, and the dark ones were as genuinely divine as the bright. Perhaps (since Lawrence was so specially sensitive to the quality of dark godhead and so specially gifted to express it in art), perhaps even more divine. Anyhow, the polytheism was a democracy. This conception of human nature resulted in the formulation of two rather surprising doctrines, one ontological and the other ethical. The first is what I may call the Doctrine of Cosmic Pointlessness. " There is no point. Life and Love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let iive, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless."

Ontological pointlessness has its ethical counterpart in the doctrine of insouciance. "'They simply are eaten up with caring. They are so busy caring about Fascism or Leagues of Nations or whether France is right or whether Marriage is threatened, that they never know where they are. They certainly never live on the spot where they are. I hey inhabit abstract space, the desert void of politics, principles, right and wrong, and so forth. They are doomed to be abstract. Talking to them is like trying to have a human relationship with the letter x in algebra.” As early as 1911 his advice to his sister was: “Don’t meddle with religion. I would leave all that alone, if I were you, and try to occupy myself fully in the present.”

Reading such passages—and they abound in every book that Lawrence wrote—I am always reminded of that section of the Pensees, in which Pascal speaks of the absurd distractions, with which men fill their leisure, so that there shall be no hole or cranny left for a serious thought to lodge itself in their consciousness. Lawrence also inveighs against divertissements, but not against the same divertissements as Pascal. For him, there were two great and criminal distractions. F irst, work, which he regarded as a mere stupefacient, like opium. ( Don t exhaust yourself too much, he writes to an industrious triend; “it is immoral.” Immoral, because, among other reasons, it is too easy, a shirking of man’s first duty, which is to live. Think of the rest and peace, the positive sloth and uxury of idleness that work is.” Lawrence had a real puritan’s disapproval of the vice of working. He attacked the gospel of work for the same reasons as Chrysippus attacked Aristotle’s gospe of pure intellectualism—on the ground that it was, in the old Stoic s words, “only a kind of amusement * and that real living was a more serious affair than labour or abstract speculations.) The other inexcusable distraction, in Lawrence’s eyes, was spirituality,” that lofty musing on the ultimate nature of things which constitutes, for Pascal, “the whole dignity and business of man.” Pascal was horrified that human beings could so far forget the infinite and the eternal as to ' dance and play the lute and sing and make verses.” Lawrence was no less appalled that they could so far forget all the delights and difficulties of immediate living as to remember eternity and infinity, to say nothing of the League of Nations and the Sanctity os Marriage. Both were great artists; and so each is able to convince us that he is at any rate partly right. Just how far each is right, this is not the place to discuss. Nor, indeed, is the question susceptible of a definite answer. “Mental consciousness,’’ wrote Lawrence, “is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be highly and delicately conscious.” Some are not. Moreover, each of the ages of man has its suitable philosophy of life. (Lawrence’s, I should say, was not a very good philosophy for old age or failing powers.) Besides, there are certain conjunctions of circumstances in which spontaneous living is the great distraction and certain others in which it is almost criminal to divert oneself with eternity or the League of Nations. Lawrence’s peculiar genius was such that he insisted on spontaneous living to the exclusion of ideals and fixed principles; on intuition to the exclusion of abstract reasoning. Pascal, with a very different gift, evolved, inevitably, a very different philosophy.

Lawrence’s dislike of abstract knowledge and pure spirituality made him a kind of mystical materialist. Thus, the moon affects him strongly; therefore it cannot be a “stony cold world, like a world of our own gone cold. Nonsense. It is a globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy.” Matter must be intrinsically as lively as the mind which perceives it and is moved by the perception. Vivid and violent spiritual effects must have correspondingly vivid and violent material causes. And, conversely, any violent feeling or desire in the mind must be capable of producing violent effects upon external matter. Lawrence could not bring himself to believe that the spirit can be moved, moved if need be, to madness, without imparting the smallest corresponding movement to the external world. He was a subjectivist as well as a materialist; in other words, he believed in the possibility, in some form or another, of magic. Lawrence’s mystical materialism found characteristic expression in the curious cosmology and physiology of his speculative essays, and in his restatement of the strange Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. To his mind, the survival of the spirit was not enough; for the spirit is a man’s conscious identity, and Lawrence did not want to be always identical to himself; he wanted to know otherness—to know it by being it, know it in the living flesh, which is always essentially other. Therefore there must be a resurrection of the body.

Loyalty to his genius left him no choice; Lawrence had to insist on those mysterious forces of otherness which are scattered without, and darkly concentrated within, the body and mind of man. He had to, even though, by doing so, he imposed upon himself, as a writer of novels, a very serious handicap. For according to his view of things most of men’s activities were more or less criminal distractions from the proper business of human living. He refused to write of such distractions; that is to say, he refused to write cf the main activities of the contemporary world. But as though this drastic limitation of his subject were not sufficient, he went still further and, in some of his novels, refused even to write of human personalities in the accepted sense of the term. The Rainbow and Women in Love (and indeed to a lesser extent all his novels) are the practical applications of a theory, which is set forth in a very interesting and important letter to Edward Garnett, dated June 5th, 1914. ⁴⁴Somehow, that which is physic—non-human in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element, which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I object to. In Turgenev, and in Tolstoi, and in Dostoievsky, the moral scheme into which all the characters fit—and it is nearly the same scheme —is, whatever the extraordinariness of the characters themselves, dull, old, dead. When Marinetti writes: ⁴It is the solidity of a blade of steel that is interesting by itself, that is, the incomprehending and inhuman alliance of its molecules in resistance to, let us say, a bullet. The heat of a piece of wood or iron is in fact more passionate, for us, than the laughter or tears of a woman’—then I know what he means. He is stupid, as an artist, for contrasting the heat of the iron and the laugh of the woman. Because what is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the molecules of steel or their action in heat: it is the inhuman will, call it physiology, or like Marinetti, physiology of matter, that fascinates me. I don't so much care about what the woman feels—in the ordinary usage of the word. That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the woman is—what she is—inhumanly, physiologically, materially—according to the use of the word. . . . You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say, ‘Diamond, what! This is carbon.' And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.)”

The dangers and difficulties of this method are obvious. Criticising Stendhal, Professor Samtsbury long since remarked on "that psychological realism which is perhaps a more different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for two generations have been willing to admit, or, perhaps, able to perceive.”

Psychological reality, like physical reality, is determined by our mental and bodily make-up. Common sense, working on the evidence supplied by our unaided senses, postulates a world in which physical reality consists of such things as solid tables and chairs, bits of coal, water, air. Carrying its investigations further, science discovers that these samples of physical reality are "really” composed of atoms of different elements, and these atoms, in their turn, are “really” composed of more or less numerous electrons and protons arranged in a variety of patterns. Similarly, there is a common-sense, pragmatic conception of psychological reality; and also an uncommonsense conception. For ordinary practical purposes we conceive human beings as creatures with characters. But analysis of their behaviour can be carried so far, that they cease to have characters and reveal themselves as collections of psychological atoms. Lawrence (as might have been expected of a man who could always perceive the otherness behind the xxii

most reassuringly familiar phenomenon) took the un-common-sense view of psychology. Hence the strangeness of his novels; and hence also, it must be admitted, certain qualities of violent monotony and intense indistinctness, qualities which make some of them, for all their richness and their unexpected beauty, so curiously difficult to get through. Most o> us are more interested in diamonds and coal than in undifferentiated carbon, however vividly described. I have known readers whose reaction to Lawrence’s books was very much the same as Lawrence’s own reaction to the theory of evolution. What he wrote meant nothing to them because they ' did not feel it here”—in the solar plexus. (That Lawrence, the hater of scientific knowing, should have applied to psychology methods which he himself compared to those of chemical analysis, may seem strange. But we must remember that his analysis was done, not intellectually, but by an immediate process of intuition; that he was able, as it were, to feel the carbon in diamonds and coal, to taste the hydrogen and oxygen in his glass of water.)

Lawrence, then, possessed, or, if you care to put it the other way round, was possessed by, a gift—a gift to which he was unshakably loyal. I have tried to show how the possession and the loyalty influenced his thinking and writing. How did they affect his life? The answer shall be, as far as possible, in Lawrence’s own words. To Catherine Carswell Lawrence once wrote: "I think you are the only woman I have met who is so intrinsically detached, so essentially separate and isolate 1, tr< be a real writer or artist or recorder. Your relations with other people are only excursions from yourself. And to wan* children, and common human fulfilments, is rather a falsity t you, I think. You were never made to 'meet and mingle,’ but to remain intact, essentially, whatever your experiences may be."

Lawrence’s knowledge of "the artist” was manifestly personal knowledge. He knew by actual experience that the real writer’ is an essentially separate being, who must not desire to meet and mingle and who betrays himself when he hankers too yearningly after common human fulfilments. AU artists know these facts about their species, and many of them have recorded their knowledge. Recorded it, very often, with distress; being xxiii

intrinsically detached is no joke. Lawrence certainly suffered his whole life from the essential solitude to which his gift condemned him. “What ails me," he wrote to the psychologist, Dr. Trigant Burrow, "is the absolute frustration of my primeval societal instinct. ... I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct—and societal repression much more devastating. There is no repression of the sexual individual comparable to the repression of the societal man in me, by the individual ego, my own and everybody else's. . . . Myself, I suffer badly from being so cut off. ... At times one is forced to be essentially a hermit. I don't want to be. But anything else is either a personal tussle, or a money tussle; sickening: except, of course, j ust for ordinary acquaintance, which remains acquaintance. One has no real human relations—that is so devastating." One has no real human relations: it is the complaint of every artist. The artist's first duty is to his genius, his daimon; he cannot serve two masters, Lawrence, as it happened, had an extraordinary gift for establishing an intimate relationship with almost anyone he met. "Here" (in the Bournemouth boarding-house where he was staying after his illness, in 1912), "I get mixed up in people’s lives so—it’s very interesting, sometimes a bit painful, often jolly. But I run to such close intimacy with folk, it is complicating. But I love to have myself in a bit of a tangle." His love for his art was greater, however, than his love for a tangle; and whenever the tangle threatened to compromise his activities as an artist, it was the tangle that was sacrificed: he retired. Lawrence's only deep and abiding human relationship was with his wife. ("It is hopeless for me,” he wrote to a fellow artist, "to try to do anything without I have a woman at the back of me. . . . Bocklin—or somebody like him—daren't sit in a cafe except with his back to the wall. I daren't sit in the world without a woman behind me. ... A woman that I love sort of keeps me in direct communication with the unknown, in which otherwise I am a bit lost.") For the rest, he was condemned by his gift to an essential separateness. Often, it is true, he blamed the world for his exile. "And it comes to this, that the oneness of mankind is destroyed in me (by the war). I am I, and you are you, and all heaven and hell lie in the chasm between. Believe me, I am infinitely hurt by being thus torn off from the body of mankind, but so it is and it is right/ It was right because, in reality, it was not the war that had torn him from the body of mankind; it was his own talent, the strange divinity to which he owed his primary allegiance. "I will not live any more in this time,” he wrote on another occasion. "I know what it is. I reject it. As far as I possibly can, I will stand outside this time. I will live my life and, if possible, be happy. Though the whole world slides in horror down into the bottomless pit ... I believe that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting to the falsehood of these personal times.” The adjective is profoundly significant. Of all the possible words of disparagement which might be applied to our uneasy age “personal” is surely about the last that would occur to most of us. I o Lawrence it vas the first. His gift was a gift of feeling and rendering the unknown, the mysteriously other. T o one possessed by such a gift, almost any age would have seemed unduly and dangerously personal. He had to reject and escape. But when he had escaped, he could not help deploring the absence of “real human relationships.” Spasmodically, he tried to establish contact with the body of mankind. There were the recurrent projects for colonies in remote comers of the earth; they all fell through. There were his efforts to join existing political organisations; but somehow "I seem to have lost touch altogether with the 'Progressive' clique. In Croydon, the Socialists are so stupid and the Fabians so flat.” (Not only in Croydon, alas.) I hen, during the war, there was his plan to co-operate with a friends to take independent political action; but I would like to be remote, in Italy, writing my soul’s words, o have to speak in the body is a violation to me.” And in the end he w • dn t violate himself; he remained aloof, remote, “essentially separate.

“It isn’t scenery one lives by,” he wrote from Cornwall in 191 , “but the freedom of moving about alone. How acu ly e suffered from this freedom by which he lived! Kangaroo describes a later stage of the debate between the solitary artist and the man who wanted social responsibilities and contact with the body of mankind. Lawrence, like the hero c his novel decided against contact. He was by nature not a leader of men, but a prophet, a voice crying in the wilderness wilderness of his own isolation. The desert was his place, and yet he felt himself an exile in it. To Rolf Gardiner he wrote, in 1926: "I should love to be connected with something, with some few people, in something. As far as anything matters, I have always been very much alone, and regretted it. but I can't belong to clubs, or societies, or Freemasons, or any other damn thing. So if there is, with you, an activi ty I can belong to, I shall thank my stars. But, of course, I shall be wary beyond words, of committing myself.” He was in fact so wary that he never committed himself, but died remote and unconnected as he had lived. The daimon would not allow it to be otherwise.

(Whether Lawrence might not have been happier if he had disobeyed his daimon and forced himself at least into mechanical and external connection with the body of mankind, I forbear to speculate. Spontaneity is not the only and infallible secret of happiness; nor is a "would-be” existence necessarily disastrous. But this is by the way.)

It was, I think, the sense of being cut off that sent Lawrence on his restless wanderings round the earth. His travels were at once a flight and a search: a search for some society with which he could establish contact, for a world where the times were not personal and conscious knowing had not yet perverted living; a search and at the same time a flight from the miseries and evils of the society into which he had been born, and for which, in spite of his artist's detachment, he could not help feeling profoundly responsible. He felt himself "English in the teeth of all the world, even in the teeth of England”: that was why he had to go to Ceylon and Australia and Mexico. He could not have felt so intensely English in England without involving himself in corporative political action, without belonging and being attached; but to attach himself was something he could not bring himself to do, something that the artist in him felt as a violation. He was at once too English and too intensely an artist to stay at home. "Perhaps it is necessary for me to try these places, perhaps it is my destiny to know the world. It only excites the outside of me. The inside it leaves more isolated and stoic than ever. That’s how it is. It is all a form of running away from oneself and the great problems, all this wild west and the strange Australia. But I try to keep quite clear.

One forms not the faintest inward attachment, especially here in America.”

His search was as fruitless as his flight was ineffective. He could not escape either from his homesickness or his sense of responsibility; and he never found a society to which he could belong. In a kind of despair, he plunged yet deeper into the surrounding mystery, into the dark night of that otherness whose essence and symbol is the sexual experience. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence wrote the epilogue to his travels and, from his long and fruitless experience of flight and search, drew what was, for him, the inevitable moral. It is a strange and beautiful book; but inexpressibly sad. But then so, at bottom, was its author’s life.

Lawrence’s psychological isolation resulted, as we have seen, in his seeking physical isolation from the body of mankind. This physical isolation reacted upon his thoughts. ' Don t mind if I am impertinent,” he wrote to one oi his correspondents at the end of a rather dogmatic letter. Living here alone one gets so different—sort of ex-cathedra.” To live in isolation, above the medley, has its advantages; but it also imposes certain penalties. hose who take a bird s-eye view of the world often see clearly and comprehensively; but they tend to ignore all tiresome details, all the difficulties of social li e and, ignoring, to judge too sweepingly and to condemn too lightly. Nietzsche spent his most fruitful years perched on the tops of mountains, or plunged in the yet more abysmal solitude of boarding-houses by the Mediterranean. That was why, a delicate and sensitive man, he could be so bloodthirstily censorious—so wrong, for all his gifts, as well as so right. From the deserts of New Mexico, from rustic Tuscany or Sicily, from the Australian bush, Lawrence observed and judged and advised the distant world of men. 1 he judgments, as might be expected, were often sweeping and violent; the advice, though admirable so far as it went, inadequate. Political advice from even the most greatly gifted of ligious innovators is always inadequate; for it is never, at bottom, advice about politics, but always about something else. Differences in quantity, if sufficiently great, produce differences of quality. This sheet of paper, for example, is qualitatively xxvii

different from the electrons of which it is composed. An analogous difference divides the politician’s world from the world of the artist, or the moralist, or the religious teacher. It is the business of the artist," writes Lawrence, "to follow it (the war) to the heart of the individual fighters—not to talk in armies and nations and numbers—but to track it home—home —their war—and it’s at the bottom of almost every Englishman’s heart—the war—the desire of war—the will to war—and at the bottom of every German heart." But an appeal to the individual heart can have very little effect on politics, which is a science of averages. An actuary can tell you how many people are likely to commit suicide next year; and no artist or moralist or Messiah can, by an appeal to the individual heart, prevent his forecast from being remarkably correct. If the things which are Caesar's differ from the things which are God’s, it is because Caesar’s things are numbered by the thousands and millions, whereas God’s things are single individual souls. The things of Lawrence’s Dark God were not even individual souls; they were the psychological atoms whose patterned coming together constitutes a soul. When Lawrence offers political advice, it refers to matters which are not really political at all. The political world of enormous numbers was to him a nightmare, and he fled from it. Primitive communities are so small that their politics are essentially unpolitical; that, for Lawrence, was one of their greatest charms. Looking back from some far-away and underpopulated vantage point at the enormous, innumerable modern world, he was appalled by what he saw. He condemned, he advised, but at bottom and finally he felt himself impotent to deal with Caesar’s alien and inhuman problems. "I wish there were miracles," was his final despairing comment. "I am tired of the old laborious way of working things to their conclusions." But, alas, there are no miracles, and faith, even the faith of a man of genius, moves no mountains.

Enough of explanation and interpretation. To those who knew Lawrence, not why, but that he was what he happened to be, is the important fact. I remember very clearly my first meeting with him. The place was London, the time 1915. But Lawrence’s passionate talk was of the geographically remote

and of the personally very rear. Of the horrors in the middle distance-—war, winter, the town—he would not speak. For he was on the point, so he imagined, of setting off to Florida—to Florida, where he was going to plant that colony of escape, of which up to the last he never ceased to dream. Sometimes the name and site of this seed of a happier and different world were purely fanciful. It was called Rananim, for example, and was an island like Prospero’s. Sometimes it had its place on the map and its name was Florida, Cornwall, Sicily, Mexico and again, for a time, the English countryside. That wintry afternoon in 1915 it was Florida. Before tea was over he asked me if I would join the colony, and though I was an intellectually cautious young man, not at all inclined to enthusiasms, though Law'rence had startled and embarrassed me with sincerities of a kind to which my upbringing had not accustomed me, 1 answered yes.

Fortunately, no doubt, the Florida scheme fell through. Cities of God have always crumbled; and Lawrence’s city—his village, rather, for he hated cities—his Village of the Dark God would doubtless have disintegrated like all the rest. It was better that it should have remained, as it was always to remain, a project and a hope. And I knew this even as I said I would join the colony. But there was something about Lawrence which made such knowledge, when one was in his presence, curiously irrelevant. He might propose impracticable schemes, he might say or write things that were demonstrably incorrec or even, on occasion (as when he talked about science), absurd. But to a very considerable extent it didn t mai ter. What mattered was always Lawrence himself, was the fire that burned within him, that glowed with so strange and marvellous a radiance in almost all he wrote.

My second meeting with Lawrence took place some years later during one of his brief revisi tings of that after-war England, which he had come so much to dread and to dislike. Then in 1925, while in India, I received a letter from Spotorno. He had read some essays I had written on Italian travel; said he liked them; suggested a meeting. I he next year we were in Florence and so was he. From that time, till his death, we were often together—at Florence, at Forte dei Marmi, for a whole xxix

winter at Diablerets, at Bandol, in Paris, at Chexbres, at Forte again, and finally at Vence where he died.

In a spasmodically kept diary I find this entry under the date of December 27th, 1927: “Lunched and spent the p.m. with the Lawrences. D. H. L. in admirable form, talking wonderfully. He is one of the few people 1 feel real respect and admiration for. Of most other eminent people I have met I feel that at any rate I belong to the same species as they do. But this man has something different and superior in kind, not degree. '

“Different and superior in kind." I think almost everyone who knew him well must have felt that Lawrence was this. A being, somehow, of another order, more sensitive, more highly conscious, more capable of feeling than even the most gifted of common men. He had, of course, his weaknesses and defects; he had his intellectual limitations—limitations which he seemed to have deliberately imposed upon himself. But these weaknesses and defects and limitations did not affect the fact of his superior otherness. They diminished him quantitively, so to speak; whereas the otherness was qualitative. Spill half your glass of wine and what remains is still wine. Water, however full the glass may be, is always tasteless and without colour.

To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness. For, being himself of a different order, he inhabited a different universe from that of common men—a brighter and intenser world, of which, while he spoke, he would make you free. He looked at things with the eyes, so it seemed, of a man who had been at the brink of death and to whom, as he emerges from the darkness, the world reveals itself as unfathomably beautiful and mysterious. For Lawrence, existence was one continuous convalescence; it was as though he were newly re-born from a mortal illness every day of his life. What these convalescent eyes saw his most casual speech would reveal. A walk with him in the country was a walk through that marvellously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of all his novels. He seemed to know, by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and tell you in the most convincing detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it thought. Of Black-Eyed Susan, for example, the cow at his N?w Mexican ranch, he was never tired of speaking, nor was I ever tired of listening to his account of her character and her bovine philosophy.

“He sees," Vernon Lee once said to me, "more than a human being ought to see. Perhaps," she added, "that's why he hates humanity so much." Why also he loved it so much. And not only humanity: nature too, and even the supernatural. For wherever he looked, he saw more than a human being ought to see; saw more and therefore loved and hated more. To be with him was to find oneself transported to one of the frontiers of human consciousness. For an inhabitant of the safe metropolis of thought and feeling it was a most exciting experience.

One of the great charms of Lawrence as a companion was that he could never be bored and so could tiever be boring. He was able to absorb himself completely in what he was doing at the moment; and he regarded no task as too humble for him to undertake, nor so trivial that it was not worth his while to do it well. He could cook, he could sew, he could darn a stocking and milk a cow, he was an efficient wood-cutter and a good hand at embroidery, fires always burned when he had laid them and a floor, after Lawrence had scrubbed it, was thoroughly clean. Moreover, he possessed what is, for a highly strung and higl intelligent man, an even more remarkable accomplishment: he knew how to do nothing. He could just sit and be perfectly content. And his contentment, while one remainc in his tragically the splendid curve of the letters droops, at the end, towards the darkness!) It was, however, in terms of anger that he chose to express this sadness. Emotional indecency always shocked him profoundly, and, since anger seemed to him less indecent as an emotion than a resigned or complaining melancholy, he preferred to be angry. He took his revenge on the fate that had made him sad by fiercely deriding everything. And because the sadness of the slowly dying man was so unspeakably deep, his mockery was frighteningly savage. The laughter of the earlier Lawrence and, on occasion, as I have said, even the later Lawrence was without bitterness and wholly delightful.

company, was infectious.                                 .

As infectious as Lawrence's contented placidity were his high spirits and his laughter. Even in the last years of his life, when his illness had got the upper hand and was killing hin me meal, Lawrence could still laugh, on occasion, with so ne hing of the old and exuberant gaiety. Often, alas, towarc the er , the laughter was bitter, and the high spirits almost terrifyingly savage. I have heard him sometimes speak of men and hei ways with a kind of demoniac mockery, to which it was painful, for all the extraordinary brilliance and profundity o hat said, to listen. The secret consciousness of his dissob ion lei the last years of his life with an overpowering sadness.

Vitality has the attractiveness of beauty, and in Lawrence there was a continuously springing fountain of vitality. It went on welling up in him, leaping, now and then, into a great explosion of bright foam and iridescence, long after the time when, by all the rules of medicine, he should have been dead. For the last two years he was like a flame burning on in miraculous disregard of the fact that there was no more fuel to justify its existence. One grew, in spite of constantly renewed alarms, so well accustomed to seeing the flame blazing away, self-fed, in its broken and empty lamp that one almost came to believe that the miracle would be prolonged, indefinitely. But it could not be. When, after several months of separation, I saw him again at Vence in the early spring of 1930, the miracle was at an end, the flame guttering to extinction. A few days later it was quenched.

Beautiful and absorbingly interesting in themselves, the letters which follow are also of the highest importance as biographical documents. In them, Lawrence has written his life and painted his own portrait. Few men have given more of themselves in their letters. Lawrence is there almost in his entirety. Almost; for he obeyed both of Robert Burns's injunctions:

"Aye free, aff han’ your story tell,

When wi* a bosom crony;

But still keep something to yoursel’ Ye scarcely tell to ony."

The letters show us Lawrence as he was in his daily living. We see him in all his moods. (And it is curious and amusing to note how his mood will change according to his correspondent. “My kindliness makes me sometimes a bit false,” he says of himself severely. In other words, he knew how to adapt himself. To one correspondent he is gay, at moments even larky—because larkiness is expected of him. To another he is gravely reflective. To a third he speaks the language of prophesying and revelation.) We follow him from one vividly seen and recorded landscape to another. We watch him during the war, a subjectivist and a solitary artist, desperately fighting his battle against the nightmare of objective facts and all the inhumanly numerous things that are Caesar’s. Fighting and, inevitably, losing. And after the war we accompany him round the world, as he seeks, now in one continent now in another, some external desert to match the inner wilderness from which he utters his prophetic cry, or some community of which he can feel himself a member. We see him being drawn towards his fellows and then repelled again, making up his mind to force himself into some relation with society and then, suddenly changing it again, and letting himself drift once more on the current of circumstances and his own inclinations. And finally, as his illness begins to get the better of him, we see him obscured by a dark cloud of sadness the terrible sadness, out of which, in one mood, he wrote his savage Nettles, i another, The Man Who Died, that lovely and profoundly moving story of the miracle for which somewhere in his mmd he still hoped—still hoped, against the certain knowledge that it could never happen.

In the earlier part of his career especially, and again towards the end, Lawrence was a most prolific correspondent. 1 here was, however, an intermediate period during his time c wander-ing, when he seems to have written very little. Of letters with the date of these after-war years, not more than a dozen or two have so far turned up; and there seems to be no reason to believe that further enquiries will reveal the existence of many more. It is not because they have been destroyed or are being withheld that Lawrence’s letters of this period are so scarce; it is because, for one reason or another, he did not then care to xxxiii

write letters, that he did not want to feel himself in relationship with anyone. After a time, the stream begins again. But the later letters, though plentiful and good, are neither so numerous nor so richly and variously delightful as the earlier. One feels that Lawrence no longer wanted to give of himself o fully to his correspondents as in the past.

In selecting the letters which Lawrence’s correspondents have so generously placed at my disposal, I have been guided by a few simple and obvious principles. Trivial notes have not been reproduced. Nor, in most cases, business letters. (There is, for example, an enormous correspondence referring to the publication and distribution of the first, Florentine edition of Lady Chatterley. This has been omitted altogether.) A certain number of passages that might have given pain to the person mentioned in them, or that deal with personalities which it did not seem right or decent to make public, have been cut out. Here and there, for obvious reasons, I have suppressed a name.

In conclusion, I would like to express my thanks to Mrs. Enid Hilton for her invaluable help in preparing this volume for the press. Lacking her co-operation, I should have been lost.

Aldous Huxley.

s

EARLY DAYS

“THE WHITE PEACOCK”

GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND ITALY

The Letters of If). H. Law re nee

12, Colworth Road, Addiscombe, Croydon.

To William Heinemann.             December 15th, 1909.

Deas Sir,—

I have just received the accompanying letter from Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer. I hasten to forward it to you, and in doing so to offer you the novel* of which he speaks.

It is my first. I have as yet published nothing but a scrap of verse. At the moment I feel a trifle startled and somewhat elated by Mr. Hueffer’s letter, but already a grain of doubt is germinating in me.

I hope you will allow me to send you the MSS. CT course I am willing to fulfil all Mr. Hueffer s injunctions. I know nothing of the publishing of books.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

12, Colworth Road, Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Sydney S. Pawling (of Heinemann’s). 27th April, 1910.

Dear Mr. Pawling,—               .     .          ,.

With reference to your letter of the 25th. I think the novel is complete and final in its form as J have sen            o

think you will not find it actually so lengthy as the weig o the manuscript might lead one to suppose. I he book is, 1

♦ The White Peacock.

+ The White Peacock, published January, 1911.

I

believe, much shorter than Tono Bungay and about the length of Jane Eyre, or rather less, I estimated it. I will delete as much as I can in phrases and perhaps here and there a paragraph from the proofs, but there are now no passages of any length that I could take out.

I have written about half of another novel. I wonder what you would think of it.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. L awrence.

1909.

To H. C.

. . . I admit your accusation of impressionism and dogmatism. Suddenly, in a world full of tones and tints and shadows I see a colour and it vibrates on my retina. I dip a brush in it and say, “See, that’s the colour!” So it is, so it isn’t. . . .

To H. C.                                       1910.

... Heinemann was very nice ; doesn’t want me to alter anything; will publish in Sept, or Oct., the best season; we have signed agreements concerning royalties, and I have agreed to give him the next novel. Will he want it? This transacting of literary business makes me sick. I have no faith in myself at the end, and I simply loathe writing. You do not know how repugnant to me was the sight of that Nethermere MSS.* By the way, I have got to find a new title. I wish, from the bottom of my heart, the fates had not stigmatised me “writer.” It is a sickening business. Will you tell me whether the Saga is good? I am rapidly losing faith in it. . . .

I assure you I am not weeping into my register. It is only that the literary world seems a particularly hateful yet powerful one. The literary element, like a disagreeable substratum under a fair country, spreads under every inch of life, sticking to the

★Nethermere was the early title of The White Peacock: the Saga was issued as The Trespasser.

roots of the growing things. Ugh, that is hateful! I wish I might be delivered . . .

To H. C.                                 Jane 2,1st, 1910.

... I was thinking to-day: how can I blame the boys for breaches of discipline? Yet I must not only blame, I must punish. Once I said to myself: “How can I blame-—why be angry?'' Then there came a hideous state of affairs. Now I say: "When anger comes with bright eyes, he may do his will. In me he will hardly shake off the hand of God. He is one of the archangels, with a fiery sword. God sent him—it is beyond my knowing” . . .

1910.

To H. C.

... Yet I have a second consciousness somewhere actively alive. I write “Siegmund”—I keep on writing, almost mechanically: very slowly and mechanically. Yet I don't think I do Siegmund injustice. Somewhere I have got the ballad of “Sister Helen”—Rossetti's—beating time. I couldn’t repeat it, but yet I beat through the whole poem, with now and again a refrain cropping up:

“Nay, of the dead what can you say,

Little Brother?”

or again.

“O Mary, Mother Mary,

Three days to-day between Hell and Heaven.”

and again.

“What of the Dead between Hell and Heaven, Little Brother?” 1'0 H.C.

When I finished the Bacchae, on Tuesday night, the last words,

“And the way shall be pointed out, strangely

It shall not go either this way, as ye expected, nor that way, as ye thought:

But elsewhere, unihought, unknown.”

Bien—I leave it—I must rise up and teach. ■«. . .

20, Dulverton Rd.,

Leicester.

To W. E. Hopkin.                       24 Aug. 1910.

Dear Mr. Hopkin,—

I am very sorry that I cannot be at home to tea and talk with you to-morrow. Mother is laid-up here, and I must certainly stay with her until Saturday. She came for a holiday with my Aunt, and whilst here a tumour or something has developed in her abdomen. I he doctor looks grave and says it is serious: I hope not. But you will understand, will you not, why I cannot keep my promise for to-morrow. I am disappointed. I seem to have lost touch altogether with the old “progressive” clique: in Croydon the Socialists are so stupid, and the Fabians so flat. It would have been jolly to talk with you about things. I’ll say my millionth damn!

Give my regards to Mrs. Hopkin and to Enid.

Yours very sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

12, Colworth Road,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

Io Sydney S. Pawling.                 i8t-r October, 1910.

Dear Mr. Pawling,—-

I am glad, and much relieved, to hear that you have the MSS. of the o. of 8 in your hands. (By the way, don’t you think

* The Saga of Siegfried, afterwards published as The Trespasser.

the title idiotic? I am a failure there. How would The Livanters do?) I shall wait with some curiosity to hear your opinion of the work. It contains, I know, some rattling gooc stuff. But if the whole is not to your taste, 1 shall not mind, for I am not in the least anxious to publish that book. I am content to let it he for a few years. Of course, you have only got the rapid work of three months. I should want, I do want, to overhaul the book considerably as soon as you care to return it to me. I am not anxious to publish it, and if you are of like mind, we can let the thing stay, and I will give you—with no intermediary this time—my third novel, Paul Morel, which is plotted out very interestingly (to me), and about one-eight 1 of which is written. Paul Morel will be a novel—not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll running to seed in realism, but a restrained, somewhat impersonal novel. interests me very much. I wish I were not so agitated just now, and could do more.                              ~

When you say "the plates of The White Peacock were sent from New York”—-do you mean the plates of the cover design, or what? I am a trifle curious. I do want that book to make haste. Not that I care much myself. But I want my mother to see it while still she keeps the live consciousness. She is really horribly ill. I am going up to the Midlands again this week-end.                                          ,,

But you will think I have a sort of Mr. Bunbury.

I don’t want to bother you to write, but let me know abot the second novel when you’re ready, please.

Yours truly,

D. H. Lawrence.

Davidson Pd. Boys Schoo>,

South Norwood, S.E,

To W. E. Hopkin.

20 Feby.t 1911.

"a' 5; Ada this morning teUing me that Hall's are kicking up a bit ok a dust over the representation of Alice. In my thinking, she ought to be flattered. She's shown as highly moral and salted with wit enough to save even the insipid Sodom of Eastwood—sauf votre respect— that is.

However, if they really feel that their noble chapel-going dignity is impaired, I wish you would assure them that I will contrive to have, in the next impression, the name changed to Margaret Undine Widmerpuddle, or any such fantasy they shall choose, far away from the sound of Hall or Gall. I suppose it’s —-------, snuffing idiot. I'll have a whack at him,

one day—so let him beware.

The book’s going moderately, but the shekels are not deluging me yet. Alas, no!

I’m afraid my sister is having a rough time with father. I wish he were in----no, I won’t say it aloud. Is one never to

have five minutes* peace?

Apologise to Mrs. Hopkin on my behalf, please, because I have not answered her letter. I will do so. Congratulate Miss Potter for me, and tell her I shall want her to speak up for me on the Judgment Day. And, I exhort you, try to keep Enid away from this deadly contamination of pen and ink. Est et silentio tuta merces—I don't know whether the quotation’s correct, but it means that the "reward is for faithful silence.” I wish I merited it.

Try and soothe off the virtuous indignation of the Halls, I beg you. I don’t want the publishers to be annoyed; it is they who are responsible, you see. I can get the name changed without much trouble, myself. Really, if many more perverse things happen, I shall betake myself to Job's muck-heap, putting a potsherd in my pocket, and advising one or two of my prosperous friends in Uz and suchlike places of my intention. In short, I’m fed up.

My regards to Mrs. Hopkin. Thanks for puffing me in the Rag.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

I was very young when I wrote the Peacock—I began it at twenty. Let that be my apology.

To H. C.

19x1.

I have received your letter, and fail to find its exceeding frankness or brutality—you are quaint. Certainly you shall treat me with humour and asperity: and I will laugh. No—but I will be better. . . . Really, I have got a bit indifferent. Life seemed so paltry, so short of generosity. It would give its half measures with much benignity—very Christian-like. Really, the one beautiful and generous adventure left seemed to be death.                                           .             ,      -       ,

And this is not because I am inactive altogether. My soul has strenuous work in intimacies to do. But then 1 scorn the intimacy, when it’s formed; it is always a lot shor....

Tc H.C.

1911.

.. . I have begun Paul Morel again—glory, you should see it! The British public will stone me if ever it catches sight . . .

12, Colworth Rd

Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.

26 April, 1911.

Deas Mrs. Hopkin,—                    , ,T .

I am sending you the dramas as I promised No doubt rt will surprise you to find me so scrupulous. Riders to' thl. Sea is about the genuinest bit of dramattc tragedy, English, since Shakespeare, I should say; and you can read it tn. Wan 1ho^. Don’t, beg you, tell me you have no time to read these books. The Trojan Women is the finest study of women from.ancient times Ah, but how women are always the same.

vary—dothey? I don’t know. CEdipus is the finest drama of

.jmes it is terrible in its accumulation like a gre.- big all times. It se.                         i llke exceedingly

wave coming up—and tnen crasn           , •

its flashing poetry. These are very great things. f°rWhe"hIve rlad them will you them to Adato read? And will you tell me what you think ar

tell me your thoughts about----— if I am not impertinentr

And will you tell me where I am wrong—since you put your head on one side and closed your eyes so shrewdly, declaring me at fault?

My regards to Mr. Hopkin and Enid.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. La whence.

12, Colworth Road,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Martin Seeker.                         12 June, 1911.

Dear Sir,—

I am very much flattered by your offer to publish a volume of my short stories: to tell the truth, I sit in doubt and wonder because of it.

There have appeared in print, in the English Review, two t and two only of my tales. Because nobody wanted the things, I have not troubled to write any. So that, at present, I have two good stories published, three very decent ones lying in the hands of the editor of the English Review, another good one at home, and several slight things sketched out and neglected. If these would be any good towards an autumn volume, I should be at the top of happiness. If they are not enough—I am in the midst of a novel, and bejungled in work, alas!

My second novel is promised to Wm. Heinemann. It is written, but I will not publish it, because it is erotic: in spite of which Mr. Heinemann would take it. But I am afraid for my tender reputation. Therefore, I stick at my third book like a broody hen at her eggs, lest my chickens hatch in a winter of public forgetfulness.

Of course I am sensible to the honour you do me—only wish I could make more satisfactory return.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Post card.

Rosewood, Victoria Avenue, Prestatyn, N, Wales.

To A. W. McLeod.

31 July, 1911.

We are installed very happily. Very pretty place—face N.W. —Gt. Ormes a faint smudge crouching down; W., Snowdon; S.W., a big faint smudge standing up between two sons, at the back of two galloping ranges: z-tone study; extremely geographic: reminds me of your plasticine relief map.

The hills jump up a mile from the sea—coast plain flatshore sandy, blue with sea holly. he tide goes out far c f, leaves streaks of water. I've been out bathing both mornings— "alone on a wide, wide shore”—amid a peevish, disagreeable pack of seagulls—felt quite primeval and near to Nature: and swallowed a most ghastly mouthful of deadly brine: the sea is very choppy. This is quite as good as a Charles Garvi novel—hope you appreciate it. 'he love d la Garvice, shall come later. What are you doing?

Vale!

D. H. Lawrence.

Coleshael, Cheveney Lane,

Quorn,

Leicestershire.

To Edward Garnett.

25.8.11.

Many thanks for your letter, which I have not received until to-day, as I have been moving about.

I have several short stones which I shall be pleased to sen to you for your approval on behalf of the Century 0., in a week or so, when I hall be back in Croydon, have promised to give the publisher a book of short stories o, next spn g If the Century Co. should honour me by accepting any of my work, they would allow me to use their stones for the book?

When I get back to Croydon, I will make haste to send you

some stuff.

Yours truly,

D H Lawrence.

12, Colworth Rd.,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Edward Garnett.                      ic Sept. 1911.

Dear Str,—

I beg to send you the accompanying two stories for your approval on behalf of the Century Co. I am afraid they may not be of the requisite length: as for the kind of thing, would you mind telling me if these are suitable. If not, I must do up something else. I have not very much time for writing.

I shall be very glad if you can dispose of a little of me in the Century. Certainly, my work is not in demand. And if, any time, you would give me a word of criticism on my MSS. I should go with surer feet.

I thank you for giving me your consideration.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

16, Colworth Rd.,

To Edward Garnett,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

25 Sept., 1911.

Dear Sir,—

I received your letter with the stories the other day. Thanks for the advice concerning Intimacy. I myself had felt the drag of the tale, and its slowness in accumulating.

I send you this, which I think would easily split up into three. It is only the first writing, rough, and not sufficiently selective. Bear with me if the first part is tedious—there are, I think, good bits later on. I tried to do something sufficiently emotional, and moral, and—oh, American! I'm not a great success. If you think this is really any good for the Century,

I will revise it, and have it typed. But if it’s not fairly hopeful, I won't have it typed out. 1 am badly off.

I also should like to—to be seen, if you will have it so. But I teach in school, in Croydon. I will try to get an hour off, and will call on you at Messrs. Duckworth's next week—3rd or 4th of October—if you wish. I hardly like foisting this lump of MSS. on anybody.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

16, Colworth Rd., Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Edward Garnett.

2nd October, 1911.

Dear Mr. Garnett,—

Thanks for the return of Two Marriages with such good hopes. I am doing it up, will split it in three, and will keep it between 12 and 15 thousand words.

I will come to Messrs. Duckworth’s on Wednesday, if it is your pleasure. My train will be in Charing Cross at 12.58, so I shall not be very late, at Henrietta Street—if you will allow me a minute or two. I shall have to depart again from Charing Cross at 2.6—am sorry I must stick so strictly within the bounds of an hour.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence,

16, Colworth Rd.,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Edward Garnett,

Oct. 6,1911.

Dear Mr. Garnett,—

I send you this, the one play I have at home. I have written to Mr. Hueffer for the other two. his is the least lite ary and the least unified of the three. I tried to write for the stage— I tried to make it end up stagily. If I send it you at once, you can read it at your leisure. The first scenes are good.

11

The MSS. of the story is with the typewriter. As soon as it comes back I will send it on—and I can tell you of the time I shall arrive at the Cearne—this time next week. I look forward to it.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

16, Colworth Rd.,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Mrs. Villiers-Stuart.                     12 Oct., ign.

Dear Madam,—

I read your letter with considerable feeling. I remember very well the death of Mrs. Thurston: I was sorry John Chilcote is the only one of her books that I have read, but that I admire sincerely. It seems very strange that a discriminating soul like Mrs. Thurston’s has read The White Peacock and now is gone away into death. It makes me wonder at life. I am glad you told me. The publishing of the book has brought me very little but bitterness. A good many folk have been hostile— practically all America; and my mother died a few days before it was published. My health, and time haven’t allowed me to get on very well with the second novel. But in spring there will be a book of short stories, and I trust a volume of verse, my dearest treasure. I hope these may give you a little pleasure. I thank you for your appreciation.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

To Edward Garnett.

16, Colworth Rd., Addiscombe, Croydon.

20 Oct., 1911,

Dear Mr Garnett,—

I have been up to Wm. Heinemann’s lately, at that gentleman’s request. He, and his Satraps, are very much sweeter. It is very remarkable. Last week they were sneering and detestable: to-day they are of the honeycomb. Heinemann wants to publish the verses. That will be all right, it will save you the bother. He will publish them in spring. Will you send me the batch, at your convenience? Do you want to see the others before Heinemann has them?—I know you are not keen on verse. Then he wants me definitely to promise the next novel— the one that is half done—for March, and to withhold the short stories from Martin Seeker until autumn. That, I suppose, is a fairly good arrangement. I forgot to ask him about the "erotic" MSS.—and Miss Hunt (Mrs. Hueffer) will see to the plays to-morrow.

I enjoyed The Breaking Point very much. What I like is its clean bareness—it is Greek in that. That is so much better than my ravels of detail. It is a fine, clean moulded tragedy, The Breaking Point. I have always got such a lot of non-essential stuff in my work. The Norse play is very interesting— coioured. But it hasn’t the bare force of the other.

I hope you received the copy of the White Peacock—I am glad you wanted it. The Chart country will be much less beautiful this week, to-day, than last week.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

16, Colworth Rd.,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Edward Garnett.                       7 Nov., 1911.

Dear Garnett,—

I received your letter, much to my joy, about an hour ago. I wondered whether you had gone away. I he Nation was very nice to take the poems: I am afraid you must have bullyragged them into it. If ever you show Scott-James any of the things, show him such as are quite respectable, and slack and white, will you?

When are you going to the "Cearne"—you do not say? I will send this to Duckworths.

I have been thinking—shall I ask Wm. Heinemann to allow me an income of £100 a year for one, or two year He will owe me £50 in February. He shall have another novel before June—not to mention the verses. Shall I ask him" This last fortnight I have felt really rotten—it is the dry heat of the pipes in school, and the strain—and a cold. I must leave school, really.

Hueffer seems actually to have lost the other two plays. It’s a nuisance.

I’ve got another rather ripping long short story—shall I show it you? Don’t let me be a bore.

I'm sending the last, best verses, the latest, and most substantial, to the Cearne to-morrow. You will be back?

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence,

16, Colworth Rd.,

Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Edward Garnett.                      17 Dec., 1911.

Dear Garnett,—

I got the cheque yesterday, and accept it gladly from you. But a little later, when I have some money, you must let me pay it back to you, because that seems to me honester.

I am very well. Yesterday I sat up to tea for an hour. It is a weird, not delightful experience, which makes me feel like the seated statues of kings in Egypt. My chest gets rapidly well, but my brain is too active. To keep myself at all in order, I ought to be up and doing. By nature I am ceaselessly active. Now I sleep badly, because I don’t do enough—and I mustn’t work, because then away goes my strength. But I feel my life burn like a free flame floating on oil-—wavering and leaping and snapping. I shall be glad to get it confined and conducted again.

I he doctor says I mustn’t go to school again or I shall be consumptive. But he doesn't know. I shan’t send in my notice, but shall ask for long leave of absence. Then I can go back if I get broke. The head-master grieves loudly over my prolonged absence. He knows he would scarcely get another man to do for him as I have done.

I shall look for you on Wednesday. Don’t bring back that novel MSS. unless you have read all you want to read. I don’t want it a bit. It is a work too charge, too emotional. It's a sponge dipped too full of vinegar, or wine, or whatever—it wants squeezing out. I shrink from it rather. I wonder whether Jefferies used to wince away from the Story of my Heart.

This is too long a letter to send to a busy man: excuse me.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

i5, Colworth Rd., Addiscombe, Croydon.

To Edward Garnett.                      18 Dec., 1911.

Dear Garnett,—

Your letter concerning the Siegmund book is very exciting. I will tell you just what Hueffer said, then you will see the attitude his kind will take up.

"The book,” he said, "is a rotten work of genius. It has no construction or form—it is execrably bad art, being all vanatioi on a theme. Also it is erotic—not that I, personally, mind that, but an erotic work must be good art, which this is not.’

I sent it to our friend with the monocle. He wrote to me, after three months: I have read part of the book. I don t care for it, but we will publish it.’

I wrote back to him: "No, I won't have the book published. Return it to me.”

That is about fifteen months ago. I wrote to Hueffer saying: "The novel called 1 he Saga of Siegmund I ha determined not to publish/ He replied to me: ou are qui right not to publish that book—it would damage your reputation perhaps permanently.’

When I was last up at Heinemann's, two months ago, I asked Atkinson to send me the MS. He promised to do so, and said: "I have never finished it. It s your handwi it mg, y< •.

a sweet smile. "Perfectly legible, but so tedious' -a sweet smile.

That’s all the criticism he ever ventured.

Is Hueffer's opinion worth anything, do you think Is le book 50 erotic? I don’t want to be talked about in an Ann Veronica' fashion.

If you offer the thing to Duckworth, do not, I beg you, ask for an advance on royalties. Do not present me as a beggar. Do not tell him I am poor. Heinemann owes me £50 in February— I have enough money to tide me over till he pays—and that fifty will, at home, last me six months. I do not want an advance—let me be presented to Duckworth as a respectable person.

Atkinson has not yet said anything about the poems. I told him I preferred only to publish about 25 of the best, impersonal pieces. He has not answered at all. I shall be glad when I have no more dealings with that firm.

You would get my yesterday’s letter before you left the Cearne to-day----?

We will, then, discuss the book on Wednesday. I shall change the title. Shall I call it The Livanters—is that a correct noun from the verb “To Divant''? To me, it doesn't look an ugly word, nor a disreputable one.

Yours sincerely,

D. IL Lawrence.

To Edward Garnett.

16, Colworth Rd., Addiscombe, Croydon.

30 Dec., 1911.

Dear Garnett,—

Have I kept the Downland too long?—I am sorry. For a day or two I have intended writing, and returning it, but one is so dilatory convalescent.

.1 am getting on very well. Yesterday I went out for the first time, a little way down the road. 1 could walk like a grenadier guard, but for my left leg, which slumbers on, when all the rest of me is awake. The doctor says it is neuritis. However, it gets much better.

Christmas was all right. My sister had her boy down. He follows her round like a dog. They had tea tete-a-tete—I was lying on the couch with my back to them. When I scanned round, he sat, holding a mince-pie minus one large round bite, and leaning forward to her so pathetically. She gave him a quick kiss, he bowed his head and humbly bit his mince-pie. All the time they kept up their trivial conversation, and I should never have known if I hadn't glegged.

I’m not a bit like that—much more brulant. My girl is here. She’s big, and swarthy, and passionate as a gipsy—but good, awfully good, churchy. She rubs her cheek against me, just like a cat, and says: “Are you happy?” It makes me laugh. But I am not particularly happy, being only half here, yet awhile. She never understands that—so I have to pitch all my wits against her. It’s very weird.

The Americans are just as stupid as we expected. Their reason, however, is really comical. It amused me—that's something unexpected. Keep the MS. as long as you like.

I am to go to Bournemouth—Lord, how sick I am of this ordering and countermanding—I loathe to be an invalid. It is nearly unendurable to have to wait for one’s strength to come back—like Penelope. I hate my legs, miserable defaulters—I detest them. I hate to be waited on, and to be treated gently. If ever I'm ill again I shall die of mortification. I am to go to Bournemouth some time next week—probably Friday.

I think I’ll send you this story. My sense of beauty and of interest comes back very strong. I wrote this story last week, in bed-—before I could sit up much. You'll find it, perhaps, thin—maladif. I can t judge it at all—one reason why I send it.

There’s no news. My sister sends her greetings.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

p.S.—For a title to that MS. called at present The Saga, will Trespassers in Cythera or The   respasser or something

that, do? Or for Cythera what can one put—what are the Isles of the Happy——? Evin, Evna Help me out.

I shall begin re-writing the first part to-day.

16, Colworth Rd.,

Addiscombe Rd., Croydon.

To Edward Garnett,                       3 Jan» 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

I hope you got Nature in Downland all right—it was posted on Saturday. I return you the rest—for which many thanks. The whole household, from Mrs. Jones downward, has devoured James Prior. Why is he a failure—Win. Heinemann said he was.

⁴'We had a fellow from your way—a James Prior—did some Sherwood Forest novels. Very good, I thought—but went quite dead, quite dead."

I saw myself also "quite dead, quite dead" in William’s hands—ghastly spectacle!

I am actually going to Bournemouth on Saturday—to "Compton House,

St. Peter’s Rd., Bournemouth."

a boarding-house. God help us.

I have begun the Saga again—done the first chapter— heaps, heaps better. There was room for improvement, by Jove! I was so young—almost pathetically young—two years ago. What do you say of me to-day?—J guess you laugh.

A long farewell,

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S.—I don’t care for Torrents of Spring—though perhaps because I read it too soon—too ill. D. H. L.

Compton House,

To Edward Garnett.

St. Peter’s Rd., Bournemouth.

7 Jan., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Many thanks for the play.* I like it best of all yours; I think it’s ripping: I wish I could say it were satirical or cynical. It

“ Lends and Masters, by Edward Garnett.

l8

looks such a damn mess between the men and the women altogether. Henderson, the Philistine, I think you're a bit hard on: just a bit. Harding, the artist, is most appallingly true: it's a case of ‘’behold thyself"—with this difference—I don’t think I should go about swearing undying love. It is a much more delicate thing to make love, and to win love, than to declare love. But in plays you have to be bald. Mrs. Henderson—I mean the young one—I could shoot her. She is typical of all that is exasperating in women. She is most abominably true. But Harding must have managed her very badly. It is a dis turbing, damnable little play—I should never have guessed you for the author. The women in it are best, aren't they? I wish I had been in Manchester to see the acting.

As for the Century man, I'm certain I haven’t a story he'd take. The three he might have had, the English has published. For the rest, you've seen most of the Seeker volume. There’s the one you’ve got—the two you've got—and the Haystacks one—and the two I sent you first—and a couple that Austin Harrison has—and a couple or so more. aat’s enough for a volume, I believe—and nothing, absolutely, for the Century’s holy eyes. What shall I say to Seeker?—he is 5, John St., Adelphi, is he not?

I was away at Red Hill for a couple of days, when your letter came, so I couldn’t root out any more stories for you—and I came straight from Red Hill here.

I don’t like it very much. It’s a sort of go-as-you-please boarding-house, where I shall be far more alone than if I hao gone into apartments, as I wanted to do. 1 think I get a bit impatient of people. But there, one is always churlish after an illness. When I’m better tempered I shall like the old maids and the philistine men and the very proper and propriemus maidens right enough. It is always raining—so stupid of it.

When I come back to Croydon, in a month’s time, I shall be very glad to come and see you at the Cearne. T hen I shall go home to the Midlands. I will try and get the Trespc in a month or so. I should like him publisfteci this spring. Must I tell Wm. Heinemann about him? I have heard nothing of the poems.

The world—there are some 50 people in the house—is going to church, so I can write in peace.

If you’ve anything really nice to read—send it me, will you?

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Compton House,

St. Peter’s Rd., Bournemouth.

To Edward Garnett.                       19 Jan., 1912.

My dear Garnett,—

What do you think of the enclosed? Is it merely soft sawder? I really don’t think the Saga was ever read at Wm. Heinemann s not by anyone. But they make me feel so uncertain and down about the wretched thing. I am always ready to believe the worst that is said about my work, and reluctant of the best. Father was like that with us children.

I have done the first 135 pages of the Trespasser—re-written t lem. Shall I send them on At the bottom of my heart I don’t like the work, though I'm sure it has points, and I don’t think it retrograde from the White Peacock. It surprises me by its steady progressiveness—I hate it for its fluid, luscious quality.

Harrison is putting in next month’s English a story I do not care for. Altogether, I am out of sorts in my literary self just now.

I’ve had a vicious cold, but it’s nearly better—and it is a fine morning at last. We have had torrents of rain, but no snow. Are you quite well?—I have been wondering.

Tell me, shall I send that so much of the Trespasser—and will you be severe on it when you have time to go through it?

I hope to get away from here in another fortnight. I have promised to visit friends in Germany in April or May.

Oh it seems evident to me Heinemann doesn’t want the verses very badly. Isn't he a nuisance. It’s because of their rotten form, I suppose. Still, he could find a Jew good ones— and he might let me know what he does want. I wish he’d give them me back.                                      ⁵

Shame to bore you with all this.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Compton Home,

St. Peter's Rd., Bournemouth.

To Edward Garnett.

21 Jan., 1912.

My dear Garnett,—

I received your letter yesterday, and the books this morning. It is very good of you, and it makes me wonder how you, who are as busy and as public a man as most literary fellows, can find the time and the energy. Hueffer impressed it on me, it couldn’t be done: by the time a man was forty, the triviality of minor interests could only command a rare slight attention: and I had begun to believe it. But you are so prompt and consistently attentive, where you gain nothing, that I begin to reconsider myself.

I will send you herewith the 180 or 190 pages of the Trespasser which I have done. It won’t take me much longer, will it? I hope the thing is knitted firm—I hate those pieces where the stitch is slack and loose. The Stranger piece is probably still too literary—I don’t feel at all satisfied.

But this is a work one can’t regard easily—I mean, at one s ease. It is so much oneself, one's naked self. I give myself away so much, and write what is my most palpitar , sens self, that I loathe the book, because it will betray me to a parcel of fools. Which is what any deeply personal or lyrical writer feels, I guess. I often think Stendhal must have writhed in torture every time he remembered Le Rouge et le .noir was public property: and Jefferies at The Story of my Heart. I don’t like The Story of my Heart.

I wish the Trespasser were to be issued privately, to a ten folk who had understanding. But I suppose by all the rules of life, it must take open chance, if it s good enough

I like the first two stories of Gertrude Bone immense y—si is wonderfully perceptive there. She’s got a lot of poetic feeling, a lot of perceptivity, but she seems scarcely able to concentrate it on her people she is studying: at least, not always. Something in Andreyev makes him rather unmteresi ng to m , and House of Cobwebs is, as Seacombe suggests, chie y o interest as footnotes on Gissing. Gissing hasn t enoug energy, enough sanguinity, to capture me. But I esteem him a good deal.

I am pretty well—have had a damnable cold, which lingers. The weather here is soft and inclined to fog. I would rather be braced a little, now.

I shall leave here on Feb. 3rd and will come straight to the Cearne, if that is convenient. I have promised to go home to Nottingham on Feb. 8th. Can you keep me at the Cearne about four days?

Here I get mixed up in people’s lives so—it’s very interesting, sometimes a bit painful, often jolly. But I run to such close intimacy with folk, it is complicating. But I love to have myself in a bit of a tangle.

Thanks very much for the things.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Compton House,

St. Peter’s Rd.,

_                               Bournemouth.

I o Edward Garnett.                       29 Jam, 1912.

My dear Garnett,—

My time here is running out. They want me badly to stay till to-day week the 5th—but I think I'd rather come on rhe Saturday. I shall leave here by the 2.0 p.m. train, which arrives m London—Waterloo—at 4.0. It is a non-stop. Would you mma to send me a train from Victoria or anywhere down to Eden bridge? You choose the time, and I will abide by it. Do not bother with a trap—I can walk quite well. I can do six miles by now.

The 7 respasser goes quite fast. In the dirty weather of the last week I have got on with it. I am past the 300th page now. I* really isn t bad, is it?—but too florid, too “charge." But it can > be anything else—it is itself. I must let it stand. At anv rate, not many folk could have done it, however they may find fault. I shall finish by the time I come to Edenbridge- -or at any rate before I leave you. So, when you can find time to go over the thing, we can decide about the publishing. If it is to come, I should like April or May for the month, as you suggested.

We have had three beautiful days—most lovely. I am very sensitive to the exquisite atmospheres of down here—I have delightful passages. In health, too, I am sure I make good strides. But at the bottom I am rather miserable. I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams. It is very queer. But my dreams make conclusions for me. They decide things finally. I dream a decision. Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer me them as dreams. It is a horrid feeling, not to be able to escape from one’s own—what?—self-daemon—fate, or something. I hate to have my own judgments clinched inside me involuntarily. But it is so.

What tosh to write. I don’t know what ails me.

Just tell me about the tram. I will bring the rest of the Trespasser.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

13, Queen’s Square, Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.

io Feb., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

I found------getting very fat—“be not puffed up came

into my mind. But he's rather nicer than he was. He seems to have had a crisis, when, dear Lord, he fizzed and bubbled over the place. Now, don’t you know, he seems, quit consider ate, even thoughtful for other folk. Bur he is fat.

Ifs -------’s good influence. Do you know, I rat ter like

her—she's such a real assassin. I evoked the memory of various friends that were her friends twelve mow ago. Behold, she nicely showed me the effigies of these oik m heart, each of their blemishes marked with a red asteri > e a dagger hole. I saluted her, she did the business so artistically: there was no loathsome gore spilt over the murdered friends.

She looked old, yet she was gay—she was gay, she laughed, she bent and fluttered in the wind of joy. She coquetted and played beautifully with —---: she loves him distractedly—

she was charming, and I loved her. But my God, she looked old.

Perhaps because she wore—she was going to some afternoon affair of swell suffragettes—a gaudy witch-cap stitched with beads of scarlet and a delicate ravel of green and blue. It was a cap like a flat, square bag: the two points she pulled over her ears—and she peeped coquettishly under the brim—but she looked damned old. It rather hurt me.

Something like this:

(Sketch)

I think ------liked it—but was rather scared. He feels,

poor fish, the hooks are through his gills this time—and they are. Yet he’s lucky to be so well caught—she’ll handle him with marvellous skill.

They sport a carriage now—have one on contract, I believe. ------ drove me in great state to the Court Theatre, where we heard some Morality Players—Yeats and Rev. something Adderley. It wasn't any very great shakes—but rather nice. —----- is really rather decent:—he likes to sark (verb to be

sarcastic unto) me because I am "a serious person at grips with life.”

I met Jane and kissed her farewell at Marylebone—my heart was awfully heavy.

Here they take my critical case with L------very seriously.

I feel rather frit.

Heinemann has settled my account £49.15.10. You will have to wait still further for your seven guineas, because I’ve got to pay the doctor and my sister and so on. But TH square up as soon as I can. Not a word, by the way, from the divine William, cock of Bedford St., concerning my invaluable poeniSs

Austin Harrison—in two lines—wants to meet me on Monday afternoon, and to know what books I want to review. I'm glad I shan’t have to go to him, to have the fount of my eloquence corked up. But what books do I want to review? For the Lord's sake, tell me.

Tell Miss Whale that the wickedness is all on top—like the scarlet sweets we used to suck, and get bloody mouths, i he inside is pure white sugar. My love to Miss Whale.

D, H. Lawrence.

Queen's Square,

Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.                       12 Feb., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

I saw L —----yesterday—she was rather ikey (adj.—to be

cocky, to put on airs, to be aggressively superior). She had decided beforehand that she had made herself too cheap to me, therefore she thought she would become all at once expensive and desirable. Consequently she offended me at evet rs end—thank God. If she’d been wistful, tender and passionate, I should have been a goner. I took her to the castle, where was an exhibition from the Art School—wonderfully good stuff. She stared at the naked men till I had to go into another room- -she gave me a disquisition on texture in modelling v h lay lives or does not live;—sarked me for saying a certain old fellow I met was a bore: could not remember, oh no, had not the ghost of a notion when we had last visited the castle together, though she knew perfectly: thought me a fool for saying the shadow < the town seen faintly coloured through a og vas st; ling-and so on. I took her to a cafe, and over tea and toast tol her for the fourth time. When she began to giggle, I asked her coolly for the joke: when she began to cry, I wanted a cup of tea. It’s awfully funny. I had a sort of cloud over my mmd—a real sensation of darkness which lifted and trembled igl y. I seemed to be a sort of impersonal creature, without heart or liver, staring out of a black cloud. It's an awfully funny phenomenon. I saw her off by the 5.8 train, perfectly calm. She was more angry and disgusted than anything, thank God.

I he sequel—which startled me—I will tell you personally some time. It shall not be committed to paper.

I have another rendezvous to-day—and one I've had to put off. But I can't tell you those things via the post.

I send you these sketches. I think they’re not bad. Would the Saturday or the Nation look at them? I’m awfully sorry to trouble you so-—really. 1 ne colliery one apropos the strike, might go down,

The weather here is livid—I loathe it. In May I go to Germany. God speed the day.

Don t smite the trembling edifice of my character in Miss Whale’s eyes—and give her my regards.

D. H Lawrence.

Queen’s Square,

Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.                       24 Feb., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

I enclose another "billet doux" from our mutual friend. He doesn’t want to publish the poems. I think he’s pretty just, isn’t he? Shall I write and say to him "All right’’?

Has Duckworth said anything about ’ he Trespasser? I’m afraid he also will not want to publish me. The only thing to do is to get on with this third novel. It goes pretty well I think [ shall finish it by May,

My sister and I were at a bit of a dance last night at Jacksdale —mining village four miles out. It was most howling good fun. My sister found me kissing one of her friends good-bye—such a ripping nttle girl—and we were kissing like nuts—enter my sister—great shocks all round, and much indignation. But_ life is awfully fast down here.

lam very well. Don’t bother to answer me if you’re busy My regards to Miss Whale.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S.—L------ writes, repenting of her horrid behaviour on

that Tuesday—beseeching me to take an excursion with her down into the country next Saturday—just to show I forgive her. I daren't accept—and shan't. D. H. L.

Station Rd. Pharmacy,

Shirebrook,

Near Mansfield.

To Edward Garnett.

6 March, 1912.

My dear Garnett,—

They forwarded me your letter on here. It is awfully good of you to write me so promptly. I had a letter from de la Mare about the poems. As Heinemann hadn’t seemed keen on publishing the things, and as I am very busy indeed at the colliery novel, which I wish to finish before I go to Germany, I said to de la Mare, shall we not trouble with the poems at the present? T hen he took me to task rather sharply or my unbusinesslike reply—whereupon I said he could do just what he liked with the verses, and I would alter them when I had time. You see I can't work at novel and verses at once just now, because the former takes all my attention. However, I suppose they will do as they choose.

Don't you bother so much about the sketches. It's not fair. By the way, would you care to see the MS. of the colliery novel, when it is finished, before it goes to Wm. H.? I have and I am afraid of you.

done two thirds or more.

Duckworth is jolly nice. Of course he can have the novel after this I am now doing. But what will William o edfo St. say? I have written putting off Martin Seeker.

I am here only till Friday. This last fortnight I have not been so well, but it’s nothing. I’m not going to tell you any stories, because at breakfast you are a sort of ather Anthony;

Here, in this ugly hell, the men are most happy. They sing, they drink, they rejoice in the land. 1 here were more runks run-in from the Crown and the Drum here last week-end, than ever since Shirebrook was Shirebrook. Yesterday I was in Worksop. It is simply snyed with pals. Every bless place 27                        c was full of men, in the larkiest of spirits. I went in the Golden Crown and a couple of other places. They were betting like steam on skittles—the "seconds" had capfuls of money. There is some life up here this week, I can tell you. Everywhere you go, crowds and crowds of men, not unhappy, as they usually are.

Will you tell me when there is anything I ought to do, and will you remember me kindly to Miss Whale?

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

13, Queen’s Square, Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.                    8th March, 1912.

Mv dear Garnett,—

It is good news from the Foruml I have altered the story much to my satisfaction. What do you think? I enclose also the duplicate. Will the title do? Shall you send the duplicate to the English and ask Harrison to publish it simultaneously with the Forum? You know better than L

I enclose a story I wrote three years back, and had forgotten. It is on the same theme, and I thought it might interest you—it is really curious. But before it was ever submitted to a publisher I would like thoroughly to revise it.

I had a letter from Duckworth, which I shall answer now "yes." But he says the title Trespasser is not particularly strong, and will I find another? I have cudgelled my brains into smithereens, and can find nothing. God help us.

What do you mean by Miss Cook’s MS., by the way? Has she sent you something?

I had two shocks this morning, by the post. One of the men who taught in the school at Croydon with me, has died suddenly of pneumonia. And ------ my very old friend, the Don

Juanish fellow I told you of—went and got married three months back, without telling a soul—and now boasts a son: "Jimmy, a very fine lad." He writes me eight pages, closely packed, this morning. The girl is living at home, with "Jimmy" in Stourbridge. The managers asked —----- —---to resign

28

his post, because of the blot on the scrutcheon. He said he’d "see them fizzled first/ In the end, he was removed to a little headship on the Stafford-Derby border—has been there six weeks—alone—doing fearfully hard work. Don Juan in hell, what ho! He implores me to go and stay a week with him. I suppose I'll have to. This has upset me—one never knows what’ll happen. You know ------has already got one ille

gitimate child. It’s a lovely story, the end of it: the beginning was damnable. She was only nineteen, and he only twenty. Her father, great Christian, turned her out. -------wouldn’t

acknowledge the kid, but had to pay, whether or not. That's five years back. Last October, I am told, the girl got married. Before the wedding—two days or so—she went to--’s home

with the child, and showed it to Georgie’s father and mother.

"I’ve come, Mr. —---, for you to own this child. Who’s

the father of that?" pushing forward the small girl.

"Eh bless her, it’s just like him," cried old Mrs. -------,

and she kissed the kid with tears.

"Well, Lizzie," said —-— to the girl, "if our George-Henry says that isn’t his’n he’s a liar. It’s the spit and image of him."

Whereupon Lizzie went away satisfied, got married to a collier, and lives in Cordy Lane. She, with one or two others, will rejoice over George’s final nabbing. Isn’t it awful;

All this, by the way, is quite verbal truth.

Vale!

D. H. Lawrence.

Queen's Square,

Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.                       ¹ April, 1912.

My dear Garnett,—

I was away in Staffs, when your letter came. I can t think o another title. Would:

A Game of Forfeits

or The Forfeit

or The Man and the Dreaming Woman

or anything like that do? I try to get something that would catch. Even The Trespasser has been used before, I believe—by Gilbert Parker. I haven’t received any proofs from Duckworth. The Daily News sent me back the article The Collier’s Wife Scores. Would the Eyewitness have it, I wonder.

Father has just come in with his strike ballot. He's balloted for—here, I’ll send you the paper.

My two sisters are raving because the meeting was rowdy, and many of the men balloted "against'*: every evil that could, be urged against a working man is urged by his women-folk. They are all aristocrats, these women, to the backbone. I hey would murder any man at any minute if he refused to be a good servant to the family. They make me curse.

---wrote and asked for my address so that he could send the plays. I sent the address, but the plays haven't come.

It’s cold here. I hope you are well.

D. H. Lawrence.

Queen’s Square,

Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.                      zrck April, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Austin Harrison writes me concerning the Forum story: is not exactly keen on publishing it, because he doesn’t love the Forum.

He wants to put one of my poems in in June; so, he says, shall he return me Love Among the Haystacks, and fix a date— either July, August or September, for the publication of the Soiled Rose—the Forum story; or shall he return me the Soiled Rose, and publish the Haystacks story in July? Which shall I say? He wants a definite answer directly.

He also says, if I want books to review, will I write at once, naming the works. But I don't know what is out. Can you tell me of anything? I beg you, do.

I like your Dostoievsky review in the Daily News to-day. They won’t have you much oftener, I’m afraid, although you've tried to put a sort of "liberal” complexion on it. Isn’t the D. N. enough to break one's heart nowadays. Did you read its notice of the English Review, and its emphasis of Sickert's dislike of the nude?

I was round with a friend delivering relief tickets yesterday. It’s not that the actual suffering is so great—though it's bad enough-—but the men seem such big, helpless, hopeless children, and the women are impersonal—little atlases under a load that they know will crush them out at last, but it doesn't matter. They aren’t conscious any more than their hearts are conscious of their endless business of beating. They have no conscious life, no windows. It makes me ill.

Don't tell Harrison I wrote for your advice—he likes to think he’s a personal benefactor.

1 shall finish my colliery novel this week—the first draft. It'll want a bit of revising. It’s by far the best thing I ve done.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S.—Had a p.c.from——--to-day to say, was Queen’s

Square my right address. I expect the plays in a week or two.

Queens Square,

Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.                       5 APril> 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Thanks for your letter. I wrote Harrison and asked him to publish the Haystacks story. But you didn’t suggest any books for me to review.

Mrs. -------sent me the plays to-day. It appears "my poor

------" has had a breakdown, and mustn’t even dictate a letter, "if he can help it." They are at Sandgate. Mrs.----— is "so

sorry the plays were delayed. I hey might have taken Quit well, while collieries are in the air. But perhaps it is not too late. You must get them published, with the aid of Mr. Garnett. So you see the fat’s in the fire there. he plays are very interesting, but again, formless. Form will never be my strong point, she says, .but I needn’t be quite so bad. ⁴ But never min

---and I always call you a genius/ I have thanked her for the sarcasm.

The first batch of proofs of the Trespasser arrived last night. I will wage war on my adjectives. Culpa mea! I think I have no occasion to write to Duckworth. But I’ll send Belloc the sketch. Those others, shall I send him them also? I suppose you have them. I mean the other two Strike Articles.

I have just found the list of books on your letter—thanks awfully. I’ll write to Harrison. He seems inclined to deflate. On Tuesday he wrote me a cocky letter, yesterday, a sweet and friendly one. Publishing people are more sickly than lepers. I am thankful to be safe out of London.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Queen’s Square, Eastwood, Notts.

To Edward Garnett.                       77 April, 19T2.

Dear Garnett,-—

Did I answer your last letter? I can’t for my life remember. Why do you take so much trouble for me?—if I am not eternally grateful, I am a swine.

It is huge to think of Iden Payne acting me on the stage: you are like a genius of Arabian Nights, to get me through. Of course I will alter and improve whatever I can, and Mr. Payne has fullest liberty to do entirely as he pleases with the play— you know that. And of course I don’t expect to get money by it. But it’s ripping to think of my being acted.

I shall be in London next week, I think-—from Thursday to Sunday—then I can see Walter de la Mare, and Harrison, who want to jaw me, and you who don’t want to jaw me. Mrs. ------

will be in town also. She is ripping—she’s the finest woman I’ve ever met—you must above all things meet her . . . she is the daughter of Baron von Richthofen, of the ancient and famous house of Richthofen—but she’s splendid, she is really. How damnably I mix things up. Mrs.------ is perfectly unconventional, but really good—in the best sense, I’ll bet you've never met anybody like her, by a long chalk. You must see her next week. I wonder if she’d come to the Ceame, if you asked us. Oh, but she is the woman of a lifetime.

1 shall love to see you again. Don't be grumpy.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Queen's Square,

Eastwood, Notts.

To P. F. T. Smith.                        22 April, 1912.

Dear Mr. Smith,—

It was awfully nice of you and the other chaps and Miss Mason to get me those two books. The plays are exceedingly interesting. I hope you read them. Tchekhov is a new thing in drama.

What changes and variations at Davidson nowadays. When I think back, it seems to me we were pretty peaceful those last two years of mine. But school is hard work, anywhere.

I am probably going to Germany on the 4th May. It is just possible that I may be detained by business, but I think to depart on Saturday week. I am going first to Metz—for only a short time; then to Waldbrol, near Bonn, and near the Rhein: I shall stay a month or two in Waldbrol, after which I have an invitation to Munich. So you see about where I shall be fixed. Do you think of going to Germany again this summe: -to the Black Forest at all?—then I could see you and Mrs. Smith. It would be very jolly.

I am pretty well in health, as Miss Mason wih have told you. It is such beautiful weather, and so pretty with blossom n he country. Sometimes I think of playtime at Davidson: ' ‘lease, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Smith says, will you blow the whistle.’' It’s a nice playground at Davidson, such a space of view, and a lot of sky. Sometimes I think I should like to come Nature lessons; cool, and jolly, with the boys happy. But I'm glad, when I hear them in the school at Beauvale here- that I'm not a prisoner. Liberty to work, oh, such a lot.

By the way, you may find very shortly in the Saturday Westminster Gazette, a string of verses of mine about school, that might interest you.

If Mr. Robertson comes in, remember me to him, will you. Tell everybody at Davidson I'm awfully fond of them. My regards to Mrs. Smith and Doris.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

20, Dulverton Rd.,

Leicester.

To Edward Garnett.                      2Z April, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

I had a letter from Iden Payne appointing me a meeting at the Managers Club on Thursday, to which I have written agreeing. I shall come back here to Leicester on Thursday evening, by the excursion.

I want to come to the Cearne on Saturday with Mrs.------.

I am most awfully fond of her. Things are getting difficult. Are you quite sure you would like her and me to come to your house? If so, will you fix a train for Saturday evening? We should go away again on Sunday. But don’t mind to say “No,” if you feel the least hesitating.

Mrs.------is going to Germany on the 4th of May. I want

to go then, because we could have at least one week together. I should think it wouldn't matter, would it, if I weren’t in London when the little play was performed? And I wanted to see it, but as things are, I want to go to Germany more. The world is so full of mean, rather brutal people. It makes me tired.

You will write me here, c/o Mrs. Krenkow.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S.—I have written a comedy—middling good. Should I send it you? D. H. L.

20, Dulverton Rd., Leicester.

To Edward Garnett.

29 April, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

I believe Mrs. —--after all left those first chapters of my

Heinemann novel Paul Morel in your book-room: I am sure they are there. And I left my scrubby gloves. Send me them on to Eastwood, will you. I am going home to-day. Probably I shall go to Germany on Friday. I am so anxious to know what -------will say. She is going to tell him to-day.

Tell me what you think of Mrs.------. I am afraid of you

suddenly donning the cassock of a monk, and speaking out of the hood. Don’t sound wise, and old, and—‘’When you’ve lived as long as I have”—sort of thing. It’s insulting.

Tell me when Duckworth will publish the novel.

To-day isn’t like yesterday. I hate this house—full of old books, gloomy as hell, and silent with books. I hate the glum silence of ranks of shut books. I imagine your apple-blossom. It seems so sociable and lovable in comparison.

Vale1

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Rheinischer Hof,

T rier.

To Edward Garnett.

9 May, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—                        .

I've not had any letters since I’ve been here—since Friday, that is—so I don’t know what is taking place. Write to me, I beg you—I am staying in Trier till next Monday or e dL then, for a week or two, my address will be c/o Frau Karl Krenkow, Waldbrol, Rheinprovinz.

Of course I’ve been in Metz with Mrs. -----s people.

There’s such a hell of a stir up. Nothing is settled yet. —- -knows everything. Oh Lord, what a mess to be m—ana this after eight weeks of acquaintance! But I don’t care a damn what it all costs. I'll tell you how things work out. At present all is vague.

I had to quit Metz because the damn fools wanted to arrest me as a spy. Mrs.------and I were lying on the grass near

some water—talking—and I was moving round an old emerald ring on her finger, when we heard a faint murmur in the rear— a German policeman. There was such a to-do. It needed all the fiery little Baron von Richthofen’s influence—and he is rather influential in Metz—to rescue me. They vow I am an English officer—I—I!! The damn fools. So behold me, fleeing eighty miles away, to Trier. Mrs.------is coming on Satur

day. Oh Lord, it’s easier to write history than to make it, even in such a mild way as mine.

Tell me if my literary affairs are shifting at all. Regards to Miss Whale.

Yours,

D. JI. Lawrence.

Isn’t it all funny!

Post card. No date and no stamp decipherable. Possibly early May.

To A. W. McLeod.

I suppose you wonder what on earth has become of me. Oh, fearful and wonderful things are happening. I have to leave Metz quick, because they’re going to arrest me as a spy—I come on to Trier—but no, I won t tell you what happens at Trier.

I am going up the Rhine on Monday. Write to me c/o Frau Karl Krenkow—Waldbrol—Rheinprovinz, there's a dear. How is everything going? I sit among the blossoming apple trees, above the vineyards of the Mosel, above the ancient town of Trier, hearkening to the cuckoo sing, and thinking of Davidson and of thee. I would not be in Davidson—no, not for anything.

Escape my dear, escape. Psalm XCI. My love to everybody.

D. H. Lawrence.

Post card. No address. Postal stamp: 19.5.12.

To A. W. McLeod,

I got your card. You sound down in the mouth. I'm so sorry. I write on top of the Drachenfels, in the cafe under the trees. One can see miles and miles of Rhine—it twists and seems to climb upwards till some of it swims in the sky. We came here down the river from Bonn-—that is a delicious town —masses of horse-chestnut trees in blossom. Germany is delightful. If I have to beg my bread I’ll never teach again. Get away if you can—try! Look for a poem in next month’s English. When did the Westminster publish me? There was a whole series of poems to come. Write to me, do. I love to have a letter from you. Don’t be cross if I only send cards in reply.

D. H. Lawrence.

bei Herr Karl Krenkow, Waldbrol, Rheinprovinz.

To Edward Garnett.

Deaf Garnett,—

I suppose I shall have to keep on amusing you, though I myself am anything but amused. I tell you, making history is no joke. But I won’t die in the attempt, if I can help it.

Now that title—the readers at Duckworth’s ought to have altered it, for I did not know that A Game of Forfeits was finally settled upon. As for Author of the White Peacock—now would you expect me to think of it? I wonder you can be so heartless. I’ve not signed any agreement with Messrs. Duckworth—I suppose it doesn’t matter. And supposing I actually haven’t a penny in the world—at present I ve a* 01 would your chief give me a sub—£10? But for the Lord s sake, don’t ask him yet—I’d rather anything. Always, somewhere, I shall find some woman who'll give me bed and board, hank

God for the women.

F—that is Mrs. —----her name is Frieda— he Peace

ful”—let me call her F.—she has gone to Munich—hundreds of miles away—and I am eating my heart out, and revising my immortal Heinemann novel, Paul Morel, in this tiny village stuck up in the Rhineland. If you wouldn’t make it a laughing matter—I'd open my poor heart to you—a rare museum. But you are too “narquois!” I left F. in 1 rier—200 miles from here —a week ago. Oh there has been such a to-do.

To live, one must hurt people so. One has to make up one's mind, it must be so. Of course my people at home wonder what I'm up to—I shall tell them all later, but nothing now— and they too are hurt. And F. is making herself ill. Now she's gone to Miinchen, to her sister. he Richthofens are an astonishing family—three girls—women—the eldest a Doctor of Social Economics—a Professor too—then Frieda—then the youngest-—28—very beautiful, rather splendid in her deliberate worldliness. They are a rare family—father a fierce old aristocrat—mother utterly non-moral, very kind. You should know them.

I am going to Munich directly—perhaps Saturday. The soles of my feet burn as I wait. Here, the slow oxen go down the main street, drawing the wagons, under my window—the country is all still, and oxen plough and harrow. In the Gast-haus, the Lutheran choir practises in one room, we drink in the next. My cousin--— is newly married—and wishes she

weren’t. She’s getting in love with me. Why is it women 1 vill fall in love with me? And I haven’t an eye for a girl, damn it. I just remain in a state of suspense, till I can go to Munich.

Frieda sort of clings to the idea of you, as the only man in England who would be a refuge. She wanted to write to you—-so I send you her letter. Don’t be wise and cryptic. After all, Frieda isn't in any book, and I'm not, and life hurts—and sometimes rejoices one. But—you see—in life one’s own flesh and blood goes through the mill—and F.’s eyes are tired now. I hope I can go to Munich on Saturday—it is 15 hours’ journey from this God-forsaken little hole. But people are wonderfully good to me. The Rhineland is nice—we were at Bonn and on the Drachenfels on Sunday—so magical. But it will always be to me a land of exile—and slow, slow cattle drawing the wagons. Those slow, buff oxen, with their immense heads that seem always asleep, nearly drive me mad as they step tinkling down the street. After them- I could hug the dog in the milkcart, that lifts his paw quickly and daintily over the shaft, and sits down panting.

Is it Tuesday?—I never know how the days go. Miss Whale is quite right when she says I’m good—I am good. Give her my love. Only the women have eyes for goodness—and they wear green moral spectacles, most of em.

Vale!

D. H. Lawrence.

To H. C

1912.

.. . I am here in Bavarian Tyrol, near the mountains. They stand up streaked with snow, so blue, across the valley, i he Isar is a quick stream, all muddy with glacier water now. If ever you come to Germany, come down the Isarthal. r he flowers are in masses, masses, enough to satisfy any heart alive, and so beautiful. And the clear, clean atmosphere, and the peasants barefooted, and the white cows with their cow-bells, it -- > so delightful. Yesterday we were at a peasant play you know this is the Ober-Ammergau country. It was an old Miracle play, with the Devil and Death, and Christ, and Maria quaint and rather touching. You would like it very much. Some time, come to Bavaria. It is the Minnesinger country. I have been in the Rhineland, and the Mosel land, but I like Bavaria best.. ..

bei Professor Alf. Weber,

Icking, bei Mlinehen.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.

2 June, 1912.

Dear Mrs. Hopkin,—

Although I haven't heard from you, I'll get a letter off .0 you> because to people I like, I always want to tell my good news. When I came to Germany I came with Mrs. - went to Metz with her. Her husband knows all about it—but 1 don t think he will give her a divorce—only a separation. I wish he d divorce her, so we could be married. But that’s as it is.

I came down from the Rhineland to Munich last Friday week. Frieda met me there, in Munich. She had been living with her sister in a village down the Isar Valley, next village to this. We stayed in Munich a night, then went down to Better-berg for eight days. Beuerberg is about 40 kilometres from Munich, up the Isar, near the Alps. This is the Bavarian Tyrol. We stayed in the Gasthaus zur Post. In the morning we used to have breakfast under the thick horse-chestnut trees, and the red and white flowers fell on us. The garden was on a ledge, high over the river, above the weir, where the timber rafts floated down. The Loisach—that’s the river—is pale jade green, because it comes from glaciers. It is fearfully cold and swift. The people were all such queer Bavarians. Across from the inn, across a square full of horse-chestnut trees, was the church and the convent, so peaceful, all whitewashed, except for the minaret of the church, which has a black hat. Every day, we went out for a long, long time. There are flowers so many they would make you cry for joy—Alpine flowers. By the river, great hosts of globe flowers, that we call bachelor’s buttons—pale gold great bubbles—then primulas, like mauve cowslips, somewhat—and queer marsh violets, and orchids, and lots of bell-flowers, like large, tangled, darkpurple harebells, and stuff like larkspur, very rich, and lucerne, so pink, and in the woods, lilies of the valley—oh, flowers, great wild mad profusion of them, everywhere. One day we went to a queer old play done by the peasants—this is the Ober-Am-mergau country. One day we went into the mountains, and sat, putting Frieda s rings on our toes, holding our feet under the pale green water of a lake, to see how they looked. Then we go to Wolfratshausen where Frieda’s sister has a house—like a chalet—on the hill above the white village.

Now Frieda and I are living alone in Professor Weber’s flat. It is the top storey of this villa—quite small—four rooms beside kitchen. But there’s a balcony, where we sit out, and have meals, and I write. Down below, is the road where the bullock wagons go slowly. Across the road the peasant women work in the wheat. Then the pale, milk-green river runs between the woods and the plain—then beyond, the mountains, range beyond range, and their tops glittering with snow.

I've just had to run into the kitchen—a jolly little place— wondering what Frieda was up to. She'd only banged her head on the cupboard. So we stood and looked out. Over the hills was a great lid of black cloud, and the mountains nearest went up and down in a solid blue-black. Through, was a wonderful gold space, with a tangle of pale, wonderful mountains, peaks pale gold with snow, and farther and farther away—such a silent, glowing confusion, brilliant with snow. Now the thunder is going at it, and the rain is here.

I love Frieda so much, I don’t like to talk about it. I never knew what love was before. She wanted me to write to you. I want you and her to be friends always. Sometime perhaps she —perhaps we—shall need you. Then you'll be good to us, won't you?

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great—quite godlike. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.

You might write to us here. Our week of honeymoon is over. Lord, it was lovely. But this—do I like this better?—I like it so much. Don’t tell anybody. This is only for the good to know. Write to us.

D. H. Lawrence.

bei Herr Professor Alf. Weber,

Icking,

bei Miinchen.

To Edward Garnett.

2 June, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

You'll never guess where I am now. And your let ter was so down—we were beastly sorry. It’s that damned play. Why, why should we be plagued with literature and suchlike tomfoolery? Why can’t we live decent honourable lives, without the critics in the Little Theatre fretting us? When I was coming down to Miinchen, last Friday week, I happened to see a man going by on Niederlahnstein platform, with a Morning f ost. It contained your play’s announcement, and then I knew you were going to have a flaming hard struggle to get through. They didn’t seem to care for the plot, nor the character, the feel of the play. Fools—they’re all fools.

But listen to me. I've had my week’s honeymoon. We went down to Beuerberg Saturday week ago. J his is down the Isar valley, in the Bavarian Tyrol, near the Alps. We stayed at a Gasthaus, and used to have breakfast out under the horsechestnut trees, steep above the river weir, where the timber rafts come down. The river is green glacier water. Bavarian villages are white and gay, the churches are baroque, with minarets, white with black caps. Every day it was perfect. Frieda and I went long ways. There are masses and masses of Alpine flowers, globe flowers, primulas, lilies, orchids—make you dance. The river was in flood. Once we had to wade such a long way. Of course that just delighted Frieda’s heart. The lovely brooks we have paddled in, the lovely things we have done!

Now, Weber, Professor at Heidelberg University (Political Economics)—who has a house in the next village, has given us his flat whilst he is back in Heidelberg It is quite tiny. This is our first morning. We have the upper storey of the cottage, and a balcony. I on the balcony in a dressing-gown, am respectable, but Frieda in her night-gown isn’t, I say. There’s a little white village below, then the river, and a plain of dark woods—all in shadow. Then there’s the great blue wall of mountains, only their tops, all snowy, glittering in far-off sunshine against a pale blue sky. Frieda is awfully good-looking. You should see her sometimes. She is getting the breakfast. We are both a bit solemn this morning. It is our first morning at home. You needn t say things about her—or me. She is a million times better than ever you imagine—you don’t know her, from literature, no, how can you? I don’t. She is fond of you. I say she’d alarm you. She's got a figure like a fine Rubens woman, but her face is almost Greek. If you say a word about her, I hate you. I am awfully well—you should see me. I wish —-----

would divorce her, but he won’t. I shall live abroad I think for ever. We shall scramble along. I don’t want any money from Duckworth.

I’m sending the colliery novel to Heinemann—it’s rather great. Can you send me the notices, .sometime, on the Trespasser?

D. H. Lawrence.

F. in a scarlet pinafore, leaning out on the balcony, against a background of blue and snowy mountains, says "I'm so happy I don’t even want to kiss you.” So there, you see, Love is a much bigger thing than passion, and a woman much more than sex.

D. H. L.

Icking,

bei Munchen, Isarthal.

To Edward Garnett.                    Monday, 11.6.12.

My dear Garnett,—

I don’t want to come back to England. For the winter I shall get something to do in Germany, I think. F. wants to clear out of Europe, and get to somewhere uncivilised. It is astonishing how barbaric one gets with love: one finds oneself in the Hinterland der Seele, and—it’s a rum place. I never knew I was like this. What Blasted Fools the English are, fencing off the big wild scope of their natures. Since am in Germany, all my little pathetic sadness and softness goes, and I am often frightened at the thing I find myself.

Nothing pleases me like the “Reprehensible Jaunt of the Nottingham. Guardian. My beautiful 1 res passe, called Reprehensible Jaunt. It is the joy of F.’s soul.

I hope things will continue to go a bit decently. F. brazenly sends her love. It’s a sunny day, for bathing.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Icking,

bei Munchen, Isarthal.

To Edward Garnett.                      29 June, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—                   .

Thanks for the cutting from the Westminster—quite good, wasn't it?—who was it? I had a letter from England yesterday, telling me the Daily News says I must "cultivate an intenser vision.” Which makes F. shriek with laughter.

You needn't think we spend all our time billing and cooing, and nibbling grapes and white sugar. Oh no—the great war is waged in this little flat on the Isarthal, just as much as anywhere else. In fact, I don't think the real tragedy is in dying, or in the perversity of affairs, like the woman one loves being the wife of another man—like the last act of Tristan. I think the real tragedy is in the inner war which is waged between people who love each other, a war out of which comes knowledge and----

But Lord!—I’m off on the preach again. All I want to say— we have fearfully good times together, but are in no danger of being killed with kindness or surfeited with sweet.

The papers have been decent to the Trespasser, haven’t they? I’ve only had the one cutting. I wonder if anybody would have a short story now. While here, I’ve written three. But, under the influence of Frieda, I am afraid their moral tone would not agree with my countrymen.

Things are a bit unsettled with England. ------- —----is

not definite about a divorce. Folk down here are very nice, and the country is lovely. F. raves over glow-worms, I over fireflies, and we nearly murder each other.

I haven’t seen an English newspaper for six weeks. What's the Parliamentary Reform Bill?

Love rather suits me. I am getting fat, and look awfully well. You don't know how surprised I am, considering the rate we go at. One man's meat is another man's poison, I suppose.

F. reads my letter before I send it, so I must be careful. Is there any news about anybody? Have you got over that play yet? It was a beastly swindle. It’s so fearfully nice to get away from the British public, altogether.

Don t be miserable, and cynical.-—Oh, and by the way, you can now say all the horrid things you like—we shall enjoy them. Sometime I’ll write you a letter when F.’s gone out.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Icking,

bei Miinchen, Isarthal.

I o Edward Garnett.                         3 July, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Your news of the Trespasser is rather cheering. Everything else is pretty bad. There are storms of letters from England, imploring her to renounce for ever all her ideas of love, to go back and give her life to her husband and her children. ------

would have her back, on those conditions. The children are miserable, missing her so much. She lies on the floor in misery —and then is fearfully angry with me because I won’t say “stay for my sake.” I say “decide what you want most, to live with me and share my rotten chances, or go back to security, and your children—decide for yourself—choose for yourself.” And then she almost hates me, because I won’t say “I love you—stay with me whatever happens.’’ I do love her. If she left me, I do not think I should be alive six months hence. And she won’t leave me, I think. God, how I love her—and the agony of it. She is a woman who also makes a man suffer, by being blind to him when her anger or resentment is roused. She is staying in Wolfratshausen with her sister’s children for the four nights—-her sister is away, and the nurse has just left. 1 he letters to-day have nearly sent us both crazy. I didn’t know life was so hard. But really, for me, it’s been a devilish time ever since I was born. But for the fact that when one’s got a job on, one ought to go through with it, I’d prefer to be dead any minute. I can't bear it when F. is away. I could bang my head against the wall, for relief. It’s a bit too much.

My dear Garnett, at this eleventh hour I love you and understand you a bit. Don’t sympathise with me, don’t.

Yours sincerely,

D H. Lawrence.

To Edward Garnett.

Icking, bei Miinchen, Monday, 25.7.12.

Dear Garnett,—

Our letters bow to each other in passing in the post, evertime. I suppose you do in the end get my notes—yours ramble in to me.

I got Paul Morel this morning, and the list of notes from Duckworth. The latter are awfully nice and detailed. What a Trojan of energy and conscientiousness you are! I’m going to slave like a 1 urk at the novel—see if I won t do you credit. I begin in earnest to-morrow—having spent the day in thought (?).

We shall be awfully glad to hear of your son David.

There is talk of getting me some lecturing in Mtinchen for the winter. dread it a bit. Here, in this tiny savage little place, F. and have got awfully wild. I loathe the idea of England, and its enervation and misty miserable modernness. I don i. want to go back to town and civilisation. I want to i ough it anc. scramble through free, free. I don't want to be tied down. And I can live on a tiny bit. I shan’t let F. leave me, if I can help it. I feel I’ve got a mate and I’ll fight tooth <md claw to keep her. She says I’m reverting, but I’m not— I'm only coming out wholesome and myself. Say I’m right, and 1 ought to be always common. I loathe Paul Morel. F. sends love.

D. H. Lawrence.

111 do you credit with that novel, if I can.

Icking, bei Mtinchen.

7e Edward Garnett.               Sunday, 4 Aug., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

What can have become of you, that we have not heard from you for so long? And we ask Bunny (so he will have it)—but h knows nothing of you. He’s awfully like you, in a thousand ways—his walk, his touch of mischief and wickedness, and nice tnngs besides. But he hasn’t got your appetite for tragedy with the bleeding brow: perhaps he’ll get it later: some female or other will create the want for it in him. (F. reads my letters.)

We are awfully fond of him. I reckon he’s a lucky dog. But J d rather have a dog lucky and adorable, like him, than unlucky and lugubrious like myself. You should see him swim in the Isar, that is effervescent and pale green, where the current is fearfully strong. He simply smashes his way through the water, while F. sits on the bank bursting with admiration, and I am green with envy. By Jove, I reckon his parents have done joyously well for that young man. Oh, but you should see him dance Mordkin passion dances, with great orange and yellow and red and dark green scarves of F.'s, and his legs and arms bare; while I sit on the sofa and do the music, and burst with laughter, and F. stands out on the balcony in the dark, scared. Such a prancing whirl of legs and arms and raving colours you never saw: and F. shrieks when he brandishes the murderous knife in my music-making face; and somebody calls in German from below: "Go and trample somewhere else,” and at last he falls panting. Oh, the delightful Bunny!—it is incredible that he is also so much like you. He should have come and stayed with us last night, but didn't turn up. I suppose he’s on the rarale in Miinchen.

We are going away from here. Oh, I must tell you how the Baroness von Richthofen "schimpfed¹ me on Friday night. She suddenly whirled in here on her way from the yrol to Constance, stayed an hour, and spent that hour abusing me like a washerwoman—in German, of course. 1 sat and gasped. "Who was I, did I think, that a Baroness should clean my boots and empty my slops: she, the daughter of a high-born and highly cultured gentleman —-at the highly-cultured I wanted to say "I don't think ” No decent man, no man with common sense of decency, could expect to have a woman, the wife of a clever professor, living with him like a barmaid, and he not even able to keep her in shoes. So she went on. I hen in Miinchen, to Else, her eldest daughter, says I am a lovable and trustworthy person. You see, I saw her off gracefully from the station.                                                     . .

We are going away to-morrow morning, early. F. is just holding forth—reciting, I call it—that everybody in the world is a rotter, except herself, Why I am a rottei at the moment, it will be interesting to hear later. I have at last nailed F.'s nose to my wagon. At last, I think, she can es me—at least for the present: despite the loss of her chil i I am sick to death of the bother. It's the rotten outsiders who plant nettles in paradise. But, thank God, we are going away. walking to Mayrhofen, about io miles from Innsbruck— stopping there for a week or two—perhaps Bunny will come— then going on down into Italian Switzerland, where we shall spend the winter, probably on Lake Garda, or Maggiore. We’ve got £23 between us, at present. We shall have to live cheap as mice, but I think we shall manage.

I had a letter from ------- re a story. His is a wishy-

washy noodle, God help me. My stories are too “steaming for him. I sent him 3 more, and asked him to forward to you at the Cearne all the MS. of mine he doesn't want. Heinemann is hesitating over the poetry. He—or rather de la Mare, wants to know, do I think of publishing a book of German sketches such as those of which the Westminster Gazette has accepted three—and would I let W. H. have the rejection thereof. I s’ll say yes (a lie). Won’t somebody in America have my stories now the Trespasser is out there? I am going to write six short stories. I must try and make running money. I am going to write Paul Morel over again—it’ll take me three months. But Duckworth won’t bring it out till Jan., will he? Write me to “Haus Vogelnest,” Wolfratshausen, bei Mtinchen, if you don’t get an address from me. I hope you are well, and all that. I’ve thought of a new novel-—purely of the common people-—fearfully interesting.

Vale!

D. H. Lawrence.

Mayrhofen 138, in filler tai, Tirol, Austria.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.                    19 Aug., 1912.

You know that it is not forgetfulness makes us not write to you. You know you are one of the very, very few who will take us into your heart, together. So, if the months go by without your hearing, I know you will understand—I know you will be sticking by us, and we shall be depending on you. 1 wanted my sister to come and talk with you, but she wouldn’t; you see, it is harder for her, she is young, and doesn’t understand quite. And she is going to marry Eddie Clarke in the spring, is going to become a hard, respectable married woman— I think the thought of me is very bitter to,her—and she won't speak of me to anybody. Only she, of all my people, knows. And I told Jessie to leave her a chance of ridding herself of my influence: nobody else. Mrs. >——— writes me—I told her I was with another woman—but no details. I am sorry for her, she is so ill.

Things have been hard, and worth it. There has been some sickening misery. ... F. is to see the children, and stay with them, next Easter. It has been rather ghastly, that part of the affair. If only one didn't hurt so many people.

For ourselves, Frieda and I have struggled through some bad times into a wonderful naked intimacy, all kindled with warmth, that I know at last is love. I think I ought not to blame women, as I have done, but myself, for taking my love to the wrong woman, before now. Let every man find, keep on trying till he finds, the woman who can take him and whose love he can take, then who will grumble about men or about women. But the thing must be two-sided. At any rate, and whatever happens, I do love, and I am loved. I have given and I have taken—and that is eternal. Oh, if only people could marry properly; I believe in marriage.

Perhaps Frieda will have to come to London to see her husband, in the autumn. Then she might want you to help her. Would you go to London, if she needed you/

We think of spending the winter in Italy, somewhere on Lake Garda. We shall be awfully poor, but don’t mind so long as we can manage. It is------and the children that ar

the trouble. You see he loves Frieda madly, and can’t let go.

We walked from the Isarthal down here—or at least, quite a long way—F. and I—with our German shoulder-bags on our backs. We made tea and our meals by the rivers. Crossing the mountains, we got stranded one night. I found a lovely little wooden chapel, quite forsaken, and lit the candles, and looked at the hundreds of Ex Veto pictures so strange. Then I found F. had gone. But she came back to the shrine, saying we were at the top of the pass and there was a hay-hut in th< Alpine meadow. There we slept that night. In the dawn, tl peaks were round us, and we were, as it seemed, in a pot, witf a green high meadow for a bottom.

Here we are lodging awhile m a farmhouse. A mountain stream rushes by just outside. It is icy and clear. We go out all day with our rucksacks—make fires, boil eggs, and eat the lovely fresh gruyere cheese that they make here. We are almost pure vegetarians. We go quite long ways up the valleys. The peaks of the mountains are covered with eternal snow. Water comes falling from a fearful height, and the cows, in the summer meadows, tinkle their bells. Sometimes F. undresses and lies in the sun—sometimes we bathe together— and we can be happy, nobody knows how happy.

There are millions of different bells: tiny harebells, big, black-purple mountain harebells, pale blue, hairy, strange creatures, blue and white Canterbury bells—then there’s a great blue gentian, and flowers like monkey-musk. The Alpine roses are just over—and I believe we could find the edelweiss if we tried. Sometimes we drink with the mountain peasants in the Gasthaus, and dance a little. And how we love each other—God only knows.

We shall be moving on soon, walking south, by the Brenner, to Italy. If you write, address us at "Haus Vogelnest”— Wolfratshausen—bei Miinchen. F., with me, sends love.

Yours,

I). H. Lawrence.

Mayrhofen iz8, in Zillertal,

Tirol, Austria.

To Edward Garnett.                      22 Aug., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Heinemann sent me back my poems, without a word except "Your manuscript is herewith returned"—and that after keeping them for six months. De la Mare says he strongly recommended them to Wm. H.—and that Atkinson had done so. But I suppose the verses also shocked the modesty of his Jew-ship. Will Duckworth have them?—I should love to have a volume of my verses out—in hard, rough covers, on white, rough paper. I should just love it. De la Mare and Atkinson were both very warm about the poetry. I'm sure it’s pretty

good. De la Mare made the selection which is held in the clip. I think he has selected and arranged rather prettily—and with some care, I am sure. But perhaps you would like some of the others, which he marked “doubtful”—included. I should put in “Lightning”—and the two Westminster Gazette school poems that are out of print. Bunny is here. He suggests Asphodels as a title. F. says Cabbage Roses. I say “Asphodels among the Cabbages"—or “Asphodels in the Kitchen Garden.' F. is drawing a lovely picture—fat purple and green cabbages sitting close to earth, and rising among them, the tall and slender, elegant lines of her imaginary asphodels.

Bunny is here—we are fearfully happy together. I swear he’ll be all right in F.’s and my care. We are just going out for the day.

F. is half contemplating going to England to see ------.

God knows what’ll come of it—if she’s not careful, a mess.

I want soon to be settling down to work.

F. sends love.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

We are here for about a week longer, I guess.

I send the verses to Duckworth’s.

De la Mare says there are two articles which the W. G. decided not to print, because they are too anti-German. He wants to know where I should like them sent to what paper. Could you suggest anything?

D. H. L

Poem Sent to Edward Garnett.

THE YOUNG SOLDIER WITH BLOODY SPURS.

BY D. H. LAWRENCE.

A Servant Girl Speaks.

The sergeant says that eight and twenty wagons

Are coming behind, and we must pu oui all

The water we can at the gate, for the horses.—He gallops To the next farm, pulls up where the elder flowers fall.

5i

The wheat on both sides of the road stands green, And hundreds of soldiers on horseback have filed between It, gone by our farm to the mountains that stand back blue This morning.

I think perhaps the man that came To Wolfratshausen last winter’s end, comes through This place to-day. These soldiers wear the same Helmets as his he lost in the wood that night, And their uniforms are the same of white and blue----

It was cold, and he put his cloak right round me As we walked; dark, so he held his arm close round me. In the stillness, he took off his helmet to kiss me----

It snowed, and his helmet was lost, he forgot me, he did not miss me.

The Isar whispers again in the valley; the children Are ducking their heads in the water tubs at the gate As they go from school; some of the officers rally At the door of the Gasthaus down the road: great Threads of blue wind far, and down the road

I wait for the eight and twenty wagons to come.

At last I hear a rattle, and there away

Crawls the first load into sight—and now there are some Drawing near, they cover the Miinchen road.

Nay,

I dread him coming; I wonder how he will take it.

I can see his raging black eyes blaze at me

And feel him gripping my wrist as if he would break it.

Here comes the first of the wagons, a grey, a dreary Shut-up coffin of a thing, with a soldier weary In the box, and four hot horses going drearily,

And a soldier in the saddle of the left-hand draught-horse, sitting wearily.

One by one they go by—at last

There he sits in the saddle of this the five .

And twentieth wagon.—And he will not drive past He pulls up for our water; would he drive On if he knew that I was at this farm?

And he swings his heavy thigh

Out of the saddle, and staggering

With stiffness comes for the water that I

Have poured for the horses—a dark-blue, staggering Strong young man.—He leans sighing With head against the shaft, and takes

His helmet off, and wipes his hair, trying To ease himself in his clothes. It makes

Me want to cry, to see him so strong and easy, Swarthy and strong with his damp thick hair Pushed up on end—and the breath sighing Between his thick lips.—I wonder where He thinks I am—if ever he thinks at all.

But his handkerchief is white with a broad blue border, A nice one, I like it.—He’ll think it’s a tall order When I say he ought to marry me.—And small I feel to have to tell him.

But why, before

He waters the horses does he wash his heel Jesus!—his spurs are red with shining blood! He splashes water from the pail upon them, And rubs the silver clean with his thick brown fingers, Bending backwards awkwardly,

And anxiously, like a boy afraid to be found out.

And he goes and washes the belly of the horse, A poor roan thing: its hind leg twitches Forwards as he rubs the wound, And bloody water falls upon the road Soiling the clean white dust.—He rubs the y Carefully again, and again, to stop the bleeding. Jesus!-—his fingers are red!

And again, rolling in his heavy high boots,

He comes to the side of the road and washes his hand, And looks round again at his heel, the bright spur, And bends again and looks at the belly of the horse, And kicks dust over the red stain in the road.

And all the time his handsome, swarthy red face

With savage black eyes is sulky: and all the time

He frowns as if he were worried, as if the place

On the horse’s belly hurt him, for he was ratjier gentle To the thing, and rather fretted. And his thick black hair Was wet with sweat, and his movements strong and heavy.

“I wonder, will he care!

Now J take the big stone jug of water

Down to the gate, and stand and wait

For a word. He is coming towards the gate—• His eyes meet mine as he takes the jug of water, He knows me, but does not speak: instead He drinks and drinks, then turns away his head.

"Do you remember me?"

—"Yes!"

"Who then?"

—“Maria, of the Gasthaus Green Hat, Wolfratshausen."

"I am with child by you----"

He looked at me, and his heavy brows came over His eyes and he sulked.—He had another lover.

"It is true," I said.

—"And what do you want?" "What do you think?" I said.

He looked away down the road.

Suddenly his horses began to start.

He shouted, ran heavily after them,

And jerked back their bridles, pushing their heads apart.

54

I waited, but he would not come back to me, He stayed with the horses, sulkily, Till the whistle went.—Then swiftly he

Swung strong and heavy to saddle again

And called to his horses, and his strong blue body Had its back to me;

And away went the last of the wagons.

Sterzing aw Brenner,

To A. W. McLeod.

2 Sept., 1912.

My dear Mac,—

You’ll wonder what the deuce has come over me, that I never write to you. But I am footling about from place to place, and there are so many folk to write to—don’t be disgusted wit) me.

I have walked here from Mayrhofen—quite an exciting scramble. And last night again we slept in a hut 2000—some odd hundred metres high. It was damnably cold. T ae water was simply freezing. And I nearly got lost. Don t be urprised if I do vanish some day in some oubliette or other among tnese

mountains.                                                  .

There isn’t much news. I am giving a last look at the Paul Morel novel as soon as I can get ten minutes’ peace. It is to come out with Duckworth in January, he same gentlem an is publishing some poetry during this or the nex mon »■* ter de la Mare made a rather pretty selection, after his own heart, that I think Garnett will more or less stick to. It will include the W. Gazette poems, of which, however, three 01 aur are missing. Would it be a great bore to you to get one o the lads to copy them out for me? And those two Nation one Violets and Lightning—careless swine that I am, I ve los past eight on Monday morning—school. You’ve no idea what a nightmare it is to me, now I have escaped. Sometimes, when it’s 3 o’clock and sunny, I think of play-time, and sweet-williams in Miss M.’s garden, and walking, talking books with you, and I should like it again. But when you blew the whistle I should want to disappear. I’m not keen on England. This is so much freer.

again. Have you got a copy ?                          ,

When I woke up this morning—in a funny wooden bedroo with walls 4 feet thick, and only a little window level with my feet, and I looked out, seeing the snow on the tops of the mountains, I wondered what day it was. It took me ages o recollect it was Monday, then bang-slap went my heart I

From Mayrhofen I walked with Garnett’s son and Harold Hobson—son of the social economics writer. We had an awfully good time. We take rucksacks—shoulder-sacks—with food and methylated, cook our meals by some stream—and twice we have slept in hay-huts. Every day F. and I are on foot, travelling the same.

This, of course, is the highroad from Germany to Italy, and one sees all sorts of queer cubs, from lords of England to Italian tramps. It is quite interesting. We are going to settle down somewhere not too far south, for the winter—somewhere cn L. Garda or just north. I wonder how it will be. I must soon begin to write again, for I've done absolutely nothing lately. I want to get a few articles done for the W. G.

Do write me to Bozen, Tirol, Austria—Posts restante. Tell me all the news you possibly can—I have heard nothing for ages. Don’t be cross with me for being such a bad correspondent. I wonder if there’s any particular Tauchnitz you’d like and I could send you.

I shan't be long in Bozen-—but letters will be forwarded. Je vous serre la main,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Leonardi,

Viale Giovanni-Prati 8, Riva, Lago di Garda, Austria.

To Edward Garnett.                       7 Sept., 1912.

Dear Garnett.—

Now we are going to settle somewhere near here in Riva. It is quite beautiful, and perfectly Italian—-about 5 miles from 56’ the frontier. The water of the lake is of the most beautiful dark blue colour you can imagine—purple in the shade, and emerald green where it washes over the white rocks. F. and I have got a beautiful room, but it is too dear: z korona—2/6 for the day—for the two of us. There are roses and oleanders and grapes in the garden. Everywhere the grapes are ripe—vineyards with great weight of black bunches hanging in shadow. It is wonderful, and I love it.

But you know all about those things. I want you, if you will, to send me the Duckworth money here. Would it be possible for it to come in notes, because cashing a cheque would be rather a bother. It is good of Duckworth to pay me up so soon. That money will have to carry me a long way. However, with God's blessing, we shall manage. I think F. and I will be quite happy to sit here a winter and see nobody: only we should be much happier still if you could come and see us. The winter here is warm and lovely. If you say to yourself, it is possible, then perhaps it will come off.

I am glad to be settling down, to get at that novel. I am rather keen on it. I shall re-cast the first part altogether. You are back at the Ceame? It seems queer, that while I am straying about here, you are working like a fiend, and hampered with my stuff as well. It worries me because it is unjust— unlevel.

I wish you would come to Italy, because I should love to talk to you—for hours and hours. 1 feel as if you were ather and brother and all my relations to me—except wife. I want to marry F., and feel rather disagreeable with ------, that

he won’t divorce her.

They are ringing the sunset bell. The fear of money nets me a bit, that’s all. Tell David I'll send his books directly. Frieda is reading Benvenuto. She sends her greetings to David, and so do I. I wish he were here—the lake is wonderful to swim in, and fruit is a dream of cheapness and niceness. Do I weary you?

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

I haven’t heard from you lately. D. H. L.

Villa Leonardi,

Viale Giovanni-Prati No 8-

Riva, Lago di Garda, Austria.

To David Garnett*                        it Sept., 1912.

Dear Bunny,—

Your welcome letter came yesterday, and I sent you the Heine. Don’t send the other Benvenuto, don’t send the Swinburne-—we can get him here. But, Frieda says, she will be undylngly grateful if you d get her a copy of The Golden Age—by—who is it by?—Graham something or other. And will you post it to Miss Elsa -----— —40. Well Walk, Hamp

stead. It is Elsa’s birthday on the izth—so you'll be too late for the day. But you won’t mind, will you, getting the book. I'll send you the other Benvenuto when Frieda has read it.

We had weird times after you’d gone—quarrelled like nuts. Then we set off to walk to Meran, and got stranded on a wild place, worse than Pfitscher Joch, Frieda dead with weariness, I furious for having come the wrong way, the night rolling up filthy and black from out of a hell of a gulf below us, a wind like a razor, cold as ice. Then, feeling too Excelsior-like for anything, having decided that the next Hutte would be Peter’s porter’s lodge, where we should knock late but find admittance, we reconciled ourselves one to the other, and, after having given up the ghost, caught it by the tail and pulled it back again and scrambled over the ridge into the Jaufen house, where we found beds and two Englishmen, Algernon Sweet and Herbert Dance of London. We got to Bozen, beautiful but beastly, and slept in a room over a pigsty. Then we moved on to Trient. It’s a pure Italian ancient decrepit town, where F. had blues enough to re-pave the floor of heaven. Now we’re at Riva, house-hunting. We know about 10 Italian words. “Casa” is a house, "d’affitare” is "to let.” Now we’ll see where that lands us. I write under the olive trees in view of the dark blue lake. I should like some jam and jelly and apples. I would forfeit my heritage—like Esau—for a mess of sweet pottage. But for God’s sake, man, do stop eating. F. says, "I don’t think a man can love much if he eats much.” It reminds me of my landlord. “Such a pretty tart in the ‘Crown/ Mr. Lawrence—really warm and fruity!”

“Oh,” I say, “and didn’t you cotton?”

‘ No—I’d rather have a good dinner any day.”

That’s a common saying among my lower class, “She's not bad—but I'd rather have a good dinner.” I think I ought to teach it you, you can say it with much aptness.

How’s Iris, that fleeting rainbow dream? I can feel Noel Olivier is an asphodel—I know she is. Well, you’re a good fat cabbage to match.

(Sketch of rainbow and asphodel.)

For heaven's sake forget that money.

I am working like hell at my novel, and F. hates me for it, because it divides my attention.

Have you heard anything of Harold?

How are the plants going? How much swank have you pulled off yet? Frieda’s got a soft blue dress on, instead of that peasant sack. We’re in such a grand room—and we have such horrors, sliding the Maggi and the sausage under the couch, when the maid comes in—she’s Italian—so she can't say nothing, but looks the more.

My love to you,

D. H. Lawrence.

Marginal Note by Frieda Lawrence.

He is telling lies and slanders about me, too bad, but you are used to our ways. I will write you a nice letter soon, your father's quite blew me up like the frog near bursting point. I want to know about your doings. I

Villa Leonard!, Riva,

Sud Tirol, Austria,

To A. W. McLeod. (No date: no stamp decipherable.)

My dear Mac,—

Your letter, rather belated, caught me up here. Why do you write such delightful letters, when you’re really rather a grumpy person, and not a literary gent? It ain’t fair nor in keeping.

My exalted head goes about in an old straw hat, shapeless and puffed up, which I bought for 36 in Miinchen, and which has stuck to me—often literally—through all my wanderings. I'm going to write an article to it. But don’t think I intend to singe my hair on the stars—much too ’umble.

I still dream I must teach-—and that’s the worst dream I ever have. How I loathed and raged with hate against it, and never knew.

I’m sending you back the two W. G. poems. They were too late. The others were in print. But Garnett may have got these two and included them. I don’t know. It won’t be a big book—rather a smallish one—a bit exquisite, the collection— d la de la Mare—to convince the critics I was well brought up, so to speak. You were an angel rooting those poems out. Garnett found them. But I thank you very nicely.

Oh, Davidson, Davidson! I don’t know whether I oughtn’t to curse you, but I can never quite get there. I think you weren’t so bad, as things go, but why have things such a beastly habit of going hatefully? No, I don’t want to see it again yet.

Paul Morel is better than The White Peacock or The Trespasser. I’m inwardly very proud of it, though I haven’t yet licked it into form—am still at that labour of love. Heinemann refused it because he was cross with me for going to Duckworth—refused it on grounds of its indecency, if you please. I he poems are coming out in about 3 or 4 weeks. Love Poems and Others they are called. Sounds sad, eh?

Duckworth sent me £50 the other day. Cheer up the rest of the world with that.

J m on the Lago di Garda. Riva is still Austria, but as Italian as an ice-cream man. Now I speak in signs. Of course the soldiers are Austrian. Austria is funny—so easygoing. The officials are all Chocolate Soldiers. They let you walk through the Customs with a good day. At Trient there was a great crowd at the ticket office—then the train came. So a man—a higher station official—sauntered up and told them to buck up. It made no difference. You know the free-and-easy manners of men in a pub.—the Austrians have always go ’em—their jolly public-house manners.

“Rovereto—Riva—Ala!”

yelled the official suddenly. I, amidst a herd of soldiers and black sombrero’d Italians, caught his eye. He put up his finger to me. Then he led me, and two others, into the booking-clerk's office. The clerk was leaning leisurely at the “Schalter.

I could see the mob through. Then my official said to the booking-clerk, “Ein Rovereto—zwei Riva—ein Mori.’ So the clerk turned amiably round, left the raging mob, and leisurely booked these tickets. Meanwhile the Italy train sat peacefully in the station, and waited for us. That's Austria. I say, it waited for me, the train into Italy.

I only talk about my poverty so as not to seem to swank. I can always afford what I want. Indeed, the villa Leonard! is quite gorgeous and palatial. The figs they send up, fresh gathered out of the garden, are a dream of bliss. Grapes and peaches are ripe—there are miles of vineyards and olive woods. The lake is dark blue, purple, and clear as a jewel, with swarms of fishes. And the boats have lemon-coloured sails. It’s an adorable lake.

I'm going to-morrow to the

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda, Italy.

There I shall probably stay all the winter. It is fearfully nice. Gargnano is a tumbledown Italian place straggling along the lake. It is only accessible by steamer, because of the o mountains at the back. The Villa Igea is just across the road from the lake, and looks on the water, 'here, in the sunshine-it is always sunny here-I shall finish Paul Morel and do another novel—God helping me. If you feel .queer, tell the doctor to order you abroad, and come and spend a holiday with us. Do—I mean it.

And, if you love me, send me something to read. I've not read a thing in English for 5 months, except Under Western Eyes, which bored me. Send me something 4-id. or yd., something light and cheap—-but do send me something. The postage isn’t so much, printed matter. I've not read New Machiavelli, nor Clay hanger, nor any of those. I know nothing about the last six—or nine months of English publishing. I can’t get Tauchnitz any longer—nothing but German and Italian, neither of which I can read. And I shall be at the Villa Igea.

My love to everybody, and to you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Leonardi, Riva,

Sad Tirol, Austria.

Monday (date between Sept. 7th

To Edward Garnett.                   and Oct. 3rd, 1912).

Dear Garnett,—

Your letter came yesterday—of course we got yours and David’s from Bozen. And this morning Duckworth sent me £50 in notes—the angel! We are both bursting with joy and puffed up with importance. Also we’ve got a place to live in.

Frieda hates me because I daren’t broach these Italians about flats and rooms. We know about 10 words of Italian. She hankered after a red place at Torbole. We hesitated for hours. Then she attacked a man, with three words.

Trego—er—er—quartiere—d’affitare.” And he insists on our taking the 3.30 omnibus to Riva, so that at last we run in terror, seeing ourselves in that bus.

But we’re going to Gargnano. The hotel lady sent us to Pietro di Paoli. We found him, a grey old Italian with grand manners and a jaw like a dog and a lovely wife of forty. Frieda adores Pietro and I the wife. They have to let, furnished, the bottom flat of the Villa Igea—dining-room, kitchen, 2 bedrooms, furnished—big pretty rooms looking over the road on to the lake—a nice garden with peaches and bamboos—not big— for 80 lire a month: about 66 - a month—everything supplied, everything nice, nothing common—z windows in the diningroom—clean as a flower. And so, we are moving in on Wednesday, and you must come to see us quick, it’s so nice.

Gargnano is a rather tumble-downish place on the lake. You can only get there by steamer, because of the steep rocky mountainy hills at the back—no ailway. You would come via Brescia, I should think. There are vineyards and olive woods and lemon gardens on the hill at the back. There is a lovely little square, where the Italians gossip and the fishermen pull up their boats, just near. Everything is too nice for words— not a bit touristy—quite simply Italian common village—Riva is 20 or 25 kilometres, and Gardone 15. Come quick while the sun shines as it shines now, and the figs and peaches are ripe, and when the grape harvest begins. You can have the other bedroom. There will only be the three of us in the flat. You can go to Venice if you feel swanky. It won’t cost you anything at the Villa Igea, so there's only tram fare. F. and I are hugging each other with joy at the idea of a menage, and gorgeous copper pans in the kitchen, and steps down irom the dining-room to the garden, and a view of the lake, which is only 50 yards away. And you sound so jolly yourself. And if you want to send anybody for a holiday, they can come to us.

Love from both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Address Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano, Lago di Garda, Italy. Pietro di Paoli writes and talks the most lovely I rencn quaintest thing on earth. I am hugely pleased about the Love Poems and Others—and I shall correct the proofs in Gargnano. What bliss. Only F. thinks they are trivial poems. She wants those concerning herself to blossom forth. D. H. L.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda, Italy,

j. o Mr. Edward Marsh.

5 Oct., 1912.

Dear Sir,—

Your letter comes only to-day. I shall be very glad if you will print my poem Snapdragon in your book, which sounds awfully nice. I am just correcting proofs for a volume of verse which Mr. Duckworth will publish immediately, but Snapdragon” is not included. If there is anything else I could at any time give you, some unpublished stuff, I shall be glad. I shall love to see the book. It will be quite profit enough in itself. My address is as above till spring.

Yours faithfully,

D. H. Lawrence.

E. Marsh, Esq.

Admiralty, Whitehall, London.

Villa Igba,

Villa di Gargnano,

To A. W. McLeod.

Lago di Garda, Italy.

Friday, 6th October, 1912.

Dear Mac,—

Your books came to-day, your letter long ago. Now I am afraid I put you to a lot of trouble and expense, and feel quite guilty. But thanks a thousand times. And F. thanks you too.

I have read Anna of the Five Towns to-day, because it is stormy weather. For five months I have scarcely seen a word of English print, and to read it makes me feel fearfully queer. J don’t know where I am. I am so used to the people going by outside, talking or singing some foreign language, always Italian now: but to-day, to be in Hanley, and to read almost my own dialect, makes me feel quite ill. I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate Bennett’s resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery. But Anna of the Five Towns 64 seems like an acceptance—so does all the modern stuff since Flaubert. I hate it. I want to wash again quickly, wash off England, the oldness and grubbiness and despair.

To-day it is so stormy. The lake is dark, and with white lambs all over it. The steamer rocks as she goes by. There are no sails stealing past. The vines are yellow and red, and fig trees are in flame on the mountains. I can’t bear to be in England when I am in Italy. It makes me feel so soiled. Yesterday F. and I went down along the lake towards Maderno. We climbed down from a little olive wood, and swam. It was evening, so weird, and a great black cloud trailing over the lake. And tiny little lights of villages came out, so low down, right across the water. Then great lightnings split out.—No, I don't believe England need be so grubby. What does it matter if one is poor, and risks one’s livelihood, and reputation. One can have the necessary things, life, and love, and clean warmth. Why is England so shabby?

The Italians here sing. They are very poor, they buy two-penn’orth of butter and a penn’orth of cheese. But they are healthy and they lounge about in the little square where the boats come up and nets are mended, like kings. And they go by the window proudly, and they don’t hurry or fret. And the women walk straight and look calm. And the men adore children—they are glad of their children even if they're poor. I think they haven’t many ideas, but they look well, and they have strong blood.

I go in a little place to drink wine near Bogliaco. It is the living-room of the house. he father, sturdy as these Italians are, gets up from table and bows to me. T he family is having supper. He brings me red wine to another table, then sits down again, and the mother ladles him soup from the bowl. He has his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his shirt collar open. Then he nods and “click-clicks” to the small baby, that the mother, young and proud, is feeding with soup 'om a big spoon. The grandfather, white-moustached, sits a bit effaced by the father. A little girl eats soup. The grandmother by the big, open fire sits and quietly scolds another little girl. It reminds me so of home when I was a boy. hey Is warm with life. The father reaches his thick brown hand to

play with the baby—the mother looks quickly away, catching my eye. Then he gets up to wait on me, and'thinks my bad Italian can’t understand that a quarter litre of wine is 15 centesimi (ltd.) when I give him thirty. He doesn't understand tips. And the huge lot of figs for 20 centesimi.

Why can’t you ever come? You could if you wanted to, at Christmas. Why not? We should love to have you, and it costs little. Why do you say I sark you about your letters?—I don’t, they are delightful. I think I am going to Salo to-morrow and can get you some views of the lake there. I haven’t got the proofs of my poems yet. It takes so long. Perhaps I will send you the MS. of Paul Morel— I shall alter the title—when it’s done.

Thanks—je te serre la main.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano (Brescia), Lago di Garda.

To Edward Garnett.                       30 Oct., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Thanks so much for the books. I hate Strindberg—he seems unnatural, forced, a bit indecent—a bit wooden, like Ibsen, a bit skin-erupty. The Conrad, after months of Europe, makes me furious—and the stories are so good. But why this giving in before you start, that pervades all Conrad and such folks— the Writers among the Ruins. I can’t forgive Conrad for being so sad and for giving in.

I've written the comedy I send you by this post in the last three days, as a sort of interlude to Paul Morel. I’ve done all but the last hundred or so pages of that great work, and those I funk. But it'll be done easily in a fortnight, then I start Scar gill Street. This comedy will amuse you fearfully—much of it is word for word true—it will interest you. I think it’s good. Frieda makes me send it you straight away. She says I have gilded myself beyond recognition, and put her in rags. I leave it to the world and to you to judge.

I'll send you the books back in a minute.

We’re going to have our first visitor to-morrow—the landlady of the Hotel Cervo, who is a German. She is fearfully honoured at the thought of coming to afternoon coffee. I am a howling gentleman and swell here—and those £50 are going to last me till March. So, because Signora Samuelli is coming to-morrow, I have spent an active afternoon scrubbing the bedroom—why F. insists on having the bedroom scrubbed I don’t know—or cleaning the silver—or nameless metal such as we use at table. The "Wirtin" of the "Gervo" is a very strict housewife, and calls F. to account sometimes.

In the storey above has come to live a hunchback and his mother and their maid. He is an artist, about 40, a painter. He talks a bit of weird, glutinous French. He’s my first acquaintance.

It is such a dark night—darker than ever in England. There is a mist on the lake, and the fishing boats with their great sails have seemed to hang in the air, like magic ships, all day long.

Do I bore you? You scare me by being so busy. I generally get up about 8.0 and make breakfast, but F. stops in bed, and I have to sit and talk to her till dinner time. I am a working man by instinct, and I feel as if the Almighty would punish me for my slacking. Do you think it's wicked? Do I do my fair share of work?—I’ve got a horror of loafing—and yet— well, I’ll take my punishment later. But I feel guilty. But we live so hard, F. and I. And I've written 400 pages of Paul Morel, and this drama. Will Sons and Lovers do for a title? I’ve made the book heaps better—a million times.

F. sends her love. Where’s Bunny? He’s got to write us a letter, not a bit of sleep-walking, tell him. The time goes so fast it takes my breath away.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

I'm in great misery, having broken my spectacles, and have no eyes to write with, so must feel in the dark.—D. H. L.

Is your address always Downshire Hill? We haven't heard from you for weeks—D. H. L.

Villa Igta,

Villa di Gargna.no (Brescia),

Lago di Garda, Italy.

To Edward Garnett.                    Tuesday, 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Very glad we were to hear from you. It was almost like the voice of Orpheus come up from hell.

All right about the publishers, Hutchinson, and so I'll leave myself all in your hands if you’ll let me. You’ll see I returned the corrected proofs of the poems to Duckworth before I got your letter. I didn't say "thanks" in the front. Do say that for me, if it’s not too late. And I only made corrections of the most unrespectable lines—I was a bit hurried. I thought the book awfully nice—I loved it. F. refuses to have sufficient respect for it—but there, she would, There are in it too many heroines other than herself. Queer, there is one poem to her "Bei Hennef"—I wish it had been the last in the book. We are grieved that it must wait till after Christmas—but you know best.

I do want to know your articles of faith, the first of which is the love of women—the second of which—is something cynical, I know—the temporality of that self-same love? I shall ask F. to put her fingers to her nose at you—she can, being an aristocrat.

Did I tell you about Marsh who is putting Snapdragon in a vol. of contemporary poetry that is coming out just now? That’ll help perhaps to advertise me.

We are sitting in an olive garden on the lake, and it is sunset of a perfect day. The tops of the mountains across are rose-coloured. In the twilight on the lake below the fishers row standing up. One is drawing in his line, and there are glints of silver. It is so still.

I he grapes are gathered, and the vines are all red and gold.

There are wild little cyclamens, rose colour, all over the hills, exquisite, smelling of lilies of the valley. When you come, primroses will be out.

1 have done 3/5 of Paul Morel. Can I call it Sons and Lovers—or—this funny hand-writing is F.’s fault.

I wonder if I dare ask you for some books—again, for my lady. She’s a cormorant, of novels, and it’s the only way to keep her good. A friend of mine sent us the Bracknels—good. I want to read something romanticky—feel like it. I’ve got a heap of warmth and blood and tissue into that fuliginous novel of mine—F. says it’s her—it would be. She saves me, and can’t save herself. That’s how all these Messiany people are.

If you hear of us murdered, that also will be F.’s fault. She empties water out of the bedroom on to the high road and a fat old lady who steals along under the wall. I had to keep all doors locked, and we sat in the spare bedroom. There arc no police. And the flat is so big, such a long way from everywhere to anywhere, and several rooms locked up—I shall develop an Edgar Allan Poe flavour.

I’ve had a swollen jaw. F. adores me all the more. Put that in your cynical pipe, and smoke it. Who’d love you with a swollen jaw? Yah!

We’ve been most god-damnably miserable, the pair of us, over various things from England. My fate’s a hard one. But wine is only yd. a litre.

There’s a new moon in the pinky evening over the lake. I wonder how much more misery we s’ll have been through before it’s all nibbled away again. F. had carefully studied Anna Karenin, in a sort of “How to be happy though livanted spirit. She finds Anna very much like herself, only inferior— Vronsky is not much like me—too much my superior.

Oh—for describing me as a woman, a Frenchman, a devil and a conger-eel, F. is your undying enemy. Remember, what ever toe-rag I may be personally, I am the fellow she livanted with. So you be careful.

We found a scorpion in the spittoon— I don t know why we have a spittoon—it stands on F.’s side of the bed, because she smokes. We found a scorpion in the spittoon. F. fled for her life and I tackled the beast with a tooth brush. Instead < calling me Pt. Lawrence or St. George, she said it had come because birds of a feather flock together. As if I could bite with my tail.

Forgive this rubbish—much love rom both.

D, H. Lawrence.

Tell Bunny we don’t believe his last scroddy letter was meant 69

for us—it got in the wrong envelope.—D. H. L.

(P.S, to letter Tuesday, Oct., 1912.) In Frieda's Hand.

. . . but I must say he is like the English in the bull-dog quality of hanging on, they say the English never are really roused till they are beaten—I do love that—though I am never quite sure whether I love or hate it. I only know I would rather die than do without him and his life along of mine. ------

offered me a flat in London with the children. I would have loved it a little while ago, but now? 1 had a photo of my little girls, they look adorable but sad; it seemed to tear pieces of my soul. I shall see them at Xmas, I hope, but I am so scared. This place is so healing, alive and yet restful and beautiful, and always different, unobtrusive like a tactful lover.

In Lawrence’s Hand.

Unlike me then. I thought we were never going to hear from you. Good of Bunny to write us. Do you think he could send us a paper once a week? We never see any news at all, not a line. Frieda’s got the blues. It’s wonderful what a cheerful person one gets, when the trouble flies thick enough. To-day is the feast of all the dead, so we’re going to the Cemetery to be made bright. It is sunny and warm as June. Yet your Cearne Porch and the storm in England sound fascinating. Of course Conrad should always do the beautiful, magic atmospheres. What on earth turned him to Razumov? I’ll bet your play will interest me more than that rotten Strindberg. Is it as good as the James Byrne one that I admired so much?-—I suppose you think what a ripping little volume of plays you will leave behind—I believe you’re invariably conceited, like anything. I'm dying to know what you think of the Fight for Barbara. You’re all vain but me—Fancy.—D. H. Lawrence.

F. being dissatisfied with Barbara!

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano (Brescia),

Lago di Garda, Italy.

To Ernest Collings.                         7 Nov., 1912.

Dear Sip.—

I was fearfully pleased with your letter and the Sappho. That was the nicest thing anybody has ever done to me, in respect of my work, the sending of your goodwill and your book.

The drawings I am so fond of. I like the sort of idea of Sappho as a white spark blown along where everything is flame and smoke. It gives a primeval feeling. I wish there was a bit more flame about in this cold ash of humanity nowadays—we d put up with the smoke to it easily.

I feel so fearfully conceited since you say such nice things about those two books of mine. The letter, the last I received before yours, had urged me to repent before it was too late, before I and my books were consumed in the fire ox wrath. That made me sad. Even I began to be afraid of my own wickedness. Now my tail is up again, and I snap at the flies.

I don't care for The Trespasser so much as the first book. My third will be out in February. Of course I think it s great.

I live in sunshine and happiness, in exile and poverty, here in this pretty hole. If ever you are within reach, will you come and see me? I should be glad. I shan’t be in England again till May or thereabouts.

I like “Favor thy suppliant’s hidden fires” and “Sweet rose of May” and “Sad Statue” best among the pictures, I think You draw Sappho rather hermaphroditic, don’t you? But * suppose she was. But no—women are more passionate than men, only the men daren’t allow it.

Excuse me if I’m impertinent. And thanks a dozen times.

Yours faithfully,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano (Brescia), Lago di Garda,

Italy,

To Ernest Collings.

14 Nov,, 1912.

Dear Mr, Collings,—

Call me "Sir” if you will. I assure you I am a man. My name is David Herbert Lawrence. My age is 27 years. I was, but am no more, thank God—a school teacher—I dreamed last night I was teaching again-—that's the only bad dream that ever afflicts tny sturdy conscience.

How queer to think of A Still Afternoon in School. It’s the first thing I ever had published. Ford Madox Hueffer discovered I was a genius—don’7 be alarmed, Hueffer would discover anything if he wanted to—published me some verse and a story or two, sent me to Wm. Heinemann with The White Peacock, and left me to paddle my own canoe. I very nearly wrecked it and did for myself. Edward Garnett, like a good angel, fished me out. Now I am living here on my paltry literary earnings. You should look up, in back English Reviews, Odour of Chrysanthemums—a story full of my childhood’s atmosphere—and the glamorous enough "Fragment of Stained Glass.” Excuse my cheek.

I can see all the poetry at the back of your verse—but there isn't much inside the lines. It’s the rhythm and the sound that don’t penetrate the blood—only now and then. I don’t like the crackly little lines, nor the "thou wouldest” style, nor "mighty hills” and garlands and voices of birds and caskets—none of that. I can remember a few things, that nearly made poems in themselves.

”We met again, and for a short laughing Did play with words; till suddenly I knew—didst thou?”

And then all the rest is inconsequent to me.

“The coverings of the doorway

Are flung open:

Superb thou standest, wild-eyed, eager girl,

Letting fall thy gown to feel the little

Winds of the morning soothe thy breasts and shoulders/’

Then you go on “Walk the earth in gladness -—but that girl isn’t going to walk the earth.

The first stanza of "Adventure" is so nice, and I love

“Now—go thy way.

Ah, through the open door Is there an almond tree

Aflame with blossom’

A little longer stay—

Why do tears blind me?

Nay, but go thy way/’

That’s a little poem, sufficient in itself, hen you go off to the “Love did turn to hate" business. And fancy anybody saying “Boy, whither away?" Then I like

“I think you must have died last night, For in my dreams you came to me---"

then the rest isn’t good. Do them in better form—put them in blank verse or something. Your rhythms aren a bit good.

Forgive me if I’m nasty. That’s what I say to myself, what

I say to you.                                      .    .

I think we might get on well together. I m quite nice really, though nobody will tell you so. If we can’t meet in Italy, we may in England. Fools, to think your Sappho drawings improper. You’d think men were born in trousers that grew o them like skin. Our clothes consume us, like ieracles g-1 ment.

Excuse this horrid bit of paper. And thanks so much or letting me read the poems. I suppose you are between 30 an 40 years of age? Do you mind your papers being squashe a into this envelope?

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea—Monday,

To Edward Garnett.

I Autumn, 1912.)

Dear Garnett,—

I have read the Jeanne d'Arc and looked at the Persian atrocity. I wanted to get into a corner and howl over the Jeanne d’Arc. Cruelty is a form of perverted sex. I want to dogmatise. Priests in their celibacy get their sex lustful, then perverted, then insane, hence Inquisitions—all sexual in origin. And soldiers, being herded together, men without women, never being satisfied by a woman, as a man never is from a street affair, get their surplus sex and their frustration and dissatisfaction into the blood, and love cruelty. It is sex lust fermented makes atrocity.

The Jeanne d'Arc interests us fearfully—it seems such a living historical document. I can’t see it as a play—more as a fact. You’ve got a fair amount of "priest" in you, and that's why you do them so well. The people stand off from one another so distinctly. I can’t do that. Of course it’s a play about the people who judge Joan, rather than about herself. It seems queer to have the keystone figure so small, scarcely seen. That makes the drama more subtle: the play of a lot of these fat flies round the same thing. It still seems to me a human record rather than a play, and I don’t know how to criticise it at all. Tell me what the papers say. They treated Lords and Masters rather meanly, didn’t they? It must have been fearfully hard to get the blood into a play like Jeanne. When the figures are ready-made in dry material, I should think it’s the devil to breathe life into them. I think the buzzing, sensational atmosphere of priests—how I loathe them—is fearfully good. How they relish a sensation, the blow-flies! I think that strictly you ought to have been a mediaeval cleric—of the nice sort, probably. I think I like the English lords the least—excepting John Grey perhaps. I think you’re best at half-sexual subtleties. It seems to me queer you prefer to present men chiefly-—as if you cared for women not so much for what they were themselves as tor what their men saw in them. So that after all in your work women seem not to have an existence, save they are the projections of the men. That is, they seem almost entirely

sexual answers to or discords with the men. No, I don't think you have a high opinion of women. .They have got each an internal form, an internal self which remains firm and individual whatever love they may be subject to. It's the positivity of women you seem to deny—make them sort of instrumental. There is in women such a big sufficiency unto themselves, more than in men. You really study the conflict and struggles of men over women: the women themselves are inactive and merely subject. That seems queer.—-And I consider the Jeanne d'Arc play is an awfully good study of the conflicting feelings of men over the almost passive Maid.—I believe you’re a curious monk, a man born to "gloss” the drama of men and women with queer penetrating notes on the men, rather than to do the drama. That’s why I like this play.—Is all this bosh? I am no critic at all. But it interests me.—Don’t be cross with me if I am stupid.

In Frieda’s Hand.

I rather like the elusiveness of Jeanne.—Of course she is really a fearfully jolly, healthy girl with a bit of the peasant cunning, and then her weird mysticness throws a veil over her and I like it—I am glad she had a St. Michael, and I like the way you treated her. L. always wants to treat women like the chicken we had the other day, take its guts out and pluck its feathers sitting over a pail—I am just wildly arguing with L. and he is so stupid, I think, in seeing things, that cannot be seen with eyes, or touched, or smelt or heard—But this is all beside the point just like a woman! 1 think that there is an individual form as much in a man as in a woman, as a rule: Jeanne I feel as an individual but I say women are not much in the hands of men. We bpth men and women are frightened of "It”—call it love or passion—This fear we think is due each to the other! The fear makes brutal and hopeless and helpless! Poor Jeanne! Whatever you do you rouse one’s sympathy for her to such a degree) I would just like to kill a ew o the at, sly, stupid swine! And from my point of view your play is a real pleasure, because of its warm sympathy, its deep humanity a twitch of satirical laughter in the corner of its mouth! Poor Jeanne in her simple, broken vitality! Don’t you men all love 75

her better because she was sacrificed: Why are all heroines really Gretchens? You don’t like the triumphant female, it’s too much for you! I have written some bosh, but there! I ask for the kind consideration of the triumphant male being.

The poor female!

Frieda.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano,

(Brescia) Lago di Garda, Italy.

To Edward Garnett.                      14 Nov., 1912.

Dear Garnett,—

Your letter has just come. I hasten to tell you I sent the MS. of the Paul Morel novel to Duckworth registered, yesterday. And I want to defend it, quick. I wrote it again, pruning it and shaping it and filling it in. I tell you it has got form— form: haven’t I made it patiently, out of sweat as well as blood. It follows this idea: a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are bom of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers—first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother—urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. It’s rather like Goethe and his mother and Frau von Stein and Christiana—As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul—fights his mother. The son loves the mother—all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the tie of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother, go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death.

It is a great tragedy, and I tell you I have written a great book. It's the tragedy of thousands of young men in England— it may even be Bunny’s tragedy. I think it was Ruskin’s, and men like him.-—Now tell me if I haven’t worked out my theme, like life, but always my theme. Read my novel. It’s a great novel. If you can’t see the development—which is slow, like growth—I can.

As for the Fight for Barbara—I don’t know much about plays. If ever you have time, you might tell me where you find fault with the Fight for Barbara. The Merry Go Found and the other ate candidly impromptus. I know they want doing again recasting. I should like to have them again, now, before I really set to work on my next novel—which I have conceived and 1 should like to try re-casting and re-forming them. If you have time, send them me.

I should like to dedicate the Paul Morel to you may I? Bu* not unless you think it’s really a good work. o Edward Garnett, in Gratitude.” But you can put it better.

You are miserab¹' about your play. Somehow or other you work riles folk. Why does it? But it makes them furious. Nevertheless, I shall see the day when a volume of your plays is in all the libraries. I can’t understand why the dreary weeklies haven't read your Jeanne and installed it as a historical docu ment of great value.” You know they hate you as a creator, all the critics: but why they shouldn’t sigh with relie" at finding you—in their own conceptions—a wonderfully subtle render and commentator of history, I don’t know.

Pinker wrote me the other day, wanting to place me a nove, with one of the leading publishers. Would he be any gooc other stuff? It costs so many stamps, I don’t reply to all these people.                                                         , ₉

Have I made those naked scenes in Paul Morel tame enough You cut them if you like. Yet they are so clean—and I have patiently and laboriously constructed tha no el.

It is a marvellous moonlight night. The mountains have shoulder-capes of snow. I have been far away into the hills to-day, and got great handfuls of wild Christmas roses. This is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. You must come. The sunshine is marvellous, on the dark blue water, the ruddy mountains’ feet, and the snow.

F. and I keep struggling forward. It is not easy, but I won’t complain. I suppose, if in the end I can’t make' enough money by writing, I shall have to go back to teaching. At any rate I can do that, so matters are never hopeless with me.

When you have time, do tell me about the Fight for Barbara. You think it couldn’t be any use for the stage? I think the new generation is rather different from the old. I think they will read me more gratefully. But there, one can only go on.

It’s funny, there is no war here—except “Tripoli.” Everybody sings Tripoli. The soldiers howl all the night through and bang tambourines when the wounded heroes come home.—And the Italian papers are full of Servia and Turkey—but what has England got to do with it?

It’s awfully good of you to send me a paper. But you’ll see, one day I can help you, or Bunny. And I will.

You sound so miserable. It’s the damned work. I wish you were here for awhile. If you get run down, do come quickly. Don't let yourself become ill. This is such a beastly dangerous time. And you could work here, and live cheap as dirt with us.

Don’t mind if I am impertinent. Living here alone one gets so different—sort of ex cathedra.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano, (Brescia), Lago di Garda.

To David Garnett.                         ig TVov., 1912.

Mv dear Bunny,—

Your last letter was fearfully welcome. We were just thinking of going to bed—there isn’t much else to do here— when it arrived and we ran to great discussions over it. I love you as an alarmist. 1 see myself and Frieda fleeing out of Gargnano, each of us seated upon a fleet ass, scouring for the 78

Austrian border, the Villa Igea in flames. But everything is so still. he greatest excitement was early Sunday morning, while it was yet dark, when there came great and ferocious howling under the bedroom windows, that hang over the road. Frieda lay in terror—she is a Tedesca (German) so her conscience in Italy is bad. But I as Inglese lie with a firm heart, ready to rush to defend the stone staircase should they force the garden gate. But it’s only the rejoicings of two wounded sons of "Villa’ returned from Tripoli, and their mates. They have been drinking all night. Frieda says, “If war makes people as sad as that, then—no, it's too bad. That’s the saddest noise I've heard.”

“My dear,’ I answer, “it’s the wine.” Then I get a curtain lecture, a la Frau Caudle.

Do come here—Italy’s so nice to look at, but nothing at all to talk to. I have learned a bit of Italian, but it won’t carry me far. I saw a man gathering the olives to-day. They perch like queer birds on a ladder made so—

(Sketch)

They look queer—but Italians have such good figures and lovely movements. Summoning all my Italian, I say to him, “It’s a late harvest.” “Come?” he says. I repeat, A late harvest, Signore;” he grins. “It’s very early. I feel like saying to him: “Don’t be a pig, I've done my best.” But I say instead, “Fa bello tempo, oggi”—“Oggi!” he repeats. ⁴ Si, Signore, oggi.” He’s got an offensive grin.

We’ve had two first visits this week: one from Signorina Feltrelline, who teaches us Italian. It’s a screaming farce: she wears black gloves and keeps F. and me in order: I can’t help drinking a little wine, to assert my masculine and marital independence, I feel I am put in so small a place by Signorina Feltrelline. Like humble children, F. and I lisp our lessons. Of course I am much quicker than F. but Signore eltrelline she’s 38 and got a slight squint—prefers Frieda, and constantly represses me. The lesson goes on in rrench, German an

Italian—I merely swear in English.

Then the Wirtin of the Stag Hotel—really del Cervc— came to coffee yesterday. Frieda kept me all morning long scrubbing floors like a galley slave—did they scrub floors? But these rooms are big, very big, and the wood of the boards is soft, and there are no carpets. It was no good my pleading my genius, scrub I had to. I felt like Mr. Mantalini.

Do send me just one newspaper. I read in Italian about Turkey and Serbia, but nothing more interesting. I s’ll feel like Orpheus coming up from Hades when I next set foot in England. But come and see us. The place is lovely as a dream.

Your Dad doesn’t like the play, and Frieda wants to hit him. But there, you know the war-like tendencies of her family.

Write us some more good letters like this last. Think of Icking and the Isar. Don't fall in love for fear you have to scrub floors and fetch groceries. Remember me to London.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Margin Note.

If these letters coincide—well, you can establish the truth, by comparing them—like the gospels.

We cook over a charcoal brazier—fornello—we eat macaroni and Maggi and I grate pounds of cheese. I cart a fowl from Brescia (3 hours’ journey) and we fry it in olive oil. Oh it's great! the weird fish we get—the poor little thrushes and blackcaps they bring to the door, on strings—oh, Italy, Italy! But I want a cloak—that I can fling over my nose. You should see ’em! But come!

Post card. (Postmark—29-11-12.)

Gargnano,

io A. W< McLeod.                        Thursday.

My dear Mac,—

The books came to-day—what a treasureful! You don’t know how grateful I am. And F. thanks you particularly. She’s swallowed the House of Mirth already—and I'm nearly through 80

Mark Rutherford. How good he is!—so just, so harmonious. I have enjoyed him to-day; it has rained.

I'm sending you a little pretty book a man sent to me—the artist of the illustrations—because he said he admired me. To-morrow I'm going to Riva to fetch some of my things—my paints among them. Then, I shall paint you your picture for Christmas. You see all the summer I've had no paints.

Why don't you come and see us—Why? Your excuses are flimsy. I’ll write in a day or so.

Love,

D. H. Lawrence.

Post card.            (i.12.12)

To Edward Garnett,-—

I sit in sadness and grief after your letter. I daren’t say anything. All right, take out what you think necessary— suppose I shall see what you've done when the proofs come, at any rate. I’m sorry I’ve let you in for such a job—but don’t scold me too hard, it makes me wither up.

D,’s terms are quite gorgeous.

But I’m so afraid you'll repress me once more, I daren’t say anything. Still another man wrote this morning that one of the most enterprising of the younger publishers wants the next novel I can let him have, at very satisfactory terms. They comfort me after your wigging.

Yrs., -

D. H. Lawrence.

Tell me anything considerable you are removing (sounds like furniture).

Thanks awfully for the newspapers—you don’t know what a treat they were!

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano, (Brescia') Lago di Garda.

To A. W. McLeod.                      2 Dec” I9T2‘

Lieber ¹ —

Why am I so sleepy, seeing it's only half past eight! You are the decentest man to me in England. The books are a joy for ever. I've read the Revolution in Tanner's Lane, and find myself fearfully fond of Rutherford. I used to think him dull, but now I see he is so just and plucky and sound-—and yes, perhaps I like his dullness—when one lives in a whirl of melodrama, as I seem to do just now, one is glad of a glass of good porter, like Rutherford. And Frieda is once more to be kept in bounds, since there's a pack of books. A thousand thanks again.

Oh, I've actually painted two pictures. I'm doing several— when they’re finished I shall send them and let you have your pick. This is the interlude between novels. The Paul Morel book—to be called, I think, Sons and Lovers, is being got ready for the printer—I’m resting a bit after having delivered it. It’s quite a great work. I only hope the English nation won’t rend me for having given them anything so good. Not that the English nation is likely to concern itself with me—but "England, my England" is for me, I suppose, "Critic, my Critic." Duckworth’s going to give me £100 on account. I feel quite like a thief.

What Jo you think of the Sappho book? It has a certain curious interest, I think—and purple leather covers. The man who did the drawings said that several London booksellers refused to stock it. He seemed quite proud of the fact. I hope you don’t mind my passing on to you a book inscribed to me. But I don’t know the man and am not a bibliophile.

You are a duffer not to come at Christmas. Harold Hobson is coming—but I'd rather have had you. I believe you’ll be too shy to go through the gates of Heaven—and you’ll be hanging round through eternity.

I'm going to bed. This is altogether too stupid. There are lots of big stars. The last steamer has gone. There’s one warm little light under the mountains on the opposite side of the lake. And imagine—there’s a big jar of Christmas roses and maidenhair fern on the table. They grow wild, such big white beauties, and so many of them. I should love a jaw to you about things. School is gradually sinking over the rim of my horizon. Imagine the bell-turret of Davidson slowly fading over the margin of my eternity.—Sounds affecting! I don’t think I ever 82 want to see it again. But this is too hopeless. "To bed, to bed, to bed!"

Fancy—I had a letter from Dobson to-day—still in his dignified and sober style. Tell me some news of people.

I'm having Italian lessons from the schoolmistress here. She scolds me and adores me. She is punctual and bores me. To-morrow I shall offer her a cognac, to make her hair curl. But she's forty, poor thing. And she thinks I’m a howling swell. And I ask her how many kids she's got, and feign such indignation and wonderment at her having 35. I ask her stupid questions about Italian education—which it appears is even stupider than my questions.

I wandered the other day into a lovely little inn in the mountains, where one sits perched high up in the chimney and pokes the sticks under the hanging pot, and eats most ghastly cheese. Then the old lady—the inn is always the family living room—told me her husband was schoolmaster in the village for 40 years, and her three daughters had been to "centre" in Toscolano and were now teaching among the mountains.

"Any of ’em married?" I naively asked.

"Ko, Signor!"

The old lady glanced at me half resentful, half ashamed. I had put my foot in it.

"And when are they at home?" I continued.

"All on Friday night."

I got frightened. The world is too, too much alike. I was afraid her husband might have been at college with P.

Tell me about people—people. I have painted 2| pictures— quite decent. I do pay my debts—some of em. Do you want any of the books back? Next time, would you send me 1 orn Jones (4^d.)?

Good-bye—here’s my hand

(said Herve Riel)

D. II Lawrence.

Dear Garnett,—

Thanks for the Stephen Reynolds. Alongshore is very interesting indeed. The only thing I find fault with in Reynolds is that he swanks his acquaintance with the Longshoremen so hugely. He writes ‘de haut en das' like any old salt talking to a clerk from London—-except that he’s the clerk himself, carefully got up as the salt. I like his strong intelligence best—better than his imagination—which runs to journalese. I will send all the books back, the Conrad, the Strindberg—he is a lurid wooden stalker—and the Reynolds, by Harold Hobson.

Tve thought of a new novel I'm keen on. It’s a sort of life of Robert Burns. But I’m not Scotch. So I shall just transplant him to home—-or on the hills of Derbyshire—and do as I like with him as far as circumstances go, but I shall stick to the man. I have always been fond of him, as a sort of brother. Now, I'll write a novel of him. Tell me if you approve.

I’m glad you don’t mind cutting the Sons and Lovers. By the way, is the title satisfactory?

It s cold here now, these last two days. I've got a cold, which no doubt accounts for the blues. It seems there’s nothing to do, but to go on, like a candle guttering and clinging in a draught. I’m sorry for myself just now. It's rather comforting.

I wonder if Rhythm would take any of my stories or sketches. I wonder if ever the Forum- is going to publish that tale—and did the American edition of the Trespasser never come out?

If there is a divorce, we shall stay out here till it is consummated, then come to England married. Frieda says she’s not keen on marrying me—but I want some peace. I want to be able to look ahead and see some rest and security somewhere. By the time I am thirty I shall have had my bellyful of living, I think, and shall have either to slacken off or go to the devil.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.                    23 Dec., 1912.

Dear Mrs. Hopkin,—

Your letter has just come. I haven’t written only because I've had a venomous cold these last three days. But yesterday and to-day Frieda and I were talking about you, for quite two hours. I was thinking Ada kept you up in what news I have. And we are the sort who can remain silent for a long time, and still the tie only grows, not weakens.

Frieda and I have been here together for three months now, living alone in this big flat. I wish you could come. Do you think, when primroses and violets are out, you could for this once muster seven or eight pounds and come and see us? You should see the moon rise up behind the snowy mountains across the lake: and you should gather great handfuls of perfect Christmas roses in the clefts of the hills, and in the olive orchards. Yes, you ought to come. We’ve got two spare bedrooms, and we should be glad.

We’ve had a hard time, Frieda and I. It is not so easy for a woman to leave a man and children like that. And it’s not so easy for a man and a woman to live alone toget er in a -reign country for six months, and dig out a love deeper and deeper. But we’ve done it so far, and I’m glad. One day 11 tell you all about it.

_______talks now of a divorce. Thank God when it comes off and we have some peace. How queer it will be > e with Frieda and stay with you! You are always there, a friend for us to turn to.

My poems are coming out in January, my novel, Sons and Lovers—autobiography—in February.   aey re bot gooc

particularly the second.

Frieda will write you some more. I shall do a nove about Love Triumphant one day. I shall do my work for women, better than the Suffrage.                               ,

My love to Enid and to Mr. Hopkin—and all good wishes for Christmas. You seem to have done my sistei good-and again, my thanks. I wish this letter would come on Christmas day, but it is too late.

With love,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano, (Brescia) Lago di Garda.

To Ernest Collings.

24 Dec, 1912.

Dear Collings,—

If I had had any decency, and if I had not had a bad cold, I should have got this letter written in time for it to come to England for Christmas. Now it must come late.

I liked your last letter. It struck me as being generous. But I have lost it, and so I can’t really reply. I only remember you are having an exhibition of your drawings in the spring. I liked your illustrations to the Sappho so much—you might tell me about your art, will you? What do you go in for, on the whole? You prefer figure to landscape, I suppose. I think I should. I sketch in water-colour myself, as a hopeless amateur. But it is such healing work, I find, to paint a bit, even if it is only to copy, after one has frayed out one’s soul with damned emotional drawing. To copy a nice Peter de Wmt is the most soothing thing 1 can do, and to copy a Frank Brangwyn is a joy, so refreshing. Do you mind that attitude to art? I always say, my motto is “Art for my sake.” If I want to write, I write—and if I don't want to, I won’t. The difficulty is to find exactly the form one's passion—work is produced by passion with me, like kisses ■—is it with you?—wants to take.

I’m glad you prefer Odour of Chrysanthemums—I do. But the literary people who have talked to me, so many of them, prefer Stained Glass. But I hate the conventionalised literary person—of the type I call Asphodels. Do you know the Radfords and the Rhys—folk like them? They are so nice— and yet—I suppose it is only I who am too clownish. Do you know J. A. Hobson—social economics man? We’ve got his son staying with us, and have a good time. I wonder if our social orbits do touch at any point.

I’m seedy, so I sit in bed chewing Toroni—do you know that

adorable sweet?—and writing a bit at a new novel, which seems to me to be so far more clever than good. January sees my poems published, February my novel Soils and Lovers. Of course I admire both works immensely. I am a great admirer of my own stuff while it’s new, but after a while I'm not so gone on it—like the true maternal instinct, that kicks off an offspring as soon as it can go on its own legs.

It all sounds very egoistic, but you don't tell me enough about yourself. It’s good of you to be only thirty. These damned old stagers want to train up a child in the way it should grow, whereas if it’s destined to have a snub nose, it’s sheer waste of time to harass the poor brat into Roman-nosedness. They want me to have form: that means, they want me to have their pernicious ossiferous skin-and-grief form, and I won't. Do tell as many people as you can that I m a great writer and that my influence is pure and sweet—also that I’m being published just now. I’m so afraid I shall have to take to teaching again.

You won’t be coming to Italy? Best wishes for the New Year —luck to the artist you.

D. H. Lawrence.

I’ve lost the address and don’t know if you 11 get this.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano, (Brescia), Lago di Garda.

1 o Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.

Christmas Day, 1912.

Dear Mrs. Hopkin —

I did write you a letter, but it’s got lost, and don t like it. I’ve been seedy, laid up in bed some days with a cold—damn its eyes. But on the day when your letter came, and the day before, Frieda and I had been talking about you, for two hours. It seemed queer to see your handwriting like an answer one heard.

We’ve had such a hard time pegging through this autumn— the children,------- and ourselves. If two people start clean

of trouble, without children and other husband between em, 87

it’s hard for them to get simple and close to each other—but when it’s like this—oh Lord, it takes it out of you. But we’ve done wonders, really. I am satisfied with what I have done— we have done, I mean—up to now. God help us. Once you’ve known what love can be, there’s no disappointment any more, and no despair. If the skies tumble down like a smashed saucer, it couldn't break what’s between Frieda and me. I think folk have got sceptic about love—that’s because nearly everybody fails. But if they do fail, they needn’t doubt love. It’s their own fault. I’ll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.

Do you think, in the spring, when the snowdrops are going and there are hundreds and thousands of violets and primroses, you could scrape six or seven pounds and come and stay some weeks with us? It would only be the journey. And one should take the opportunities that come. It is so lovely here. There have been such perfect clumps of Christmas roses, wild, in the olive orchards and by the gullies of streams.

My book of poems comes out next month—my novel in February. They are good. But I shall always be a priest of love, and now a glad one—and I’ll preach my heart out, Lord bless you.

------ talks about a divorce. Won’t it be queer, when Frieda and I are married, and come and stay with you. What a jumpy sea life looks for me—I wonder if I shall make a living. But I don’t mind—to-day.

We’ve got the son of J. A. Hobson, the economist writer, staying with us—we are fond of him.

I wonder if we shall be in England at Easter. If the divorce is coming, we shall probably wait for it.

I am stupid-headed—don’t mind. Things work out, bit by bit, and we all help one another. Try to come and see us here— it is Italy. My regards to Willy and to Enid.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

1 hanks for helping Ada—you did her good.

I love it that one uses sand for blotting-paper here—it’s such fun.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano.

To David Garnett.                 Sunday, 29 Dec., 1912.

Dear Bunny,—

Thanks so much for doing the money business. They gave me 39 lire for the 31/-, and I felt rich again. Your budget of letters was interesting. Of course Harold said swank, but Frieda said she liked it, and I'm simply starving to be able to swank myself. Do you think you might persuade one or two quite tender young ladies to lionise me a bit when I get back to England? Frieda pulls all my tail-feathers out, and I feel as if a little gentle adoration would come remarkably soothingly unto me. Not that lions have tail-feathers. Put it at a tuft.

(Sketch)

This is the kind of lion I feel at present: shall we say a rattailed lion?

I've tried hard to make a chivalrous Sir Galahad of Harold. But it’s no good. He is a lion indeed—but all bark and bristles. If he and I were rolled into one you'd have a king of beasts. He doesn’t bite, really.

Seriously we’ve been awfully jolly together, the three of us, and we shall miss him horribly when he goes. If we are here next summer, I see you hopping into that lake: how you d love it! I think it’s possible we might stay here till we can be married: then we should kick our heels if you came.

I envy you your life of toil: It is a sweet vision before my "amaro far niente” eyes. I a ink of the rest and peace, the positive sloth and luxury of idleness, that hard work is. I wish the Lord would grant me a little. You see one can only write creative stuff when it comes—otherwise it s not much good, should love something to swot, or something mechanical, on which to spend my sweat.

Your rag-bag letters are most highly acceptable: one can hear your voice. Don’t be long before you write again.

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Garnett,—

I am going to send you a new play I have written. It is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—just ordinary. It is quite objective, as far as that term goes, and though no doubt, like most of my stuff, it wants weeding out a bit, yet I think the whole thing is there, laid out properly, planned and progressive. If you don't think so, I am disappointed.

I enjoy so much writing my plays—they come so quick and exciting from the pen—that you mustn’t growl at me if you think them waste of time. At any rate, they’ll be stuff for shaping later on, when I'm more of a workman. And I look at the future, and it behoves me to keep on trying to earn money somehow. The divorce will come off, I think, for sure. Then Frieda and I must see to ourselves, and I must see to the money part. I do think this play might have a chance on the stage. It’ll bear cutting, but I don't think it lacks the stuff for the theatre.—I am afraid of being a nuisance. Do you feel, with me, a bit like the old man of the seas? If I weren’t so scared of having no money at all, I’d tell you to shovel all my stuff on to Pinker, get rid of the bother of me, and leave me to transact with him. The thought of you pedgill ing away at the novel frets me. Why can’t I do those things?—I can't. I could do hack work, to a certain amount. But apply my creative self where it doesn't want to be applied, makes me feel I should burst or go cracked. I couldn't have done any more at that novel—at least for six months. I must go on producing, producing, and the stuff must come more and more to shape each year. But trim and garnish my stuff I cannot—it must go. The plays I can re-write and re-create: I shall love it, when I want to do it. But I don't want to do it yet.

I’m simmering a new work that I shall not tell you about, because it may not come off. But the thought of it fills me with a curious pleasure—venomous, almost. I want to get it off my chest.

We had a good time with Harold—you may congratulate us all.

It is rainy weather for three days, so that we are amazed and indignant. It has been so sunny all the time.,

And again, about my getting some work. I shall never go into a big school to teach again. I'll be the proverbial poor poet in the garret first—and I must say I loathe the fellow. I’ve no sympathy with starvers, Gissings or Chattertons. I might get a little country school. But I don’t want to bury Frieda alive. Wherever I go with her, we shall have to fall into the intelligent, as it were, upper classes. I could get along with anybody, by myself, because, as Frieda says, I am common, and as you say, | th Cockney. I find a servant maid more interesting as a rule than a Violet------or a Grace— . After all, I was brought

up among them. But Frieda is a lady, and I hate her when she talks to the common people. She is not a bit stuck-up, really more humble than I am, but she makes the de haut en bas of class distinction felt—even with my sister. It is as she was bred and fed, and can’t be otherwise. So, that really cuts out a country school. I mustn’t take her to England to bury her alive. We had six months without anybody at all. One needs some people, to keep healthy and well aired. I ought to live near London. Perhaps I could get some publishers’ reading to do. We could manage on £200 a year. It ought not to be impossible. You must help me a bit, with advice.

If we come to England at Easter, there is not long here. Frieda wants to see her children then, but I don’t know. I never thanked you for the American copy of the Trespasser. It is ugly. Have a bit of patience with me. You won’t come out and see us? When do the poems appear ’—I shall want a dozen copies, I owe so many people a remembrance. But I can pay for them. Frieda sends her regards.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igfa,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia), To A. W. McLeod.                      17 rg-Z-

Dear Mac,—

It's high time I wrote and thanked you for the notes and book. It's a delightful little Burns. And Henley was awfully good, but made me rather wild. Frieda and I have had high times, arguing over Andrew Lang and Henley and Lockhart. As for the book, my novel on the subject, I wonder if I shall ever get it done. I have written 80 pages of a new novel: a most curious work, which gives me great joy to write, but which, I am afraid, will give most folk extreme annoyance to read, if it doesn't bore them.

We've got a theatre here, and last night I went to see Amletto. Do you recognise our old friend? Now he was, really, the most amazing creature you can imagine: rather short, rather stout, with not much neck, and about forty years old: a bit after the Caruso type of Italian: the Croton type. I almost fell out of my little box trying to suppress my laughter. Because being one of the chief persons in the audience, and of course, the only Englishman, and ranking here as quite a swell—they acted particularly for me. I sat in my box No. 8, and felt a bigger farce than the stage. Poor Amletto—when he came forward whispering—‘ Essere—o non essere,* I thought my ears would fall off. When the gravedigger holds up a skull and says "Ecco, Signore! Questo cranio e quel----” I almost protested.

Hamlet addressed as Signore!—No—it was too much. I saw Ghosts and gulped it down—it was rather good. I have seen a D’Annunzio play, and rather enjoyed it—fearful melodrama. But they are only peasants, the players, and they play farces: and the queen is always the old servant woman, born for the part; and the king is always the contadino, or the weedy, weedy, old father—also born for the part. And Hamlet is usually the villain in some ‘amour'—and poor Amletto, if I hadn’t known what it was all about, I should have thought he had murdered some madam *d la Crippen' and it was her father’s ghost chasing him: whilst he dallied between a bad and murderous conscience, a slinking desire to avoid everybody, and a wicked hankering after ‘Ofaylia’—that’s what she sounds like. I am muddled.

It’s nasty weather—a beastly wind from the Po that has brought the snow right down the mountains, not many yards above us. I object. I came here for sunshine, and insist on having it.

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor.

Did H. H. send you the pictures all right? He’s a lazy devil. If they’ve not come, drop him a p.c. and ask if he’s posted them to the wrong address. Write me a letter soon: it is nice to feel one’s folk in England. Tell F. T. I’ll write him soon. My love to everybody.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano>

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To Ernest Collings.                          17 Jan., 191Z.

Dear Collings,—

Your letters are as good as a visit from somebody nice. I love people who can write reams and reams about themselves, it seems generous. And the points are interesting. a rum chap you are! Are you a celibate? (Don t answer if you don want to—I’m a married man, or ought to be.) our work seems too—too—one-sided (I’ve only seen a tiny bit of it, as you know)—as if it were afraid of the female element—which makes me think you are more or less a Galahad which is not, believe, good for your art. It is hopeless for me to try to do anything without I have a woman at the back of me. And you seem a bit like that—not hopeless—but too uncertain. Bdcklin —or somebody like him—daren’t sit in a cafe except wit his back to the wall. I daren’t sit in the world without a woman behind me. And you give me that feeling a bit: as1 if'ya were uneasy of what is behind you. Excuse rr if wrong. But a woman that I love sort of keeps me in direct communication with the unknown, in which otherwise x am a bit lost.

Don’t ever mind what I say. I am a great bosher, and full of fancies that interest me. Only these are my speculations over the two drawings. I think I prefer the Sphinx one. And then, when it comes to the actual head, in both cases, one is dissatisfied. It is as if the head were not the inevitable consequence, the core and clinching point of the rest of the picture. I hey seem to me too fretful for the inevitability of the land which bears them. The more or less of wonder in the Sappho I liked better. Why is the body, so often, with you, a strange mass of earth, and yet the head is so fretful? I should have thought your conception needed a little more of fate in the faces of your figures, to be expressed: fate solid and inscrutable. But I know nothing about it. Only what have you done with your body, that your head seems so lost and lonely and dissatisfied?

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not. I conceive a man’s body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, forever upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things around. And I am not so much concerned with the things around—which is really mind—but with the mystery of the flame forever flowing, coming God knows how from out of practically nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it, that it lights up. We have got so ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything—we think there are only the objects we shine upon. And there the poor flame goes on burning ignored, to produce this light. And instead of chasing the mystery in the fugitive, half-lighted things outside us, we ought to look at ourselves, and say ‘My God, I am myself!’ That is why I like to live in Italy. The people are so unconscious. They only feel and want: they don’t know. We know too much. No, we only think we know such a lot. A flame isn’t a flame because it lights up two or twenty objects on a table. It’s a flame because it is itself. And we have forgotten ourselves. We are Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. We cannot be. ’To be or not to be'-—it is the question with us now, by Jove. And nearly every Englishman says ’Not to be.’ So he goes in for Humanitarianism and suchlike forms of not-being. The real way of living is to answer to one’s wants. Not T want to light up with my intelligence as many things as possible’ but ‘For the living of my full flame—I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub and have a good time, I want to look a beastly swell to-day, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult that man. Instead of that, all these wants, which are there whether-or-not, are utterly ignored, and we talk about some sort of ideas. I’m like Carlyle, who, they say, wrote 50 volumes on the value of silence.

Send me some more drawings, if ever you have any quite to spare. I liked your photograph, but it wasn’t very much of a revelation of you. I like immensely to hear about your art. Write me when you feel you can write a lot.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Post card to Edward Garnett.

I was fearfully anxious to write a foreword to Sons and Lovers, and this is what I did. I am a fool but it will amuse you.                                                          .    . .

I am glad you think my prospects so good. It is raining here. I wonder how that rheumatism of yours is. I'll write immediately.

Did Harold give you all your books back?

D. H. L.

Foreword to *'Sons and Lovers.”

To Edward Garnett.

John, the beloved disciple, says, The Word was made

Flesh.* But why should he turn things round? j he women simply go on bearing talkative sons, as an answer. 'The Flesh was made Word.*

For what was Christ? He was Word, or he became Word. What remains of Him? No flesh remains on earth, from Christ; perhaps some carpentry he shaped with his hands retains somewhere his flesh-print; and then His word, like his carpentry just the object that His flesh produced, is the rest. He is Word. And the Father was Flesh. For even if it were by the Holy Ghost His spirit were begotten, yet flesh cometh only out of flesh. So the Holy Ghost must either have been, or have borne from the Father, at least one grain of flesh. The Father was Flesh—and the Son, who in Himself was finite and had form, became Word. For form is the uttered Word, and the Son is the Flesh as it utters the Word, but the unutterable Flesh is the Father.

And the Word is not spoken by the Father, who is Flesh, forever unquestioned and unanswerable, but by the Son. Adam was the first Christ: not the Word made Flesh, but the Flesh made Word. Out of the Flesh cometh the Word, and the Word is finite, as a piece of carpentry, and hath an end. But the Flesh is infinite and has no end. Out of the Flesh cometh the Word, which blossoms for a moment and is no more. Out of the Flesh hath come every Word, and in the Flesh lies every Word that will be uttered. The Father is the Flesh, the eternal and unquestionable, the law-giver but not the law; whereas the Son is the mouth. And each law is a fabric that must crumble away, and the Word is a graven image that is worn down, and forsaken, like the Sphinx in the desert.

We are the Word, we are not the Flesh. The Flesh is beyond us. And when we love our neighbour as ourself, we love that word, our neighbour, and not that flesh. For that Flesh is not cur neighbour, it is the Father, which is in Heaven, and forever beyond our knowledge. We are the Word, we know the Word, and the Word alone is ours. When we say T,’ we mean 'The Word I am.’ This flesh I am is beyond me.

So that if we love our neighbour, we love that Word, our neighbour, and we hate that Lie, our neighbour, which is a deformity. With that Flesh, our neighbour, We, the Word-96

Utterer, have nothing to do. For the Son is not greater than the Father. And if we love and subserve that Flesh, our neighbour, which is the Father, it is only by denying and desecrating the Father in ourselves. For the Father is the Almighty. The Flesh will feel no pain that is not upon itself, and will know no hurt but its own destruction. But no man can destroy the Almighty, yet he can deny Him. And pain is a denial of the Father. If then we feel the pain and suffering of our neighbour’s flesh, we are putting destruction upon our own flesh, which is to deny and make wrathful the Father. Which we have done. For in loving our neighbour, the Flesh, as ourself, we have said ⁴ There is no Father, there is only the Word.' For it is the Word hath charity, not the Flesh. And it is the Word that answereth the cry of the Word. But if the Word, hearing a cry, shall say, ‘My flesh is destroyed, the bone melteth away/ that is to blaspheme the Father. For the Word is but fabric builded c the Flesh. And when the fabric is finished, then shall the Flesh enjoy it in its hour.

But we have said ‘Within this fabric of the Word the Flesh is held.’ And so, the Son has usurped the Father. And so, the Father, which is the Flesh, withdraws from us, and the Word stands in ruins, as Nineveh and Egypt are dead words on tne plains, whence the Flesh has withdrawn itseif. For the lesser cannot contain the greater, nor the Son contain the Father, but he is of the Father.

And it is upon the head of that nation that shall deny the Father. For the Flesh will depart from that collective Word, the nation, and that great nation shall remain as a Word in ruin, its own monument.

For who shall say, ’No child shall be born of n e at, d n y wife. I, the Word, have said it’? And who shall say— hat woman whom my flesh, in its unquestionable sincerity, clea toward, shall not come unto my flesh, ut my ord shall come unto her. I, the Word have said it’? That is to usurp the flesh of my neighbour, and hold governance over it by the Word. And who shall say, ’That woman shall be Flesh of my Flesh. I, the Word, have said it’? For either the woman is Flesh of my Flesh, or she is not, and the Word altereth nothing, but can only submit or deny.

And when we burned the heretic at the stake, then did we love that Word, our neighbour, and hate that lie, the heretic. But we did also deny the Father, and say, * 1 here is only Word. And when we suffer in our flesh the pangs of those that hunger, then we do deny the Flesh, and say, it is not. For the Flesh suffereth not from the hunger of the neighbour, but only from its own hunger. But the Word loveth its neighbour, and shall answer to the cry of the Word, ‘It is just, what thou askest.’ For the Word hath neither passion nor pain, but lives and moves in equity. It has charity, which we call love. But only the Flesh has love, for that is the Father, and in love he begets us all, of love are we begotten. But it was spoken, They shall be one Flesh.' Thus did the Word usurp the Father, saying, ‘I unite you one flesh.’ Whereas the Word can but confirm. For the twain are one flesh, whether the Word speak or not. And if they be not one twain, then the Word can never make them so, for the Flesh is not contained in the Word, but the Word in the Flesh. But if a man shall say ‘This woman is flesh of my flesh,' let him see to it that he be not blaspheming the Father. For the woman is not flesh of his flesh, by the bidding of the Word; but it is of the Father. And if he take a woman, saying in the arrogance of the Word, ‘The flesh of that woman is goodly,’ then he has said, ‘The flesh of that woman is goodly as a servant unto the Word, which is me,’ and so hath blasphemed the Father, by which he has his being, and she hath her being. And the Flesh shall forsake these two, they shall be fabric of Word. And their race shall perish.

But if in my passion I slay my neighbour, it is no sin of mine, but it is his sin, for he should not have permitted me. But if my Word shall decide and decree that my neighbour die, then that is sin, for the Word destroyeth the Flesh, the Son blasphemeth the Father. And yet, if a man hath denied his Flesh, saying, T, the Word, have dominion over the flesh of my neighbour,’ then shall the Flesh, his neighbour, slay him in self-defence. For a man may hire my Word, which is the utterance of my flesh, which is my work. But my Flesh is the. Father, which is before the Son.

And so it was written: “The Word was made Flesh,’’ then,

98 as corollary, '‘And of the Flesh was made Flesh-of-the-Flesh, woman." This is again backward, and because the Son, struggling to utter the Word, took for his God the accomplishment of his work, the Uttered Word. Out of his flesh the Word had to come, and the flesh was difficult and unfathomed, so it was called the servant. And the servant of the servant was woman. So the Son arranged it, because he took for his God his own work when it should be accomplished: as if a carpenter called the chair he struggled with but had not yet made, God. But the Chair is not a God, it is only a rigid image. So is the Word a rigid image, parallel of the chair. And so the end having been chosen for the beginning, the whole chronology is upsidedown: the Word created Man, and Man lay down and gave birth to Woman. Whereas we know the Woman lay in travail, and gave birth to Man, who in his hour uttered his word.

It is as if a bit of apple-blossom stood for God in his Wonder, the apple was the Son, as being something more gross but still wonderful, while the pip that comes out of the apple, like Adam’s rib, is the mere secondary produce, that is spat out, and which, if it falls to the ground, just happens to start the process of apple-tree going again. But the little pip that one spits out has in it all the blossom and apples, as well as all the tree, the leaves, the perfume, the drops of gum, and heaven knows what else that we never see, contained by miracle in its bit of white flesh: and the tree, the leaves, the flowers themselves, and the apple are only amplifications of this little seed, spent: which never has amplified itself enough, but can go on to other than just five-petalled flowers and little brown apples, if we did b it know.                                          .

So we take the seed as the starting point in this cycle. I he woman is the Flesh. She produces all the rest of the flesh, including the intermediary pieces called man and these curious pieces called man are like stamens that can irn into exquisite-coloured petals. ' hat is, they can beat out the stuff o their life thin, thin, thin, till it is a pink or a purple petal, or a thought, or a Word. And when it is so beaten out that it ceases to be begetting stuff, of the Father, but is spread much wider, expanded and showy: then we say, 'This is the Utmost!’—as everybody will agree that a rose is only a rose because o the

petals, and that the rose is the utmost of all that flow of life, called 'Rose/ But what is really ‘Rose’ is only in that quivering, shimmering flesh of flesh which is the same, unchanged tor ever, a constant stream, called if you like rodoplasm, the eternal, the unquestionable, the infinite of the Rose, the Flesh, the Father—which were more properly, the Mother.

So there is the Father—which should be called Mother—then the Son, who is the Utterer, and then the Word. And the Word is that of the Father which, through the Son, is tossed away. It is that part of the Flesh in the Son which is capable of spreading out thin and fine, losing its concentration and completeness, ceasing to be a begetter, and becoming only a vision, a flutter of petals, God rippling through the Son till he breaks in a laugh, called a blossom, that shines and is gone. The vision itself, the flutter of petals, the rose, the Father through the Son wasting himself in a moment of consciousness, consciousness of his own infinitude and gloriousness, a Rose, a Clapping of the Hands, a Spark of Joy thrown off from the Fire to die ruddy in mid darkness, a Snip of Flame, the Holy Ghost, the Revelation. And so, the eternal Trinity.

And God the Father, the Inscrutable, the Unknowable, we know in the Flesh, in Woman. She is the door for our in-going and our out-coming. In her we go back to the Father: but like the witnesses of the Transfiguration, blind and unconscious.

Yea, like bees in and out of a hive, we come backwards and forwards to our woman. And the Flowers of the World are Words, are Utterance—“Uttering glad leaves,” Whitman said. And we are bees that go between, from the flowers home to the hive and the Queen; for she lies at the centre of the hive, and stands in the way of bees for God the Father, the Almighty, the Unknowable, the Creator. In her all things are born, both words and bees. She is the quick of all the change, the labour, the production.

And the bee, who is a Son, comes home to his Queen as to the Father, in service and humility, for suggestion, and renewal, and identification which is the height of his glory, for begetting. And again the bee goes forth to attend the flowers, the Word in his pride and masterfulness of new strength and new wisdom. And as he comes and goes, so shall man for ever come and go:

go to his work, his Uttering, wherein he is masterful and proud* come home to his woman, through whom is God the Father, and who is herself, whether she will have it or not, God the Father, before whom the man in his hour is full of reverence, and in whom he is glorified and hath the root of his pride.

But not only does he come and go: it is demanded of him that he come and go. It is the systole and diastole of the Heart, that shall be. The bee comes home to the hive, and the hive expels him to attend the flowers. The hive draws home the bee, the bee leaps off the threshold of the hive, with strength, and is gone. He carries home to the hive his essence, of flowers, his joy in the Word he has uttered, he flies forth again from the hive, carrying to the flowers the strength and vigour of his scrambling body, which is God Almighty in him. So he fetches and carries, carries and fetches.

So the man comes home to woman and to God, so God the Father receives his Son again, a man of the undying flesh; and so the man goes forth from the house of his woman, so God expels him forth to waste himself in utterance, in work, which is only God the Father realising himself in a moment of forgetfulness. Thus the eternal working. And it is joy enough to see it, without asking why. For it is as if the Father took eligh seeing himself for a moment unworking, for a moment wasting himself that he might know himself. For every petalled flower, which alone is a Flower, is a worK of productiveness. It is a moment of joy, of saying, T am I.' And every table or chair a man makes is a self-same waste of his life, a fixing into stiffnes and deadness of a moment of himself, for the sake of he glad cry: ⁴ This is I—I am I.' And this glad cry when we know, is the Holy Ghost the Comforter.

So, God Eternal, the Father, continues, doing we know not what, not why: we only know He is. And again and again comes the exclamation of joy, or of pain which is joy—like Galilz and Shakespeare and Darwin—which announces I am I.

And in the woman is the eternal continuance, anc from the man, in the human race, comes the exclamation c joy and astonishment at new self-revelation, revelation o that which is

Woman to a man.                   .

Now every woman, according to her kind, uemanus man shall come home to her with joy and weariness o^ the work he has done during the day: that he shall then while he is with her, be re-born of her; that in the morning he shall go forth with his new strength.

But if the man does not come home to a woman, leaving her to take account of him, but is a stranger to her; if when he enters her house, he does not become simply her man of flesh, entered into her house as if it were her greater body, to be warmed, and restored, and nourished, from the store the day has given her, then she shall expel him from her house, as a drone. It is as inevitable as the working of the bees, as that a stick shall go down stream

For in the flesh of the woman does God exact Himself. And out of the flesh of the woman does He demand: Carry this of Me forth to utterance.’ And if the man deny, or be too weak, then shall the woman find another man, of greater strength. And if, because of the Word, which is the Law, she do not find another man, nor he another woman, then shall they both be destroyed. For he, to get that rest, and warmth, and nourishment which he should have had from her, his woman, must consume his own flesh, and so destroy himself: whether with wine, or other kindling. And she, either her surplus shall wear away her flesh, in sickness, or in lighting up and illuminating old dead Words, or she shall spend it in fighting with her man to make him take her, or she shall turn to her son, and say, ‘Be you my Go-between/

But the man who is the go-between from Woman to Production is the lover of that woman. And if that Woman be his mother, then is he her lover in part only; he carries for her, but is never received into her for his confirmation and renewal, and so wastes himself away in the flesh. The old son-lover was CEdipus. The name of the new one is legion. And if a son-lover take a wife, then is she not his wife, she is only his bed. And his life will be torn in twain, and his wife in her despair shall hope for sons, that she may have her lover in her hour.

D. H. Lawpence.

Gargnano. Jan, 1913.

Post card. No address and only IYIZ decipherable on stamp.

(Bogliaco). -

To A. W. McLeod.                   Jan.—Feb,, 191Z.

Thanks again for the books. It so happens Katherine Mansfield sent me Rhythm at the same time. You’ll see some of my work in next month’s, I believe. The poems are due the first week in March. You know what procrastinators publishers are. I am doing proofs of Sons and Lovers—it is quite a great novel, but I hope it won't bring the ceiling down on my head. Now again I am not sure when I shall come back. England looks cold and inhospitable towards me. I might be here another year—in Italy, not here. You should come, a he theatre has gone, alas. Send me now and again a newspaper, will you? This is a good view of the Lake villages—all like this, those high up. Love.

D. H. L.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To Edward Garnett.                     ¹ hebbraio, 913.

Dear Garnett,—

The three plays—Fig/zt for Barbara, Married Man, and Merry Go Round—came this morning. Thanks for them. Frieda is reading them, and will put me through the mill because of them in a little while.                 .

I believe that, just as an audience was found in Russia lor Tchekhov, so an audience might be found in England for some of my stuff, if there were a man to whip ’em m. It s t e producer that is lacking, not the audience. I am sure we are sick of the rather bony, bloodless drama we get nowad ys it is time for a reaction against Shaw and Galsworthy anc Barker and Irishy (except Synge) people—the rule an neasure mathematical folk. But you are of them and your sympathies are with your own generation, not with mine. I think it is inevitable. You are about the only man who is willing to let a new generation come in. It will seem a bit rough to me, wnen I am 45, and must see myself and my tradition supplanted. I shall bear it very badly. Damn my impudence, but don’t dislike me. But I don’t want to write like Galsworthy nor Ibsen, nor Strindberg, nor any of them, not even if I could. We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority.

But Lord, I can’t be sententious and keep my dignity.

I don’t want neither a foreword nor a descriptive notice publishing to Sons and Lovers. I wanted to write a Foreword, not to have one printed. You can easily understand. I am fearfully satisfied with myself as it is, and I should die of shame if that Foreword were printed.

You are very comforting about my monetary prospects. But coming of hand-to-mouth poor folk, I never believe in any money that is not in my pocket. Still, I hope one day to be quite, quite rich, and then I shall establish a Little Lord Fauntleroy system, where everything goes so well. That is my dream.

About the book of poems: I want to see it—but I'll enclose a list of addresses. It seems awful cheek of me, but you told me I might.

There are more short stories somewhere—four, for instance, that the English Review has published, and still more in MS. I must think them up. Are you cross with me for telling Katherine Mansfield she could have a story for Rhythm, for nothing? I wanted to do it. But if you disapprove, then I won’t promise any more. You will have heard from her, perhaps. I thought, if the Forum were not up to scratch—as I don’t suppose they will be—she could have their story The Soiled Rose and publish simultaneously. If not—she might have another—just as you think best—but I should want to revise it, in that case.

About coming to England—Frieda is determined to come at Easter, but we have as yet heard nothing, neither of the divorce, nor of the children, whether she is to have them or not. We shall come to the Ceame. It is the only place in England open to the pair of us. Perhaps you will have us for a week or two, till we can find another place. Don’t you think I could get some publisher's reading, or reviewing, to do, when I am in

England? I should feel then that I earned something. The money one gets from novels feels like the manna which falls from the skies. And I'll bet, every morning the Israelites looked out of their tent doors and held their breath, for fear nothing had fallen. I think Frieda and I might get a cottage somewhere. If I had work in London, it would have to be near London. Otherwise, we might take some little furnished cottage at the seaside for six months. One can get those places fairly easily, I think. I think the divorce is going. Then later we can marry, perhaps next winter we can come back to Italy. It all depends how the money goes. At any rate, if Duckworth gives me £100 for Sons and Lovers, I shall have enough to a me through till September or October. But I don't want him to be creditor to me. I don’t want to owe him money. I could get some teaching work if nothing were forthcoming. Will the Trespasser bring any more than the £50 have had, o* no I have got enough money, I think, to bring me to England at Easter—with a little care. I hen I must ask Duckworth for

some.                                    .

I have done too pages of a novel. I think you will nate it, but I think, when it is re-written, it might find a good public amongst the Meredithy public. It is quite different in manner from my other stuff-far less visualised. It is what I can write just now, and write with pleasure, so write it I must, however you may grumble. And it is good, too. I think do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of to-day: to the real, deep want of the English people, not to just what fancy they want. And gradually, I shall get my hold on them. And this novel is perhaps not such good art, but it is whai they want, need, more or less. But I needn t talk about it,

when only 106 pages are written.

They call the last three days in January the days of -Meria—the Blackbird—and they are supposed to be tne wor three days in the year. They have been, heir M erla sar g true tune this time. But it is sunny again to-day.

I should think you find me a bit of a burden on your hands. It seems queer, that you do it and get no profit. I should you’ve forgotten the Yorkshire proverb, An if tha does o for nowt, do it for thysen.

105

Tell Bunny we will write to him. I know he gets all news of us from you—and there is not much to tell.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To David Garnett.                         18 Feb., iJiZ.

My dear Bunny,—

It's a beastly shame we don’t write to you. But you read your father’s letters from us, don’t you? And I’m sure they’re enough, you won’t want any more

I am glad not to be coming to England just yet. It is funny how I dread my native land. But here it is so free. he tightness of England is horrid.

The spring is here—violets and primroses in profusion, and beautiful tufts of heather. F. and I went to Campione on Bunday—about io miles up the lake.

It's a queer place—just a flat strip of land at the foot of great cliffs, and mere cotton mills, and workmen's dwellings— all perfectly isolated, on a little ledge that the lake washes. Well, having got into Campione, we couldn’t get out. I wanted to find a road, but Frieda rushed to the first man, and asked him. He turned out to be fearfully drunk, and said he would guide us over the gallery. We went a little way—the gallery is quite a fantastic path that climbs the gorge, under a great spurt of water. Well, I wanted to send him back, because we could go by ourselves, and being so drunk, he was winking at Frieda over my shoulder. She was terrified. He wouldn’t think of returning. I had an altercation with him, and he threatened to throw me into the stream—all this on the steps of the gallery, like flies on the side of a wall. We retreated—he was furious. And the dialect they speak is quite unintelligible to me. At last I got some youths to hang on to him whilst we mounted the gallery. There were ropes of ice where the stream leaps over the path. Then one must go through tunnels, on boards laid over the stream, the water running just below one’s

feet, the rock about neck-high, and beastly dark. It took us an hour and a half, hard going, to climb out of Campione. Then we were among the snow, fearfully wild. And these deserted Italian villages stand so like rubble of rocks between the hills. The old maize stalks shook in an icy wind above a snow field that gleamed like silver. It is pretty.

In Gardola di Tignale—the next village—the brass band was playing for a major returned from Tripoli, and he was standing in his doorway while the band brayed in his honour on his doorstep. The landlord of the inn was an awfully jolly old sport. The inns are the living-room of the family—dogs, babies, boiling pots, villains, and great open chimneys in which one sits. The hearth is raised about 3 ft., so one sits in a high, high chair—a chair on stilts—with one's feet near the ashes, and drinks moscato—Asti spumante I think it’s called—or muscadine—lovely white fizzy wine—at a lira per litre—quite a lot for fivepence, 3 or 4 tumblerfuls.

If we are here, could you come for the Easter vacation Fancy, I might be alone. You could come 3rd quite cheaply, I should think. You would adore this country. How goes work? Have you seen Harold lately? I must write him. Bu I expected to hear again from him.

How's your heart? Still fluttering round a microscope?

Send me a book to read, will you?—a 42th that doesn t matter.

It is Easter in a month—good Lord! and so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe. Write and say something nice to us. "What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative dru^—etc.

The theatre has gone, much to my sorrow. But good bye viele herzliche Grussen,

D H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea, Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To Ernest Collings.                       ²4 ^., i9I3-

Dear Collings,—                    ...

It is quite a long time since I got your letter and the drawings. I do like them immensely. I think my favourite is ‘the beauty of the summer morning? That J think is quite lovely, with its sense of sunshine and atmosphere. 1 think after all you care more for landscape than for figure, and are much more o' a poet than a dramatist. I do think you ought to have come here this spring: it is a perfect place for you, would rejoice you: the cypresses, the olives, the great high rocks and gorgeous contours. And who has ever done the lovely glimmer of olive trees in black and white—or in colours? You would adore them. And then the lake is blue like nothing else. We may be here still another couple of months—though I am not sure. Tut if we are, couldn’t you squeeze a fortnight here? You should—it would mean a lot to you. We are poor as mice, but have heaps of room, and are glad of a visitor. Carpe diem. I am not sure that I can get used to your straight trunks of pillars—like the one where the bicycle is just disappearing. Somehow or other, when your big figure comes in—the idol or the satyr or the sphinx—you seem to lose your magic, joyful effect. It is as if, in your figures, you become didactic, while in the landscape you are lyrical. There’s never the same free grace and joy about your figures, as about your trees. You bother too much about them—are too laborious and effortful with them—you think them too important. Do tell me if I’m wrong. I think that satyr in the bicycle picture is bossy and stupid. He tires to boss the atmosphere, instead of revealing it in a big glint.

How do you work? Do you start with the idea of the satyr and the bicycle, and moonshine, and develop the rest? But your satyr ought to come out of your moon—your bit of a bicycle does.

In the picture that looks like March, where the man is offering fruits, there is rather a delicious feeling of weather, but again the same uneasiness remains, as if you hadn’t hit the thing dead certain, not left the picture with the finality one wants. I know how hard it is. One needs something to make one’s mood deep and sincere. There are so many little frets that prevent our coming at the real naked essence of our vision. It sounds boshy, doesn't it? I often think one ought to be able to pray, before one works—and then leave it to the Lord. Isn’t it hard, hard work to come to real grips with one’s imagination 108

—throw everything overboard. I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me—and it's rather an awful feeling. 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."

I like "wide open spaces"—and the Pavlova cover is a treat. Now there I feel you've hit it jolly well. It made me want to design a cover for my next book of poems. By the way, I asked the publishers to send you a copy of my Love Poems ano Others. Have they done so? If not, I’ll send you one from here.

My next book of poems will be a book of Elegies. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? If ever I bring it out, will you help me to design a cover?                                            ,

You should find some of my stuff in March Rhythm. It s a daft paper, but the folk seem rather nice.

I am correcting proofs of my novel, Sons and Love s. It is by far the best thing I’ve done. It will be out in about a month.

I am fearfully keen to know what folk will say about my poems. Tell me your opinion when you can. Send me always any drawings you don’t want to keep. It is ripping to feel one develops in one’s work, don't you thinks

Edward Garnett has just written and says the poems were sent off.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

To Edward Garnett.

Gargnano.

Tuesday, 26.2.13.

Dear Garnett,—

Thanks again for your letteranswer to yours c. — The 6 books of poetry came- „ D         -

send them. I think it looks awfully nice, and lamin love wi it—wonder if it’ll do anything.

__1___vid you not get mine in of the nth? I posted it to Hampstead.

;—.jolly good of the publisher to

The last proofs of Sons and Lovers came to-day. I admire my own work a good deal, /on did well in the cutting thanks again. Shall you put in the dedication, "To my friend, Edward Garnett"—or just "To Edward Garnett,’ or what?

You are awfully good about the Cearne. But I don’t want us to bother you if we can help it. Nothing is certain—except the torment of the present. I shall let you know as soon as there is anything.

I am so anxious to know how the poems will be received. You’ll send me some cuttings. I wonder when I shall see you.

A rivederla,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To Edward Garnett.                     3 March, 1913.

Dear Garnett,—

Frieda thanks you for the address of your brother, and she will write to him. I liked the American reviews—those that weren't screamingly funny I understood quite well. It is true, I liked the look of the poetry book immensely—so did the people to whom it was sent. I think it is a good collection. Those who won't be pleased by one thing should find another they like. Whereas de la Mare in his choice only wanted to please the exquisite folk.

I’m glad you got the Forum cheque. Send me two five-pound notes. I can’t do anything with a cheque. I am coming to the end of my cash. Soon I shall have to ask Duckworth for something. I finished and returned all the proofs of Sons and Lovers. I suppose they came all right. It is rather a good novel—but if anything a bit difficult to grip as a whole, at first. Yet it is a unified whole, and I hate the dodge of putting a thick black line round the figures to throw out the composition. Which shows I’m a bit uneasy about it. I’m very keen to know what the folk will say about the poems.

We met Mrs. A. in Salo. The wire came too late for us to

get to Desenzano. She is still just a bit tired, but we shall get along like three bricks. When folks have all had a good few knocks under the jaw, they hang together better.

I’ve got a perfectly barren head, so don’t mind my letter. There’s one thing, Mrs. A. can do my share of the housework, thank the Lord. I feel I’ve cooked cart-loads of foods and scrubbed acres of dirty boards. Now I'm fed.

I should think Masefield’s masterpieces will do for a sort of heavy hors d'oeuvres—pickled herring, though not so good—to introduce my elegant dishes. He’s a horrible sentimentalist— the cheap Byron of the day—his stuff is Lara 1913.

Mrs. Anthony is just prodding the cauliflower with a fountain pen, to see if it’s done. It explains the whole situation.

Do you know anything of Harold? We are quite anxious about him. You Garnetts are like the spoons in a hell-broth of tragedy—you stir and stir.

Frieda sends love, along o' me.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To Edward Garnett.                     ¹¹ March, 1913*

Dear Garnett,—

I am anxious down to my vitals about the poems. I thought my friends in the field—de la Mare and so on—would review them decently for me. God help us. I’ve got the pip h orri at present. I don’t mind if Duckworth crosses out a hundred shady pages in Sons and Lovers. It’s got to sell, I ve get to live.

I’m a damned curse unto myself. I’ve written rather mo than half of a most fascinating (to me) novel. But nobody w 1 ever dare to publish it. I feel I could knock my head against the wall. Yet I love and adore this new book. It’s all crude as yet, like one of Tony’s clumsy prehistorical beasts—most cumbersome and floundering—but I think it s great so new, so really a stratum deeper than I think anybody has e ver gone, in a novel. But there, you see, it’s my latest. It is all analytic?.

—quite unlike Sons and Lovers, not a bit visualised. But nobody will publish it. I wish I had never been born. But I'm going to stick at it, get it done, and then write another, shorter, absolutely impeccable—as far as morals go—novel. It is an oat I have vowed—if I have to grind my teeth to stumps, 111 do it—or else what am I going to live on, and keep Frieda on withal? Don’t you mind about this tirade.

I think we shall give this place up at the end of this month. Frieda wants to come to England. We might have Mrs. Anthony’s rooms, down in Ashdown Forest, mightn’t we—at least for a time? Then she would have our rent—at least, some of it—and be richer.

She is up at San Gaudenzio, perched on the brim of the mountain over the lake, in a farmstead of olives and vines, a situation beautiful as a dream. We are going up there this afternoon. I don’t think zo lire a month much for her room, do you? It’s only 24/- a calendar month—and the folk are nice.

I have also got some friends who have a small grammar school in the Isle of Man, at Ramsey. I’m sure I could get a bit of teaching there, and I think Ramsey wouldn’t be a bad place to live in, for the summer.

We have written to your brother Robert Garnett.

Thank Bunny for his letters. He sounds a bit unhooked—-manhood comes hard to him, evidently. He’s like me, I suppose. I had a devil of a time getting a bit weaned from my mother, at the age of 22. She suffered, and I suffered, and it seemed all for nothing, just waste cruelty. It’s funny. I suppose it is the final breaking away to independence.

Forgive me if I am impertinent.

Ask Duckworth to send me £50, will you? That must take me on five months or so, and then if there’s any more due, I can draw, and if there isn’t, I must wait.

I had rather not come to England this summer. But it is a case of Frieda’s children. We wouldn’t trouble you at the Cearne for very long—at the most not more than a fortnight. Does it seem an imposition? We can do all our own work, get in food and cook. And we shouldn’t come before about the middle of April.

It's very sunny and pretty. Frieda has gone boating on the lake with some Germans. I didn't want to go—have had a damned cold.

I wish somebody would give my poems a lift.

A rivederla,

D. H. Lawrence.

I enclose Bunny an orchid. I find lovely flowers for him, and lose them again.

The novel is not about Frieda and me, nor about a Baroness neither.

Villa Igea,

Villa di Gargnano,

Lago di Garda (Brescia).

To Ernest Coliings.               Saturday, March, 1913.

My dear Collings,—

Thanks very much for your letter and crits. It is awfully interesting to hear what various people say—and on the whole, I agree with you. The book is not going to be received well, I'm sorry to say.

But I want you to do something for me. Garnett must be mad. In an offhand sort of fashion he demands that I bhall design a thing for the wrapper of my new novel. Sons and Lovers. It seems preposterous. He asks for something suggesting the collieries—headstocks. Fancy doing collieries here in Italy, with no coal within miles and miles, and not an industry worth the mention, and no pictures—oh, Lord, it's frightful. One-third or so of the cover is to be picture, the rest a brief notice on the novel. It’s a damned nuisance. Would it be a great bore to you just to give it a bit of a try ? Is it impudence to ask it? Because, of course, they don't want to pay me for designing a cover, or a bit of a cover. And I am pennilessly poor, always. But we might arrange something that way. At any rate, I’ll send you the first batch of proofs. If it* too m fag for you, just send the things back and say No. oumig get an idea from the proofs—the text, I mean. Oh, God, wish I was a navvy or a policeman.

I enclose s draft of the size of the cover and spacing. 1 hey want the thing awfully soon too. If you do it, you might post it to Edward Garnett, at Duckworth and Co., 3, Henrie ta St., W.C.

I am in a mess and a misery all round just now. I believe I am moving to Rome in about ten days—¹sn t Avernus Hole” somewhere down there—the mouth of hell I ought to draw a bit nearer to it.

I'll help you when I can, I will really.

D. H Lawrence.

San Gaudenzio, Gargnano.

To David Garnett.                         5 April, 1913*

Dear Bunny,—

We were all highly interested in your last letter. You are a varied and boldly coloured person. It is a little form, a little strength of line that is perhaps lacking. You seem a bit sporadic, and one looks for the "core of ardour.” If I were you, I’d be a plain dull person for a bit.

You'll wonder at my last brief note. It was like the horn of Tristan sounding across the sea—I mean of Isolde. Frieda after all feels she must be near the children—within an hour’s train journey of them. So, instead of going to Florence—the luggage was already addressed—we are coming to England. But first Frieda must see her sister in Verona. Else is in Rome now. We meet her, I think, next Friday: that is, I believe, the nth. So we should be in England about the 1 zth. I must let you know. We shall be very thankful to stay at the Cearne for a bit.

At present we are living at San Gaudenzio with Mrs. Anthony. It is a lovely place. There is a garden over a mile round, with vines and olives. It falls to the cliff edge above the lake. I sit and write in a deserted lemon-garden which gathers the sun and keeps it. he mountains are covered with snow opposite. Then the Capelli-—the people—are fearfully nice. The place is almost like an inn—illegal, there is no licence, so that people are always coming—handsome young men who are conscripts and just about to flee to America, and so on. One need never

be alone. And the folk are nice—warm and generous. I reckon Mrs. A. is jolly lucky, if you ask me anything, to be in such a lovely spot with such decent folk. We play games at evening. Last Sunday there was a band—’cello, mandoline, and two weird guitars—playing all evening while we danced. Nay, even there was a wild and handsome one-legged man with a deltoid like a boss of brass, who danced Frieda, and then 1 ony, like a wooden-legged angel. What can woman want more? We are out nearly all day—up at the charcoal-burners’ hut on the mountains, or away at the great scree. It is quite wonderful and unspoiled everywhere. There are little grape-hyacinths standing about, and peach blossom is pink among the grey olives, and cherry blossom shakes in the wind. Oh, my sirs, what more do you want?

I register what you say about my "pottery,” and am glad to succeed the Salvation Army on the throne of your heart. No, I don’t think I’m the greatest poet that ever lived—I’m not very conceited. I should not like to say 1 though <. myself as great a poet as Lord Tennyson—perhaps when I ve finished, I shall, perhaps I shan’t. But let me finish first. You are only twenty yet—I’m only 27.

I wonder where your father is. I hear he is beginning a new book. I drink to its success, though the wine is miserable stuff. I did 200 pages of a novel—a novel I love then I put aside to do a pot-boiler—it was too improper. The pot-boiler is at page no, and has developed into an earnest and painful work— God help it and me.

I’m so sick of the last lot of proofs of Sons and Lovers, that I have scarcely patience to correct them. By the way, a friend of mine, an awfully nice fellow—Ernest H. R. Collings, 24, Gorst Rd., Wandsworth Common—did a drawing for the cover of Sons and Lovers. Your Dad asked me to do it—bM Collings is a professional, and has done some good .tuff. e sent the thing into Duckworth’s, but has had no acknowledgment. Do ask your father to be nice to him about it—he s young and struggling and his stuff is good, if its not man-e -lous. But he’s an awfully lovable chap—generous. He s olde r than me—God bless me for my patronising.

I 'am thinking we may stay at Forest Row lor a bit, then get nJ

some little erib. I wish I was a lily of the field. I’m sure I don’t want to sow and spin.

I don't want to bother your father while he is away. When do you go back to college? I suppose we shall be here four or five days longer. With my love and Frieda's.

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S. BY F.

I am looking forward to seeing you. I want to read your book; don’t be hopeless, and don’t forget that one is never as hopeless as at 21! Love F.

P.S. by D. H. L.

I want to see that book. I'll help you with it if you like. Mrs. Anthony says it’s a mean dodge, your trying to extract an unearned letter from a lonely and forlorn lady, who watches the post like Isolde the ships oversea—longing to hear from her . . .

(Pen drawing of a rabbit.)

Hotel Europa s Aquila Nera, Verona.

To Edward Garnett.                      14 April, 1913.

Dear Garnett,—

It is years since I heard from you. We are on the move at last—been here a couple of days. After all, we are coming to England, but not direct. We are going to-night to Mtinchen and shall be there about a week. You might write to me at the "Haus Vogelnest,” Wolfratshausen, bei Munchen, and tell me how you are. Will you have us at the Cearne in about a week’s time? Do you know of any little cottage anywhere, that we could rent?—somewhere by the sea, if we can. Mrs. Anthony says that your brother Arthur Garnett knows those things. We want soon to settle down again. We could furnish a little place for ourselves, if we knew of one.

I sent off all those proofs of Sons and Lovers. Did you get the drawing that Collings did? I haven't seen it, but I'll bet it’s nice. Do thank him, will you?—Ernest H. R. Collings, 24, Gorst Rd., Wandsworth Common.

I shall be so glad to see you, and feel myself in your hands for a day or two.

I may be in Heidelberg on Thursday—but letters to Wolfratshausen will always find me. I want to hear from you. It's so long since I did.

Frieda joins me in love—and to Bunny.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Jaffe,

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, bei Munchen.

To Edward Garnett.

Friday, 17.4.13.

Dear Garnett,-—

I am sorry the poems only sold 100.—T|rieda is very cross. Don’t you think Duckworth's printers or somebody are very slow? If one wants things to go like hot cakes, the cakes should be hot, surely. But the poems hung fire for months—Sons and Lovers does likewise. The interest- what of it there may be—goes lukewarm. It’s no good—if Hamlet and (Edipus were published now, they wouldn’t sell more than 100 copies, unless they were pushed: I know that Duckworth will have wait till my name is made, for his money. I can understand is a bit diffident about putting me forward. But he needn't be afraid. I know I can write bigger stuff than any man in England. And I have to write what I can write. And I write for men like David and Harold—they will read me, soon. My stuff is what they want: when they know what they want. You wait.                              ,                     ,

Bliss Carmen was very nice. I have half a mind to write to him. Shall I?                                          .. . .

We—or rather Frieda—had a letter from Harold this morning.

I am only doing reviews for the Blue Monthly, or whatever it is.

Shall I send some poems, and a story, for the Forum

I have written 180 pages of my newest novel, The Sisters. It is a queer novel, which seems to have come by itself. I will send it you. You may dislike it—it hasn’t got hard outlines— and of course it’s only first draft—but it is pretty neat, for me, in composition. Then I've got 200 pages of a novel which I'm saving—-which is very lumbering—which I'll call, provisionally, The Insurrection of Miss Houghton. That I shan’t send you yet, but it is, to me, fearfully exciting. It lies next my heart, for the present. But I am finishing The Sisters. It will only have zoo pages. It was meant to be for the jeunes files, but already it has fallen from grace. I can only write what I feel pretty strongly about: and that, at present, is the relation between men and women. After all, it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women. In a month The Sisters will be finished (D.V.).

It is queer, but nobody seems to want, or to love, two people together. Heaps of folk love me alone—if I were alone—and of course all the world adores Frieda—when I’m not there. But together we seem to be a pest. I suppose married (sic) people ought to be sufficient to themselves. It’s poverty which is so out of place.

I want to go back to Italy. I have suffered from the tightness, the domesticity of Germany. It is our domesticity which leads to our conformity, which chokes us. The very agricultural landscape here, and the distinct paths, stifles me. The very oxen are dull and featureless, and the folk seem like tables of figures. I have longed for Italy again, I can tell you.

I think these letters of ours are typical. Frieda sprawls so large I must squeeze myself small. I am very contractible. But aren’t you writing a book about Dostoievsky? Those things crack my brains. How does it go? You are a pessimist really. We have not mentioned Mrs. G. to anybody, I believe. Tell David to write to me here.

D, H. Lawrence.

Villa Jaffe, Irschenhausen, (Post) Ebenhansen,'

bei Munchen (Isartal).

To A. W. McLeod.        (Postal stamp, April 26th, 1913.)

Deaf Mac,—

I’m here instead of in England. It’s a jolly little wooden house—oh, don't jump to conclusions, quite luxurious— standing in a corner of a fir-wood, in a hilly meadow all primulas and gentian and looking away at the snowy Alps. Ecco! F. and I are quite alone. The place is a little summerhouse belonging to her brother-in-law, which he has lent us for a month or two. It is lonely. The deer feed sometimes in the corner among the flowers. But they fly with great bounds when I go out. And when I whistle to a hare among the grass, he dances round in wild bewilderment.

I must thank you again for the books. Medea is still very good. But I thought her a bit stupid in the end. F. is mightily impressed by her still. I am wading through New Machiavelli. It depresses me. I sometimes find it too long. But it is awfully interesting. I like Wells, he is so warm, such a passionate declaimer or reasoner or whatever you like. But, ugh! he hurts me. He always seems to be looking at life as a cold and hungry little boy in the street stares at a shop where there is hot pork. I do like him and esteem him, and wish I knew half as much about things. I think the Gadfly man has a complex”—some sexual twist—that he likes physical hurt as he does Those old inquisitors and sadists and Caligulas of course had perverted sex—which was why they "savoured ' those nasty hurts. The Bergson book was very dull. Bergson bores me. He feels a bit thin,

I don’t know when they’ll get Sons and Lovers out Duelworth's are a damned dilatory lot. Curse them, they 11 put forth in their Spring—it won’t be long, I suppose. I will give you a copy. I am doing a novel which I have never grasped. Damn'its eyes, there I am at page 145, and I ve no notion what it’s about. I hate it. F. says it is good. But it s like « novel in a foreign language I don’t know very well-I ran only just make out what it is about.

I don’t know when I shall be in England. Eut my youngest sister—my only unmarried sister—marries in August, so I shall have to appear about that time. Write to me and tell me lots of news. One can buy such pretty pictures in Munich. Do you want anything particular? Perhaps I shall soon be able to furnish a cottage in England. Then you could come and stay with us. Would you like it? I should.

It broke my heart to leave Italy. I still cannot, cannot believe this landscape is real. I expect it to lift and clear away, and reveal my bright Garda again. Lord, but I am a conservative person. I make such deep roots wherever I go. Soon I must settle down. I can’t bear to tear myself about. And it is so queer to greet the peasants in German. ⁴‘Gruss Gott,” they say. In Austria they say "Servus.” In Italy "riverisco.” But it hurts me not to say the Italian. One must love Italy, if one has lived there. It is so non-moral. It leaves the soul so free. Over these countries, Germany and England, like the grey skies, lies the gloom of the dark moral judgment and condemnation and reservation of the people. Italy does not judge. I shall want to go back there.

Pray to your gods for me that Sons and Lovers shall succeed. People should begin to take me seriously now. And I do so break my heart over England when I read the New Machiavelli. And I am so sure that only through a readjustment between men and women, and a making free and healthy of this sex, will she get out of her present atrophy. Oh, Lord, and if I don't "subdue my art to a metaphysic,” as somebody very beautifully said of Hardy, I do write because I want folk— English folk—to alter, and have more sense.

Give my love to everybody. I could send you such heaps of German books if you could read that floundering language, which is alien to my psychology and my very tissue. I should never be able to use German, if I lived here for ever.—But everything is translated into German. Nietzsche said the Germans are the great receptive, female nation.

I must close—auf wiedersehen.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

To H. C.

1913.

.. . Tour letter followed me here. I've left Italy—-at least during the hot months. If I can, I shall go back in September—if I've got any money.

Perhaps you are a little bit mistaken about the Soiled Rose. I wrote it while I was still in Croydon—still in bed after the last illness. Don’t you think it a bit affected? It is a bit stiff, like sick man’s work. So that the philosophy which is in the Soiled Rose didn’t hold good for me long after the writing of the story.

I am here in a little house made of wood, standing in a corner of a hilly meadow against a big pinewood, and looking over at the Alps. Sometimes a deer steps out into the wheat, sometimes a hare lobs among the grass. In the bedroom one can hear the squirrels chattering. We stay here only a little longer. I may come to England for a short time. I don’t want to. want to go back to Italy. I don't want to live in England any more.

Sons and Lovers comes out just now. I remember your telling me, at the beginning, it would be great. I think it is so. I wonder if you will agree.

I seem to have had several lives, when I think back. This is all so different from anything I have known before. And now I feel a different person. It is all queerer than novels. It is enough to make one take life carelessly, it behaves so topsy-turvily. Life unsaddles one so often. But now I don t think it can, not much, any more .. .

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, Oberbayern.

To A. W. McLeod.                    Wednesday,

Dear Mac,—                              ,

Thanks for the books. What a measly thing Shaw s New Statesman was. God help him! And it is amazing how narrowly Phillpotts shaves it, and just misses, always.

I sent you a rather miserable card of Wolfratshausen r 10 g it might interest you geographically. It looked rather nice on a white mount. Sons and Lovers comes out on the 29th. 1 ve had just one copy-—it looks nice. If they don't fall on me for morals, it should go. It is my best work, by far.

I have nearly done another remarkable work, called The Sisters. Oh, it is a wonder—but it wants dressing down a bit.

I am still sighing for Italy. Bavaria is too humid, too green and lush, and mountains never move—they are always there. They go all different tones and colours—but still, they are always there.

We are perhaps coming to England end of June—but not to stop. I hope to go back to Italy. Of course a lot depends on Sons and Lovers selling. You talk about the lines failing to me in pleasant places—I reckon a good many of em fall in stripes on my back. “Resigned, I kissed the rod?" Never.

What did you do at Whitsuntide? I live in a green meadow by the budding pines, and look at these damned mountains, and write bloody rot. Oh, Gawd! Oh, Gawd!

There's a grand procession to-day—the folk in Bavaria are the most fervent Roman Catholics on God's earth—and now it’s come on in sheets of thunder-rain. It always does. Damned climate, this. I shall send you some of Arthur Ransome’s Essays; ought to be entitled **Je sais tout." Aren’t you well? For the Lord’s sake don’t get ill, or I shall feel as if I heard the props of the earth cracking. I’ll have a copy of Sons and Lovers sent you. Remember me to A. Where is he going for his summer holiday? And you? But I hope to see you before then.

Auf wiedersehen,

D. H. Lawrence.

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, bei Mimchen, To Ernest Collings.                        13 May, 1913.

Dear Collings,—

After straying about all over the shop, and being fearfully unsettled, I am fixed here for a bit. It is a perfect little wooden house—d la mode—standing in a corner of a fir wood looking over at the long line of the Alps. It is very pretty, I assure you. But after Italy I can’t bear Germany—even Bavaria—so tidy, so arranged.

I heard from Garnett the other day, that Duckworth sent back your drawing to you, thinking that the idea of a colliery was unsuitable. I don’t know how to apologise to you sufficiently. I am so sorry, you don't know. Garnett asked me for a colliery design. And, damn it all, when you had been so good. I don’t know now what Duckworth is putting on the cover of the book and I don’t care. He half wants to boom the thing, and he is half afraid—and there you are, neither hot nor cold. What is one to do? But don’t let it make you offended with me, will you? Curse the publishers. I wonder if you liked the novel. Will you tell me? It comes out in a fortnight.

Spring is so late here, the apple blossom is only just coming into flower, and a month ago the weather was icy cold. I want to go back to Italy. I feel restless and without a root. But soon I must come to England. And then, if &ons and Lovers aoes not go, I shan’t have enough money to return to the south. It’s touch and go with me now. he poems have done pretty miserably—sold 100. ae reviewers, some of them my friends, were so faint. They are afraid to write well of me, for fear of the folk coming down on them for immorality. And some of the reviews have been so God-forsakenly stupid, it is enough to break the heart of a granite boulder.

But it is a pretty world—shadows of big clouds coming slowly here across the Isar and up the valley, a shepherd dog scampering round a flock of sheep near the wood, and among the rising corn, great oblong stretches where it is all yellow with dandelions. Then in the sky the hazy mountains, their dim snow looking between the clouds.

By the way, how did you like Switzerland? How was your holiday? Did it make you happy, and is your work going well? Are you giving any drawings to that scoundrel, the Blue Review? "Scoundrel" is half affectionate, of course.

I am going it strong enough with a new novel, that is two-thirds done. You must say nice things about Sons ana -.overs, because my spring, like the year’s, is very backward ano osty.

Do you know Munich? For some things I love it, and for some things I hate it. I hate it for its puffiness-puffed under the eyes with beer and bohemianism. hen I love it >r indifference. But it should be debonair in its bohemianism, and it isn't—it is rather unwholesome, and seems conscious its dirty linen. I hate Munich art. But yet it. is free of that beastly, tight, Sunday feeling which is so blighting in England. I like Italy, which takes no thought for the morrow, neither fear nor pride. The English are ‘good’ because they are afraid, and the Municheners are “wicked'' because they are afraid, and the Italians forget to be afraid, so they are neither good nor wicked, but just natural- Viva VItalia!

Well, you'll be sick of my jaw. I shall be glad to know you arc all right.

Yours,

D. H. Lawfence.

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebetihausen,

Ober bay ern,

To Edward Garnett.                   Tuesday, r 1.6.13.

Deaf Garnett,-—

Thanks for your letter and the review and for sending the books off, and for the advice you give us.

I got the first half of the Sisters returned. Did you receive the second half? You did not mention it.

On this day week we are leaving here for England. Frieda will not wait any longer. And she cannot come alone. I shall not mind coming with her. We must do what we can. If you would let us have a room at the Cearne, for not more than two weeks, we should be very glad. Then we shall go to the seaside, and have a room for a month or so; then, if Sons and Lovers justifies it, we shall go straight to Italy. Unless one of us is really ill, we shall not fail to come, arriving next Wednesday—what will it be, June 16th or thereabouts? I don’t know the date. Frieda wants to see your brother Robert, and so on. I am doing as you say, letting her choose her own way. But that includes my being there. And I want to help in what I can. It is true, the trouble about the children has knocked us both a bit loose at the joints. But Frieda has stayed a day or two in Wolfratshausen alone. There is not any definite news from anybody.

I am very anxious about Sons and Lovers. A friend sent me a Standard review, but I thought it was done by you, perhaps. I have written the best short story I have ever done—about a German officer in the army and his orderly. Then there is another good autobiographical story. I think it is good: then there is another story in course of completion which interests me. I might send them away, mightn't I? It is not fair for you to be troubled with the business. So I shall give them to you, that it is so piffling now.

and you, perhaps, will suggest where they may go.

You are going away—is it very far?—-and for a holiday, or will you keep on working? You did not tell me your address.

I have been reading the English Review. It makes me sad

If anything happens so that Sons and Lovers should not go I was glad the libraries took it—then I shall get some work when I am in England—teaching, I suppose.

I shall not change my mind about travelling next Tuesday. But we shall keep it quiet, that we are in England. We might, of course, come back here in about a month s time. Professor Jaffe wants us to do so. We shan t be able to see folks much in England. I do feel cut oft from my past life like reincarchildish.

nation.                                                          ,

You will come and see us when we are at the Cearne, won t you? I hope you will stand by me a bit; I haven t a man in the world, not a woman either, besides Frieda, who will. Not that anybody else has, I suppose, who goes his own way. But I haven’t yet got used to being cut off from folks ins ic e: a bit

How does your life of Dostoievsky go? Why do you never say anything about yourself?

The world gets a queer feel of shut-in-ness, as if it stifled one, the horizon being too near, the sky too low.

If it is at all a nuisance to you, we can get a room in London.

You must tell us.                             .

This time it is really, from both of us, auj wtedersehen.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

The Cearne,

Nr. Edenbridge,

Kent.

To Edward Garnett,                      21 June, 1913.

Dear Garnett,—

We are here, you see, fearfully glad to be at the Cearne with Mrs. Garnett and David. It is beautiful down here—I should think only England can do it. We are looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday—meanwhile the time falls softly away—we spent the morning netting the raspberries.

I liked the reviews of Sons and Lovers: also received cheque for £50 from Duckworth’s this morning. I hope the book will sell. I have just had a long letter of congratulation from W. L. George.

I wrote the biography, and sent it off, with what reviews of Sons and Lovers I had, to Mitchell Kennerley. There is a letter from another American man, which I shall enclose.

Then Ezra Pound asked me for some stories because "he had got an American publisher under his wing." The tenant of Pound’s wing-cover turns out to be the editor of the American Review—a reincarnation of the Smart Set—and I think his name is Wright. Now I have written three good short stories just before we came to England—two about German soldier-life. I want to know whether to send them to him or not. Then I had a letter from Austin Harrison asking for stories. I.shall want your advice soon. I want to send some stories out. I want to get hold of those you have in MS. and revise them. There is the English Review, the Forum, the American Review, perhaps the Century. I should be glad to have some stories in magazines. Do you see any reason why I shouldn’t offer some poetry to the Forum?

Frieda wants to see your brother Robert Garnett on Monday, to talk things over with him. She has written to him.

I love the Cearne and the warm people, but the English dimness in the air gives me the blues.

We are trying to be good for David and his exam.—God knows how we are succeeding—all right, I think.

By the way, Pound said his wing-chicken, the editor, wanted the stuff at once.

Till Wednesday, then.

Riverisco,

D. H. Lawrence.

Frieda sends her love and says she is so happy with Mrs. Garnett.

28, Percy Avenue,

Kingsgate, Broadstairs.

To Edward Marsh.

12 July, 1913.

Dear Mr Marsh,—

What joy to receive £3 out of the sweet heavens! I call that manna. I suppose you’re the manipulating Jehovah. 11 sing you a little Te Deum.

I wish you had the publishing of one’s work—soon I should have a fur-lined coat.                                     ,

I should like to see you very much. I suppose you won t be Margate way? (Don’t be insulted, at any rate.) If you are, I wish you would come and see us. But I think I shall be in London again in the very beginning of August. Are you then still in town? At any rate, I’ll write to you wnen I am coming up.

And many thanks.

D H. Lawrence.

Riley House, Percy Avenue, Kingsgate, Broadstairs.

To Edward Marsh.

14 Jd-y> I9I3-

Dear Mr. Marsh,—                           ,

How clever of the gods to move you down here! I wonder how long you are staying ,n Kingsgate. Will you come in for tea on Sunday-about 4"? But choose your own time if you W< W Enclosed autograph do for W. H. Davies? By the way, I should like to meet him—he feels so nice in all his work. Do you think it possible sometime?

Adieu till Sunday.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

My wife is looking forward to seeing you, also.

28, Percy Avenue,

Kingsgate, Broadstairs.

To J. M. Murry.                 (About July 15th, 191Z.)

Dear Murry,—

Oh, but why didn’t you come and let us lend you a pound. I think that when times have been so rough, you shouldn't bring about a disappointment on yourselves, just for the money. That seems to me wrong. We could just as well lend you five pounds as have it in the bank—if you want it. I consider now that your not coming on Sunday was a piece of obtuseness on your part. You are one of the people who should have a sense of proportionate values; you ought to know when it's worth while to let yourself borrow money, and when it isn’t. Because you must save your soul and Mrs. Murry’s soul from any further hurts, for the present, or any disappointments, or any dreary stretches of misery.

When Marsh said on Sunday, because we couldn’t understand why you hadn’t come: "I suppose they hadn’t the money for the railway tickets,” I thought it was stupid, because you seemed so rich, because you can earn so much more than I can. I had no idea.

So now I think you'd better come down for the week-end. Come on Saturday and stay till Monday morning. We can put you up. Don’t on any account bring chickens or any such like rubbish. We can get them down here. Though perhaps they are cheaper in town. Bring one if you like.

Come for the week-end, and bathe. We’ve got a tent in a little bay on the foreshore, and great waves come and pitch one high up, so I feel like Horace, about to smite my cranium on the sky. I can only swim a little bit and am a clown in the water, but it’s jolly. So you come, and bathe on Saturday. It’ll be high tide then about 5.0. And bathe on Sunday, and bathe on Monday morning. Then you’ll feel much jollier.

I am not poor, you know. But I didn’t know you were really stony. Only I have to watch it, because Frieda doesn’t care.

Harold Hobson might be here—but you'd like him.

Regards to you both,

D. H. Lawrence.

Let us know by what train you’ll come on Saturday.

What a shame for Mrs. Murry to have had such a chase. I put in a sovereign. Will she give Monty half a sovereign if she can—if not give me the money back when you like.—D.H.L.

28, Percy Avenue,

Kingsgate, Broadstairs.

To Ernest Collings.

22 July, 1913.

Deap. Collings,—

There—we are in England—came a little while ago, stayed a few days at the Cearne, and came down here for the air. We are staying till the 29th, then going to London for a day or two. Might I not see you one day—either the Wednesday, 30th, o. the Thursday? Or are you going away immediately?

I was glad to hear from you. If I can get a chance I w go and see that exhibition—your drawings would interest me, so would some of the other things. I went one day into the Academy, but was simply bored. It is the utter paucity of conception that is so disheartening. I he poor devils have go-nothing inside ’em—they’ve only got rather cleve fmg

I liked the woodpecker—not quite so much as some of yours —but it seems fresh. What are you doing now; ,           ,

Sons and Lovers has been well received, hasn’t it? I don t know whether it has sold so well. 1 tie damned prigs in libraries and bookshops daren’t handle me because they prete they are delicate-skinned and I am hot. May they fry 111 Hell.

I don’t like England very much, but the English do see m rather lovable people. They have such a lot of gentleness. There seems to be a big change in England, even in a year: such a dissolving down of old barriers and prejudices. But I look at the young women, and they all seem such sensationalists, with half a desire to expose themselves. Good God, where is there a woman for a really decent earnest man to marry hey don’t want husbands and marriage any more—only sensation.

Though why I talk like this to you I don't know. T. ry and see us some time next week in London—we go back to Bavaria about Aug. 8th.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

28, Percy Avenue, Kingsgate, Broadstairs.

To Edward Marsh.                       28 July, 1913.

Dear Marsh,—

Mrs. Lawrence and I will come then to Raymond Buildings at 1.45 on Wednesday. We are awfully keen to see you again, and to meet Davies,

It was nice of you to introduce us to the Asquiths—we have enjoyed so much talking to Mrs. Asquith, during the week. We hear quite a lot about you from her.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen,

bei Munchen.

To S. A. Hopkin.                        n Aug., 1913.

We are settled down again here now. Frieda is getting better of her trouble about the children, for the time being, at least. And I am glad we are together again. We think of staying here till the end of September, and of then going to Lerici, on the west coast of Italy, not far from Pisa. That would, I think, be ideal, if only we had the money and could get a place there.

It is lovely to be in Germany again, for the climate. Here everything looks so bright and sharply defined, after England. The mountains twenty miles away look much, much nearer than Crich Stand at home. One can see fold after fold of the Alps, all varying with the changing light. It is very beautiful, and it makes me so much more cheerful after England, where every tiring is dim and woolly, and the sky hangs low against one’s head.

We have had half a dozen children here to-day. They are wild young things, full of life. It is such fun to see them racing about the woods and the grass in their striped bathing suits. They do it for the freedom of it, and call it taking a ‘'Luft Bad" —an air bath. It is a very wild time we have with them.

Oh, but I am glad to be again in this great wide landscape where one can breathe, and where one’s head does not feel tightened in.

It will be lovely, if we go to Lerici, for Mrs. Hopkin to come there, t here will be the Mediterranean, and the mountains, and my beloved Italy. It would not be so very dear. I hope we shall have some luck, and can get there. We should be so delighted for you to come.

I have written to-day my first sketch—on Eastwood. It interests me very much. I propose to do a bockful of sketches— publish them in the papers first. You, Willie Hopkin, must tell me all the things that happen, and sometimes send me a Rag. And remember I am going to do an article on the Artists of Eastwood. I do the Primitive Methodist chapel next.

It is Frieda’s birthday to-day. Her little niece came crowned with flowers, her little nephews in white, carrying a basket of peaches, and of apricots, and sweets in boxes, and perfumes and big bunches of flowers, and other presents, walking in procession up the path through the meadow. Frieda stood on the verandah, dressed in Bavarian peasant’s dress, and received them. Then Peter, aged seven, recited some birthday verses, and Frieda blew on a mouth organ. I wanted to laugh, and to hide my head. We’ve had quite a feast.

We both send our love to you. Again thank you for having me at Devonshire Drive. I kiss my hand to that haughty Enid.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, Oberbayern.

To Edward Garnett.

13 Aug., 1913.

Dear Garnett,—

So we are settling down again, Frieda and I, and we are going to be very happy again. I can’t tell you how glad I am to be out of England again. Everything seems so living: so quick. I rather love my countrymen. But isn’t it queer, I feel as if not once, all the time I was in England, had I really wakened up. Everything seems to have been ravelled and dull and woolly— no sharp contact with anything. But, by God, it is good to breathe again, out here. So dark and woolly everything in England seems. You should see the mountains go up and down across the sky, twenty miles away.

I have been very busy reading the play to Frieda. It wants a lot of altering. I have made it heaps better. You must by no means let the MS. go to the printer before I have it—neither here nor in America. What a jolly fine play it is, too, when I have pulled it together. I shall be glad if you’ll send me the typed copy when you can, so I may alter it. Must I find another title? The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd describes it, but doesn’t sound very well.

The Northern Syndicate sent back the two stories as not being of the right length. I think I shall give one to the New Statesman, and one Pinker can have. I don't know Pinker’s address. The Smart Set has just sent me $36 for Kisses in the Train and Violets—good—Wright, the editor, has been ill, and so some delay. I have just got proofs of Italian sketches from the English. I am working hard at clearing things up. I am working very hard. As soon as possible I begin The Sisters. I am ready for it.

We think of going to Lerici for the winter. It is on the Mediterranean just above Leghorn. Mrs. Garnett will come and see us there—if we get there. Already I am thinking it will be glorious.

I wish you gave me your address when you go away. But you will write to me notwithstanding.’

The Westminster Gazette say they sent to the Cearne, last year, two sketches of the Tyrol, which Frieda loves so much, and which they could not use. I wonder if you can remember anything of them.

Let me hear from you. I feel so busy.

Viele herzliche Grasse,

D. H. Lawrence.

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, Oberbayern.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.   Wed,, Aug. 17,1913, or thereabouts.

Dear Mrs. Asquith,—

Suddenly we’ve got a nt of talking about you and your skirt with holes in and your opal brooch. And again we are in the little cove by the sea—and it’s absolutely heart-breaking to hear us singing the duet, What are the wild waves saying? I think I’m the living spit and image of Paul Dombey grown up, and Frieda----well, the less said about her the better.

You were awfully nice to us at Kingsgate. But that your Marylands was such a joy, I might have found myself hurrying over the edge of the cliff in my haste to get away from that halfcrystallised nowhere of a place, Kingsgate. Kingsgate oh, God! The last was a pathetic little bill for one and fourpence, the dregs and lees of our housekeeping down there. I believe it was the Baker, But it dogged our footsteps, and ran us down here. So I made a little boat of it and set it afloat. "Cast thy bread upon the waters,, I cried to the Baker, and send thy bills out after it." Far down the dancing Danube, and over Hungaria’s restless plains, my Baker s bill on its bobbling course goes seeking the golden grains. Ask ... if that isn t perfect Flecker-rhythm. The Golden Journey to Samarcand. You knew it climbed Parnassus en routes I shall write a uoo called The Poet’s Geographer one day. By the way ——- will hold it as a personal favour if I will take more care < my rhythms. Poor things, they go cackling round like a poultry farm—but he told it me—in a letter. He thinks I'm too Ragtime!—.not that he says so. But if you’ll believe me, that Golden Journey to Samarcand only took place on paper—no matter who went to Asia Minor.

I hope you don't mind if my letter is rather incoherent. We live in a little wooden house (but genuine Diirer engravings and Persian rugs) in a corner of a pine forest. But it rains—oh, Lord!—the rain positively stands up on end. Sometimes one sees the deer jumping up and down to get the wet out of their jackets, and the squirrels simply hang on by their tails, like washing. I take one morning run round the house in my bathing suit in lieu of a shower-bath.

It’s Frieda's brother-in-law’s house. He’s staying here now and then. He’s a professor of Political Economy, among other things. Outside the rain continues. We sit by lamplight and drink beer, and hear Edgar on Modern Capitalism. Why was I born? It was Markt in Wolfratshausen on Sunday. But there was nothing to buy but Regenschirme and Hosentragen and debkuchen. I wanted to buy a Herzkuchen with ⁴'Frieda” on, but rhere was such a mob of young gents eagerly sorting them out—one wanted Tauben with Emilie and another Vergiss-michnnicht und Creszenz, so that I never got a look in. I am born to be elbowed out.

We are going to Italy in a month or so. Then we think of Lerici, somewhere near Leghorn—Shelley and Byron tradition. It might be good for my rhythms.

We had an awfully jolly lunch at Marsh’s. I liked it ever so much.

How are you and where are you? Would you like any German books?—you can have some from here if you would— that was simply the best melon I ever tasted, the one you gave us. German books remind me of it.

How's the fat and smiling John? May I be remembered to Mr. Asquith. My respects to the gallant Sir Walter and his Lady, if ever you see them.

Viele Grusse,

D, H. Lawrence.

Are you Honourable or aren’t you? How does one address your letters?

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, Oberbayern.

To Edward Marsh.                       18 Aug., 1913.

Dear Marsh,—

I was glad to get your letter. Here it does nothing but rain. It is enough to make one’s verse as sloppy as Lamartine.

I think you will find my verse smoother—not because I consciously attend to rhythms, but because I am no longer so criss-crossy in myself. I think, don t you know, that my rhythms fit my mood pretty well, in the verse. And if the mood is out of joint, the rhythm often is. I have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it. It needs the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of the craftsmen. That Japanese Tone Noguchi tried it. He doesn t quite bring it off. Often I don’t—sometimes I do. Sometimes Whitman is perfect. Remember skilled verse is dead in fifty years—I am thinking of your admiration of Flecker.

Thanks very much for saying nice things about -Sons and Lovers. I am sure you’ll help.

I want Davies to come out to Germany or a while, if we an manage it. We move to Italy in about a month s time. My wife wants to go with her people to Baden Baden thei e off. I shall be glad—it rains so much here.

Do you mind posting this letter to Mrs. Asquit or he second time I have lost her address. I don't know if one does write "The Honourable.” If not, put it in another envelope, will you. And tell me.

My wife sends greetings.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Garnett,—

I was glad to hear from you again—your Wales sounds all right for you—but I know and hate its black rock and its atmosphere of slate and gloom. Give me Bavarian highlands when the sun shines, and the pine woods are dark, with glittering flakes, and suddenly the naked, red-skinned limb of a pine tree throws itself into the heat, out of the shadow, and deer go trotting through the sun-dapplings: where in the upland meadows, the autumn crocuses stand slim, a great many each standing single, in the intense green of the cut grass, lovely slender mauve-pmk things, balancing their gold in the centre while a butterfly comes and goes: where the chicory bushes glimmer so blue, they seem to tremble with sources of light beside the pond, as the white ducks go in a row: and where, far off, the golden-coloured mountain tops look out of heaven, over the shoulders of the dim-radiant ranges in front. So!

I send the revised MS. of the play to Duckworth. It is pretty much altered, and much improved. If Kennerley has printed, I must have the MS. back to correct proofs by.

Douglas Clayton will also send you another story directly. I don’t know what new MS. you are expecting from me.

I enclose the letter from the Northern Syndicate. I think they might take Two Marriages-—now called Daughters of the Vicar— which they might easily split up to a three-part serial. Is it at Pinker? Could you get it from him and send it at once—or let him send it for me—but privately? I reckon you ought to take the 10 per cent commission, not him.

Harrison, I am thankful to say, is giving me £25 for three Italian sketches, in the Sept. English.

We are here for another month. I hope the Tirol articles aren't lost—they are beloved of Frieda. When you have seen Pinker, give me his address so I can write him direct and save you bother.

We are going in three weeks, I think, to Italy. The Sisters is

the devil—I’ve made two false starts already—but it’ll go----

Yrs.,

D, H. Lawrence.

Regards from Frieda, who has bucked up.

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, Oberbayern.

To Ernest Collings.

4 Sept,, 1913.

Dear Collings,—

I was awfully pleased to get the little book, and your letter, and sketches for Elegies. T he latter book of mine is not likely to come yet, because the Love Poems were not a success. Iioweve , in God’s good time. I am glad also to hear of you in Monro s magazine. He asked me for some things, but I want paying, and I don’t think he likes the idea. Or perhaps he just didn’t like what I sent him. At any rate, you’ve got a pull of me this time. I must ask someone to send me a copy of the Poetry, and

Drama, that lias you in.

I don’t like the Boucher cover design nearly as much as your other work. It does not seem beautiful. It is interesting, blanking out of the face. It achieves the high-light effect, which attracts attention straight away. But I don’t like this covei ze much. It does not seem beautiful to me, though it is interesting. Have you read the text of the book? It is a joy.

We were awfully pleased with your drawings when we saw them. I am sure, too, this is your time for colour. V ou h ive got it in your blood. One could feel it when you were there. You are more interested in it at present than in nne, 1 think. That is because it is more passionate, voluptuous, I suppos

and this is your hour.                                       c

I was in Munich the other day, at a great exhibition o' pictures and sculpture—German, Spanish, Italian, Russ an, Swedish and so on. I wish you could go S.ome tune come to Munich, it is such a town of pictures. Th R™ interested me very much—there is more life m their thin ,. The Germans are vigorous, and brutal, and get simply amazing technical effects, but the real feeling is not there. The French are thin. Very interesting people are the Swedes—and I iove that mellow colouring of Spanish pictures—dark and mellow like golden plums in the shade.

We are thinking of moving, about the 22nd of this month, down into Italy—I don’t know exactly whither. So I am restless, waiting to go. There I shall settle down to work again. This country’ is beautiful—far off, the high, cool, blue mountains, with a luminous air between and dark pinewoods, 'hat is not your style, really: too cool. You like hotter colour. You ought to go to Italy in autumn—end of October. That is your time, when the dark-crimson fig-trees hang like blood on the grey rocks, and vines simply flare their yellow under a scabious blue sky.

I am having a play published directly. If I can I will send you a copy. It is pretty good, I think, f

Have a good time in Cornwall. Write us again when anything is doing.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

My wife sends her regards and best wishes for your holiday.

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, Oberbayern.

To Mitchell Kennerley.                     8 Sept,, 1913.

Dear Mr. Kennerley,—

I am very sorry to have caused trouble by coming in so late with my revision of the play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. The MS. had lain with Mr. Garnett for nearly two years: he had had it typed, and I had seen nothing of it till I asked for it a week or two back. Then I saw how it needed altering— refining. Particularly I hated it in the last act, where the man and woman wrangled rather shallowly across the dead body of the husband. And it seemed nasty that they should make love where he lay drunk. I hope to heaven I have come in in time

to have it made decent. The MS. forwarded you by Mr. Duckworth, revised by me, looks rather messy, but I am sure is perfectly easy for a printer to decipher. He can correct from that copy. There is not, after all, such a great amount of alteration.

I wish I could have the proofs here. But if it is very late for you, your own proof-reader might do the corrections, because I went over that MS. very carefully.

The two stories which Mr. Wright returned did not come to me, but went to London. If you would care to see them, I will have them sent on. I am very glad that you are so friendly disposed to my work, and grateful also. A good deal of my hope rests on you.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S.—I don't know what you think of the title— The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd. Garnett said it wasn’t good. I suggested Afterdamp on the last MS., but am by no means keen on it. It would do exceedingly well, in idea, but I don’t like the word. I wish it were the German : Schlagender Wetter♦

Irschenhausen,

(Post) Ebenhausen, Oberbayern.

To Edward Garnett.                         Monday.

Dear Garnett,—

I enclose a letter from Pound. You will advise me.

The Sisters is going well. I’ve done a hundred pages. I wonder what you’ll think of it. It is queer. is r fine, think. I am in it now, deep.

We are going away on Wednesday—Frieda to Baden Baden for some days. I am walking a week in Switzerland—meeting her in Basle-then we go to Italy. Don’t write to me until you get an address. I shall take The Sisters in a rucksack.

I shan’t do anything but The Sisters now. I hope to have it done in a month. I do wonder what you will think c it.

139

We arc glad you’ll come to Italy to sec us. Frieda says you’re the only person who understands me at all. But she is a bit cross with you, because you are cross with her. She says I’ve ruined her in everybody’s estimation, by abusing her. I say I ve only ruined myself.

But I’ll put her on a pedestal again.—Lord God, what a -----time this has been. I think it will be better in Italy. At any rate, now I work myself blind.

I wrote to Mitcheil Kenner ley.

I haven’t got any news. I’m 28 now. How slowly one gets old, in comparison.

It’s a weird novel you’ll get from me this time: but perfectly proper. The libraries will put it on their Sunday School prize list. I shall send you my address soon. My love to Mrs. Garnett. Frieda is in Wolfratshausen. Good-bye.

D H. Lawrence.

Love to David—he writes splendid letters. But is he in love? What's got him? He’s suddenly developed a responsible vein. He takes the world seriously, my hat, and grieves over the shallow and unprofitable Asphodel as if he were the Apostle John in embryo.

Post card to Enid Hilton.

18.9.13. Konstanz,

What jolly news, that you have got through Oxford and are swotting Matric at Nottingham. I think it is good to swot while one is young—don't you slack. I liked your letter very much— it was handed in at Munich just as I left, and I read it in the train. I am at present on a steamer on the Lake of Constance going from Uberlingen to Constance. I love these old towns with roofs sticking up so high, and tiles all colours—sometimes peacock blue and green. I am going to-morrow to Schaffhausen, then walking to Zurich and Lucerne and the Gotthard.

Love to your father and mother.

Good luck to you,

D. H. Lawrence.

Albergo delle Palme,

To Edward Garnett.

Lerici, Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

Tuesday, 30 Sept., 1913.

Dear Garnett,—

I am so happy with the place we have at last discovered, I must write smack off to tell you. It is perfect. There is a little tiny bay half shut in by rocks, and smothered by olive woods that slope down swiftly. Then there is one pink, flat, fisherman’s house. Then there is the villino of Ettore Gambrosier, a four-roomed pink cottage among vine gardens, just over the water and under the olive woods. There, D.V., is my next home. It is exquisite. One gets by rail from Genoa or from Parma to Spezia, by steamer across the gulf to Lerici, and by rowing boat round the headlands to Fiascherino, where is the villino which is to be mine. It is L60 a month—60 lire, that is— furnished—and 25 lire for the woman who does all the work and washing and sleeps in Tellaro, the fishing village twenty minutes off; in all, 85 francs a month. You run out of the gate into the sea, which washes among the rocks at the mouth of the bay. The garden is all vines and fig trees, and great woods on the hills all round. Now you will come and see us—and so will Constanza Davidovna—she promised—she would be so happy. Yellow crocuses are out, wild. I he Mediterranean washes softly and nicely, with just a bit of white against the rocks. Figs and grapes are ripe. You will come and see us—-and David too—it is a perfect place for him. Think, we can sit round the open chimney in the kitchen at night, and burn olive wood, and hear the sea washing. I want to go to-morrow. But the proprietor remains in possession still another eight days, for the crops. I feel I can’t wait: Though this is a delicious hotel—6 francs a day pension, jolly good food, wine and all included—a big bedroom with a balcony just over the sea, very beautiful. But I want to go to my villino.

1 haven’t got much money left. The cheque from the New Statesman hasn’t come yet—but it will eventually wander here, I suppose. Perhaps you could send me £10 from what I have left. Send it me in notes here, to this Albergo.

I walked all the way from Schaffhausen to Zurich, Lucerne, ever the Gotthard to Cirolo, Bellinzona, Lugano, Como, It was beautiful—Switzerland too touristy, however—spoilt.

Don't ask me anything about literature this time.

Frieda's mother gave her a lot of this paper—please excuse it.

Love from both,

D. H. Lawpence.

Villino Ettore Gambrosier,

Let id, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia.

Italy.

To Mitchell Kennerley.                   5 Ottobre, 1913.

Dear Me. Kennerley,—

I got your letter of the 19th alt. this morning at last, and rejoiced exceedingly over it. Mr. Garnett had sent me the proots of the play a few days before, and I had wrestled with them, then given them up to await the arrival of the MS. from you. Instead I hear that Mr. Bjorkman will correct for me in America, and I am very glad. Mr. Garnett said you might legitimately send me a heavy bill for alterations, and I was afraid you were displeased. However, all goes well. I am glad Mr. Bjorkman will see to the revision. He will use his discretion over any little point that may arise. I like to think he will look after the thing for me. Of course I take unto myself all the beautiful and laudatory things he says about me in the preface: they seem to me very just. I never did read Freud, but I have heard about him since I was in Germany.

As for Sons and Lovers, its star is already sinking from my sky, now I am well on into another very different novel.

We have got a tiny four-roomed cottage amongst the vines, on a little rocky bay down here. The Mediterranean is very warm, so I am always trying to drown myself. We’ve got a barefoot servant of sixty, who kisses my wife’s hand and calls all the blessings of heaven on her. So we manage to live on about 130 francs a month. Felice, the woman, is wizened but triumphant. She marches like a queen with a dozen kilos of charcoal on her head. She lifts her hands and laments over our bathing in such a "mare grosso." Publish me something in the Forum if you can, will you? I am horribly afraid of not being able to pay Felice her wages, and she is my first servant, and I feel frightfully responsible for her. Her husband—ah, il poverino—died four years ago.

This is really to tell you my address. I shall be delighted to hear from Mr. Biorkman, if ever he should find occasion to write.

One can hear the sea all the time. It is very beautiful here. The figs are bursting after a day’s rain. Many thanks for your courtesy.

Yours sincerely,

D. II. Lawrence.

We stay here at least six months—until April.

The men and women in Italy are natural enemies—it is very queer.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia.

Tc Edward Garnett.                      6 Ottobre, iHiA.

Dear Garnett,—

I enclose you a letter from Harrison. It seems to me pretty fair. What do you think? As I am pretty badly off for money, I am jolly glad of the offer. I suppose you could get back from Pinker the one story—would you? Perhaps you will see Norman Douglas at lunch one day, and can tell him. I have asked Ezra Pound to forward to the English Review two stories he had, which were returned from the Smart Set. One of th Once if Harrison dare print it, would go excellently well with the two soldier stories. You remember, it is the tale of a woman who was loved by a young officer—he threw roses on her- one night in an hotel. What do you think of the chances of that For a fourth, I think I would write one I have had in my mind for a long time.

Then Mitchell Kennerley wrote me a fearfully nice letter in answer to one of mine from Irschenhausen. He says that Bjorkman will correct the proofs of the play from the revised MS. of mine—which is rather nice. So I needn't bother about the proofs from you.

Did you say Mrs. Garnett posted a cheque for £4 from the New Statesman, to Irschenhausen? It hasn’t turned up yet. The letters have been zigzagging about horribly. But perhaps I shall get it ultimately.

Kennerley also sent me a copy of his Sons and Lovers, and a New York Times with a very laudatory notice.

I am working away at The Sisters. It is so different, so different from anything I have yet written, that I do nothing but wonder what it is like. When I get to page 200 I shall send you the MS. for your opinion.

It is very lovely here. I sit on the rocks against the sea all day and write. I tell you it is a dream. Figs are ripe in the garden—they are delicious. Frieda and I eat hundredweights.

We’ve got a servant called Felice. She is a rum creature— about sixty, and wizened, and barefoot. She goes barefoot, walks with half a hundredweight of charcoal on her head, like a queen wearing a crown, and whistles her acquiescence when you ask her to do anything. She is a jewel. You must come and see her.

Frieda and I are being very happy here. But the letters take the devil of a time.

Love from us to you,

D. H. Lawrence.

We haven’t any money. Did you send the £10? What an awful nuisance I am to you. Never mind, you come here and stay with us and be happy. It is an easy place to get apartments in, quite cheap, if you know anyone wanting a resting place in Italy—I mean Lerici. But you come and stay here with us in Fiascherino.

I’ve only 50 francs in the world. Did you say Mrs. Garnett forwarded a cheque from the New Statesman to Irschenhausen? It has never come to me. God knows if it is lost. Did you ever just glance round to see if the MSS. of those Tirol sketches was at the Cearne?

Fiascherino, Lerici, Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Edward Marsh.

14 Ottobre, 1913.

Dear Marsh,—

Don't think that it is because your last letter offended me at all, that I don't write. In reality, I quite agreed with what you said. I know my verse is often strained and mal-formed. Whether it gets better I don't know. I don’t write much verse now. I've got to earn my living by prose. One day 111 copy you out some of my later things, if you'd care to see them.

We’ve been on the move since God knows when. 3 aat is why I haven't written. When we left Bavaria, 1 walked across Switzerland to Italy. Switzerland is rather banal. hen we have prospected here and there to find a spot for the winter. Now we are settled in Fiascherino. It is an hour s walk from San Terenzo, Shelley's place. We’ve got a little pink cottage among vines and olives. I also just caught a flea, and am in a rage because it leapt from my fingers out again into the infinite. What a glorious flying jump a flea can take! The full moon shines on the sea, which moves about all glittering among black rocks. I go down and bathe and enjoy myself. You never saw such clear, buoyant water. Also I don’t swim more than a dozen yards, so am always trying to follow the starry Shelley and set amid the waves. I don t work much, and don want to work. If I'd got the smallest income I should be delighted to loaf for ever. But now I watch the servant, Felice, and my heart goes down plump. She is delighted to serve such grand and glorious people as we are. She is sixty, very wrinkled, bul full of gusto. She strides up to the little arbour they call the Belvedere—it is impossible to think it only means Bellevue -bearing the soup-tureen as if she were the Queen of Sheba raking spice to Solomon: barefoot, she comes, with her petticoats kilted up, and a gleam of triumph in her eye Think it couldn’t afford to pay her wages. I would take my las b ithe. Don't mind my lapsing into pounds shillings and pence, If 1 die rich, I shall order my tombstone to be a big go>d sovereign, with me for king—Fidei Defensor, etc., round the rim. caught the flea, by the way. One can be so keen on the chase. Figs are falling with ripeness in the garden. I am trying drying some—you dip them in boiling water. But I am in such a rage that the bright and shiny flies hover so thick about them when they are spread out, that they can’t really get enough sun to dry them: always clouded with shadow.

How did you like your walk in Spain? I try to think of you, but can’t quite see you. I suppose it would be rather fine. How did you like Lascelles Abercrombie? You will introduce me to him when there is an opportunity, will you not? Davies says he’ll come here in the spring. I can see his one eating, gnawing anxiety is to write. God help us, when a poet must hunt his muse like Tartarin de Tarascon the one remaining hare. We take ourselves too seriously, nous autres poetes.

Write me a letter, and tell me all that is happening in the world of rhyme, will you? If anything good comes, let me know and I'll try to get it. Remember me to Gibson, if you see him. Tell Davies he ought to come before spring, but we’ll be glad to see him then if he can't get before. I have to go to Tellaro for the letters—it is a little sea-robbers’ nest still inaccessible—and I feel so disgusted when, after hunting down the post-master— to-day he was helping the priest to tack up trimmings in the church—I get only a broad smile and a wave of the hand that implies a vacuum in space, and a "niente, signore, niente oggi, niente, niente.” It is nearly half an hour's walk too. So when the post-master is forced to follow at my heels up the cobbly track humbly to deliver me my letter, I am justified.

Many greetings from us to you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Post card. Postmark 17.10.tz.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To A. W. McLeod.

Dear Mac,—

1 can't remember whether I wrote to you or not. I think I did, but you don't write to me. I have got so mixed up in everything, I scarcely know where I am.

But we’ve got a beautiful place—a little pink cottage on the Mediterranean among vines and olives.- It isn’t far from Shelley’s San Terenzo—one can see his house across the bay at Lerici—but our position is a million times prettier. You have no idea how delightful it is. You must come in the spring. Perhaps we can keep this place.

The play is coming out soon. I shall send you a copy. I believe the English Review is going to publish me a series of four short stories. This is all my literary news.

I am glad you liked Sons and Lovers on re-reading. I feel, somehow, as if you had not been pleased with the thing—nor with me as the author of it. Don’t find fault with me.

Send us a little book, will you—something that costs nothing. This is a wilderness. I have to walk two chilometri up the sea’s edge to Teliaro for letters every day. There is no road— everything must come by boat from Lerici—see how we are lost to the world. But one can go out of the house and bathe—-I like it. Write me a letter.

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            23rd October, 1913.

Dear Mrs. Asquith,—

I have been wanting to write to you for such a long time. But we have been "on the way here. It is ages since we Bavaria. Frieda went to her people in ^aden Baden, which I didn’t want to do. So I walked across Switzerland—and am cured of that little country for ever, he only excitement in it is that you can throw a stone a frightfully long way down that is forbidden by law, As for mountains— stick my little finger over my head, I can see it shining against the sky and caU it Monte Rosa. No, I can’t do with mountains at close quarters-—they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude hem-selves*

Then I got to beastly Milano, with its imitation hedgehog of a cathedral, and its hateful town Italians, all socks and purple cravats and hats over the ear, did for me.

But we’ve got an adorable place here, a beautiful palazzino in large grounds, that descend in terraces to the sea—that's the Italian for it. I call it a little pink four-roomed cottage in a big vine garden, on the edge of a rocky bay. Frieda calls it a pink-washed sepulchre, because it is—or was—so dirty inside. Lord, what a time we’ve had, scrubbing it. It was no use calling on Elide, the girl. She had never seen a scrubbing brush used. So I tied my braces round my waist and went for it. Lord, to see the dark floor flushing crimson, the dawn of deep red bricks rise from out this night of filth, was enough to make one burst forth into hymns and psalms. “Ah, cries Elide, “l’aria e la pulizia-—air and cleanliness are the two most important things in this life.” She might as well have said nectar and ambrosia, for all she knew of ’em.

But the Italians don’t consider their houses, like we do, as being their extended persons. In England my house is my outer cuticle, as a snail has a shell. Here it is a hole into which I creep out of the rain and the dark. When they eat, the Capitano and his wife-—the place belongs to them, she inherited it, but they let it and live in town—they fling all their scraps and "bouts de vin” on the floor unceremoniously, and the cats and the flies do the w ar dance about them.

It’s a lovely position—among the vines, a little pink house just above a rocky bay of the Mediterranean. One goes down in a towel to bathe. And the water is warm and buoyant—it is jolly. I wish you could try it too.

We live awfully cheaply-—I know these things interest you more than eternal truths—house, 60 francs a month, maid 25, and vegetables in abundance, cheap as dirt. And in the morning one wakes and sees the pines all dark and mixed up with perfect rose of dawn, and all day long the olives shimmer in the sun, and fishing boats and strange sails like Corsican ships come out of nowhere on a pale blue sea, and then at evening all the sea is milky gold and scarlet with sundown. It is very pretty

Did you make your dash to Venice—and did it stink? Lord, but how Italy can stink. We have to fetch letters from Tellaro— twenty-five minutes upstairs and downstairs on the sea-edge, an inaccessible little sea-robbers’ place—and my dear heart, but it is dirty.

I hope you are pretty well—are you? But isn’t it a bit much, to go dashing to Venice and back in a week? Why don’t you go to Margate again? I think it makes an awful difference, when one is happy in a place. How is the jonquil with the golden smile. Is Mr. Asquith making heaps of money at the bar? I believe I’m going to get about £150 this winter, which will be rolling wealth for us here.

We heard from Eddie Marsh yesterday—such a heavy acorn fell on my head at this moment—now that is an omen. Are you any good at soothsaying? He is fearfully warm and generous, I think. I think I was wrong to feel injured because my verse wasn't well enough dished-up to please him.

The Mediterranean can get very cross. To-day the wind is the Maestrale—and the sea is showing its teeth in an unbecoming fashion.

I'm going to have a play published. 1 he¹ black hen has just come home. She went lost. Elide is waving her hands with joy. A very decent play. They won’t give me any copies or 1 d send you one. But you must read it.

My regards to Mr. Asquith and to the Jonquil and to you.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To A. W. McLeod.                   Sunday, 27.10.13.

Dear Mac,—

Your letter, with the cutting, came yesterday, and to-day the books. You are a decent chap. Frieda wanted to read Ann Veronica. I have read it, and found it rather trashy. I love Tristram Shandy. But the book on Art and Ritual pleases me most just now. I am just in the mood for it. It just fascinates me to see art coming out of religious yearning-one’s presentation of what one wants to feel again, deeply. But I haven t got far in. As for the divorce, it is curious how at first it upsets me and then goes off, and matters no more. I have found that one has such a living social self. I am sure every man feels first, that he is a servant—be it martyr or what—of society. And if he feels that he has trespassed against society, and it is adverse to him, he suffers. Then the individual self comes up and says, "You fool."

Now again, only the sea—it is rather dark to-day, with heavy waves—and the olives matter to me. London is all smoke a long way off. But yesterday I was awfully grateful to you for you sane and decent letter. You must continue to believe in me—I don’t mean in my talent only—because I depend on you a bit. One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one. I felt you had gone off from me a bit, because of Sons and Lovers. But one sheds one’s sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.

I did send some verse the other day to the English, but I think Harrison doesn't want to publish my poetry—he wants my prose more. He has got three soldier stories, which he is going to publish in a sort of series—perhaps four—so he says— which will make a book afterwards. I hope they'll go all right. I have been so much upset, what with moving and Frieda’s troubling about the children—you know she has three—and what not, that I haven’t been able to work. It is no joke to do as Frieda and I have done—and my very soul feels tired. But here it is going to pick up again and I am going to work like a brick.

It is very warm and beautiful here—and we bathe in a warm, bright sea, This afternoon we have been making a visit to the contadini laggiu. They have the only other house on the bay— and a lot of garden and vines going up in terraces. The kitchen is the top room in the house—and wherever you sit, if you look at the window, you see the sea moving. It is very queer. I have never been in such a house. They are awfully nice people. I want you to come here, if you can—either at Christmas or Easter. It is so beautiful. Perhaps we shall keep the cottage too for next winter. Do try and come.

I should like an Ernest Dowson, if you would lend me him. I will send him back carefully. I only know one or two things of his and he interests me.

You didn’t tell me very much news. Write to me again and let me know about folk.

Frieda is going to write to you.

Love,

D. H. Lawrence.

How are you and what are you doing and what do you think of things nowadays?

If your mother happens to have a recipe for marrow jam— Frieda wants to make some with pumpkins—send it when you write, will you?—D.H.L.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Edward Marsh.                       2S Oct., 1913.

Dear Marsh,—

We were awiully pleased with your letter—it was so tull ot things. Your trip in Spain sounds finer even than Italy. But Jim Barnes must be a rum chap, for I can't see how politics has got much to do with poetry:-—no, you say letters. Letters might mean Cicero and Arthur Balfour, so I suppose they do more or less flirt with politics. But I love the idea of a reformer. Tell me next time his chief dream.

The Abercrombies sound nice. But 1 don t like the idea c L.A.’s never finishing anything. But if they are coming to Italy in November, I think either they might come this way, or we might go to Florence for a day or two. I must write to Gibson. No, I did not see the Solway Firth in the English.

Poor Davies—he makes me so furious, and so sorry. He’s really like a linnet that’s got just a wee little sweet song, but it only sings when it’s wild. And he’s made himse a tame 11 d’poor little devil. He makes me furious. I shall be a 1 ig now the winter is coming,’ he writes, now I can sit by the f re and work.” As if he could sing when he's been straining his heart to make a sound of music, for months. It isn t as if h were a passionate writer, writing his agon. ’ Oh, my ad, he s like teaching a bull-finch to talk. I think one ought to be downright cruel to him, and drive him back: say to him, Davies, your work is getting like Birmingham tin-ware; Davies, you drop your h's, and everybody is tempering the wind to you, because you are a shorn lamb; Davies, your accent is intolerable in a carpeted room; Davies, you hang on like the mud on a lady's silk petticoat. Then he might leave his Sevenoaks room, where he is rigged up as a rural poet, proud of the gilt mirror and his romantic past: and he might grow his wings again, and chirrup a little sadder song.

And now I've got to quarrel with you about the Ralph Hodgson poem: because I think it is banal in utterance. The feeling is there, right enough—but not in itself, only represented. It's like M asked for bread, and he gave me a penny." Only here and there is the least touch of personality in the poem: it is the currency of poetry, not poetry itself. Every single line of it is poetic currency—and a good deal of emotion handling it about. But it isn't really poetry. I hope to God you won’t hate me and think me carping, for this. But look:

"the ruby’s and the rainbow’s song the nightingale's—all three"

There’s the emotion in the rhythm, but it’s loose emotion, inarticulate, common—the words are mere currency. It is exactly like a man who feels very strongly for a beggar, and gives him a sovereign. The feeling is at either end, for the moment, but the sovereign is a dead bit of metal. And this poem is the sovereign. "Oh, I do want to give you this emotion,” cries Hodgson, "I do. ’ And so he takes out his poetic purse, and gives you a handful of cash, and feels very strongly, even a bit sentimentally over it.

--the sky was lit The sky was stars all over it, I stood, I knew not why”

No one should say, "I knew not why” any more. It is as meaningless as "yours truly” at the end of a letter.

You can come this way to Rome. There is one train—about 7.0 in the morning from Milan, comes Milan, Parma, Sarzana, Pisa, Rome—a direttissimo. Also Spezia is on the main line, Genoa to Rome. But you could easily come via Sarzana— which is the station for Lerici. Do bring us Jim Barnes. We could put you up for a night or two. My wife is afraid because everything is so rough—but you wouldn’t mind.

Did you see about the divorce, and that Frieda and I are really scapegoats still? It seems queer-—we have been together nearly two years. We feel a bit upset, for fear we sort of gained a false entry in Margate—with you and Mr. Asquith. If you feel displeased about it, don't bother to answer the letters.

I send you some bits of poetry. Nobody will publish it. It is good, if it isn’t perfect. It is not like so much poetry, good imitation only. I asked the typewriter to send you one or two bits he had typed for the English Review.

I am doing a novel for next spring. I am having a play published very shortly, and, I think, a series of three or four short stories in the English Review— don’t know when. But they are good. You must, read them.

Frieda wrote you a letter—if I can find it again. She wrote it before we knew the divorce was heard.

A rivederla,

D. H. Lawfence.

I’ve copied you out quite a lot of poems, i ell me if you lik them. If you know anybody who is dying to publish such wonderful work, you may as a great favour " ' him this. Don’t put my Ballad of a "Wayward Woman’ lightly aside. It is woman trying the various ideals—Aphrodite, Apostle John, etc.

Lerici, per Fiascherinot Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Edward Marsh.         Tuesday (postmark—19.11.13)

Dear Marsh,—                             . . T

You are wrong. It makes me open my eyes. I think 1 reaa my poetry more by length than by stress—as a matter of

movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth.

Just a few of the roses we gathered by the Isar

Are fallen, and their blood-ied petals on the cloth,

Float like boats on a river, waiting

For a fairy wind to wake them from their sloth.

I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre.—So I read

I wonder if that is quite intelligible. I am sure I am right. There is a double method of scanning verse—if you'll notice it.

I have | forgot much), Cynara gone with the wind Flung roses', roses j riotously with the \ throng,) Dancing • to put thy pale|, lost hikes out | of mind; But I was des|olate|, and sick i of an old passion,

Yea, all the time because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee Cynara, in my fashion.

Would you scan like that? I hate an on-foot method of reading. I should go:

It all depends on the pause—the natural pause, the natural

154

lingering of the voice according to the feeling—it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious form.

I have forgot much, Cynara, gone with the wind.

It is the lapse of the feeling, something as indefinite as expression in the voice carrying emotion. It doesn’t depend on the ear, particularly, but on the sensitive soul. And the ear gets a habit, and becomes master, when the ebbing and lifting emotion should be master, and the ear the transmitter. If your ear has got stiff and a bit mechanical, don’t blame my poetry. That’s why you like Golden Journey to Samarcand—-it fits your ' habituated ear, and your feeling crouches subservient and a bit pathetic. "It satisfies my ear,” you say. Well, I don’t write for your ear. This is the constant war, I reckon, between new expression and the habituated, mechanical transmitters and receivers of the human constitution.

I can’t tell you what pattern I see in any poetry, save one complete thing. But surely you don’t class poetry among the decorative or conventional arts. I always wonder if the Greeks and Romans really did scan, or if scansion wasn’t a thing invented afterwards by the schoolmaster. Yet I seem to find about the same number of long lingering notes in each line. I know nothing about it. I only know you aren’t right.

You are wrong, I think, about the two rhymes—why need you notice they are rhymes? You are a bit of a policeman in poetry. I never put them in because they are rhymes.

"Drearisome,” I am guilty of—peccavi.

"Sloth,” I feel a bit guilty about—not quite so guilty as you would have me. I’m not sure about Purity ’ I always felt suspicious of it, and yet I am inclined to think it is good.

"The land of her glad surmise” is a penny, not a sovereign. I always knew it was shocking bad. must thins about that ballad.                                                    ,         .

I rather suspect you of being a young Philistine with the poetry of youth on you, and the——

But I am being a David that throws stones.

Don’t mind me. I find it frightfully easy to tneorise and say all the things I don’t mean, and frightfully difficult to find out, even for myself, what I do mean.

I only know that the verse you quote against me is right, and you are wrong. And I am a poor, maligned, misunderstood, patronised and misread poet, and soon I shall burst into tears.

But thanks be to God above, my poetry doesn’t stick to me. My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry—all literature in fact—to the droppings of the goats among the rocks—mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

1 think I came a real cropper in my belief in metre, over Shelley. I tried all roads to scan him, but could never read him as he could be scanned. And I thought what bit of Latin scansion I did was a horrible fake: I never believed for an instant in the Sapphic form—and Horace is already a bit of a mellow varsity man who never quite forgot Oxford.

I'm frightfully furious to-day. I rose at six and caught the steamer for Spezia—very beautiful the dawn on the water and rocks that are afire and yet don’t burn. But in Spezia the bank hadn’t done what I wanted, and the picture framer hadn’t done anything, and the pianoforte man hadn’t got ready and I cursed the Italians right and left. I hate them and want to stamp on them.

Don’t talk to me any more about poetry for months—unless it is other men’s work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I’m fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.

Non sum qualis eram bonx sub regno Cynarx. I read that when I lift my eyes, and immediately feel inclined to weep. Why have we lost the luxury of tears? It is well done to call a good wine Lachrimr Christi.

Frieda is grilling a nice little steak over a wood fire. I think it’s rough, when I've just eaten a lot of carrots in butter, and can't eat no more: then she discovers that nice little steak.

We are exceedingly anxious for you to come at Christmas. I was thinking to-day how I would take you (I've got a fearful desire to play "mine host”) on the steamer and over our gallant hills—you and Jim Barnes. Tell us when you’ll come—come a bit earlier than the 21st if you can—and stay—it sounds very magnificent—two nights, will you? This terrific burst of hospitality on our part will surprise you. But you might be happy for two days, and dying of boredom the third. It's like a beautiful lady I know—very slightly. “Ah—I never stay with a man more than a fortnight, neither my clothes nor my conversation will hold out any longer.”

It is very beautiful, and the robins sing ail day among the red leaves of the vine, etc., etc., etc.

This coruscating notepaper was given to my wife by her mother; you must hold us guiltless.

This is a long letter. I am getting more amiable.

Say how you’ll come here, and when—whether to Sarzana or to Spezia. Sarzana is quicker—you sit in a broken-down omnibus for an hour. Spezia has a beautiful ride in a dirty steamer for 40 minutes across the bay.

Many thanks for giving the poem to the New Statesman. It's a poem that would stand printing in a weekly paper.

Many warm regards from us.

D. H. Lawrence.

Your letter was jolly good to me really— always thank God when a man will say straight out to me what he has to say. But it’s rare when one will. I call it affectionately not anything else.—D.H.L.

We’ve got in 25 litres of wine—I wonder what you’ll think of it when you come. I am fearfully proud of it I stand an 1 gloz over the rush-wrapped fat bottles.—D.H.L.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To J. M. Murry.                        Thursday (1913).

Dear Murry,—

I’m going to answer your letter immediately, and ’■rankly.

When you say you won’t take Katherine’s money, it means you don’t trust her love for you. When you say she needs lit e luxuries, and you couldn’t bear to deprive her of them, it means you don’t respect either yourself or her sufficiently to do it.

It looks to me as if you two, far from growing nearer, are snapping the bonds that hold you together, one after another. I suppose you must both of you consult your own hearts, honestly. She must see if she really wants you, wants to keep you and to have no other man all her life. It means forfeiting something. But the only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater. Only one must be thoroughly honest about it.

She must say, ‘'Could I live in a little place in Italy, with Jack, and be lonely, have rather a bare life, but be happy?’ If she could, then take her money. If she doesn’t want to, don’t try. But don’t beat about the bush. In the way you go on, you are inevitably coming apart. She is perhaps beginning to be unsatisfied with you. And you can’t make her more satisfied by being unselfish. You must say, "How can I make myself most healthy, strong, and satisfactory to myself and to her?” If by being lazy for six months, then be lazy, and take her money. It doesn’t matter if she misses her luxuries: she won’t die of it. What luxuries do you mean?

If she doesn't want to stake her whole life and being on you, then go to your University abroad for a while, alone. I warn you, it’ll be hellish barren.

Or else you can gradually come apart in London, and then flounder till you get your feet again, severally, but be clear about it. It lies between you and Katherine, nowhere else.

Of course you can’t dream of living long without work. Couldn't you get the Westminster to give you two columns a week, abroad? You must try. You must stick to criticism. You ought also to plan a book, either on some literary point, or some man. I should like to write a book on English heroines. You ought to do something of that sort, but not so cheap. Don’t try a novel—try essays—like Walter Pater or somebody of that style. But you can do something good in that line; something concerning literature rather than life. And you must rest, and you and Katherine must heal, and come together, before you do any serious work of any sort. It’s the split in the love that drains you. You see, while she doesn’t really love you, and is not satisfied, you show to frightful disadvantage. But it would be a pity not to let your mind flower—it might, under decent circumstances, produce beautiful delicate things, in perception and appreciation. And she has a right to provide the conditions. But not if you don't trust yourself nor her. nor anybody, but go on slopping, and pandering to her smaller side. If you work yourself sterile to get her chocolates, she will most justly detest you—-she is perfectly right. She doesn't want you to sacrifice yourself to her, you fool. Be more natural, and positive, and stick to your own guts. You spread them on a tray for her to throw to the cats.

If you want things to come right—if you are ill and exhausted, then take her money to the last penny, and let her do her own housework. Then she'll know you love her. You can’t blame her if she's not satisfied with you. If I haven’t had enough dinner, you can’t blame me. But, you fool, you squander yourself, not for her, but to provide her with petty luxuries she doesn’t really want. You insult her. A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep cn a board.

It strikes me you’ve got off your lines, somewhere you've not been man enough: you’ve felt it rested with your honour m give her a place to be proud of. It rested with your honour to give her a man to be satisfied with—and satisfaction is never accomplished even physically unless the man is strongly and surely himself, and doesn’t depend on anything but his own being to make a woman love him. ou ve tried to satisfy Katherine with what you could earn for her, give her: and she will only be satisfied with what you are.

And you don’t know what you are. You’ve never come to it. You’ve always been dodging round, getting Rhythms and flats and doing criticism for money. You are a fool to wo so hard for Katherine—she hates you for it—and quite right. You want to be strong in the possession of your own soul. Perhaps you will only come to that when this affair of you and her has gone crash. I should be sorry to think that—I don [ believe . You must save yourself, and your self-respect, by making it complete between Katherine and you—if you devour her money till she walks in rags, if you are both outcast. Make her cert i pander to her—stick to yourself-do what you want to do-don’t consider her-she hates and loathes being considered. You insult her in saying you wouldn’t take her money.

The University idea is a bad one. It would further disintegrate you.

If you are disintegrated, then get integrated again. Don't be a coward. If you are disintegrated your first duty is to yourself, and you may use Katherine—her money and everything—to get right again. You're not well, man. Then have the courage to get well. If you are strong again, and a bit complete, she'll be satisfied with you. She’ll love you hard enough. But don't you see, at this rate, you distrain on her day by day and month by month. I've done it myself.

Take your rest—do nothing if you like for a while—though I’d do a bit. Get better, first and foremost—use anybody's money, to do so. Get better—and do things you like. Get yourself into condition. It drains and wearies Katherine to have you like this. What a fool you are, what a fool. Don't bother about her—what she wants or feels. Say, "I am a man at the end of the tether, therefore I become a man blind to everything but my own need.” But keep a heart for the long run.

Look. We pay 60 lire a month for this house: 25 lire for the servant; and food is very cheap. You could live on 185 lire a month in plenty—and be greeted as “Signoria” when you went out together—it is the same as “Guten Tag, Herrschaften;” that would be luxury enough for Katherine.

Get up, lad, and be a man for yourself. It’s the man who dares to take, who is independent, not he who gives.

I think Oxford did you harm.

It is beautiful, wonderful, here.

A ten-pound note is 253 lire. We could get you, I believe, a jolly nice apartment in a big garden, in a house alone, for 80 lire a month. Don't waste yourself—don’t be silly and floppy. You know what you could do—you could write—then prepare yourself: and first make Katherine at rest in her love for you. Say,⁴ I his I will certainly do”—it would be a relief for her to hear you. Don't be a child—don’t keep that rather childish charm. Throw everything away, and say, “Now I act for my own good, at last.”

We are getting gradually nearer again, Frieda and I. It is very beautiful here.

We are awfully sorry Katherine is so seedy. She ought to write to us. Our love to her and you.

D. H. Lawrence.

If you've got an odd book or so you don’t want to read, would you send it us? There is nothing for Frieda to read—and we like everything and anything.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Tuesday, Nov. —, 191Z.

Dear Mrs. Asquith,—

Because 1 feel frightfully disagreeable, and not fit to consecrate myself to novels or to short stories, I’ll write a letter. I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze. Don’t mind, will you?

You say we re happy—per Bacchino! If you but knew the thunderstorms of tragedy that have played over my wretched head, as if I was set up on God’s earth for a lightning conductor, you’d say," l hank God I m not as that poor man. Xf you knew the slough of misery we’ve struggled and suffocated through, you’d stroke your counterpane with a purring motion, like an old maid having muffins for tea in the lamplight and reading Stanley in Africa. If ever you hear of me in a mad-house, and Frieda buried under a nameless sod, you’ll say, "Foor things, no wonder, with all they’ve gone through. You talk about tears drowning the wind—ray God. Wc are the most unfortunate, agonised, fate-harassed mortals since Orestes and that gang. Don’t you forget it. Put away all illusions concerning us, and see the truth.

When I had an English feel come over me, I took it frightfully badly, that we had appeared before you as if we were p fee ly respectable couple. I thought of the contamination—etc., etc.— and I really was upset. I’m glad you didn t mind y-.    " "

with justice have taken it amiss—and then, Lord, what a state I should have been in when the English feel came over me again. Heaven be blessed, England is only a spot of grease on the soup just now.

I’m sorry you’ve got a cold. But what do you expect, after purpling in Venice—Frieda’s been in bed for four days also— like Robinson Crusoe: "First day I vomited----I wandered

under the falling vines muttering: "What rhubarb, senna and what purgative drug---It was sheer misery. We have had

a time, between us: oh dear o me! She is a bit better to-day.

I've been to Spezia. Frieda will hire a piano, not a hurdy-gurdy. Well, it has to come first on the workmen's steamer to Lerici, then be got down into a rowing boat, and rowed along the coast, past jutting rocks where the sea goes up and down to bring your heart in your mouth, finally landed into the shingle of this little bay, and somehow got up the steeps to the house. Well, the man found out what a journey it was, and he clings to his piano as if it were his only child, nor could I snatch it from him to-day. So we fell out—and in the midst of it a man in sailor's uniform with "White Star" on his breast came and said he was English and did we want to buy contraband English cloth. And he wasn't English—nor French, nor German, nor Italian—but spoke twenty words of each. Now I might have wrested this pianoforte out of the fervent arms of Rugi Gulielmo, but for the interruption of the sailor with a sack. As it was, I returned, boat and all, empty save of curses.

"Ecco—un pianoforte—it’s not like a piece of furniture—if it was a piece of furniture—he! va bene—but—a pianoforte—-he!----"

I loathe and detest the Italians. They never argue, they just get hold of a parrot phrase, shove up their shoulders and put their heads on one side, and flap their hands. And what is an honest man to do with ’em? (Forget my past when I say "Honest man.’’) Now I shall have to go to-morrow, and pay a regiment of facchini to transport that cursed pianoforte.

"Take it up tenderly,

Lift it with care,

.           Fashioned so slenderly,

Young and so fair."

And it’s a tin-pot thing not fit for a cat to walk up and down. And if it does go to the bottom of the sea—well, God bless it and peace be with it, a gay blonde head.

"Il pleut doucement sur la viile

Cotnme d pleut dans mon cceur."

As a matter of fact, it's a perfectly glittery and starry nmht, with a glow-worm outside the door, and on the sea a lighthouse beating time to the stars.

Well, adieu, fair lady, don't be cross and sad. Think that we have simply worn holes in our hankeys, with weeping.

Why should the cat sleep all night on my knee, and give me fleas to bear? Why?

There's a peasant wedding down below, next Saturday. The bride in white silk and orange blossom must clamber fearful roads, three hours there and back, to go to the Syndaco of 1’Ameglia, to be married. Mass at 7.30 at Tellaro—piccolo, colazione at the bride’s house at 8.30—un boccone—marriage at 10.0 at 1’Ameglia—pranzo down here at mid-day. We are invited. But it’s rather sad, he doesn’t want her very badly. One gets married—si—come si fa! They say it so often—ma— come si fa!

Il pleut doucement dans la viile,

I think I am missing a meal.

A rivederla, signoria,

D. H. Lawrence.

They call us "Zignoria." How’s that for grandeur! Shades of my poor father!

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To A. W- McLeod.

2 Dec,, 1913.

Dear Mac,—

We were awfully glad to have the Dowson, but 1 was disappointed. I only knew the "Cynara" poem, and the verse, which ran in my mind:

"We are not long for music and laughter

Love and desire and hate.

I think we have no portion in them, after

We pass the gate."

That always haunted me. But I had remembered it wrong—I always remember poetry wrong. 1 thought he was a simple, rather restrained poet—and I find him translating Verlaine very badly. It’s a shame. And yet he is a poet—I rather love him. The playlet is pifile—but some of the songs—I hate the Beardsley illustrations.—I shall send you the book back soon— with many, many thanks.

We have been reading James Stephens—another disappointment.

Did you see my poem in the New Statesman, a fortnight or so back? Some people loved it—as for me—I got a guinea for it.

The other day, suddenly descended upon us Lascelles Abercrombie and W. W. Gibson and Trevelyan and a man called Waterfield. We were at a peasant wedding at a house on the bay, dressed in our best clothes in honour of the bride, and having an awfully good time. Gibson is a really lovable fellow— so is Trevelyan—and Abercrombie one of the sharpest men I have ever met. But it was so queer, to leave the feast and descend into the thin atmosphere of a little group of cultured Englishmen. At the upper room where the feast was spread were twenty-five people. There were nine fowls killed for the feast—and the next course was octopuses—(quite big ones, with arms half a yard long-—I saw Ezzechieli bring them in from the sea, with their stony eyes open—and they nearly made me sick). The wine was running very red—then suddenly we must descend to these five English poets. It was like suddenly going into very rare air. One staggered and I quite lost my bearings. Yet they are folk I am awfully fond of.

W. H. Davies is coming in the spring—oh, lots of folk. How are you going on? You don’t tell us much news about yourself.

I am writing my novel slowly—it will be a beautiful novel— when it’s done. But here, it is too beautiful, one can’t work. I was out rowing on the sea all afternoon—and the sea did heave— the sky is still coming up and down. There is a new moon among a miracle of a sunset, a sea all gold and milk white, with a train of fire—ah, you should come here.

Some time, send me just a newspaper, will you? Don’t send books, they are so costly. You have no idea how much I got out of that Ritual and Art book—it is a good idea—but a school marmy woman who writes it.

It is dark. Elide must go to Tellaro—io devo fi.ni.re.

A rivederla,

D. H. Lawrence..

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Edward Marsh.                       Dec. 17, 1917.

Dear Eddie,—

We were awfully sorry to think of Jim Barnes’s appendix, as you may imagine. By this time he should be getting quite well again—is he? You seem to take appendicitis lightly—which of course scares me. I think one ought to say ⁴ he’s sure to die,' then perhaps he’ll get better quick. We don’t mind waiting i you will really come. But I hope he is well again, or on the way there now.

I think of us driving in a carriage, glorious and resplendent, over the Magra from Sarzana to La Serra. But we must walk from Serra down here—about a mile—down paths as slippery and dangerous and beautiful as the road to hell. So don t bring your bigger luggage, because this place is near! inaccessible.

We were to have other visitors, but they won’t come because of their little baby, which they daren’t leave with the Irish nurse in London. So we are mourning our neglected state. I do hope that appendix will consent to abdicate peacefully, ry to stay two nights—wring them out of somebody else, ther-wise the time would be so short.

Did the poets tell you how they came and found me in patent leather boots and black suit, playing Signore at the wedding It 1vas a shock. But we went back to the feast and had high jinks.                                                                    ,

I loved Gibson still more than Abercrombie—perhaps because I know him better. But I think Gibson is one of the clearest and most lovable personalities that I know. Abercrombie is sharp—he is much more intellectual than I had imagined: keener, more sharp-minded. I shall enjoy talking 165

to him. We both loved Mrs. Abercrombie: she’s not a bit like a Madonna, neither the Raphael nor Botticelli sort, so you're wrong there, sir. But she’s most awfully jolly, and a fine true-metal sort that I love. They invited us to go and stay with them, both the Abercrombies and Gibson, with such warm generosity: and I shall kick my heels with joy to go.

About metres, I shall have to pray for grace from God. But (scissors!) I think Shelley a million thousand times more beautiful than Milton.

I send you a poem which you ought to like. If you do, give it to somebody to publish, when you’ve got an easy, leisurely occasion.

The poets let us in for society. They brought Waterfield from Aulla, he brought Mrs. Huntingdon, she brought Mrs. Pearse, and the plot thickens. We were the week-end at Aulla with Waterfield, who has quite a wonderful castle, in a sort of arena, like the victim, with the Apennines all round. It is a wonderful place, but it gives me the creeps down my back, just as if one sat in a chair down in the middle of the amphitheatre at Verona, and the great banks of stone took no notice, but gathered round.

Only when we were coming away, at the station, there were four men emigrating to Buenos Ayres, and two young wives looking bewildered, then tears, and Frieda howling on my left hand, and the emigrants on my right, till, I can tell you, I felt in the middle of a cyclone. It affects me yet.

We are just going to Mrs. Pearse’s for tea. Last time they came here, we rowed them home. But coming back, Frieda and I fell out so frightfully-—we were rowing one oar each— that the boat revolved on its axis, and seriously thought of diving under water out of our way. So to-day Madam must walk, whether she will or no.

Barrie—I remembered to put Dear Sir James Barrie, when I answered—I nearly put Dear Sir James Barrie, Bart.— wrote me a nice little note, and was generous enough to say he was going to be proud of me. He hasn't seen me—the bel pezzo that I am.

Perhaps I shan’t write to you any more before Christmas. All Greetings and Good Wishes! How did you look, futuristically? Lord, you're a bit of a jig-saw puzzle to start with, mixing poets and pictures, the Admiralty and what-not, like somebody shuffling cards.

A rivederci—auf wiedersehen—au revoir—jamque vale!

D. H. Lawrence.

Poem enclosed with Letter to Mr. Edward Marsh dated

17 Dec., igiz.

To Eddie Marsh, with much affection, this poem for a Christmas card, which, albeit a trifle lugubrious, pray God may go daintily to his ear.

Grief.

The darkness steals the forms of all the queens, But oh, the palms of his two black hands are red!

It is death I fear so much, it is not the dead, Not this grey book, but the torn and bloody scenes.

The lamps are white like snowdrops in the grass, The town is like a churchyard, all so still

And dark now night is here—nor will

Another torn red sunset come to pass.

And so I sit and turn the book of grey,

Feeling the darkness like a blind man reading,

All fearful lest I find some new word bleeding— Nay, take my painted missal book away.

David Herbert,

Son of Arthur John Lawrence, wrote this poem:

December 16, 1913.

Requiescat in pace.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To W. E. Hopkin.                         18 Dec., 191Z.

Dear Will,—

I was glad to get that letter from you, full of good old crusty Eastwood gossip. Always write to me like that.

And don't wonder at what I write now, for Felice is rattling away like a hail-storm in Italian, just near my left ear, and Frieda, with her usual softness of heart (and head now and then), is letting herself in for things that will need the courage of St, George to extricate her from.

We have got a beautiful place here (and don’t lose the address). It is a little pink cottage of four rooms, under great hills of olive woods, just over the sea. We have a great vine garden, all shut in, and lemons on the wall, and to-day, with a wind from the Apennines, the big, heavy oranges swing gold in their dark green leaves. We’ve only one orange tree, but it is a beauty.

There is no road here, that carts may pass—not even a mule road. Everything must go by rowing boat on the sea, that is not carried on the heads of the peasants. They carry, women and all, masses of stuff on their heads. It is supposed to give them a beautiful carriage, but that is a lie. It presses in the loins in a most curious fashion.

At this time of the year all the women are out in the olive woods—you have no idea how beautiful olives are, so grey, so delicately sad, reminding one constantly of the New Testament. I am always expecting when I go to Tellaro for the letters, to meet Jesus gossiping with his disciples as he goes along above the sea, under the grey, light trees. Now the hills are full of voices, the peasant women and children all day long and day after day, in the faint shadow of olives, picking the fallen fruit off the ground, pannier after pannier full. Our village is Tellaro. It grows sheer out of the rocks of the sea, a sea-robber’s nest of 200 souls. The church is over the water. I here is a tale that once in the night the church bell rang, and rang again. The people got up in terror—the bell rang mysteriously. Then it was found that the bell rope had fallen 168 over the edge of the cliff in among the rocks, and an octopus had got hold of the end, and was drawing it* It is quite possible. The men go fishing for the octopus with a white bait and a long spear. They get quite big ones, six or seven pounds in weight sometimes—and you never saw anything so fiendishly ugly. But they are good to eat. We were at a peasant wedding the other day, and a great feast—octopus was one of the dishes: but I could not fancy it: I can eat snails all right, but octopus—no. We can have the boat belonging to the peasants on the bay when we like, and row out on the sea. The Mediterranean is quite wonderful—and when the sun sets beyond the islands of Porto Venere, and all the sea is like heaving white milk with a street of fire across it, and amethyst islands away back, it is too beautiful.

I am very fond of the Italians. We have a little oddity of a maid called Elide—25 years old. Her old mother Felice is quite a figure. They are very funny and ceremonious. When Elide has put the soup on the table, she says “a rivederci, eh? before she can leave us. There is only one other house on this bay—only one other house within nearly a mile-—and that is the peasants’ down on the beach. They are cousins of Elide. Sometimes they come and play and sing with us at evening— bringing the guitar. It is jolly. Luigi is very beautiful-—and Gentile is a wild joy. How happy you would be with these people—and Mrs. Hopkin with the country. The wind is now cold—there is snow on the mountains over Carrara—but still at night a glow-worm shines near the door, and sometimes a butterfly, a big black and red one, wanders to the remaining flowers—wild pinks and campanulas. I love living by the sea one gets so used to its noise, one hears it no more. And the ships that pass, with many sails, to Sardinia and Sicily, and through the gates of Porto Venere to Genova, are very beautiful. Spezia is Italy's great naval arsenal. Right in the harbour lie her warships: and she wastes such a lot of powder with their rattling cannon. T he men of the villages go in to Spezia to work. The workmen run the only steamers across the bay. They are interesting.

And now, after all this, you must come you ano Mrs. Hopkin at least—and Enid if she can. You can get here cheap, 169

some way or other—perhaps by sea to Genoa or to Leghorn— or by trips. We shall be here, I think, till June. So make up your minds, and scrape together. I want you. We both want you to come—and it is the most beautiful place I know.

I am laughing at your swatting with Willie Dunn. We send heaps of good wishes for Christmas. Write to me oftener. And make up your minds to come. Mrs. Hopkin promised us last spring,

Love from Frieda and me to you three.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawpence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia,

Italy.

To Edward Garnett.                       21 Dec., 1913.

Dear Garnett,—

I had a letter from the secretary of the Stage Society to-day, saying that Arnold Bennett had recommended the committee to consider any work of mine I might bring out, and asking me if I cared to submit the MS. But the MS. is in such a state they could not read it—and I have no duplicate proofs. I said I would send them a copy of the play as soon as I had one. Kennerley said he would mail me them about Jan. 1st.

The novel goes slowly forward. I wonder what you’ll think of it. In a few days’ time I shall send you the first half of the MS.

Christmas is nearly here. I feel late, and frightfully busy. We have had to pay visits lately. This last week-end we were three days at Aulla—12 miles inland, staying with an English artist who has an Italian fortress there. It is a wonderful place: a squat, square castle on a bluff of rock, with all the jagged Apennines prowling round, two rivers creeping out of the fastness to meet at the foot of the fortress, where is a tiny town, then flowing on, red-blazing in the sunset, into the black hills towards the sea. And when one is on the roof, and the dawn comes driving rosy across the mountain tops, it is wonderful. Day seems to stay a little while pale in the valley, then comes the sunset all gorgeous flaming, clashing back to red to where the dawn came from, and the eastern peaks are alive and rosy above the gathering dusk of the valley. You must come here— it is a most wonderful place.

You will bring out the play in February?—that is the Bookman month. Harrison ought to be ready with the first story by then.

Our best wishes for your Christmas—I hope nice things will happen to you. I wish I were at the Cearne for a day or two with you, in spite of our wonderful emerald sea and gorgeous sunsets behind the islands.

Love,

D. H. Lawrence.

Send me the Primrose Path here, some day when it is convenient, please.-—D. H. L.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

The shortest day.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.           21st December, 191Z.

Dear Mrs. Asquith,—

You never answered my highly diverting and beautiful letter, only shed a tear over Frieda—which I call skimpy. So I refuse to write you a letter. I'd send you a visiting card if I'd got one, with "All Seasonable Greetings” written on it.

How Is the winter treating you? If badly, you d better come here and set up in a beautiful little tower over the Pine Wood and the Sea—for 140 francs a month.

We went to a castle the last week-end—-ancient Italian Fortress, walls three yards thick. There it sits keeping ax e ye on the two rivers that come crawling insidiously out of the foggy Apennines, as if expecting them to pounce. But they don’t—they only swallow each other and go with trailing skirts haughtily through the mountain doors to the sea. But the castle watches, whether or not. And it gives one the fidgets. And the artist gentleman painted in the manner > g definite gentleman artists—their ghosts haunted his canvases like the ghosts of old dead soldiers his castle hall. And the servants crouched in a corner of the great dark kitchen, making polenta cakes.

A merry Christmas—though you don’t deserve it, for sending Frieda only a little bottle of tears and me not even a sugared almond. Also a merry Christmas to Don John, and to Mr. Asquith.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Goljo della Spezia, Italy.

To Edward Garnett.                      30 Dec., 1913.

Dear Garnett.—

In a few days’ time I shall send you the first half of The Sisters—which I should rather call The Wedding Ring—to Duckworth’s. It is very different from Sons and Lovers: written in another language almost. I shall be sorry if you don’t like it, but am prepared. I shan’t write in the same manner as Sons and Lovers again, I think—in that hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation. You must see what you think of the new style.

I wish you would send to Ezra Pound—10, Church Walk, Kensington, W.—three or four copies of my poems, and send me the bill for them. I owe him something like a sovereign, which the Smart Set sent him as commission, for getting them my two stories. This commission he sent on to me "as being averse from returning anything to the maw of an editor, and unable to take commission on my work!"—I didn't want Pound’s pound of commission. So now he says he would like three or four copies of the poems, to get them into the hands of the members of the Pohgnac prize committee, or some such reason. The Hueffer-Pound faction seems inclined to lead me round a little as one of their show-dogs. They seem to have a certain ear in their possession. If they are inclined to speak my name into the ear, I don’t care.

We had rather a nice Christmas. The peasants—16—came in on Christmas Eve, and we sang the “Pastorella” at midnight. On Christmas Day we went to English service in the------s

private chapel—lambs we looked, I can tell you—and lunched with the Huntingdons—very nice folk. Then the next day we lunched at the Pearses—I do like Mrs. Pearse—who have a beautiful house where the Empress Frederick of Germany spent a winter with them—and Count Seckendorf. The parson is out here for six months—hired by the wealthy and impossible —-—, who flings gold at the Italians around and bruises their faces. The Rev.------is a very decent fellow—

I like him—and he has taken a great fancy to us. When all our dark history comes out, I shall laugh.

The Pearses and Huntingdons read Sons and Lovers with great admiration. They have been 40 years in Italy, and are not shocked any more.

1 felt injured because you never wished me a Merry Christmas.

Best Wishes for the New Year to you and Mrs. Garnett and David.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Send me here the Primrose Path—at your leisure.—D. H. L.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To A. W. McLeod, -   -                 10 Jan» ^4-

Dear Mac,—

We owe you heaven knows how many thanks for the books at Christmas and for the newspapers. I love the Morning Post, it is so fat. The Italian newspapers are ha’penny thin miserable things—all alike, from the Corriere della Sera and the Secolo downwards. It is lovely suddenly to flounder among English news and book reviews and articles. I hope it isn an a nuisance—if not, do keep it up and send us the Morning Post as you have been doing.—We had fearful discussions on the Gilbert Murray. He is very interesting: just a bit conceited, but interesting right through. Rhesus I didn’t think up to much.—And it is quker how uninteresting Davies is in Italy. His Nature Poems, which I loved in England, seem so thin, one can hardly feel them at all.

I wonder if you liked that picture of the old seigneurie. I am afraid not much. I rather liked it—out here. But in England perhaps it set your teeth on edge. All the houses here are pink like that.

You will find me next month—-I expect—in the Bookman; also some poetry in the English Review, which I hope you will like. What do you think of the latest Masefield?

I am awaiting the coming of my play from America: it is being published first out there. It is good, I think. The Sec. of the Stage Society wrote me and said Arnold Bennett had told them, if I ever published drama, they must get hold of it. I shall send them a copy.

I have nearly finished my novel. It is a weird production. It is quite different from Sons and Lovers, much quieter. I shall not write quite so violently as Sons and Lovers any more. I wonder what you’ll say to my new work.

We are so busy here, with visitors. There are some English people on the hills—and an English chaplain—so that we are always out to tea, or having visitors. Which is very odd. I am expecting Edward Marsh—the Georgian Poetry man—and Jim Barnes on Monday—they are calling on their way home from Rome. I wonder if Marsh is projecting another Georgian Poetry issue—I must ask him. Have you ordered the Abercrombie—Gibson—Brooke—Drinkwater: New Numbers? Gibson says he’ll send it me soon. I wonder why we can’t establish a real poetry number among all of us—we should do well enough if we but hung together.

Won’t you come out here and stay with us a while this spring? Miss M. promises to come for Easter. Whether she will fulfil is another matter. Surely you might manage for Whitsuntide. Why don’t you want to?

Yesterday I was out with the peasants picking olives. They knock all the olives from the trees with long canes, then gather them from the ground. The picking has been going on z months already, and will last another 3 months. All the women are out all day. And they chatter and sing, and sometimes a man or two is with them, and it is jolly. On Wednesday I went with the chaplain on the English collier ships in Spezia harbour. They are rum men. But one must love Englishmen, somehow. They are so definitely resistant—they’ve got so much personality—and so much backbone, and are so aware of another person—more than Italians are. They felt rather brotherly, to me, those colliers on the ship. One writes stories. He is going to send me his latest to criticise. He is not a Joseph Conrad, however.

Tanti saluti affettuose—and from Frieda.

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Edward Marsh.                    24 Gennaio, 1914.

Dear Eddie,—

That Georgian Poetry book is a veritable Aladdin s lamp. I little thought my Snapdragon would go on blooming and seeding in this prolific fashion. So many thanks for the cheque for four pounds, and long life to G. P.

We are still trying to get over the excitement or your rush through Fiascherino. I still think with anguish of your carrying your bag up that salita from Lerici—don’t remember it against me. I have received one or two more apologies from Severino, for his having taken us for the three saltimbanchi .* the latter, by the way, gave a great performance in I ellaro, at the bottom there by the sea, on Sunday, hey performed in the open air. Elide assisted at the spectacle, but confessed to disappearing into the church when the hat came round: along witl parts of the crowd. The poor saltimbanchi were reduced o begging for a little bread, so stingy was ellaro.

The night you went, was a great fall of snow. We woke the morning wondering what the queer pallor was. An snow lay nearly six inches deep, and was still drifting nely, shadowily, out to the sombre-looking sea.

Of course, no Elide appeared. I got up and made a oaring fire and proceeded to wash the pots, in a queer, silent, muffled Fiascherino; even the sea was dead and still.

It looked very queer. The olives on the hills bowed low, low under the snow, so the whole slopes seemed peopled with despairing shades descending to the Styx. I never saw anything so like a host of bowed, pathetic despairers, all down the hillside. And every moment came the long creak—cre-eak of a tree giving way, and the crash as it fell.

The pines on the little peninsula were very dark and snowy, above a lead-grey sea. It was queer and Japanesy: no distance, no perspective, everything near and sharp on a dull grey ground. The water cut out a very perfect, sweeping curve from the snow on the beach.

The Mino—the cat—had been out at night as usual. He appeared shoulder-deep in snow, mewing, terrified—and he wouldn’t come near me. He knows me perfectly. But that sudden fall of deep snow had frightened him out of his wits, and it was a long time before we could get him to come into the house.

At midday appeared Elide with her elder brother, Alessandro. And there was an outcry. Alessandro stood in the doorway, listening to the trees cracking, and crying, “Ma dio, dia—senti signore, senti—Christo del mondo—e ana rovina.” All Tellaro was praying to the Vergine in the church: they had rung a special appeal at 9.30, and the old women had flocked in. Elide looked once more at the driving snow-flakes, stamped her foot like a little horse, and cried defiantly, “Ma se il Dio vuoV mandare il fine del mondo—che lo mandaShe was ready. Meanwhile Alessandro moaned, “Una rovina, an danno!”

It really was a ruin. Quite half the trees were smashed. One could not get out of our garden gate, for great trees fallen there. No post came to Tellaro—nothing happened but moaning. And the third day, in lamentation, they brought a commission to see the damage and to ask to have the taxes remitted. Now they are quite happily chopping up the ruin, crying, “Ora si ptio scaldarsi

Another excitement! Luigi, down at the house on the bay here, the evening of your departure came home pale with excitement, found our Felice, and said hoarsely, “Ma zia, io ho una brutta notizia da portare. Quelli due Inglesi del signore erano arrestati stasera, al pontino di Lerici.” Loud, loud lamentations from Felice, Elide maintaining stoutly, “Forse mancava qualche carta—di certo e una cosa di niente” Think how you let us in for it—between strolling players and arrests.

There was also a great argument between Felice and Elide, as to which of you was the more beautiful. Elide said Jim Barnes, Felice said you—and they got quite cross.

Addio,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Edward Garnett.                   29 Gennaio, 1914.

Dear Garnett,—

I am not very much surprised, nor even very much hurt by your letter—and I agree with you. I agree with you about the Templeman episode. In the scheme of the novel, however, 1 must have Ella get some experience before she meets her Mr. Birkin. I also felt that the character was inclined to fall into two halves-—and gradations between them. It came of trying to graft on to the character of-----— the character, more or

less, of —. That I ought not to have done. To your two main criticisms, that the Templeman episode is wrong, and that the character of Ella is incoherent, I agree. Then about the artistic side being in the background. It is that which troubles me most. I have no longer the joy in creating vivid scenes, that I had in Sons and Lovers. I don’t care much more about accumulating objects in the powerful ight c emotion, and making a scene of them. 1 have to write di fferently. lam most anxious about your criticism of this, the second half of the novel, a hundred and fifty pages of which I send you to-morrow. Tell me very frankly what you think of and if it pleases you, tell me whether you think Ella would be possible, as she now stands, unless she had some experience of love and of men. I think, impossible. Then she must have a love episode, a significant one. But it must not be a Templeman episode.

I shall go on now to the end of the book. It will not take me long. Then I will go over it all again, and I shall be very glad to hear all you have to say. But if this, the second half, also disappoints you, I will, when I come to the end, leave this book altogether. Then I should propose to write a story with a plot, and to abandon the exhaustive method entirely— write pure object and story.

I am going through a transition stage myself. I am a slow writer, really—I only have great outbursts of work. So that I do not much mind if I put all this novel in the fire, because it is the vaguer result of transition. I write with everything vague—plenty of fire underneath, but, like bulbs in the ground, only shadowy flowers that must be beaten and sustained, for another spring. I feel that this second half of The Sisters is very beautiful, but it may not be sufficiently incorporated to please you. I do not try to incorporate it very much—I prefer the permeating beauty. It is my transition stage—but I must write to live, and it must produce its flowers, and if they be frail or shadowy, they will be all right if they are true to their hour. It is not so easy for one to be married. In marriage one must become something else. And I am changing, one way or the other. Thank you for the trouble you take for me. I shall be all the better in the end. Remember I am a slow producer, really.

Yours,

D. IL Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

io A. W. McLeod.                   9th February, 1914.

Dear Mac,—

I must thank you first for the books. I think Crosland’s Sonnets are objectionable—he is a nasty person. I think Hilaire Belloc is conceited. Full of that French showing-off which goes down so well in England, and is so smartly shallow. And I have always a greater respect for Mark Rutherford: I do think he is jolly good—so thorough, so sound, and so beautiful.

Tell me, when you write, what you thought of the poems in Poetry and in the English. I am glad you sent me the former. In England people have got that loathsome superior knack of refusing to consider me a poet at all: “Your prose is so good," say the kind fools, “that we are obliged to forgive you your poetry.” How I hate them. I believe they are still saying that of Meredith.—In America they are not so priggish conceited.

I have begun my novel again—for about the seventh time. I hope you are sympathising with me. I had nearly finished it. It was full of beautiful things, but it missed—I knew that it just missed being itself. So here I am, must sit down and write it out again. I know it is quite a lovely novel really—you know that the perfect statue is in the marble, the kernel of it. But the thing is the getting it out clean. I think I shall manage it pretty well. You must say a prayer for me sometimes.

Mrs. Garnett is staying at the hotel in Lerici, with a Russian girl. She was speaking of you the other day, how sorry she was she did not see anything of you. Why don’t you go and see them sometimes?

Kennerley says they have sent me my plays from New /ork, but they haven’t come yet. I look forward to having them, ou must have patience with my promise of one.—By the way, what a frightfully decent paper the Morning Post is. The more I read it, the more I think it is worth while to be a gentleman and to have to do with gentlemen. Heir reviews of books, their leaders, and all, have such a decent, honourable tone, such a relief after the majority of newspaper filth.

We have got spring coming in already. I have ound a handful of the little wild narcissus, with the yello ntres, and a few sweet violets, and a few purplish crimson anemones with dark centres. And one can drift about all afternoc boat, getting shell-fish from off the rocks under water, with a long ^plit cane. You know that warm, drowsy, uneasy feel of spring, when scents rouse up. It is already here i lizards are whipping about on the rocks, like a suu flicking

of a dried grass blade. And one is wakened in the morning by the birds singing. They are almost brave—they sing aloud as the sun comes up, in spite of the bold Italian cacciatore, who, in full costume and a long slim gun, stalks shadowily through the olive trees in quest of wrens and robins. When I walked in Switzerland, and came across a colony of Italians in a publichouse—

“L/Italia-—ah che bel sole!—e gli uccellini-----/ /" "Oh,

Italy—such a beautiful sun—and the little birds—aren’t they good!”—the cry of the exile.

Frieda sends warmest regards—urte bonne poignee.

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To A. W. McLeod,                    14 Marzo, 1914.

Dear Mac,—

Thanks for the House of the Dead. We have begun reading it, but I don’t like it very much. It seems a bit dull: so much statement.

It reminds me that the other Sunday we went to the house of a very popular modern Russian novelist, Amphiteatroff, at Levanto. It was a rum show: twenty-six people at lunch, a babble of German, English, Russian, French, Italian—a great fat laughing man, the host, carefully judging the Cinque Terre wine: a drawing-room, clever, highly educated wife at the head of the table, a peasant sculptor in a peasant’s smock at the foot, and in between a motley of tutors and music teachers for the children—an adopted son of Maxim Gorky, little, dark, agile, full of life, and a great wild Cossack wife whom he had married for passion and had come to hate—then a house full of scuffling servants and cultured children—no, it was too much. You have no idea how one feels English and stable and solid in comparison. I felt as if my head were screwed on tighter than the foundations of the world, in comparison. I must say, in one way, 1 loved them—for their absolute carelessness about everything but just what interested them. They are fine 180

where we have become stupid.

Oh, it is so beautiful here, I feel as if my heart would jump out of my chest like a hare at night—it is such lovely spring. The sea is blue all day, and primrose dusking to apricot at evening. There are flowers, and peach trees in bloom, and pink almond trees among the vapour grey of the olives.

To-day we have been a great picnic high up, looking at the Carrara mountains, and the flat valley of the Magra, and the sea coast sweeping round in a curve that makes my blood run with delight, sweeping round, and it seems up into the vaporous heaven with tiny scattering of villages, like handfuls of shells thrown on the beach, right beyond Viareggio.—I could not tell you how I could jump up into the air, it is so lovely. I want at this time to walk away, to walk south, into the Apennines, through the villages one sees perched high up across the valley.

My novel goes on slowly. It ought to be something when it is done, the amount of me I have given it.

I think there will be some of my poems in a paper called The Egoist. I don’t know anything about it. Ezra Pound took some verses, and sent me £3 zs. T ry to get a copy, will you — believe it will be next month—it might be this, but I think not. But unless I can get hold of a copy I absolutely don't know what they have published.

I wish you could come here—why don’t you try?

Many regards from us both. Don’t you keep on sending us things, it seems such an imposition. Did you get the copy < the play I sent you? Tell me what you think of it /ait hear—tanti salati.

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To Edward Marsh.                    -4 Marzo, 1914-

Caro Edoardo,—

There will be some of my poems in a magazine I have never seen, called The Egoist—next month, I believe. Some of them you don’t know at all. One you might like—I think you might.

181

Tell me—-I always want to hear what you say.

I suppose the play was too sordid for you, was it? I wait to hear from you about it. I am sorry we shall not see you at Easter. If we were well enough off, we too would go to Florence that week. Remember me to Jim Barnes, will you? I don’t care for Lascelles in New Numbers. Wilfrid is jolly good—one poem of Rupert Brooke I like—the others aren’t up to much. Drinkwater isn’t bad, I think.

Tanti saluti,

D. H. Lawfence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To Ernest Collings.                      22 Marzo, 1914.

Dear Collings,—

This morning has arrived your book of drawings. It was an unexpected pleasure to get it. You have done me too much honour in inscribing it to me.

I am really delighted with the book, for all that. How much better your things look now they are gathered together. Now at last one is able to get something like a real impression of your work. I must confess you puzzle me. You are a queer man. I think if you persist you will one day have a real boom. Because people will think you are an esoteric wonder-freak, and it will be a kind of aesthetic qualification to know you, as it was to know Beardsley, and is rather now to know Alastair.

I wish you would tell me what you feel is your aim. Because you are, Frieda says, absolutely unemotional. But I suppose it is a form of emotion to which we are not accustomed. But what are you trying to interpret, I wonder. I will not say that for me your work is unemotional, because some of the pictures really move me—how, I can't say. I am always puzzled to know how I feel or what I feel. I suppose you rouse very mixed feelings. I often notice you start some response in me, and then rebuff me, as in the picture "Hill," where I cannot, after answering to the figure and the clouds, receive the hard conical thrust of the jagged lines at the figure’s head. It seems to me rather as if you did not bring your two strong motions together, so that they meet and clinch and are together, but as if they lose each other. It seems to me, in the figure, you have a motion of offering—to the sky, from the body straight out at right angles; and then the shoot of the hill is at the head of the figure, so that I feel the picture like this—no, I can’t draw it—but concentrating at the head, when surely the hill offers to the sky a great, primitive body. It is this I can't understand—■ what you mean us to feel. Am I to believe that a hill culminates in what corresponds to the human head (brain, intellect)—and in the hill the human head (brain or intellect) lies for ever fixed, under a sky that disregards it? Because we are so used to the mythical idea of the earth’s fruitful body, or to the rocks representing the chained body, that I cannot, cannot feel them representing the head sealed down and rigid and scarcely to be liberated. You must please help me to understand. Phen in homage to Ivan M.—I cannot understand the significance of the high wings of the sphinx. When I say understand, I mean they baffle my feeling. They don’t answer to the womanfigure—or I can't see the connection. You see they have an emotional force. But I cannot feel how it relates to he other emotional force—the woman-figure. Don t tell me it is merely beautiful form and space-filling: that means tour de force. The thing must be the expression of some strong emotion or idea. And I can't grasp it. You are not intelligible to me. And I want to understand. What do you want to conveys I shall look at these drawings a hundred times, and try to find it. You don’t use the human figure to express any individual emotion—not dramatically. Don t say it is just a decorative use. Look at your "Head of a Woman. here is something some thing big and looming and blanched that is very chars erist of you—a sort of looming of the brain-pan big over everything, so that features, emotions are insignificant only this big blanched, almost blank something that is like the intellectual ego, something frozen like death which survives life, and knows nothing of life or resurrection—J don’t know what it is. I like very much "Apres-midi d’un Faune” -but there again, the blanked-out figures of the women, and then the over-solid figure of the man, rather destroy each other-—they don t seem to be in the same picture. The man’s figure is not good. What do you mean by your blanked-out figures? If you can tell me, then I can either see you are right, or else see where you are wrong. I think “Tragedie de Salome” very good—right proportion of blank and black. Elide, the maid, says, “Come e bella!”—“How beautiful it is!” I think it very good indeed. Perhaps there one might find out how you use substance and blank—some relation of the human to the elements—but I don’t know.

It seems to me you have two or three styles: the marionette, and then the strong line flowing and embracing a blank, then the sort of Indian. Of the three styles, I think I like best your strong line embracing a blank—like Dancer (33). That is one of the best drawings.

What do you use the background lines for?—the / // ///// lines? They express motion in a certain direction, I expect— then they have a tone value—and then a static value, a sort of standing value. But I don’t always see how you have used them. In ‘‘ Youth” (47) you get a jolly good motion by means of them. I like that drawing—Frieda likes it best. Perhaps of them all I like The Masquers (41) most. You’ve used the lines, upright and horizontal, rather well there. But what do you mean by your white shadows? Do you know, I think they are the most interesting thing about you. But what do you quite mean to suggest by them? I think it needs a subtler handling of the hachure lines, or whatever you call them, to bring the thing home. The same in the Velasquez motiv. I feel as if the lady were not in quite the right setting, and yet I have not a notion of what I would alter. Perhaps the lines and accessories, like the chequer and curtain, should suggest what you have left out of the figures: as the slanting lines in the last picture convey the eager, storm-like travelling of youth. Then you would want to suggest, by your surrounding of your shadow lady, some essential quality of hers and her sort, by which they live almost impersonally, as the forces of nature— or a force of nature.

I am afraid I am obscure. But I think, unless one is so pure by instinct that one does the right thing without knowing, then one must know what one is after. And I can't make out what you are after, however I try. You want to use the human body to express—what?—something elementary in nature, something non-organic, or of the realm of physics—what? What property of the human *soul do you want to express?—the mechanicalness of thought, as one of the natural forces?—the natural torrent of youth? What? I think if there had been just a bit more intensity got into "Youth," that might have r been very beautiful.

But I shall stop talking now, or I shall never have done, and I get no further.

It is very beautiful here now the spring is here with all the sunshine. The sea is rough and bursting in foam all along the shore. I am getting on with a novel—I have been lazy this last year. There will be a drama of mine published shortly. If I can get hold of any copies, I will send you one. We are thinking of staying here till the end of May, and then to England for a while. I shall see you then.

I have no other news. Tell me about your aims. The book is very interesting to us—and we thank you for it, very much.

A rivederla,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To J. M. Murry.                         3 Aprile, 1914*

Dear Murry,—

Well, your letter was unexpected. I thought that you and Katherine held me an interfering Sunday-school superintendent sort of person who went too far in his superintending am became impossible: stepped just too far, which is the crime 0 crimes. And I felt guilty. And I suppose I am guilty. But thanks be to God, one is often guilty without being damned.

I quite agree with you that telling is absolutely of no use enlightenment, it only gives one something to hang on >, occasionally; rouses some dull little instinct and giv s stimulation. At present, I do believe in trying to give what moral support one can. I call it, helping people to have aith. I am rather great on faith just now. I do believe in it. We are so egoistic, that we are ashamed of ourselves out of existence. One ought to have faith in what one ultimately is, then one can bear at last the hosts of unpleasant things which one is en route. I seem to spend half my days having revulsions and convulsions from myself. But I do know that Frieda knows I am really decent, and so I depend on her. It is so horribly difficult not to betray oneself, somehow, with all the different people.

I did chink you didn't want to write to me any more—that I’d trampled in forbidden places. But it doesn’t matter, does it? I mean I think I did trample in forbidden places.

I'm glad you and Katherine are all right. I know and did know that you would both of you only be negative sort of things once you’d split. Whatever happens and doesn’t happen, I know you should stick to the love you have each for the other. And one has to remember this when things go wrong.

Frieda and I are really very deeply happy. I am a tiresome thing to myself and to everybody. Somehow, I find it so difficult to live proportionately: to keep a proportion, a reserve. So I am always going in headlong and crawling out ignominious and furious, mostly with myself. But when one is furious with oneself, one does make everybody else’s life a misery.

Don’t mind what--——- or C-----say of me: it

sounds as if they said unpleasant things. "Be all things to all men.” That isn’t my ideal, it seems like my fate. But really, one can only be towards each person that which corresponds to him, more or less. And one might as well talk to a daisy by the path, as be one’s further self with —-----. C-------ought

not to misunderstand me.

Yes, you do need to write your own personal stuff, otherwise you can’t be yourself. And if you can’t be yourself, how can any woman love you? I’m glad you’ve come through all right. Oh, I think to myself, if only one could have a few real friends, who will understand a bit along with one. They are all against one. I feel------against me with the whole of his being: and

0——— would like to be, for he is a perverse devil.

What is your work? I should like to hear about that.

Oh, I tried so hard to work, this last year. I began a novel

seven times. I have written quite a thousand pages that I shall burn. But now, thank God, Frieda and I are together, and the work is of me and her, and it is beautiful, I think. I have done two-thirds. Tell me what yours is.

Don't say it’s a prosy history, yours. The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do. So I flatter myself.

I'm getting rather sermony. But I say, we’ll all get on, and we’ll have enough money for our purposes, and we'll be jolly. I do look forward to the time when we can all be jolly together. I'm fed up with miseries and sufferings.

It is spring, with puffs of pear blossom among the olive trees. But I know your war-cry now is work.

Give my regards to Katherine. I suppose we’ve all abused each other, but it doesn't really matter, does it? Frieda is out just now with her sister, or she d add a line.

D H. Lawrence.

I am awfully glad you wrote.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy,

To A. W. McLeod.                    16th April, 1914.

Dear Mac,—

I feel a fearful pig when the newspapers come so regularly. Are you sure it isn’t an imposition on you? Don’t send them so regularly. It makes me feel guilty. What a beast of a paper is The Egoist. I wouldn’t have given them those verses had I known. And there were 7 misprints—swine, swine. I shall not easily forgive them those misprints.

Did you see in Good Friday's Morning Post that the curves in Greek architecture were not after all to give the illusion of straight lines? I remember what an impression it made on me, when you said they were. I wonder which is right. I would rather the first were right, that the curves were made to give the temple a look of being actually straight.

187                        H

There is a great disturbance in the house to-day because the priest is coming on Sunday to bless the ‘house. I hese people don’t really believe any more, but they go on with the old performances. And the Church ritual is very real to-day. "Eh,” said Achille, on Good Friday morning (the Church makes Christ die on Thursday, to have time to perform their businesses by Easter Sunday, Felice says). "Eh,” said Achille, when Elide went for the bread, "we can sin as much as we like to-day—the Signore is dead, and he won’t see us.’ And they half mean it. Isn't it queer? In their heads, they don’t believe a thing. A man, Gamba, was saying to me yesterday that the Latin nature is fundamentally geometrical: its deepest aspiration is essential geometry—Form. He says that is the real meaning of the Renaissance—geometrical Form, in contrast to Mediaeval mysticism. In the Renaissance, he says, the Roman spirit appeared again, materialistic, mathematic, individualistic, and overthrew the Germanic mediaeval influence. Does that interest you? I am trying to swallow it, to digest it. It doesn’t go down very easily. Because if the nature of the Italian is rationalistic and materialistic, what about the procession I tell you of now?—and yet it is rationalistic and materialistic.

We went on Good Friday eve to see the procession of Jesus to the tomb. The houses in Tellaro are stuck about on the rocks in a tiny opening. It was a still night with a great moon, but the village deep in shadow, only the moonlight shining out at sea. And on all the window-sills were rows of candles trembling on the still air, long rows in the square, big windows, very golden in the blue dark shadow under a lighted sky. Then the procession came out of church, the lads running in front clapping wooden clappers, like those they scare birds with at home. Such a din of clappers. And the noise means the grinding of the bones of Judas. Then came the procession— a white bier with drawn curtains, carried high on the shoulders of men dressed all in white, with white cloths on their heads— a weird chanting noise broken by the noise of the sea, and candles fluttering as the white figures moved, and two great, gilt rococo lanterns carried above. Then, with all the clatter and the broken mournful chanting and the hoarse wash of the sea, they began to climb the steep staircase between the high, dark houses, a white, ghostly winding procession, with the dark-dressed villagers crowding behind. ■ It was gone in a minute. And it made a fearful impression on me. It is the mystery that does it—it is Death itself, robbed of its horrors, and only Fear and Wonder going humbly behind. You must come to Italy. Soon all this will be gone—-the Church is nearly dead.

Auf wiedersehen,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italy.

To Fdward Garnett.                      22 April, 1914.

Dear Garnett,—

I send you by this post as much of the Wedding Ring as the consul has as yet typed. I have only some 80 pages more to write. In a fortnight it should be done. You will perhaps get it in three weeks' time, the whole.

From this part that I have sent you, follows on the original Sisters—the School Inspector, and so on.

I am sure of this now, this novel. It is a big and beautiful work. Before, I could not get my soul into it. hat was because of the struggle and the resistance between Frieda and me. Now you will find her and me in the novel, I think, and the work is of both of us.

I am glad you sent back the first draft of the Wedding Ring, because I had not been able to do in it what I wanted to do. But I was upset by the second letter you wrote against, it, because I felt it insulted rather the thing I wanted to say: nor me, nor what I had said, but that which I was trying to say, and had failed in.

In the work as it stands now, there will, if anything, be only small prolixities to cut down.

I hope you will like it. It is a big book now that I lav got it down. I hope it will have a good sale. Both Pit an Curtis Brown write to me making offers authorised, they ins ist, by leading publishers in England and America—definite offers. It was horrid to receive the accounts of Sons and Lovers, and to see that Duckworth has lost a number of pounds on the book—fifteen or so, was it? That is very unpleasant. Because I only had a hundred pounds even then—and I have had £35 from Kennerley. If a publisher is to lose by me, I would rather it were a rich commercial man such as Heinemann. You told me in your last letter that I was at liberty to go to any other firm with this novel. Do you mean you would perhaps be relieved if I went to another firm? Because if you did not mean that, wasn't it an unnecessary thing to say? You know how willing I am to hear what you have to say, and to take your advice and to act on it when I have taken it. But it is no good unless you will have patience and understand what I want to do. I am not after all a child working erratically. All the time, underneath, there is something deep evolving itself out in me. And it is hard to express a new thing, in sincerity. And you should understand, and help me to the new thing, not get angry and say it is common, and send me back to the tone of the old Sisters. In the Sisters was the germ of this novel: woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative. But the first Sisters was flippant and often vulgar and jeering. I had to get out of that attitude, and make my subject really worthy. You see—you tell me I am half a Frenchman and one-eighth a Cockney. But that isn’t it. I have very often the vulgarity and disagreeableness of the common people, as you say Cockney, and I may be a Frenchman. But primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience. That I must keep to, because I can only work like that. And my Cockneyism and commonness are only when the deep feeling doesn't find its way out, and a sort of jeer comes instead, and sentimentality, and purplism. But you should see the religious, earnest, suffering man in me first, and then the flippant or common things after. Mrs. Garnett says I have no true nobility—with all my cleverness and charm. But that is not true. It is there, in spite of all the littlenesses and commonnesses.

And that is why I didn't like the second letter you wrote me about the failed novel, where you rubbed it in: because you seemed to insult my real being. You had a right to go for my work, but in doing that, you must not make me cheap in your own eyes. You can be angry with a person without holding him cheap, and making him feel cheap. You believe too much in the Frenchman and the Cockney. Those are the things to criticise in me, not to rest your belief on.

Soon I shall want some money. Perhaps you might send me the little I left in Mrs. Garnett's bank—is it seven pounds or so? Don’t bother if it is any trouble. I have a little still in the bank here. So I can use cheques.

If Duckworth is not really keen on this novel, we will give it to Pinker without its coming back here. I don’t think I want to sign an agreement with Duckworth for another novel after this. I did not like to see he had lost on Sons and Lovers. And I must have money for my novels, to live. And if the other publishers definitely offer, they who are only commercial people, whereas you are my friend—well, they may lose as much as they like. For I don’t want to feel under an obligation. You see I can’t separate you from Duckworth and Co., in this question of novels. And nobody can do any good with my novels, commercially, unless they believe in them commercially—which you don’t very much.

Will you also tell me who makes the agreement with Ken-nerley for U.S.A, publication, and what is the agreement made.

I see that Mrs. Holroyd is coming out. Do you give me any copies? Tell me about it, will you?

We think of staying here till the end of June, perhaps. I don’t know whether we shall come straight to England, or go o Germany first. We want to be married this summer, if the decree absolute is declared all right. Then we think of coming back here for the winter. We have an invitation to the Abruzzi, to the Bai on nessa di Rescis, in September, and I want to go to the Abruzzi.

I am always grateful to you, and if Duckworth could ha my novels and all of us be satisfied, I si iould be glad. Bi am sure we are none of us very well satisfied with the result of Sons and Lovers.                                               „

I shall be glad if you like the novel now—but you will tell me. Frieda sends her regards.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della SpeZia,

Italy.

To J. M. Murry.                        8 Maggio, 1914.

Dear Murry,—

I wrote to Katherine yesterday, but don't know if she'll get the letter, as the address is different.

As a matter of fact, all you ought to do is to get well physically and let everything else go. You say you are patient—now use your patience for letting your soul alone and making your body well. You make one as miserable as miserable. Do for God's sake lie down and leave everything to other people just now. Don’t bother—things are all right, really. Let them work out themselves. Don't give up feeling that people do want to hear what you say; or rather, they don’t want to hear, but they need to, poor things. Don’t be so miserable. Have patience with yourself most of all. Don’t be miserable. You’ve used too much of your strength, and now you’re weak, and will have to depend on other people for a bit. But I am sure you are the best critic in England; I’m sure you can help terrifically to a new, cleaner outlook. But you can’t do anything if you squander yourself in these miseries. Do consent to be poor and dependent —what does it matter?

The play (Mrs. Holroyd)—well, it’s not bad. I don’t set great store by it. I will send you a copy when Duckworth will give me some. I will write and ask him to send you a copy. It isn’t worth z/6 of your money, at any rate.

Four days, and I shall have finished my novel, pray God. Don’t get sick and leave me in the lurch over it. Can you understand how cruelly I feel the want of friends who will believe in me a bit? People think I’m a sort of queer fish that can write; that is all, and how I loathe it. There isn’t a soul cares a damn for me, except Frieda—and it’s rough to have all the burden put on her.

We are coming to London in June. Till the divorce was pronounced, we only allowed a mere possibility of England this summer. We thought of going to Germany from here. But now Frieda is set on England in June—we shall come in about a

month’s time. For what will happen then, we must pray heaven. But I only decided to come two days ago.

I’m glad I shall see you again soon. We must try and be decent to each other all round. I wish you had come out here instead of going to Paris. Never mind. Do get better, and leave things.

Frieda sends many sympathies. We shall see you soon.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To Edward Garnett.                     9 Maggio, 1914.

Dear Garnett,—

Many thanks for your other letter with the cheque for £5 from Duckworth. Will this do as the receipt? I am surprised that the papers are going on at such length about the play. I hope you will really like the novel. You will swear when you see the length. It’s a magnum opus with a vengeance. I have got about three thousand more words to write—two more days, and then basta. Frieda wants the novel to be called 7 he Rainbow. It doesn’t look it at first sight, but I think it is a good title. 1 like it better than The Wedding Ring. Dunlop will have finished the typing by next Thursday. I hope you’ll have the MS. by Monday week. I have been a bit seedy lately.

Yours affectionately,

D. H. Lawrence.

Regards from Frieda.

Lerici, per Fiascherino, Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To Edward Marsh.                      24 Maggio, 1914.

Dear Eddie,—                 _

It seems a long time since I wrote to you—t rungs go on so monotonously here. I have worked away at my novel, and

193

finished it, and now I am getting ready to depart from here: that is all.

The other day I got the second New Numbers. I was rather disappointed, because I expected Abercrombie’s long poem to be great indeed. I can't write to Wilfrid because I think I have never seen him to worse advantage than in this quarter. And it is no good your telling me Lascelles’ End of the World is great, because it isn't. There are some fine bits of rhetoric, as there always are in Abercrombie. But oh, the spirit of the thing altogether seems mean and rather vulgar. When I remember even H. G. Wells' Country of the Blind, with which this poem of Abercrombie's had got associated beforehand in my mind, then I see how beautiful is Wells’ conception, and how paltry this other. Why, why, in God’s name, is Abercrombie messing about with Yokels and Cider and runaway wives? No, but it is bitterly disappointing. He who loves Paradise Lost must don the red nose and rough-spun cloak of Masefield and Wilfrid. And you encourage it—it is too bad. Abercrombie, if he does anything, surely ought to work upon rather noble and rather chill subjects. I hate and detest his ridiculous imitation yokels and all the silly hash of his bucolics; I loathe his rather nasty efforts at cruelty, like the wrapping frogs in paper and putting them for cartwheels to crush; I detest his irony with its claptrap solution of everything being that which it seemeth not; and I hate that way of making what Meredith called Cockney metaphors:—moons like a white cat and meteors like a pike fish. And nearly all of this seems to me an Abercrombie turning cheap and wicked. What is the matter with the man? There’s something wrong with his soul. Mary and the Bramble and Sale of St. Thomas weren’t like this. They had a certain beauty of soul, a certain highness which I loved:-—though I didn’t like the Indian horrors in the St. Thomas. But here everything is mean and rather sordid, and full of rancid hate. He talked of Sons and Lovers being all odi et amo. Well, I wish I could find the 'amo' in this poem of his. It is sheer 'odi/ and rather mean hatred at that. The best feeling in the thing is a certain bitter gloating over the coming destruction. What has happened to him? Something seems to be going bad in his soul. Even in the poem before this, the one of the Shrivelled Zeus, there was a gloating over nasty perishing which was objectionable. But what is the matter with him? The feelings in these late things are corrupt and dirty. What has happened to the man? I wish to heaven he were writing the best poems that were ever written, and then he turns out this.

I am coming soon to London. We leave here about June 14th, I think. My wife wants to go to her people in Baden Baden, I want to come straight to England by sea—in a tramp steamer if I can. That idea pleases me. Italy is just beginning to get hot, and I am just ready to move.

We shall stay in London about a month, I think, to get married by the registrar. Perhaps Lascelles would like to write a long poem called the Poet's Wedding, upon the subject. We shall stay with G. H. Campbell—an Irish barrister—a very nice man—do you know him? We shall see you, shall we not? 1 want to see Mrs. Asquith also.

I look forward to seeing you again. Write me a line here within the next fortnight, will you?

Tanti saluti di mia moglie—Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Le.rici, per Fiascherino,

Gol/o della Spezia, Italia.

To A. W. McLeod.                      2 Junio, 1914.

Dear Mac,—

I never thanked you for the Meredith poems. I was very glad indeed to get them—and a bit disappointed in them. They aren't what I want just now, I suppose.

I have been interested in the futurists. I got a book of their poetry—a very fat book too—and a book of pictures- anu read Marinetti’s and Paolo Buzzi s manifestations and essays and Soffici's essays on cubism and futurism. It inter ests me very much. I like it because it is the applying to emotions of the purging of the old forms and sentimentalities. 1 .ike 1 for its saying—enough of this sickly cant, let us be hone t am 1 stick by what is in us. Only when folk say, Let us be honest and stick by what is in us'—they always mean, stick by those things that have been thought horrid, and by those alone. They want to deny every scrap of tradition and experience, which is silly. They are very young, college-student and medical-student at his most blatant. But I like them. Only I don't believe in them. I agree with them about the weary sickness of pedantry and tradition and inertness, but I don't agree with them as to the cure and the escape. They will progress down the purely male or intellectual or scientific line. They will even use their intuition for intellectual and scientific purpose. The one thing about their art is that it isn't art, but ultra scientific attempts to make diagrams of certain physic or mental states. It is ultra-ultra intellectual, going beyond Maeterlinck and the Symbolistes, who are intellectual. There isn’t one trace of naivete in the works—though there’s plenty of naivete in the authors. It’s the most self-conscious, intentional, pseudo-scientific stuff on the face of the earth. Marinetti begins: “Italy is like a great Dreadnought surrounded by her torpedo boats.” That is it exactly—a great mechanism. Italy has got to go through the most mechanical and dead stage of all—-everything is appraised according to its mechanic value— everything is subject to the laws of physics. This is the revolt against beastly sentiment and slavish adherence to tradition and the dead mind. For that I love it. I love them when they say to the child, “All right, if you want to drag nests and torment kittens, do it lustily.” But I reserve the right to answer, “All right, try it on. But if I catch you at it you get a hiding.”

I think the only re-sourcing of art, revivifying it, is to make it more the joint work of man and woman. I think the one thing to do, is for men to have courage to draw nearer to women, expose themselves to them, and be altered by them: and for women to accept and admit men. That is the start-—by bringing themselves together, men and women—revealing themselves each to the other, gaining great blind knowledge and suffering and joy, which it will take a big further lapse of civilisation to exploit and work out. Because the source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

Which is a sermon on a stool. We are leaving here on the 8th—next Monday. Frieda goes to Laden Baden for about io days. I am coming to England by ship. We are staying with Gordon H. Campbell in 9, Seiwood Terrace, Sth Kensington. I shall write to you as soon as we arrive. I shall be 8 or 9 or 10 days at sea, I think.

We are all upset, moving. I want to write an essay about Futurism, when I have the inspiration and wit thereunto.

Many regards from us—and auj wiedersehen,

D. H. Lawrence.

Lerici, per Fiascherino,

Golfo della Spezia, Italia.

To Edward Garnett.                       5 Junio, 1914.

Dear Garnett,—

First let me remember to thank you for letting the two books be sent to the Consul in Spezia.

About Pinker, I will do as you say, and tell him that the matter of the novel is not yet settled, and I will call on him in some fifteen or twenty days.

I don’t agree with you about the Wedding Ring. You will find that in a while you will like the book as a whole. I don’t think the psychology is wrong: it is only that I have a different attitude to my characters, and that necessitates a different attitude in you, which you are not prepared to give. As for its being my cleverness which would pull the thing through that sounds odd to me, for I don t think I am so very clever, in that way. I think the book is a bit futuristic—quite unconsciously so. But when I read Marinetti—‘the profound intuitions of life added one to the other, word by word, according to their illogical conception, will give us the gene il lines of an intuitive physiology of matter —I see something c what I am after. I translate him clumsily, and his Italian is obf iscated and I don’t care about physiology of matter—but somehow— that which is physic—non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashionec human element-which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I object to. In Turgenev, and in Tolstoi, and in Dostoievsky, the moral scheme into which all the characters fit—and itis nearly the same scheme—is, whatever the extraordinariness of the characters themselves, dull, old, dead. When Marinetti writes: “It is the solidity of a blade of steel that is interesting by itself, that is, the incomprehending and inhuman alliance of its molecules in resistance to, let us say, a bullet. The heat of a piece of wood or iron is in fact more passionate, for us, than the laughter or tears of a woman”—then I know what he means. He is stupid, as an artist, for contrasting the heat of the iron and the laugh of the woman. Because what is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the molecules of steel or their action in heat: it is the inhuman will, call it physiology, or like Marinetti—physiology of matter, that fascinates me. I don't so much care about what the woman feels—in the ordinary usage of the word. That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the woman is—what she is— inhumanly, physiologically, materially—according to the use of the word: but for me, what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception. That is where the futurists are stupid. Instead of looking for the new human phenomenon, they will only look for the phenomena of the science of physics to be found in human beings. They are crassly stupid. But if anyone would give them eyes, they would pull the right apples off the tree, for their stomachs are true in appetite. You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say, 'Diamond, what! This is carbon.’ And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) You must not say my novel is shaky—it is not perfect, because I am not expert in what I want to do. But it is the real thing, say what you like. And I shall get my reception, if not now, then before long Again I say, don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, as when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown.

I hope this won’t bore you. We leave here on Monday, the 8th. Frieda will stay in Baden Baden some 10-14 days. I am not going by sea, because of the filthy weather. I am walking across Switzerland into France with Lewis, one of the skilled engineers of Vickers-Maxim works here. I shall let you know my whereabouts.

Don't get chilly and disagreeable to me.

Au revoir,

D H. Lawrence.

I shall be awfully glad to see Bunny again—and Mrs. Garnett and you.

Please keep this letter, because I want to write on futurism and it will help me. I will come and see Duckworth. Give Bunny my novel—I want him to understand it.

9, Seiwood Terrace, South Kensington, S.W.

To Edward Garnett.                          Jtily, ¹9¹4-

Dear Garnett,—

I am awfully sorry I was precipitate at the last moment, called to see you before I went to Pinker. I hen you weren t in. And I hung a few minutes on the pavement outside, saying. “Shall I go to Pinker?” And there was very little time, because we had to lunch with Lady St. Helier. And Frieda ? disappointed she couldn't have any money. And most of all, 1 remembered Mr. Duckworth on Saturday.

"Well?" he said when I came in.

"Pinker offers me the £300 from Methuen,’ I said.

"He does?"

"Yes."

"Then," he said, as if nettled, "I'm afraid you’ll have to accep it?* Which rather made me shut my teeth, because the tone was peremptory. So I went to Pinker, and signed his agreement, and took his cheque, and opened an acc. with the London County and Westminster Bank—et me voila.

I am sorry. Shall I see you at the Cearne?

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

9, Seiwood Terrace, South Kensington, S.W

To Catherine Carswell.                Monday, July 1914.

Dear Mrs. Jackson,—

I must tell you 1 am in the middle of reading your novel. You have very often a simply beastly style, indirect and roundabout and stiff-kneed and stupid. And your stuff is abominably muddled—you’ll simply have to write it all again. But it is fascinatingly interesting. Nearly all of it is marvellously good. It is only so incoherent. But you can easily pull it together. It must be a long novel—it is of the quality of a long novel. My stars, just you work at it, and you’ll have a piece of work you never need feel ashamed of. All you need is to get the whole thing under your control. You see, it takes one so long to know what one is really about. Your Juley is a fascinating character— not quite understood sufficiently—not quite. Ruth is good. Leave the other children sketchy.

When I've finished it—to-morrow or Wednesday—we must have a great discussion about it. My good heart, there’s some honest work here, real.

I must go to Croydon to-morrow afternoon. But I'll ring you up when I’ve finished.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

You must be willing to put much real work, hard work, into this, and you’ll have a genuine creative piece of work. It’s like Jane Austen at a deeper level.

THE WAR

**THE RAINBOW”

CORNWALL AND DERBYSHIRE

9, Seiwood Terrace,

South Kensington, 5.1V.

To Catherine Carswell.         Tuesday, June or July, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Jackson,—

I've just finished your novel. I think it’s going to be something amazingly good. But it means work, I can tell you. I’ve put thousands of notes and comments and opinions in the margin, out of my troubled soul. I hope they’ll help. I wonder if you could come to lunch to-morrow? Come about mid-day, and we’ll have a real go at this MS. I hope you can come. Ring us up. If you are not free in the morning, we have the afternoon till four o’clock. I want to settle it with you before we go away.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

9, Seiwood Terrace,

South Kensington.

To Edward Garnett.

Tuesday.

Dear Garnett.—

I send you herewith another batch of the short stories. There remains only one to send—one story. It is the German soldier story that came in last month’s English Review. I find it wants writing over again, to puU it together. I have gone over the stories very carefully. I wish you would go through the selection I have sent in, and see if there is any you would leave out, and any you would like putting in. I think all the stories have been already printed, except Daughters of the V tear* I would like them arranging so:

About

6,000

words

6,000

2,500

3,300

--

8,000

--

18,980

ff

1. A Fragment of Stained Glass.

2. Goose Fair.

3. A Sick Collier.

4. The Christening.

5. Odour of Chrysanthemums.

6. Daughters of the Vicar.

About

words

Which makes it about 88,000 words. If you would like any more, please tell me. And which of the titles will you choose for a book-title? Goose Fair?

I will send in the last story—Via Ordinaire—within a day or two. Tell me if this Jot is all right.

We are an irrefutable married couple now. Does it seem dull to you, to be so respectable? The trouble about the children is very acute just now.

Many regards,

D H. Lawrence.

I sent the first batch of stories in to Mr, Duckworth a week ago on Thursday.

The Cearne,

Near Edenbridge, Kent.

To T. D. D.

7 July, 1914.

Dear D.,—

I was glad to get your still sad letter, and sorry you are so down yet. I can't help thinking that you wouldn’t be quite so down if you and Mrs. D. didn t let yourselves be separated rather by this trouble. Why do you do that? I think the trouble ought to draw you together, and you seem to let it put you apart. Of course I may be wrong. But it seems a shame that her one cry, when she is in distress, should be for her mother. You ought to be the mother and father to her. Perhaps if you go away to your unhealthy post, it may be good for you. But perhaps you may be separating your inner life from hers—I don't mean anything actual and external—but you may be taking yourself inwardly apart from her, and leaving her inwardly separate from you: which is no true marriage, and is a form of failure. I am awfully sorry; because I think that no amount of outward trouble and stress of circumstance could really touch you both, if you were together. But if you are not together, of course, the strain becomes too great, and you want to be alone, and she wants her mother. And it seems to me an awful pity if, after you have tried, you have to fail and go separate ways. I am not speaking of vulgar outward separation: I know you would always be a good reliable husband: but there is more than that: there is the real sharing of one life. I can't help thinking your love for Mrs. D. hasn’t quite been vital enough to give you yourself peace. One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always towards the other soul, not away from it. Do you think love is an accomplished thing, the day it is recognised? It isn’t. To love, you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures. You mustn’t think that your desire or your fundamental need is to make a good career, or to fill your life with activity, or even to provide for your family materially. It isn’t. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security, no matter how many things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work, a real independent workman.

You asked me once what my message was. I haven’t got any general message, because I believe a general message is a general means of side-tracking one’s own personal diffi alt es. like Christ’s—thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself—has given room for all the modern filthy system of society. But this that I tell you is my message as far as I’ve got any.

Please don’t mind what I say—you know I don’t really want to be impertinent or interfering.

Mrs. Huntingdon is coming over to England th s month. Probably she would bring Mrs. D. But perhaps Noemi would be better. I am sorry Paddy is still so seedy. He is a strange boy. I think he will need a lot of love. He has a curious heavy consciousness, a curious awareness of what people feel for him. I think he will need a lot of understanding and a lot of loving. He may, I think, have quite an unusual form of intelligence. When you said he might be a musician, it struck me. He has got that curious difference from other people, which may mean he is going to have a distinct creative personality. But he will suffer a great deal, and he will want a lot of love to make up for it.

I think our marriage comes off at the Kensington registrar's office on Saturday. I will try to remember to send you the Times you asked for. When I get paid for my novel, I want to send you a small cheque for doing the novel. You will not mind if it is not very much that I send you.

We are very tired of London already, and very glad to be down here in the country. Probably we are going to stay in Derbyshire—and then for August going to the west of Ireland. But I shall write and tell you. Don’t be miserable—I have you and Mrs. D. rather on my conscience just now—I feel as if you were taking things badly. But don’t do that.

Auf wiedersehen,

D. H. Lawpence. Remember me to Mrs. D.

9, Sei wood Terrace, To Catherine Carswell.                    12th July, 1914.

I’m awfully sorry we couldn’t come to-night. I, poor devil, am seedy with neuralgia in my left eye and my heart in my boots. Domain sono i nostri matrimonii—alle io|. Povero me, mi sento poco bene. Frieda says will you meet her on Tuesday morning—and will you ring us up?

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

9, Seiwood Terrace,

South Kensington, S.W.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.                    13 July, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Hopkin.—

Frieda and I were married this morning at the Kensington registrar’s office. I thought it was a very decent and dignified performance. I don’t feel a changed man, but I suppose I am one.

On Saturday I think we are going to Ripley for a few days. I don’t think we shall come out to Eastwood. But you must come over to see us—you and Mr. Hopkin and Enid. 1 must see you.

We have been so busy seeing people and doing things here in London. I am getting so tired of it. We are going to the West of Ireland for August. Write and tell us your news.

Love—an revoir,

D. H. Lawrence.

9. Seiwood Terrace,

South Kensington, S.W,

To Edward Marsh                       *5     1914*

Dear Eddie,—

Have you got Lascelles Abercrombie’s book on Thomas Hardy; and if so, could you lend it me for the space of, say, six weeks; and if so, do you mind if 1 scribble notes in it ! d if you've got any of those little pocket edition Hardy s, will you lend me those, too? I am quite a reliable man to lend books to I send them back safely. I am going to write a little 00k on Hardy’s people. I think it will interest me. We are going to Ireland at the end of this month. I shall do it there. I have jus finished getting together a book of short stories. Lord, iov I’ve worked again at those stories—most of them- orging them up. They’re good, I think.

Saluti di cuore,

D. H. Lawrence.

9, Seiwood Terrace,

South Kensington, S W.

To Edward Marsh.                       17 July, 1914.

My dear Eddie,—

But what a shock I got when the books came. I began to yell—"but I didn’t ask him for them”—and I rushed round the room almost cracked, between shame of having made it possible, and horror at your spending so much money on me, and joy of having the books. Frieda was getting in my way crying: “Never mind—never mind-—take them—how lovely— oh, how I shall revel—let him give them you----.” I still feel

shaken. I’ve never had such a lot of books in my life. I tell you the selfish motive is triumphing, and I'm rejoicing in the land. I'm awfully excited about it. So is Frieda. If my book—a tiny book—on Hardy comes off and pleases me, and you would like it, I dedicate it to you with a fanfare of trumpets.

Thank you a million times,

D. H. Lawrence.

To Harriet Monroe.                       31 July, 1914.

Dear Miss Monroe,—

Your letter finds me just getting up to go from London. I am satisfied that you take the poems you mention, and that you will publish them something in this order:

Grief, Memories, Weariness, Service of all the Dead, Don Juan, Song, in November or December.

Why, oh why, do you want to cut off the tail of poor Ophelia*s ballad? Don't you see the poor thing is cracked, and she used all those verses—apples and chickens and rat—according to true instinctive or dream symbolism? This poem—I am very proud of it—has got the quality of a troublesome dream that seems incoherent but is selected by another sort of consciousness. The latter part is the waking up part, yet never really awake, because she is mad. No, you mustn't cut it in two. It is a good poem: I couldn’t do it again to save my life. Use it whole or not at all. I return you the MS. If you don't use it, please destroy it.

I was at dinner with Miss Lowell and the Aldingtons last night, and we had some poetry. But, my dear God, when I see all the understanding and suffering and the pure intelligence necessary for the simple perceiving of poetry, then I know it is an almost hopeless business to publish the stuff at all, and particularly in magazines. It must stand by, and wait and wait. So I don't urge anybody to publish me.

Mrs. Aldington has a few good poems.

Will you address me c/o Messrs. Duckworth, 3, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, W.C. I am without an address till I am back in Italy about mid October.

"Lawrence at his best."

Merci, Monsieur, whoever you are, and what do you know about it.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

9, Seiwood Terrace, South Kensington, S.W'.

To J. B. Pinker.

10 August, 1914.

Dear Pinker,—

Here is a state of affairs—what is going to become of us You said Methuen signed the agreement for the novel —(did he give you the cheque at the same time? I ask because I a 1 wondering how I am going to get on. We can t go back to Italy as things stand, and I must look for somewhere to live. I think I shall try to get a tiny cottage somewhere, put a little bit of furniture in it, and live as cheaply as possible. But to do tnat even I must know there is a little money coming from some -where. Will you let me know about Methuen? We can’t stay here much longer.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

The Triangle,

Bellingdon Lane, Chesham, Bucks.

To J B Pinker.

5 Sept., 1914.

Dear Pinker,—

Are you better from your accident? We were sorry to hear of it. But your secretary said it was not at all serious. Will you thank her for her courteous letter? I hope you are really all right now.

I am very sorry to worry you again about money. Do you think Methuen will pay up the £150 to you? I can last out here only another month—then I don’t know where to raise a penny, for nobody will pay me. It makes me quite savage. Extort me my dues out of Methuen if you can, will you?

What a miserable world. What colossal idiocy, this war. Out of sheer rage I've begun my book about Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid—queer stuff—but not bad.

I do wish I needn’t worry you—I wouldn’t if I could help it.

Regards from us,

D. H. Lawrence.

The Triangle,

Bellingdon Lane, Chesham, Bucks.

To Harriet Monroe.

1 Oct,, 1914.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

I’m glad to hear my Ophelia shall go in whole—a great relief to me. I could not bear that she should be cut through the middle, and the top half given to me and the lower half given to the world. Am I not her mother, you Solomon with the sword?

Send me the draft here, to this God-forsaken little hole where I sit like a wise rabbit with my pen behind my ear, and listen to distant noises. I am not in the war zone. I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and 208

for fun. Neither shall I go in for your war poem. The nearest

I could get to it would be in the vein of

The owl and the pussy cat went to sea In a beautiful peagreen boat

-—and I know you wouldn't give me the hundred dollars.

I will let you know if I change my address.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Bellingdon Lane, Chesham, Bucks.

To Edward Garnett.                       iz Oct., 1914.

DEAR Garnett,—

It is a long time since I have written, but the war puts a damper on one's own personal movement. It makes me feel very abstract, as if I and what I am did not matter very much.

What are you doing? Do you still go as usual to Duckworth's? Or is there not so much work to do.

The proofs of the stories keep on coming. What good printers these Plymouth people are. They never make a mistake. And how good my stories are, after the first two. It really surprises me. Shall they be called The Fighting Line After all, this is the real fighting line, not where soldiers pull triggers.

We hear now and then from Germany: every German heart full of the altar-fire of sacrifice to the war: two of the Richthofen intimate officer-friends killed, "der gute Udo von Henning ist am 7. Sept, bei Charleroi gefallen"—that is the spirit. Frieda’s father is very ill. She and I hardly quarrel any more.

We have a little money—not much-—enough -Pinker sold Honour and Arms to America for £25, and I had a little roi Manchester Guardian. Here the autumn has been very beautiful. We are quite isolated, amid wide, grassy roads, with quantities of wild autumn fruit. This is curiously pale-tinted try, beautiful for the blueness and mists of autumn.

I have been writing my book more or less—very much less— about Thomas Hardy, I have done a third of it. When this much is typed I shall send it to Bertram Christian.

I wonder if you will come and see us. I should be very glad. It is not dear—there are cheap week-end tickets. And why doesn’t David come?

Come for a week-end, will you? We have a bed. Any weekend after this next.

Our love to Mrs. Garnett,

D. H. Lawrence.

Billingdon Lane,

Chesham, Bucks.

To Catherine Carswell.                 21 st October, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Jackson,—

How exciting your letter is! We are glad to hear you are going to marry Donald Carswell. Your life will run on a stable pivot then, and you will be much happier. After all, one has a complete right to be happy. I only want to know people who have the courage to live. The dying resigned sort only bore me now. We are glad to have your news—soon we’ll come and see you.

The Literary Fund gave me £50. I have got about £70 in the world now. Of this I owe £145 to the divorce lawyers, for costs claimed against me. This I am never going to pay. I also owe about £20 otherwise. So I've got some £50. If you think the other fund would give me any more—benissimo, I’ll take it like a shot. Have not I earned my whack—at least enough to live on—from this nation?

We should like to come to London one day next week—say Tuesday—or Thursday—and stay one night at your house. We should like to do that very much. But tell us if it would be easy.

Oh, by the way—I was seedy and have grown a beard. I think I look hideous, but it is so warm and complete, and such a clothing to one's nakedness, that I like it and shall keep it. So when you see me don’t laugh.

Many nice regards,

Bellingdon Lane,

Ches ham, ■

Bucks.

To Harriet Monroe.                       17 Nov,, 1914.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

Yesterday came your cheque for £8. Thank you very much.

To-day came the War Number of Poetry, for which also I thank you. It put me into such a rage—how dare Amy talk about bohemian glass and stalks of flame?—that in a real fury I had to write my war poem, because it breaks my heart, this war.

I hate, and hate, and hate the glib irreverence of some of your contributors—Aldington with his “Do you know what it's all about, brother Jonathan? We don't.” It is obvious he doesn’t. And your nasty, obscene, vulgar in the last degree— “Hero” —----may God tread him out—why did you put him

in? You shouldn’t.

At least I like the woman who wrote Metal Checks—her idea, her attitude—but her poetry is pretty bad. I rather like the suggestion of Marian Ramie’s Face I shall never see- man. I shall never see. And Unser Gott isn’t bad—but unbeauti-fully ugly. Your people have such little pressure: their safety valve goes off at the high scream when the pressure is still so low. Have you no people with any force in them? Aldington almost shows most—if he weren t so lamentably 1 nitating Hueffer.                                                ,

I don’t care what you do with my war poem. I don t particularly care if I don’t hear of it any more. The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the neart of the individual fighters—not to talk in armies and nations and numbers—but to track it home—home—their war—and it s at the bottom of almost every Englishman’s heart—the w ir—tl desire of war—the will to war—and at the bottom of every

Don't put common things in like the Campfollower—why do you? They are only ugly, ugly—* putrid lips” it is something for the nasty people of this world to batten on.

I typed my poem on a typewriter Amy Lowell gave me. I think I did it quite well—and it was thrilling. I like it when you send me Poetry, even if it makes me rage.

ValeI

D. H. Lawrence.

Take care how you regard my war poem—-it is good.

Bellingdon Lane,

Chesham, Bucks.

To J. B. Pinker.                              5 Dec., 1914.

Dear Pinker,—

I send you the first hundred or so pages of my novel, which I am writing over. It needs the final running through. It is a beautiful piece of work, really. It will be, when I have finished it: the body of it is so now.

I began to type it. But it took me hours, and I am too busy writing. So I left off. Is there any need to have it typed at all, the MS.? I never did for Duckworth. But if it must be done, will you have it done for me?

I am glad of this war. It kicks the pasteboard bottom in of the usual "good" popular novel. People have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months, and they are not going to let themselves be taken in by "serious” works whose feeling is shallower than that of the official army reports. Mackenzie was a fool not to know that the times are too serious to bother about his Sinister Street frippery. Folk will either read sheer rubbish, or something that has in it as much or more emotional force than the newspaper has in it to-day. I am glad of the war. It sets a slump in trifling. If Lucas reads my novel, he ought to know how good it is, and he ought to respect it.

I shall finish the thing by the end of January—perhaps earlier. I will send it to you as I do it—100 pages at a time. Then, if at the end of January Methuen will give me more money, I shall go to Italy. I am tired of this country, the war, the winter.

I hope all is well with your business. I hope your son is at home with you, not joining any army. I hope you are quite well.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

The Rainbow is a better title than The Wedding Ring, particularly in these times. Garnett was a devil to call my book of stories The Prussian Officer—what Prussian Officer?

The Triangle,

Bellingdon Lane,

Chesham, Bucks.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.             3rd January, 1915.

Dear Lady Ottoline,—

I was glad you wrote and told me you like my stories. One wants the appreciation of the few. And it isn’t faute de mieux, either—I am no democrat, save in politics. I think the state is a vulgar institution. But life itself is an affair of aristocrats. In my soul, I’d be as proud as hell. In the state, let there be the Liberte-Egalite business. In so far as I am one of many, Liberte, Lgalite—I won’t have Fraternite. The state is an arrangement for myriads of peoples’ living together. And one doesn't have brothers by arrangement. In so far as I am myself, Fierte, Inegalite, Hostilite.

It doesn’t sound very French, but never mind. I think the time has come to wave the oriflamme and rally against humanity and Ho, Ho! St. John and the New Jerusalem.

We should like very much to come and see you again. When we come to town we shall come to lunch with you. I shall let you know. We don’t come very often, because of the poverty. I shake down the thermometer of my wealth, and rind it just nearly at zero. But I like to be poor. I d like to wa e my feathers like a bird of paradise. But as yet, one must be decent

How I loathe this dark weather.

My wife wants to see how you embroider—will you show her when we come? She sends her greetings, with mine

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

The Triangle,

Bellingdon Lane,

Chesham, Bucks.

To Edward Garnett.                       13 Jan., 1915.

Deaf Garnett,—

I send you the letter of this lady. I don’t know whether anything can be done with my grandfather's old rival, Jesse Boot. You know that my mother’s father and this grand-duke of drugs quarrelled and had a long war as to which of them should govern a chapel in Sneinton, in Nottingham. My grandfather won. So now, Weh’ mir, dass ich ein Enkel bin—woe is me, that I am a grandchild, for I am booted out of my place as a popular novelist.

I’ve got a cold and lie in bed for a day or two. It is nothing. Next week we go down to Sussex to live in a better and less crannied house than this. Of course I am happy in the prospect of being on the move again.

If you are in town next Wednesday or Thursday, I should like to see you. Will you let me know? How are Mrs. Garnett and David? I have no news. I won't ask you about The Prussian Officer, it might make me sad.

Frieda sends her greetings—I mine.

D. H. Lawrence.

Bellingdon,

Chesham, Bucks.

To W. E. Hopkin.

Monday, 18 Jan., 1915.

Dear Willie,—

I just remember I’ve got this set of duplicate proofs of my stories, and perhaps you’ll accept them in lieu of a bound volume. If ever I rise to fame these will be unique—because there are many differences between these sheets and those revised and published—also you can have them bound into a book for a few pence. So don’t grumble at them, please. I remember I promised you a proper book.

We are just packing up to move again—not to Italy, alas—but to a beautiful place in Sussex—Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex, is the address. It is the Meynells’ place. You know Alice Meynell, Catholic poetess, rescuer of Francis Thompson. The father took a big old farm house at Greatham, then proceeded to give each of his children a cottage. Now Viola lends us hers. It is, I think, a big cottage, and everything nice and handy. It is on the L. B. & S. C. Railway—near Arundel— on the edge of the downs—not far from Littlehampton, which is seaside.

So you must come and see us, all three of you, when we are settled and the spring is coming on. That will be just jolly.

We will also talk of my pet scheme. I want to gather together about twenty souls and 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, and some real decency. It is to be a colony built up on the real decency which is in each member of the community. A community which is established upon the assumption of goodness in the members, instead of the assumption of badness.

What do you think of it? I think it should be quite feasible. We keep brooding the idea—I and some friends.

Now the weather is sunny, but I have hated it. I am glad to be going to Sussex—it is a county I like very much. I don't like this Bucks—it is meagre.

How are you and Sallie, and how is Enid? We leave here Thursday morning—stay two days in London—go to Pul borough on Saturday.

Many greetings from Frieda and me.

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough,

Sussexi

To Lady Ottoline Morrell                  27 Jam, 1915.

Dear L^dy Ottoline,—                           t* 11

We liked Duncan Grant very much. I really liked him. f ell him not to make silly experiments in the futuristic line, with bits of colour on a moving paper. Other Johnnies can do that. Neither to bother making marionettes—-even titanic ones. But to seek out the terms in which he shall state his whole. He is after stating the Absolute—like Fra Angelico in the Last Judgment—a whole conception of the existence of man— creation, good, evil, life, death, resurrection, the separating of the stream of good and evil, and its return to the eternal source. It is an Absolute we are all after, a statement of the whole scheme—the issue, the progress through time—and the return —making unchangeable eternity.

In a geometric figure one has the abstractions ready stated A so, or O so. But one cannot build a complete abstraction, or absolute, out of a number of small abstractions, or absolutes. Therefore one cannot make a picture out of geometric figures. One can only build a great abstraction out of concrete units. Painting is not architecture. It is puerile to try to achieve architecture—third dimension—on a flat surface, by means of 'lines of force’! The architecture comes in in painting, only with the suggestion of some whole, some conception which conveys in its own manner the whole universe. Most puerile is this dabbing geometric figures behind one another, just to prove that the artist is being abstract, that he is not attempting representation of the object. The way to express the abstract-whole is to reduce the object to a unit, a term, and then out of these units and terms to make a whole statement. Do rub this into Duncan Grant, and save him his foolish waste. Rembrandt, Corot, Goya, Monet have been preparing us our instances—now for the great hand which can collect all the instances into an absolute statement of the whole. I hope you aren’t bored, but do tell this to Duncan Grant.

We have got a beautiful cottage here-—long and narrow—it was a long barn—it is like the refectory of a little monastery. The country is beautiful. When will you come and see us? Choose your own time. And will you bring Cendrelle—I don’t know her name. We have got spare bedrooms, if you come.

A rivederci,

D. H. Lawrence.

We should be very glad to see Philip Morrell, if a Member of Parliament and an energetic landowner has any time to waste.

Greatham> Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.    Sunday, 30th January, 1915.

Dear Lady Cynthia.—

We were very glad to hear from you. I wanted to send you a copy of my stories at Christmas, then I didn’t know how the war had affected you—I knew Herbert Asquith was joined and I thought you'd rather be left alone, perhaps.

We have no history, since we saw you last. I feel as if I had less than no history—as if I had spent those five months in the tomb. And now, I feet very sick and corpse-cold, too newly risen to share yet with anybody, having the smell of the grave in my nostrils, and a feel of grave clothes about me.

The War finished me: it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes. I had been walking in Westmorland, rather happy, with water-lilies twisted round my hat big, heavy, white and gold water-lilies that we found in a pool high up—and girls who had come out on a spree and who were having tea in the upper room of an inn, shrieked with laughter. And I remember also we crouched under the loose wall on the moors and the rain flew by in streams, and the wind cam rushing through the chinks in the wall behind one s head, and we shouted songs, and I imitated music-hall turns, whilst th? other men crouched under the wall and I pranked in the rain on the turf in the gorse, and Koteliansky groaned Hebrew music— Ranan. Sadekim Badanoi.

It seems like another life—we were happy four men. Then we came down to Barrow-in-Furness, and saw that war was declared. And we all went mad. I can remember soldiers kissing on Barrow station, and a woman shouting defiantly to her sweetheart—“When you get at 'em, Clem, let ’em have it,” as the train drew off—and in all the tramcars, War. Messi . Vickers-Maxim call in their workmen—and the great notices on Vickers' gateways—and the thousands of men streaming ovei the bridge. Then I went down the coast a few miles. And I think of the amazing sunsets over flat sands and the smoky sea-then of sailing in a fisherman’s boat, running m the wind against a heavy sea—and a French onion boat coming in with

her sails set splendidly, in the morning sunshine—and the electric suspense everywhere—and the amazing, vivid, visionary beauty of everything, heightened by the immense pain everywhere. And since then, since I came back, things have not existed for me. I have spoken to no one, I have touched no one, I have seen no one. All the while, I swear, my soul lay in the tomb—not dead, but with a flat stone over it, a corpse, become corpse-cold. And nobody existed, because I did not exist myself. Yet I was not dead—only passed over—trespassed— and all the time I knew I should have to rise again.

Now I am feeble and half alive. On the Downs on Friday I opened my eyes again, and saw it was daytime. And I saw the sea lifted up and shining like a blade with the sun on it. And high up, in the icy wind, an aeroplane flew towards us from the land—and the men ploughing and the boys in the fields on the table-lands, and the shepherds, stood back from their work and lifted their faces. And the aeroplane was small and high, in the thin, ice-cold wind. And the birds became silent and dashed to cover, afraid of the noise. And the aeroplane floated high out of sight. And below, on the level earth away down—were floods and stretches of snow, and I knew I was awake. But as yet my soul is cold and shaky and earthy.

I don’t feel so hopeless now I am risen. My heart has been as cold as a lump of dead earth, all this time, because of the War. But now I don’t feel so dead. I feel hopeful. I couldn’t tell you how fragile and tender this hope is—the new shoot of life. But I feel hopeful now about the War. We should all rise again from this grave—though the killed soldiers will have to wait for the last trump.

There is my autobiography—written because you ask me, and because, being risen from the dead, I know we shall all come through, rise again and walk healed and whole and new in a big inheritance, here on earth.

It sounds preachy, but I don’t quite know how to say it.

Viola Meynell has lent us this rather beautiful cottage. We are quite alone, It is at the foot of the Downs. I wish you would come and see us, and stay a day or two. It is quite comfortable—there is hot water and a bathroom, and two spare 218 bedrooms. I don’t know when we shall be able to come to London. We are too poor for excursions. But we should like to see you, and it is nice here.

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To J. B. Pinker.                              ist Feb., 1915.

Dear Pinker,—

I wish I had done that novel. I seem so long. But it will certainly be done by the end of this month, February, for I have done 450 pages out of 600 or so. Therefore tell Methuen, if he asks, that the whole will be sent in by the end of the month, and that there shall be no very flagrant love-passages in it (at least to my thinking).

Viola Meynell would like to type the MS. for me, and I think perhaps it would be safer. Will you send it to her?

Miss Viola Meynell,

2a, Granville Place, Portman Square, W.

I should feel safer if there were two copies extant of the manuscript.

Here it is rather beautiful—in fact very beautiful, and I am getting better. I was seedy in Bucks, and so black in spirit. I can even hope beyond the War now. oome day the wo id will come through, I think, and in the end will be cleaner.

I hope I am not a great deal of trouble to you with this novel, Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Margin Note.

Did you write to America about the book of short stories—or to Kennerley?

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.          Monday, 1 Feb., 1915*

Dear Lady Ottoline,—

I must write-you a line when you have gone, to tell you how my heart feels quite big with hope for the future. Almost with the remainder of tears and the last gnashing of teeth, I could sing the Magnificat for the child in my heart.

I want you to form the nucleus of a new community which shall start a new life amongst us—a life in which the only riches is integrity of character. So that each one may fulfil his own nature and deep desires to the utmost, but wherein tho', the ultimate satisfaction and joy is in the completeness of us all as one. Let us be good all together, instead of just in the privacy of our chambers, let us know that the intrinsic part of all of us is the best part, the believing part, the passionate, generous part. We can all come croppers, but what does it matter? We can laugh at each other, and dislike each other, but the good remains and we know it. And the new community shall be established upon the known, eternal good part in us. This present community consists, as far as it is a framed thing, in a myriad contrivances for preventing us from being let down by the meanness in ourselves or in our neighbours. But it is like a motor car that is so encumbered with non-skid, non-puncture, non-burst, non-this and non-that contrivances, that it simply can’t go any more. I hold this the most sacred duty—the gathering together of a number of people who shall so agree to live by the best they know, that they shall be free to live by the best they know. The ideal, the religion, must now be lived, practised. We will have no more churches. We will bring church and house and shop together. I do believe that there are enough decent people to make a start with. Let us get the people. Curse the Strachey who asks for a new religion—the greedy dog. He wants another juicy bone for his soul, does he? Let him start to fulfil what religion we have.

After the War, the soul of the people will be so maimed and so injured that it is horrible to think of. And this shall be the new hope: that there shall be a life wherein the struggle shall not be for money or for power, but for individual freedom and common effort towards good. That is surely the richest thing to have now—the feeling that one is working, that one is part of a great, good effort or of a great effort towards goodness. It is no good plastering and tinkering with this community. Every strong soul must put off its connection with this society, its vanity and chiefly its fear, and go naked with its fellows, weaponless, armourless, without shield or spear, but only with naked hands and open eyes. Not self-sacrifice, but fulfilment, the flesh and the spirit in league together not in arms against one another. And each man shall know that he is part of the greater body, each man shall submit that his own soul is not supreme even to himself. "Io be or not to be" is no longer the question. The question now is, how shall we fulfil our declaration, "God is"? For all our life is now based on the assumption that God is not—or except on rare occasions.

... We must go very, very carefully at first. The great serpent to destroy, is the will to Power: the desire for one man to have some dominion over his fellow-men. Let us have no personal influence, if possible—nor personal magnetism, as they used to call it, nor persuasion—no "Follow me"—but only "Behold." And a man shall not come to save his own soul. Let his soul go to hell. He shall come because he knows that his own soul is not the be-all and the end-all, but that all souls of all things do but compose the body of God, and that God indeed shall Be.

I do hope that we shall all of us be able to agree, that we have a common way, a common interest, not a private way and a private interest only.

It is communism based, not on poverty but on riches, not on humility but on pride, not on sacrifice but upon complete fulfilment in the flesh of all strong desire, not in Heaven but on earth. We will be Sons of God who walk here on earth, not bent on getting and having, because we know we inherit all things. We will be aristocrats, and as wise as the serpent in dealing with the mob. For the mob shall not crush us noi starve us nor cry us to death. We will deal cunningly with the mob, the greedy soul, we will gradually bring it to subjection.

We will found an order, and we will all be Princes, as the angels are.

We must bring this thing about—at least set it into life, bring it forth new-born on the earth, watched over by our old cunning and guided by our ancient, mercenary-soldier habits.

My wife sends her greetings and pledge of alliance. I shall paint you a little wooden box. Au revoir,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To J. B. Pinker.                             24 Feb., 1915.

My dear Pinker.—

Do be getting me some money, will you? I heard the wolf scratch the door to-day.

I am very, very near the end of the novel. But Miss Meynel-is somewhat behind with the typing. Is it definitely too late for spring publication? I hear how phenomenally well novels are doing. For my own part, I always shrink from having my work published. I hate the public to read it.

Do you think Methuen is ready to back up this novel of mine? He must make some fight for it. It is worth it, and he must do it. It will never be popular. But he can make it known what it is, and prevent the mean little fry from pulling it down. Later, I think I must go and see him. There will be a bit of a fight before my novels are admitted, that I know. The fight will have to be made, that is all. The field is there to conquer.

I hope your son hasn't gone to the war.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                  March, 1915.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

1 send you the next batch of the MS. There wilf only be one more lot. I hope you will like it.

Monica has a motor-car every day to drive her out, so we go too. To-day we drove to Bognor. It was strange at Bognor— a white, vague, powerful sea, with long waves falling heavily, with a crash of frosty white out of the pearly whiteness of the day, of the wide sea. And the small boats that were out in the distance heaved, and seemed to glisten shadowily. Strange the sea was, so strong. I saw a soldier on the pier, with only one leg. He was young and handsome: and strangely self-conscious, and slightly ostentatious: but confused. As yet, he does not realise anything, he is still in the shock. And he is strangely roused by the women, who seem to have a craving for him. They look at him with eyes of longing, and they want to talk to him. So he is roused, like a roused male, yet there is more wistfulness and wonder than passion or desire. I could see him under chloroform having the leg amputated. It was still in his face. But he was brown and strong and handsome.

It seemed to me anything might come out of that white, silent, opalescent sea; and the great icy shocks of foam were strange. I felt as if legions were marching in the mist. I cannot tell you why, but I am afraid. 1 am afraid of the ghosts of the dead. They seem to come marching home in legions over the white, silent sea, breaking in on us with a roar and a white iciness. Perhaps this is why I feel so afraid. I don’t know. But the land beyond looked warm, with a warm, blue sky, very homely: and over the sea legions of white ghosts tramping. I was on the pier.

So they are making a Coalition government. I cannot tell you how icy cold my heart is with fear. It is as if we were all going to die. Did I not tell you my revolution would come? It will come, God help us. I he ghosts will bring it. Why does one feel so coldly afraid? Why does even the coalition of the Government fill me with terror? Some say it is for peace negotiations. It may be, because we are all afraid. But it is most probably for conscription. The touch of death is very cold and horrible on us all.

D. H. Lawrence.

It is the whiteness of the ghost legions that is so awful.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.          Monday, 19 April, ’15.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

To-day you will be going to Buxton, through this magnificent sunshine. I almost wish it were my turn to rise up and depart. My soul is restless and not to be appeased. One walks away to another place, and life begins anew. But it is a midge life.

We have had MacQueen and David Garnett and Francis Birrell here for the week-end. When Birrell comes—tired and a bit lost and wondering—I love him. But, my God, to hear him talk sends me mad. To hear these young people talking really fills me with black fury: they talk endlessly, but endlessly —and never, never a good or real thing said. Their attitude is so irreverent and blatant. They are cased each in a hard little shell of his own, and out of this they talk words. There is never for one second any outgoing of feeling, and no reverence, not a crumb or grain of reverence. I cannot stand it. I will not have people like this—I had rather be alone. They made me dream in the night of a beetle that bites like a scorpion. But I killed it—a very large beetle. I scotched it and it ran off— but I came upon it again and killed it. It is this horror of little swarming selves that I can’t stand.

D. H. Lawpence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

Monday (date approximately To E. M. Forster-                       April, 1915).

Dear Forster,—

Don’t expect any sort of answer or attention from me to-day, because everything is so strange and I feel as if I’d just come out of the shell and hadn’t got any feathers to protect me from the weather. It is very snowy here, and rather beautiful.

, Will you come down next week-end and stay with us? I think nobody else will be here. As for my not listening to your answers, I've got a deep impression that you never made any.

I've only read one or two stories of yours, and should like very much to have the Celestial Omnibus.

This cottage is rather fine—a bit monastic—it was a cattle shed—now it is like a monks’ refectory—the whole establishment is cloistral.

I'm glad you’re not really Buddhistic—everybody said you were. I want somebody to come and make a league with me, to sing the Chanson des Chansons—das hohe Lied—and to war against the fussy Mammon, that pretends to be a tame pet now, and so devours us in our sleep.

But do come at the week-end.

D, H. Lawrence.

Greatham. Pulborough, Sussex.

To J. B. Pinker.                            23 April, 1915.

Dear Pinker,—

Miss Meynell told me you wanted the MS. of the novel. Lady Ottoline Morrell is reading it just now: she will send it on to you as she reads it.

I hope you are willing to fight for this novel. 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. So you must tell me in detail if there are real objections to printing any parts.

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 don’t like it: because he must have a nose, and his own nose, too.

Oh God, I hope I'm not going to have a miserable time over this book, now I've at last got it pretty much to its real being.

Very soon I shall have no money. I got £25 paid in the last time at the last moment. Now it is nearly gone. I depend on you to get me something.

Yours very sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                 3° April, 19I5*

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

Never mind the numbering of the pages of the MS. Just tell me the last page of this secondary numbering when you write, is it 356?—and send the batch to Pinker: Talbot House, Arundel St., Strand. I’m glad you like it.

You were quite cross with me last time, because of my elaborate theory. Never mind—don’t let us bother.

225

We went to Worthing yesterday on the motor-bus: very beautiful: even I loved Worthing: and such light, such quantities of light beating and throbbing all around. I felt like Persephone come up from hell. But to-day I would rather say, like Eurydice: jamque vale!

How dark my soul is! I stumble and grope about and don't get much further. I suppose it must be so. All the beauty and light of the days seems like an iridescence on a very black flood. Mostly one is underneath: sometimes one rises like the dove from the ark: but there is no olive branch.

What a sentimental simile: myself as a dove: a sparrow is nearer the mark.

If you are in London next week—Wednesday till Monday— we are there then, so let us go somewhere together, shall we?— to Kew or Hampton Court—London excursioners.

This is very beautiful weather. But it is going to rain. I can smell the soot in the chimney.

I wish I were going to Thibet—or Kamschatka—or Tahiti— to the ultima, ultima, ultima Thule. I feel sometimes 1 shall go mad, because there is nowhere to go, no "new world." One of these days, unless I watch myself, I shall be departing in some rash fashion, to some foolish place. . . .

I almost wish I could go to the war—not to shoot: I have vowed an eternal oath that I won’t shoot in this war, not even if I am shot. I should like to be a bus conductor at the front— anything to escape this, that is.

The death of Rupert Brooke fills me more and more with the sense of the fatuity of it all. He was slain by bright Phoebus’ shaft—it was in keeping with his general sunniness— it was the real climax of his pose. I first heard of him as a Greek god under a Japanese sunshade, reading poetry in his pyjamas, at. Grantchester,—at Grantchester upon the lawns where the river goes. Bright Phoebus smote him down. It is all in the saga.

O God, O God, it is all too much of a piece: it is like madness.

Yesterday, at Worthing, there were many soldiers. Can I ever tell you how ugly they were. "To insects-—sensual lust." I like sensual lust—but insectwise, no—it is obscene. I like men to be beasts—but insects—one insect mounted on another —oh, God! The soldiers at Worthing are like that—they remind me of lice or bugs: “to insects—sensual lust.” They will murder their officers one day. They are teeming insects. What massive creeping hell is let loose nowadays.

It isn’t my disordered imagination. There is a wagtail sitting on the gate-post. I see how sweet and swift heaven is. But hell is slow and creeping and viscous and insect-teeming: as is this Europe now, this England.

Vale!

D. H. Lawrence.

Great ham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.               i^th May, 191Z.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

When we talked in Brighton, lying on the cliff, I did not take much notice of what I said, because my subconsciousness was occupied with the idea of how pleasant it would be to walk over the edge of the cliff. There seemed another, brighter sort of world away below, and this world on top is aU torture and a flounder of stupidity. But I will write to you. ......

For yourself, you must learn to believe in God. Believe me, in the end, we will unite in our knowledge of God. Believe me, this England, we very English people, will at length join together and say, “We will not do these things, because m our knowledge of God we know them wrong.” We shall put away our greatness and our living for material things only, because we shall agree we don't want these things. We know they are inferior, base, we shall have courage to put them away. We shall unite in our knowledge of God—not perhaps in our expression of God—but in our knowledge of God: and we shall agree that we don’t want to live only to write and make riches, that England does not care only to have the greatest E mpir or the greatest commerce, but that she does care supremely for the pure truth of God, which she will try to fulfil.

This isn’t ranting, it is pure reasoning from the knowledge of God and the truth. It is not our wickedness that kills us, but our unbelief. You learn to believe in your very self, that we in England shall unite in our knowledge of God to live according to the best of our knowledge, Prime Ministers and Capitalists and artisans all working in pure effort towards God —here, to-morrow, in this England—and you will save your own soul and the soul of your son. Then there will be love enough.

You see, this change must come to pass. But nobody will believe it, however obvious it is. So it almost sends me mad, I am almost a lunatic.

Please write to me and ask me anything you like—but please do believe that the thing shall be.

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                 14 May, 1915.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

I wonder if you are still in Buxton, and if you got the last batch of MS. which I sent you, enclosed with a copy of the Jmagist Anthology which contains some of my verses. If you got them, tell me, will you?

We were in London for four days: beautiful weather, but I don’t like London. My eyes can see nothing human that is good, nowadays: at any rate, nothing public. London 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. The fashions and the women’s clothes are very ugly.

Coming back here, I find the country very beautiful. The apple trees are leaning forwards, all white with blossom, towards the green grass. I watch, in the morning when I wake up, a thrush on the wall outside the window—-not a thrush, a blackbird—and he sings, opening his beak. It is a strange thing to watch his singing, opening his beak and giving out his calls and warblings, then remaining silent. He looks so remote, so buried in primeval silence, standing there on the wall, and bethinking himself, then opening his beak to make the strange, strong sounds. He seems as if his singing were a sort of talking to himself, or of thinking aloud his strongest thoughts. I wish I was a blackbird, like him, I hate men.

“The ousel cock of sable hue

And orange-yellow bill.”

The bluebells are all out in the wood, under the new vivid leaves. But they are rather dashed aside by yesterday's rain. It would be nice if the Lord sent another flood and drowned the world. Probably I should want to be Noah. I am not sure.

I've got again into one of those horrible sleeps from which I can't wake. I can't brush it aside to wake up. You know those horrible sleeps when one is struggling to wake up, and can't. I was like it all autumn—now I am again like it. Everything has a touch of delirium, the blackbird on the wall is a delirium, even the apple-blossom. And when I see a snake winding rapidly in the marshy places, I think I am mad.

It is not a question of me, it is the world of men. I he world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up.

When I read of the Lusitania, and of the riots in London, J know it is so. I think soon we must get up and try to stop it. Let us wait a little longer. hen when we cannot bear it any longer, we must try to wake up the world of men, which has gone mad in its sleep.

I cannot bear it much longer, to let the mauness get trc nger and stronger possession. Soon we in England shaJ go -mad, with hate. I too hate the Germans so much, I could kill every one of them. Why should they goad us to this xy of hatred, why should we be tortured to madness, w he we are only grieved in our souls, and heavy hey will drive our heaviness and our grief away in a fury c ig don't want to be worked up into this fury, this destruct madness of rage. Yet we must, we are goaded on and on. I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a mill two millions

I wonder when we shall see you again, and where you are. I have promised to stay here for another month at least, to teach Mary Saleeby. Her mother has a nervous breakdown, and they asked me to teach the child. I do it for the child's sake, for nothing else. So my mornings are taken up, for hours each day.

Don't take any notice of my extravagant talk—one must say something. Write soon and tell us where you are, and how you are. I feel a little bit anxious about you, when you do not write.

Vale!

D. II. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough.

To J. B, Pinker.                           zi May, 1915.

Dear Pinker,—

In response to the wire from E. Garnett, I send you the final batch of MS. of the Rainbow. One or two little things: you will see the pages are not numbered: we all lost count after a certain point. Will you let somebody number the pages: also see that they run on, that none of the MS. is missing: also please see that the chapters are correctly numbered.

1 hope you will like the book: also that it is not very improper. It did not seem to me very improper, as I went through it. But then I feel very incompetent to judge, on that point.

My beloved book, I am sorry to give it to you to be printed. I could weep tears in my heart, when I read these pages. If I had my way, 1 would put off the publishing yet awhile.

One other little tiling: I want on the fly-leaf, in German characters, the inscription “Zu Else”—i.e.,

Zu else

Put that in for me, will you? It is just "To Else.” But it must be in Gothic letters.

We shall have peace by the time this book is published.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                Monday.

Dear Lady Ottoline,—

Please don’t call me "Mr." any more, call me Lawrence.

I always feel very sad and guilty for trailing you so far on the Downs and making you so tired. I hope you didn’t really feel any the worse for it afterwards.

We are most excited thinking of the cottage, which is to be called our cottage. I don’t want actually to own :t—ownership always makes me sad, there is something so limited and jealous in it—but I want to call it mine. But please don’t let it cost you a great deal, on our behalf, or I shall be miserable and feel responsible again.

I have been reading Van Gogh—very sad. He couldn’t get out of the trap, poor man, so he went mad. One can see it so plainly, what he wanted. He wanted that there should be a united impulse of all men in the fulfilment of one idea as in Giotto’s and Cimabue's time. But in this world there is as yet only chaos. So he struggled to add one more term to the disorderly accumulation of knowledge. But it was not living. It was submitting himself to a process of reduction, which sent him mad. To live, we must all unite, and bring all the knowledge into a coherent whole, we must all set to for the joining together of the multifarious parts, we must knit all words together into a great new utterance, we must cast all personalities into the melting pot, and give a new Humanity its birth. Remember, it is not anything personal we want any more any of us. It is not honour nor personal satisfaction, it is the incorporation in the great impulse whereby a great people shall come into being, a free race as well as a race of free indit iduals. The individual is now more free than the race. His race hurts him and cribs him in. No one man can create a new ice. I needs all of us. So we must all unite for this purpose. It makes me quite glad to think how splendid it will be, when more and more of us fasten our hands on the chains, and pull, and pull, and break them apart.

One must always destroy the old Moloch of greediness > love of property and love of power. But think what a splendid world we shall have, when each man shall seek joy and understanding rather than getting and having.

Don’t think that 1 am important. But this thing which is of all of us is so important and splendid that the skies shiver with delight when it is mentioned. And don’t be sceptical. We are the young. And it is only the young who can know a great cause.

Bertrand Russell wrote to me. I feel a real hastening of love to him. Only wait. I am coming to London on Friday, Frieda and I both—then I go to Cambridge on Saturday— Frieda stays in London, then we come back to Greatham on Monday afternoon. I will come without Frieda, to tea or to lunch one day, and she will come without me, to see you. There is no reason why we should always be a triangle.

Why don't you have the pride of your own intrinsic self? Why must you tamper with the idea of being an ordinary physical woman—wife, mother, mistress. Primarily, you are none of these things. Primarily, you belong to a special type, a special race of women: like Cassandra in Greece, and some of the great woman saints. They were the great media of truth, of the deepest truth: through them, as through Cassandra, the truth came as through a fissure from the depths and the burning darkness that lies out of the depth of time. It is necessary for this great type to re assert itself on the face of the earth. It is not the salon lady and the blue stocking—it is not the critic and judge, but the priestess, the medium, the prophetess. Do you know Cassandra in TEschylus and Homer? She is one of the world's great figures, and what the Greeks and Agamemnon did to her is symbolic of what mankind has done to her since— raped and despoiled and mocked her, to their own ruin. It is not your brain you must trust to, nor your will—but to that fundamental pathetic faculty for receiving the hidden waves that come from the depths of life, and for transferring them to the unreceptive world. It is something which happens below the consciousness, and below the range of the will—it is something which is unrecognised and frustrated and destroyed.

I am glad you are going away into the country. There you must put away this temporary life, and give yourself to the dream of the new life, the dream of the greater truth, the pro-foundest wisdom. Because passion is not in heat, but in deep, deep strength and profundity of source. The source of passion is the burning darkness which quickens the whole ball of this earth, from the centre, it is not the bonfire built upon the surface, which is this man or that. But the dark fire, the hidden, invisible passion, that has neither flame nor heat, that is the greatest of all passion.

Please don’t mind me when I am stupid or impertinent. It is all so difficult for us each one to be his intrinsic self, each one of us to be the angel of liimself in a big cause. We are the animals of ourselves also, but that when we are single, not when we are together, holding hands for the big cause.

I see Van Gogh so sadly. If he could only have set the angel of himself clear in relation to the animal of himself, clear and distinct but always truly related, in harmony and union, he need not have cut off his ear and gone mad. But he said, do you remember—about "in the midst of an artistic life the yearning for the real life remains"—“one offers no resistance, neither does one resign oneself’—he means to the yearning to procreate oneself "with other horses, also free." This is why he went mad. He should either have resigned himself and lived his animal "other horses”—and have seen if his art would come out of that—or he should have resisted, like Fra Angelico. But best of all, if he could have known a great humanity, where to live one’s animal would be to create oneself, in fact, be the artist creating a man in living fact (not like Christ, as he wrongly said)—and where the art was the final expression of the created animal or man—not the be-all and being of man— but the end, the climax. And some men would end in artistic utterance, and some wouldn’t. But each one would create the work of art, the living man, achieve that piece of supreme art, a man’s life.

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough,

Sussex,

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.              Thursday.

Dear Lady Ottoline,—

. . . We shall be most glad to have a place we can always come to. And if you have need of the cottage, you will tell us at once. I know I shall be restless all my life. If I had a house and home I should become wicked. I hate any thought of possessions sticking on to me like barnacles, at once I fee! destructive. And wherever I am, after a while I begin to ail me to go away.

I believe you, that love is all. But it is not easy. If I love a man, and a dog bites him, I must hate the dog. But if I must love the dog? And if I love my fellow-men, how must I feel, say, about Cambridge? Must I take hope and faith? But if I have toothache I don’t depend on hope nor faith nor love, but on surgery. And surgery is pure hate of the defect in the loved thing. And it is surgery we want, Cambridge wants, England wants, I want. There is in us what the common people call "proud flesh”—-i.e., mortified flesh: which must be cut out; it cannot be kissed out, nor hoped out, nor removed by faith. It must be removed by surgery. And it is in us now, "proud flesh.”

I thought the war would surgeon us. Still it may. But this England at home is as yet entirely unaffected, entirely unaware of the mortification in its own body. It takes a dodge to protect its own fester from being touched: preserve your ill from touch or knowledge: that is the motto.

If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” It has all been said before, plainly. It is all there, for every man to hear. But if no man wants to hear?—will cajolery or the toleration of love affect him? Curse him, let him die, and let us look to the young. 1 hat is all the faith and hope one can have—or even love.

Our love to you.

D. H. Lawrence.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Greatham, Pulborough.

Monday.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

Why, then, are you both so downcast, both you and Russell? What is the use of being downcast, when there is so much to be done? What ails Russell is, in matters of life and emotion, the inexperience of youth. He is, vitally, emotionally, much too inexperienced in personal contact and conflict, for a man of his age and calibre. It isn't that life has been too much for him, but too little. Tell him he is not to write lachrymose letters to me of disillusion and disappointment and age: that sounds like 19, almost like David Garnett. Tell him he is to get up and clench his fist in the face of the world. Really, he is too absurdly young in his pessimism, almost juvenile.

... I want us to have a real meeting at Garsington: Russell, the Carmans, ourselves, to discuss propaganda.

I don’t mean a “tyranny" in the state: but I don’t believe in the democratic electorate. The working man is not fit to elect the ultimate government of the country. And the holding of office shall not rest upon the choice of the mob: it shall be almost immune from them.

I shall write all my philosophy again. Last time I came out cf the Christian Camp. This time I must come out of these early Greek philosophers. I am so sure of what I know, and what is true, now that I am sure I am stronger, in the truth, in the knowledge I have, than all the world outside that knowledge. So I am not finally afraid of anything.

The war is resolving itself into a war between Labour and Capital. Unless real leaders step forward, to lead in the light of a wide-embracing philosophy, there will be another French Revolution muddle. We shall never finish our fight with Germany. The fight will shift to England. And we must be ready in time to direct the way, to win with the truth.

We shall see you in a very short time. Then we shall begin.

. . . Don’t be melancholy, there isn’t time.

Love,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex,

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.   Tuesday (Postmark i June, 15).

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

... I must come and look at Garsington. I want very much to come.

It is beautiful also here: on the top of the Downs a whole fire of gorse—very fine.

I dreamed last night that all the stars were moving out of the sky. It was awful. Orion in particular went very fast, the other stars in a disorderly fashion, but all trooping out of the sky, in haste, to the left hand. And some of them low down, took fire. I was very terrified, more terrified than I have ever been. There became a smoke and a burning.

Now' read my dream, you who should be a prophetess.

D H. Lawrence.

We aren’t so very badly off yet. They didn’t make me a bankrupt-—it is still in the air. But I was examined—I hated it. When I am in need I shall take your money, gratefully. We didn’t get the rooms in Hampstead after all.—D. H. L.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.               Thursday.

Dear Lady Ottoline,—

I send you so much of my novel as is typed. It is perhaps one-half or one-third of the whole—one-third, I should say.

I know you will take care of the MS. Let Russell read it if he wants to. And tell me very plainly what you think. I really do like criticism.

When are you coining to see us? At last, to-day, all our visitors are gone away. I have been in bed for three days. My old cold that I have had so long never really gets better, and occasionally comes full tilt back again. It is a sort of cold in the stomach: it feels like a sore throat in the middle of one’s belly—very horrid and tiring and irritating. I am afraid this house is damp. Frieda has had a very bad raw cold for the last two weeks again. I think soon we shall move from here— because of the dampness. When will Garsington be ready for us to come?

I o-day I have begun again my philosophy—Morgenrot is my new name for it. I feel as if I can do it now. God preserve me from getting out of my depths.

Had you read my play before I sent it you? Tell me if you like it. Nobody sends us letters nowadays.

Love from Frieda and me to you.

D. H. Lawrence.

I have just read Brailsford on Shelley and Godwin—very good. I like Brailsford. Can I meet him? I still don’t like Strachey—his French literature neither—words—literature— bore.

Do you notice that Shelley believed in the principle of evil, coeval with the principle of good. That is right. Have you got a Chapman’s Homer or a Brothers Karamazov to lend me? I beg and implore you not to buy either if you haven’t got it. I shall bring your other books to Garsington, if not to London— all of them.

My novel is so good—please have patience with it.

I have had a great struggle with the Powers of Darkness lately. 1 think I have just got the better of them again. Don’t tell me there is no Devil; there is a Prince of Darkness. Sometimes I wish I could let go and be really wicked—kill and murder—but kill chiefly. I do want to kill. But I want to select whom I shall kill. Then I shall enjoy it. The war is no good. It is this black desire I have become conscious of. We cant so much about goodness—it is canting. Cell Russell he does the same—let him recognise the powerful malignant will in him.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex. To Lady Ottoline Morrell.             Wednesday.

My dear LADY Ottoline,—

Thank you very much for the books and your letter. You shouldn't say you are afraid of writing dull things. hey are not dull. The feeling that comes out of your letter is like the

scent of flowers, so generous and reassuring. It is no good now, thinking that to understand a man from his own point of view is to be happy about him. I can imagine the mind of a rat, as it slithers along in the dark, pointing its sharp nose. But I can never feel happy about it, I must always want to kill it. It contains a principle of evil. There is a principle of evil. Let us acknowledge it once and for ail. I saw it so plainly in-----, it made me sick. I am sick with the know

ledge of the prevalence of evil, as if it were some insidious disease.

I have been reading Dostoievsky’s Idiot. I don’t like Dostoievsky. He is again like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and, in order to belong to the light, professing love, all love. But his nose is sharp with hate, his running is shadowy and rat-like, he is a will fixed and gripped like a trap. He is not nice.

The Cannans are here. I must say I rather love them Strangely enough, I feel a real, unalterable power for good in Gilbert. But he is very crude, very shockingly undisciplined, and consequently inarticulate. He is not very passionate. But he is a power for good, nevertheless, and I like him to be with us. Mary is rather nice too: she is rather a dear: but shallow. I like Gilbert, I am glad of his existence,

Bertie Russell will come next Thursday, to stay till Saturday. Will you let us know when you will come? You choose your own day.

Love from Frieda and me.

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex, To Lady Ottoline Morrell.               Sunday.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

I send you what is done of my philosophy. Tell me what you think, exactly.

Bertie Russell is here. I feel rather glad at the bottom, because we are rallying to a point. I do want him to work in the knowledge of the Absolute, in the knowledge of eternity.

238

He will—apart from philosophical mathematics—be so temporal, so immediate. He won’t let go, he won’t act in the eternal things, when it comes to men and life. He is coming to have a real, actual, logical belief in Eternity, and upon this he can work: a belief in the absolute, an existence in the Infinite. It is very good and I am very glad.

We think to have a lecture hall in London in the autumn, and give lectures: he on Ethics, I on Immortality: also to have meetings, to establish a little society or body around a religious belief, which leads to action. We must centre in the knowledge of the Infinite, of God. Then from this centre each one of us must work to put the temporal things of our own natures and of our own circumstances in accord with the Eternal God we know. You must be president. You must preside over our meetings. You must be the centre-pin that ho ds us together, and the needle which keeps our direction constant, always towards the Eternal thing. We mustn t lapse into temporality.

Murry must come in, and Gilbert—and perhaps Campbell. We can all lecture, at odd times. Murry has a genuine: side to his nature: so has Mrs. Murry. Don't mistrust them. I .e f are valuable, I know.

We must have some meetings at Garsington. Garsington must be the retreat where we come together and knit ourselves together. Garsington is wonderful for that. It is like the Boccaccio place where they told all the Decamerone. I hat wonderful lawn, under the ilex trees, with the old house and its exquisite old front—it is so remote, so perfectly a small world to itself, where one can get away from the tempor things to consider the big things. We must draw toget er. Russell and I have really got somewhere. We must bring le Murrys in. Don’t be doubtful of them; and Frieda will come round soon. It is the same thing with her as with .11 the Germans—all the world—she hates the Infinite immor tality. But she will come round.           ...

I know what great work there is for us all to do in the autumn and onwards. Mind you keep your strength for it and we must really put aside the smaller personal things, and realij 1 together in the big impersonal world as well: that must be our real place of assembly, the immortal world, the heaven of the great angels.

Send my philosophy on to Gilbert, will you? And tell me if you like it.

Don’t be sad. We are only sad for a little while. At the bottom one knows the eternal things, and is glad.

My love to Julian and to you. My warm regards to Morrell— remember me to Maria, and to Miss Sands, and Miss Hudson.

I trust in you entirely in this eternal belief.

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough, Sussex.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.            9 July, 1915.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

I wonder if you got the boxes I sent off the other day, and if you like them. I wonder if this queer unsettled weather affects your health. I hope you are well.

I am just going to London for the week-end to see about furnishing the flat. Frieda has been up for several days. We should come back on Sunday evening. I shall see Russell and we shall talk about the scheme of lectures. He sent me a synopsis of a set of lectures on Political Ideas. But as yet he stands too much on the shore of this existing world. He must get into a boat and preach from out of the waters of eternity, if he is going to do any good. But I hope he isn’t angry with me.

There are three weeks more here: three weeks to-day I have finished. Then I go to London, and we come to Garsington. I feel, when we leave here, there is the entry upon a new epoch. I am quite afraid, I feel as if I would run away—I don’t know from what. But one can’t run away from fate. The thought of fate makes me grin in my soul with pleasure: I am so glad it is inevitable, even if it bites off my nose.

I have broken down in the middle of my philosophy—I suppose I shall go on later when I am freer. I am correcting the proofs of the Rainbow. Whatever else it is, it is the voyage of discovery towards the real and eternal and unknown land. We are like Columbus, we have our backs upon Europe, till we come to the new world.

I must go now to teach the child—in three weeks we leave here, it is finished.

Au revoir,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulboroagh.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                Monday.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

I was in London this week- end for two days. Bertie Russell told me about your eyes. I was very sorry. You must keep very still, and not think about troublesome things. I wish I could have come to Oarsington. But I can't neglect my teaching, for the short time longer it lasts.

... I rather quarrelled with Russell’s lectures. He won't accept in his philosophy the Infinite, the Boundless, the Eternal, as the real starting point, and I think, whosoever will really set out on the journey towards Truth and the real end must do this now. But I didn't quarrel with him. We have almost sworn Blutbruderschaft. We will set out together, he and I. We shall really be doing something, in the autumn. I want you to believe always.

As for my philosophy, I shall write it again. And we will talk about it when I see you.

... I really think I shall give some lectures on Eternity. I shrink from it very much. I am very shy, publicly. I hate publicity of all sorts. I am safe and remote, when I write. It will be horrible to stand up and say the things I feel most vitally before an audience. But I think it must be done. I think I shall do it. I don’t know. There is a little fog between me and the autumn. I must wait for the impulse really to be born. But I think I shall be speaking. God help me, I would rather have done anything else. I would like to be remote, in Italy, writing my soul’s words. I o have to speak in re body is a violation to me—you don’t know how much. However, anything for the new infinite relation that must come to pass.

ValeI

D. H. Lawrence

Greatham, Pulborough.

To J. B. Pinker.                             26 July, 1915.

Dear Pinker,

I send you back the slips and pages. I have cut out, as I said I would, all the phrases objected to. The passages and paragraphs marked I cannot alter. There is nothing offensive in them, beyond the very substance they contain. And that is no more offensive than that of all the rest of the novel. 1 he libraries won’t object to the book any less, or approve of it any more, if these passages are cut out. And I can’t cut them out, because they are living parts of an organic whole. Those who object, will object to the book altogether. These bits won’t affect them particularly.

Tell Methuen, he need not be afraid. If the novel doesn’t pay him back this year, it will before very long. Does he expect me to be popular? 1 shan't be that. But I am a safe speculation for a publisher.

These slips and pages I return to you are not revised proofs. I am now at page 192 of the revised proofs, the final form, and I must go on from there.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.             29 July, 1915.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

We are going down to Littlehampton to-morrow to the sea for a few days. I feel I want to be blown and washed and to forget. We were at Littlehampton on Sunday; the Radfords are there, also Lady Cynthia was there. We had a very good bathe, very good indeed. There was a strong wind that never ceased, and the waves came travelling high—much water travelling heavily and swinging one away. It was very good indeed.

3ertie*s letters chagrined me. Are we never going to unite in one idea and one purpose? Is it to be a case of each one of us having his own personal and private fling? That is nothing. If we are going to remain a group of separate entities separately engaged, then there is no reason why we should be a group at all. We are just individualists. And individuals do not vitally concern me any more. Only a purpose vitally concerns me, not individuals—neither my own individual self, nor any other. I want very much to come to Garsington if we are going to be a little group filled with one spirit and striving for one end. But if we are going to be a little set of individuals each one concerned with himself and his own personal fling at the world, I can't bear it. . . . The postman is here.

Au revoir,

D. H. Lawrence.

Greatham, Pulborough. To Lady Cynthia Asquith.              Wednesday.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I wish you would send me a p.c. to tell me what number you are, S. Parade, Littlehampton, as I quite forget.

Also may I bring Viola Meynell to the tea-party, as she would like to come, because she thinks you are the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. It always irritates me, this talk of “a beautiful woman." There is something so infinitely more important in you than your beauty. Why do you always ignore the realest thing in you, this hard, stoic, elemental sense of logic and truth? that is your real beauty.

I think I should like-------very much. But I doubt if she’s

got the quality of absoluteness there is in you—or not so much of it. I hope, after the war, we may have a real revolution. I want the whole form of government changing. ! don t be ieve in the democratic (republican) form of election. I think the artisan is fit to elect for his immediate surroundings, but for no ultimate government. The electors for the highest place should be the governors of the bigger districts—the whole thing should work upwards, every man voting for that which he more or less understands through contact no canvassing of mass votes.

And women shall not vote equally with the men, but for different things. Women must govern such things as the feeding and housing of the race. And if a system works up to a Dictator who controls the greater industrial side of the national life, it must work up to a Dictatrix who controls the things relating to private life. And the women shall have absolutely equal voices with regard to marriage, custody of children, etc.

There will inevitably come a revolution during the next ten years. I only don't want the democratic party to get the control. We must not have Labour in power, any more than Capital.

I want you to agree to these things, vitally: because we must prepare the way for this in the autumn.

D. H. Lawrence.

And don’t be conservative about the land—after all, what does it matter if one owns a land or not—the life cannot consist in ownership. Life does not consist in ownership, not for any of us, any more. D. H. L.

12, Bay ford Rd., Littlehampton.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell. Bank Holiday Monday, 1915.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

We are here till Wednesday or Friday of this week. Then we go to London to our flat.

It is very blowy, with a heavy sea: very beautiful to see the sailing-ship beat up, with only her top-sails spread, very nervous and phantom-hke, till she is in the river, safe, gliding in, and the sailors, very easy now, standing with their arms folded, leaning against the yellow timber, and looking up at the people on the banks.

We are going to Chichester to-day, to the cathedral. I am very fond of Sussex—it is so full of sky and wind and weather.

I think things come right, if one can manage to persist, or to keep one's soul living and unbroken. What a struggle. But we will have a meeting soon, and make a new start. It is no use meeting unless we are in a good ready spirit. When we are sure, then we will make a new start. It is to be done. We’ve got to get our own souls ready. 1 have many periods of revulsion, when I don’t care a broken straw about the things I care most for, at another time. One can only say, “Now, I don’t care. Very good, I don’t care. If I care again, I shall care again. Come sard sardIt is like a tide in one’s soul. And one’s will is like King Canute. Come sard sard. But it will be all right.

Au revoir,

D. H. Lawrence.

Littlehampton.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.                      Tuesday.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We have lived a few days on the seashore, with the wave banging up at us. Also over the river, beyond the ferry, there is the flat silvery world, as in the beginning, untouched: with pale sand, and very much white foam, row after row, coming from under the sky, in the silver evening: and no people, no people at all, no houses, no buildings, only a haystack on the edge of the shingle, and an old black mill. For the rest, the flat unfinished world running with foam and noise and silvery light, and a few gulls swinging like a half-born thought. It is a great thing to realise that the original world is still there—perfectly clean and pure, many white advancing foams, and only the gulls swinging between the sky and the shore; and in the wind the yellow sea poppies fluttering very hard, like yellow gleams in the wind, and the windy flourish of the seed-horns.

It is this mass of unclean world that we have superimposed on the clean world that we cannot bear. When I looked back, out of the clearness of the open evening, at this Littlehampton dark and amorphous like a bad eruption on the edge of the land, I was so sick I felt I could not come back: all these little amorphous houses like an eruption, a disease on the clean earth; and all of them full of such a diseased spirit, every landlady harping on her money, her furniture, every visitor harping on his latitude of escape from money and furniture. The whole thing like an active disease, fighting out the health. One watches them on the sea-shore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished that their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too horrible. One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away. . . .

One must destroy the spirit of money, the blind spirit of possession. It is the dragon for your St. George: neither rewards on earth nor in heaven, of ownership: but always the give and take, the fight and the embrace, no more, no diseased stability of possessions, but the give and take of love and conflict, with the eternal consummation in each. The only permanent thing is consummation in love or hate.

D» H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale 0/ Health, Hampstead, N.W.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.               16 August, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We also waited at Appenrodt’s till 5.30: you must have gone to the wrong one. Bad luck.

I am sorry that gloom tumbles on top of gloom with you. But the dead are the only people one need not fret about nowadays.

The Lectures you ask about. I don’t know if they will ever begin. I don’t see how I am to start. Russell and I were to do something together. He was to give a real course on political reconstruction ideas. But it is no good. He sent me a synopsis of the lectures, and I can only think them pernicious. And now his vanity is piqued, because I said they must be different. He cannot stand the must, and yet they must be different, if they are to be even decent.

I am so sick of people: they preserve an evil, bad, separating spirit under the warm cloak of good words. That is intolerable in them. The Conservative talks about the old and glorious national ideal, the Liberal talks about this great struggle for right in which the nation is engaged, the peaceful women talk about disarmament and international peace. Bertie Russell talks about democratic control and the educating of the artisan, and all this, all this goodness, is just a warm and cosy cloak for a bad spirit. They all want the same thing: a continuing in this state of disintegration wherein each separate little ego is an independent little principality by itself. What does Russell really want? He wants to keep his own established ego, his finite and ready-defined self intact, free from contact and connection. He wants to be ultimately a free agent. That is what they all want, ultimately—that is what is at the back of all international peace-for-ever and democratic control talks they want an outward system of nullity, which they call peace and goodwill, so that in their own souls they can be independent little gods, referred nowhere and to nothing, little mortal Absolutes, secure from question. That is at the back of all Liberalism, Fabianism and democracy. It stinks. It is the will of the louse. And the Conservative either wants to bully or to be bullied. And the young authoritarian, the young man who turns Roman Catholic in order to put himself under the authority of the Church, in order to enjoy the Esthetic quality of obedience, he is such a swine with cringing hind-quarters, that I am delighted, I dance with joy when I see him rushing down the Gadarene slope of the war.

I feel like knocking my head against the wall: or of running off to some unformed South American place where there is no thought of civilised effort. I suppose I could learn to ride a horse and live just by myself for myself.

But it is too bad, it is too mean, that they are all so pettily selfish, these good people who sacrifice themselves. I want them—just Russell, or Murry—anybody—to say: I his is wrong, we are acting in a wrong spirit. We have created a great, almost overwhelming incubus of falsity and ugliness on top of us, so that we are almost crushed to death. Now let us move it. Let us have done with this foolish form of government, and this idea of democratic control. Let us submit to the knowledge that there are aristocrats and plebeians born, not made. Some amongst us are born fit to govern, and some are born only fit to be governed. Some are born to be artisans and labourers, some to be lords and governors. But it is not a question of tradition or heritage. It is a question of the incontrovertible soul. If we have right spirit, even the most stupid of us will know how to choose our governors, and in that way we shall give the nucleus of our classes. There are such falsities of distinction now. Let us get rid of them.

It is a question of the spirit. Why are we a nation? We are a nation which must be built up according to a living idea, a great architecture of living people, which shall express the greatest truth of which we are capable. There must be King and Queen, and Lords and Ladies, and Burghers and Burgesses, and Servants: but not ———----- and  ----------> not

Lord---— or Earl -------(or-------) or-------. It

is a question of spirit even more than of intelligence. A bad spirit in a nation chooses a bad spirit in a governor. We must begin to choose all afresh, for the pure, great truth. We must have a new King, who stands for the truth, and a new Queen, a House of Lords and a House of Ladies, but lords of the spirit and the knowledge, and ladies the same. If we have a right spirit, then our Lords and our Ladies will appear, as the flowers come forth from nowhere in the spring. If we continue in our bad spirit, we shall have Horatio Bottomley for our Prime Minister before a year is out.

We must rid ourselves of this ponderous incubus of falsehood, this massive London, with its streets and streets of nullity: we must, with one accord and in purity of spirit, pull it down and build up a beautiful thing. We must rid ourselves of the idea of money. A rich man with a beautiful house is like a jewel on a leper’s body. You know that. Your Stanway is a jewel on a leper’s body: so near to Burslem, Hanley and Stoke and Wolverhampton. Our business is not in jewellery, but in the body politic. You know that. What good is it to a sick, unclean man, if he wears jewels.

I hope you are with me in this. Russell says I cherish illusions, that there is no such spirit as I like to imagine, the spirit of unanimity in truth, among mankind. He says that is fiction. Murry says that the spirit matters, but that an idea is bad. He says he believes in what I say, because he believes in me, he might help in the work I set out to do because he would be believing in me. But he would not believe in the work. He would deplore it. He says the whole thing is personal: that between him and me it is a case of Lawrence and Murry, not of any union in an idea. He thinks the introduction of any idea, particularly of any political idea, highly dangerous and deplorable. The thing should be left personal, each man just expressing himself. Frieda says things are not so bad as I pretend, that people are good, that life is also good, that London is also good, and that this civilisation is great and wonderful. She thinks if the war were over, things would be pretty well all right.

But they are all wrong.

I’ve got a real bitterness in my soul, just now, as if-------

and —----were traitors—they are traitors. They betray the

real truth. They come to me, and they make me talk, and they enjoy it, it gives them a profoundly gratifying sensation. And that is all. As if what I say were meant only to give them gratification, because of the flavour of personality, as if I were a cake or a wine or a pudding. Then they say I, D. H. L., am wonderful, I am an exceedingly valuable personality, and hat the things I say are extravaganzas, illusions. They say I cannot think.

All that is dynamic in the world, they convert to a sensation, to the gratification of what is static. They are static, static, static, they come, they say to me, - ou are wond rful, you are dynamic,” then they filch my life for a sensation unto themselves, all my effort, which is my life, they betray, they are like Judas: they turn it all to their own static selves, convert it into the static nullity. The result is for them a gratifying sensation, a tickling, and for me a real bleeding.

But I know them now, which is enough.

I don’t know how to begin to lecture or write, publicly, these things of the real truth and the living spirit. Everything is so awful and static, so large and ponderous, like the physical mass of London lying on the plain of south England. And one must shift that mass: it is the mountain that faith must move. I do believe there are people who wait for the spirit of truth. But I think one can’t find them personally. I had hoped and tried to get a little nucleus of living people together. But I think it is no good. One must start direct with the open public, without associates. But how to begin, and when, I don’t know yet.

I hope you don’t mind having all this fired off at you. I half feel I ought not to send it. But I intend to send it.

Only, I don’t want any friends, except the friends who are going to act, put everything-—or at any rate, put something into the effort by bringing about a new unanimity among us, a new movement for the pure truth, an immediate destruction—and reconstructive revolution in actual life, England, now.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

x, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, N.W.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            5th September, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I think you did not like my last letter. But I don’t know that I am any the better for your rebuke. My soul is still fizzling savagely.

We are thinking—Murry and Mrs. Murry and I, primarily, of issuing a little paper, fortnightly, to private subscribers— 2/6 for three months (6 copies) including postage. Perhaps Bertie Russell and Gilbert Carman will come in. I don’t know.

We have a little Jew in the East End, who is engaged on the Jewish Encyclopaedia. He will print us 250 copies, of 28 pages, of 36 lines, for £5; or 36 pages for £6. It will be about the same size as the Mercure de France, but 28 or 36 pages thick. If it is 28 pages thick, that costs £30 for three months: 250 half-crowns is just £31.5.0. So we must get 250 subscribers. You must subscribe and find one or two people who care about the real living truth of things: for God’s sake, not people who only trifle and don’t care.

I am going to do the preaching—sort of philosophy—the beliefs by which one can reconstruct the world: Murry will do his ideas on freedom for the individual soul, Katherine Mansfield will do her little satirical sketches. Then there is perhaps Bertie Russell and Cannan.

I hope you are interested. As for Lectures, I have quarrelled in my soul with Bertie Russell—I don’t think he will give his. I shall do nothing at all in that line. The sight of the people of London strikes me into a dumb fury. The persistent nothingness of the war makes me feel like a paralytic convulsed with rage. Meanwhile I am writing a book of sketches, or preparing a book of sketches, about the nations, Italian, German and English, full of philosophising and struggling to show things real. My head feels like a hammer that keeps hammering on a nail. The only thing I know is, that the hammer is tougher than the nail, in the long run. It is not I who will break.

The novel comes out on the 30th of this month. I will send you a copy. Presently you will be bored with my I, I, and my, my.

Tell us how you are, and what you are doing. Mind you help with our paper. I think it is to be called The s ignature. Frieda sends her love. She hates me for the present. But 1 shall not go to the war.

D. H. Lawrence.

1, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, N.W,

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                  9 Sept., T9¹5*

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

One can’t help the silences that intervene nowadays, it must be so. But I think they are times when new things are born, and like winter, when trees are rid of their old leaves, to start again. It is the New Year one wants so badly: let the old die altogether, completely. It is only the new spring I care about, opening the hard little buds that seem like stone, in the souls of people. They must open and a new world begin. But first there is the shedding of the old, which is sb slow and so difficult, like a sickness. I find it is so difficult to let the old life go, and to wait for the new life to take form. But it begins to take form now. It is not any more such a fierce question of shedding away.

1 always want us to be friends, real friends in the deep, honourable, permanent sense. But it is very difficult for me to be clear and true to my deepest self. We must allow first of all for the extreme lapses in ourselves. But the little hard buds of a new world are not destroyed. I do believe in our permanent friendship, something not temporal.

Russell and I have parted for a little while, but it is only in the natural course. The real development continues even in its negation, under the winter.

For the present, Murry and I are going to start a little paper, which is to contain his ideas of immediate personal freedom, what it means for me to reel free in my own soul, when I am alone: and I am to write my ideas of the other, the impersonal freedom, the freedom of me in relation to all the world, me and all the world, a free thing. Then Mrs. Murry is to write a satirical sketch, perhaps each number.

We begin in October. Then for three months I shall work hard, and not mind if people are sterile or stones. Then at the end of three months we shall reconsider what is done and what is to be done.

I should want you to subscribe the 2/6, and to get me anybody you know who cares. I only want the people who care. It is not a matter even of making the thing pay. I am quite willing to lose. I am weary of the consideration of money. If I have nothing, I will ask people for a piece of bread. But I believe that one does not lack—it is like the prophet in the wilderness.

Our coming to see you depends on us all three, you and me and Frieda. When we all want it, to make the new thing, the new world that is to be, then we will come. And I should very much like you to see our flat here.

Last night when we were coming home the guns broke out, and there was a noise of bombs. Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds: high up, like

a bright golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it Were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes near the ground—and the shaking noise. It was like Milton— then there was war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden Zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up. It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order, a new heaven above us: and as if the world in anger were trying to revoke it. Then the small, long-ovate luminary, the new world in the heavens, disappeared again.

I cannot get over it, that the moon is not queen of the sky by night, and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith of the night, golden like the moon, having taken control of the sky; and the bursting shells are the lesser lights.

So it seems our cosmos has burst, 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. So it is the end—our world is gone, and we are like dust in the air.

But there must be a new heaven and a new earth, a clearer, eternal moon above, and a clean world below. So it will be.

Everything is burst away now, there remains only to take on a new being.

I look forward to seeing you again. Frieda will write to you soon. Remember me to Morrell and to Julian. . . .

I should like the Murrys to be with us at Oarsington one day. And let us all have patience with each other: though I’m the worst for patience.

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                 J4 dept., §915.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

I send you a few leaflets about our paper. If you or Morrell 253

could get a few people, who really care, tc take it, I should be very glad. But only people who care about this life now and in the future.

To day I wrote very violently to Russell. I am glad, because it had to be said some time. But also I am very sorry, and feel like going into a corner to cry, as I used to do when 1 was a child. But there seems so much to cry for, one doesn't know where to begin. And then, damn it all, why should ones

Viele Grasse,

I). H. Lawrence

Tell those two American ladies, near you, whom I went to see, that I expect them to have my paper, because of what it says.

if Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To W. E. Hopkin.                        14 Sept., 1915.

My dear Willie,—

We have taken a little flat here, and are to spend the winter in town. If ever you can get up to London, you or Sallie, or Enid, we can rig you up a bed. We shall be very glad to see you.

I send you some leaflets about our paper. It is a rash venture. We are desperately poor, but we must do something, so we are taking the responsibility of this little journal on ourselves, Murry and I, and also we are going to have meetings in a room in town—12, Fisher St.—which we have taken. Heaven knows what will come of it: but this is my first try at direct approach to the public: art after all is indirect and ultimate. I want this to be more immediate.

Get me a few people in Sheffield, will you—people who care vitally about the freedom of the soul—a few people anywhere—but only those who really care. Ask Sallie to write to Mrs. Dax—I would rather not open a correspondence with her again, after so long a silence; though I like her, and always shall feel her an integral part of my life; but that is in the past, and the future is separate. Yet I want her to have this paper, which will contain my essential beliefs, the ideas I struggle with. And perhaps she—Alice Dax—will ask one or two people in Liverpool, Blanche Jennings, for instance. You see I want to initiate, if possible, a new movement for real life and real freedom. One can but try.

I wish we could meet and talk. Soon I shall go to Ripley. Perhaps you will come to London. I send you the proofs of a story that is coming in next month's English Review.

Tell Sallie I feel she must come and see this tiny flat on Hampstead Heath.

Greetings from Frieda, and love from me.

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To A. W. McLeod.

15 Sept., 1915.

My dear Mac,—

At last we have come up to London and taken a little flat here. We shall stay the winter, I expect. Now you must come to see us.

I wonder if you are still interested in my work. The new novel comes out on the 30th of this month—The Rainbow. You must read it: it is really something new in the art of the novel, I think. There is a story to come in October’s English Review. And then we are doing this little paper. (The Signature.) I want you particularly to take the paper, because it contains the stuff I believe in most deeply—the philosophy. And get just one or two people who really care about the freedom of the soul to subscribe, will you?

I wonder how you are, and what you are doing. Come and see us when you are in town.

Greetings from both of us.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

r, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To Harriet Monroe.

18 Sept., 1915.

Dear Harriet Monpoe,—

How is poetry going in America? There is none in England, the muse has gone, like the swallows in winter.

This is the real winter of the spirit in England, We are just preparing to come to fast grips with the war. At last we are going to give ourselves up to it—and everything else we are letting go. I thought we should never come to this—but we are. And the war will go on for a very long time. I knew it when I watched the Zeppelin the other night, gleaming like a new great sign in the heavens, a new, supreme celestial body. I knew by the spirit of London—game for fight, all considerations gone—and I knew by the look of the Zeppelin which had assumed the heavens as its own. God knows now what the end will be.

Only I feel, that even if we are all going to be rushed down to extinction, one must hold up the other, living truth, of Right and pure reality, the reality of the clear, eternal spirit. One must speak for life- and growth, amid all this mass of destruction and disintegration.

So I bring out this little paper. And will you take it too, and get one or two friends to take it—not for the money’s sake, but for the spirit which is struggling in it?

Pray to heaven to keep America always out of this war. God knows what will be the end of Europe.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

(A circular describing The Signature was enclosed with the above letter.)

Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.          20th September, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We have not heard from you for a long time. I hope there is no bad news perching on your house-roof that keeps you silent.

At last we have burst into a sort of activity. You will see by the leaflet, about the little paper we are starting. To-day I have sent in the MS. of the first number.

Murry and I are doing it just off our own bat. Russell stuck by an old formula, that I hated, so I just had a violent sort of row, a thunderstorm, and went on without him. It is better so, for the present. My last letter to you was in the midst of a series of thunderstorms. Now the air is clearer, there is a sort of washed freshness in the sky, and the light is beginning to shine for a new creation, 1 think. We have found a little Jew in the Mile End Road who will print us 250 copies of our little journal at £5 a time, so we have begun, and what we lose, we lose of our own. It is a three months' venture.

We have also taken two rooms in Fisher Street, and are going to have little dub meetings.

Don't be alarmed at the paper: my contribution is purely philosophic and metaphysical, and on these grounds sociological. Murry is purely introspective.

Perhaps by Christmas we shall have some little footing, and I can be reconciled to all my friends, and we can unite in a bigger effort, a bigger paper, and Russell give his Lectures, and we can have good Club Meetings. Perhaps—God knows. And perhaps, everything will fizzle out. I hen if possible we shall go abroad, and I shall have another try when the social weather is more promising.

At least tell us how you are. Frieda sends her love I mine.

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vain of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.          22nd September, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I send you a few more leaflets, as you ask me. Let the half-crowns be posted to Fisher Street or to me, as you will.

But if you really do care about affirmation, in this life of negation, please do get the other people who care, to have the paper. It is really something: the seed, I hope, of a great change in life: the beginning of a new religious era, from my point. I hope to God the new religious era is starting into being also at other points, and that soon there will be a body of believers, in this howling desert of unbelief and sensation. . . .

I wish you would come back to town. There are so many people, but none of them have any real being. They are all inconclusive and unresolved, as if they had no absolute existence at all, anywhere, but were only sorts of small relative natural phenomena, all of them, without souls.

We have only got about 30 subscribers so far. But there will be more.

1 am glad Herbert Asquith is away from the war. . . .

1, Byron Villas,

To Edward Marsh.

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London. Friday (Postmark—23 Sep., 1915).

Dear Eddie,—

I don't believe you’ve seen these poems by Anna Wickham (Mrs Hepburn). She is just bringing out a book, with Grant Richards: either in December or February. Her address is— 49, Downshire Hill, N.W.

I think some of these poems very good. You may like them for the Georgian Poetry,

D. H. Lawrence

To Ernest Ceilings.

i, Byron Villas.

I9I5-

Dear Collings,—

Thanks for your subscription. If you can get another it will be welcome.

I send you back the “Form.⁰ I don't think much of the drawing; it is rather foolishly phallic, I think. One can't do these things deliberately, without being stupid and affected.

Yours,

D. H. L.

1, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.             2nd October, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

Thank you for the 2/6 for The Signature. I have done my six papers—but I wonder if we shall ever be able to afford to continue the paper. We've only got about £7 subscriptions so far. We shall need £30 for the whole.

I think my papers are very beautiful and very good I feel if only people, decent people, would read them, somehow a new era might set in. But I don't think people care. And perhaps I am too self-important. At any rate, it will be as it wih be. But still, we must do our best. It is no good, if everybody leaves the doing to everybody else.

1 send you my novel, and also your scarf, which am ashamed to find still in this house. I wanted Frieda to send it you weeks ago.

Where is your husband? And when are you coming to town What was the matter with Herbert Asquith? Give us some news of him. Queer, how one feels these returned soldiers on 01 le conscience. Those that are dead are all right. But those are alive are to begin to live again. One must put away all ordinary common sense, I think, and work only from the invisible world. The visible world is not true. ne invisible

world is true and real. One must live and work from that. Frieda sends her love.

D. H. Lawrence.

i , Byron Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead.

To Edward Marsh.

4 Oct., 1915.

Dear Eddie,—

Thank you for your letter. I'm glad you like The Rainbow. I should have sent you a copy from the publishers—but now you have one.

Do as you like about the poetry. I cannot really get the hang of verses again, after I've left them for a long time.

And come and see us again one evening, won’t you?

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

1, Byron Villas,

To Eleanor Far jeon.

Vale of Health, Hampstead.

7 Oct., 1915.

Dear Eleanor,—

I mean the “of” to be there. When Christ said “the blasphemy against the Father should be forgiven, and the blasphemy against the Son, but not the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,” he meant, surely, that that which is absolute and timeless, the supreme relation between the Father and Son, not a relation of love, which is specific and relative, but an absolute relation, of opposition and attraction both, this should not be blasphemed. And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove. Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.

Can you not see that if the relation between Father and 260

Son, in the Christian theology, were only love, then how could they even feel love unless they were separate and different, and if they are divinely different, does not this imply that they are divine opposites, and hence the relation implied is that of eternal opposition, the relation stated is eternal attraction, love?

I hope this doesn't seem confused: I think it is quite clear really.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Christ Himself is always going against the Holy Spirit. He must insist on the love, because it has been overlooked. But insistence on the one is not to be interpreted as negation of the other. In His purest moments, Christ knew that the Holy Spirit was both love and hate—not one only.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.

21st October, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

What can one say about your brother’s death except that it should not be. How long will the nations continue to empty the future—it is your own phrase—-think what it means— I am sick in my soul, sick to death. But not angry any more, only unfathomably miserable about it all. I think I shall go away to America if they will let me. In this war, in the whole spin which we now maintain, I do not believe, I believe it wrong, so awfully wrong, that it is like a great consuming fire that draws up all our souls in its draught. So if they will let me I shall go away soon, to America. Perhaps you will say it is cowardice: but how shall one submit to such ultimate wrong as this which we commit, now, England—and the other nations? If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. And I am English, anc. my Englishness is my very vision. But no¹    *          iy»

if my soul is sightless for ever. Let it then be blind, rather than commit the vast wickedness of acquiescence.

Don’t think I am not sorry about your brother—it makes me tremble. Don't think I want to hurt you—or anybody—I would do anything rather. But now I feel like a blind man who would put his eyes out rather than stand witness to a colossal and deliberate horror.

Yours,

D, H. Lawrence.

I am so sorry for your mother. I can’t bear it. If only the women would get up and speak with authority.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To Harriet Monroe.

26 Oct., 1915.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

Thank you for the subscriptions to The Signature: the two numbers will be on their way to you by now.

Thank you also for the poetry numbers. I liked some things: Hermann Hagedorn, "Fatherland,” very much. I should like to know him some time: my wife is German. I liked your "Mountain Song”: also Nancy Campbell—"The Monkey.” Agnes Lee is rather good. I shall be glad when American verse develops away from European influence.

I send you the only poem I have done for a long while: and it was done in these last days. If you don’t like it, wait awhile before sending it back. I think I am coming to America.

I enclose also some of Anna Hepburn’s poems. Her book is just coming out, with Grant Richards. I think she is good. When you have to write to her, or return her manuscript, write to Mrs. Hepburn, 49, Downshire Hill, Hampstead, N.W.

Probably I am coming to America. Probably, in a month’s time, I shall be in New York. I hope, if I come, I can come to Chicago to see you all. Tell Amy, if you see her, I think of coming. I must see America: here the autumn of all life has set in, the fall: we are hardly more than the ghosts in the haze, we who stand apart from the flux of death. I must see America. I think one can feel hope there. I think that there the life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld. I must see America. I believe it is beginning, not ending.

I hope I shall see you all, you Chicago poetry people, if I come.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            29th October, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I got Frieda’s passport form handed in to-day—G. H. Campbell vouched it. It is made out for U.S.A, like mine: Frieda Lawrence. If you didn't write to your friend in the Foreign Office, I should be so grateful if you would do so. They may keep Frieda hanging round: her "born at Mett” may worry them. And I haven't got my passport yet. You know we are perfectly straight. Why should they keep us hanging round for ever?

Your showing me that detestable sketch of yourself reminds me that I have done a rather good word sketch of you: in a story. I think it good. When the story is finished, and 1 ve got it typed, I'll give you the MS. to see what you think of your likeness.

I hope it isn’t a nuisance our bothering you about passport Come and see us when you can, you and Herbert Asquith.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

I bet my sketch of you, in words, is better than Sargent or Watts in paint.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London<

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.             30th October, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

This is the story: I don’t know what you’ll think of it. The fact of resurrection, in this life, is all in all to me now. I don't know what the story is like, as a story. I don’t want to read it over—not yet. Send it back to me soon, will you, and tell me what you think of it. Then I can see if it is fit to be typed and offered to an editor, though who will print it, God knows. If you like—if you want the MS. when I have got typed copies, I will give it you. The fact of resurrection is everything now: whether we dead can rise from the dead and love, and live, in a new life, here.

I tremble very much in front of this. If it could come to pass, one would give anything. If it cannot come to pass, one must go away: you and your husband also. Having known this death, one cannot remain in death. That were profanity. One must go away.

If the war could but end this winter, we might rise to life again, here in this our world. If it sets in for another year, all is lost. One should give anything now, give the Germans England and the whole empire, if they want it, so we may save the hope of a resurrection from the dead, we English, all Europe. What is the whole empire, and kingdom, save the thimble in my story? If we could but bring our souls through, to life.

So I keep suspended the thought of going away. The passports are for U.S.A. I mean the applications. Let them stand at that. If I go, I will go to America. If I go, I will see about that novel: the publisher keeps on cabling. But I hope not to go.

Yet will you write to your friend and ask him will he see our passports for U.S.A, through, so I may not sit any more hours in that shed at the Foreign Office. Then I am equipped to go, if we must go.

Let us all now conquer death and this rushing on death, if 264

we can. Let us set hard against the war, ,and also against the anarchy, the breaking of all unity which is going on everywhere: this false democracy. I think Herbert Asquith is good for a new life, now, a new reality. That makes me at once not want to leave England.

Oh God, what tender, timid hopes one has—then the cursed blackening frost.

Frieda sends her love.

D. H. Lawrence.

Hampstead.

2nd November, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I will answer you straight away about the “downing tools." First of all I want to send you the poem, which might help to convince you. You say that the war does not prevent personal life from going on, that the individual can still love and be complete. It isn’t true. The one quality of love is that it universalises the indix idual. If I love, than I am extended over all people, but particularly over my own nation. It is an extending in concentric waves over all people. This is the process of love. And if I love, I, the individual, then necessarily the love extends from me to my nearest neighbour, and outwards, till it loses itself in vast distance. This is love, there is no love but this. So that if I love, the love must beat upon my neighbours, till they too live in the spirit of the love, and so on, further and further. And how can this be, in war, when the spirit is against love?

The spirit of war is, that I am a unit, a single entity that has no intrinsic reference to the rest: the reference is extrinsic, a question of living, not of being. In war, in my being I am a detached entity, and every one of my actions is an act of further detaching my own single entity from all the rest.

If I love, then, I am in direct opposition to the principle of war. If war prevails, I do not love. If love prevails, there is no war. War is a great and necessary disintegrating autumnal process. Love is the great creative process, like spring, the making of an integral unity out of many disintegrated factors. We have had enough of the disintegrating process. If it goes on any further, we shall so thoroughly have destroyed the unifying force from among us, we shall have become each one of us so completely a separate entity, that the whole will be an amorphous heap, like sand, sterile, hopeless, useless, like a dead tree. This is true, and it is so great a danger, that one almost goes mad facing it.

That is why I almost went away out of the country: I may still have to go: because in myself I can never agree to the complete disintegration, never stand witness to it, never.

Then the Prussian rule. The Prussian rule would be an external evil. The disintegrating process of the war has become an internal evil, so vast as to be almost unthinkable, so nearly overwhelming us, that we stand on the very brink of oblivion. Better anything than the utter disintegration. And it is England who is the determining factor for Europe: if England goes, then Europe goes: for we are at this time the vital core of the whole organism. Let the leaves perish, but let the tree stand, living and bare. For the tree, the living organism of the soul of Europe is good, only the external forms and growths are bad. Let all the leaves fall, and many branches. But the quick of the tree must not perish. There are unrevealed buds which can come forward into another epoch of civilisation, if only we can shed this dead form and be strong in the spirit of love and creation.

Besides, Germany, Prussia, is not evil through and through. Her mood is now evil. But we reap what we have sowed. It is as with a child: if with a sullen, evil soul one provokes an evil mood in the child, there is destruction. But no child is all evil. And Germany is the child of Europe: and senile Europe, with her conventions and arbitrary rules of conduct and life and very being, has provoked Germany into a purely destructive mood. If a mother does this to a child—and it often happens—is she to go on until the child is killed or broken, so that the mother have her way? Is she not rather, at a certain point, to yield to the paroxysm of the child, which passes away swiftly when the opposition is removed? And if Prussia for a time imposes her rule on us, let us bear it, as a mother temporarily bears the ugly tyranny of the child, trusting to the

ultimate good. 7 he good will not be long in coming, all over Europe, if we can but trust it within ourselves. (This is not yielding to the child—this is knowing beyond the child’s knowledge.)

I very much want you to tell me what you think, because it is a question for the women of the land now to decide: the men will never see it. I don’t know one single man who would give the faintest response to this. But I still have some hope of the women; they should know that only love matters, now; that further destruction only means death, universal death, disintegration.

D. H. Lawrence.

We have gone too far, oh very much too far, Only attend to the noiseless multitudes

Of ghosts that throng about our muffled hearts.

Only behold the ghosts, the ghosts of the slain, Behold them homeless and houseless, without complaint Of their patient waiting upon us, the throng of the ghosts.

And say, what matters any more, what matters, Save the cold ghosts that homeless flock about Our serried hearts, drifting without a place?

What matters any more, but only love?

There's only love that matters any more.

There’s only love, the rest is all outspent.

Let us receive our ghosts and give them place, Open the ranks, and let them in our hearts, And lay them deep in love, lay them to sleep.

The foe can take our goods, our homes and land, Also the lives that still he may require, But leave us still to love, still leave us love.

267

Leave us to take our ghosts into our hearts, To lap them round with love, and lay them by To sleep at last in immemorial love.

We let the weapons slip from out our hands,

We loose our grip, and we unstrain our eyes, We let our souls be pure and vulnerable.

We cover the houseless dead, so they sleep in peace,

We yield the enemy his last demands,

So he too may be healed, be soothed to peace.

For now the hosts of homeless ghosts do throng

Too many about us, so we wander about Blind with the gossamer of prevalent death.

But let us free our eyes, and look beyond

This serried ecstasy of prevalent death,

And pass beyond, with the foe and the homeless ghosts.

Let us rise up, and go from out this grey

Last twilight of the Gods, to find again

The lost Hesperides where love is pure.

For we have gone too far, oh much too far

Towards the darkness and the shadow of death;

Let us turn back, lest we should all be lost.

Let us go back now, though we give up all The treasure and the vaunt we ever had, Let us go back, the only way is love.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                        Friday,

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

We should like to come to Garsington on Monday, and stay till Thursday. On Friday Frieda must go to the dentist.

268

I haven't asked the Murry's, because I think I would rather we came alone. But if you have asked them, separately, to come with us, very good.

To-day I have got our passports. I feel as if really we were going to America-—and soon. We may go to Florida for this winter. I must see if I can get some money, that is all. But I can, I think, all right. . . .

I feel awfully queer and trembling in my spirit, because I am going away from the land and the nation I have belonged to: departing, emigrating, changing the land of my soul as well as my mere domicile. It is rather terrible, a form of death. But I feel as if it were my fate. I must: to live.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To J. B. Pinker.                            6 Nov., 1915.

Dear Pinker,—

I had heard yesterday about the magistrates and The Rainbow. I am not very much moved: am beyond that by now. I only curse them all, body and soul, root, branch and leaf, to eternal damnation.

As for Hiibsch, if you think it is a good and wise proceeding for him to publish the book in America, then let him publish it. But please tell him all that has happened here.

I am away from Monday to Thursday of next week. If there is anything tc write to me, address me at

Garsington Manor,

Near Oxford.

I will come and see you on Friday, if that suits you. Perhaps you will offer me that lunch then: otherwise one day early the next week.

I hope to be going away in about a fortnight’s time: to America: there is a man who more or less offers us a cottage in Florida: but nothing is settled yet. We have got passports. It 269 is the end of my writing for England. I will try to change my public.

Yours,

D. II. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead.

To Edward Marsh.

6 Nov,, 1915.

My dear Eddie,—

You jeered rather at The Rainbow, but notwithstanding, it is a big book, and one of the important novels in the language. I tell you, who know. Now the magistrates have suppressed the sale of the book, and ordered Methuen to deliver up all copies in existence.

And I am so sick, in body and soul, that if I don't go away I shall die. A man said we could live on his little estate in Florida. I want you, if you can, to give me a little money to go with: if you can, easily, that is. God knows I don’t want to mulct you. I'll give it you back if ever I have any money: I owe you £10 already. And I will give you full and final possession of some poems, when I have any you like. And I will ask you not to send me any part in the proceeds of Georgian Poetry. Because if I can get a little money now, so that my wife and I can go away, I will work at anything over there. But I feel so sick, I shall never be able to get through a winter here.

Yours,

D. H, Lawrence.

Gar sington Manor, Oxford.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.                Tuesday (1915).

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

. . : Your letter makes me sad. Believe me, my feet are more

270

sure upon the earth than you will allow—given that the earth is a living body, not a dead fact.

More tiresomeness is that a magistrate has suppressed the sale of The Rainbow, and Methuen’s are under orders to deliver up all existing copies. This is most irritating. Some interfering person goes to a police magistrate and says, "This book is indecent, listen here." Then the police magistrate says, "By Jove, we’ll stop that." Then the thing is suppressed. But I think it is possible to have the decision reversed. If it is possible, and you and Herbert Asquith can help, would you do so? You know quite well that the book is not indecent, though I heard of you saying to a man that it was like the second story in the Prussian Officer, only much worse. Still, one easily says those things. But I never quite know where you stand: whether the inner things, the abstract right as you call it, is important to you, or only a rather titillating excursus♦ I suppose you’ve got to arrange your life between the two: it is your belief—pragmatistic. I suppose it had to be so, since the world is as it is, and you must live in the world, but if you can help me about The Rainbow, 1 shall ask you to do so, because I know that the pure truth does matter to you, beyond the relative immediate truths of fact.

We’ve got our passports: thank you very much.

When I drive across this country, with autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad, for my country, for this grea wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming: this house it is England—my God, it breaks my soul -theit I ngland, these shafted windows, the elm-trees, the blue distance the past, the great past, crumbling down, breaking down, not under the force of the coming birds, but under the weight oL many exhausted lovely yellow leaves, that drift over the lawn, and over the pond, like the soldiers, passing away, into winter and the darkness of winter—no, I can't bear it. For the win er stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.

It has been 2000 years, the spring and summer of our era. What, then, will the winter be? No, I can’t bear it, I can t let it go. Yet who can stop the autumn from falling to pieces, when November has come in? It is almost better to be dead, than to see this awful process finally strangling us to oblivion, like the leaves off the trees.

I want to go to America, to Florida, as soon as I can: as soon as I have enough money to cross with Frieda. My life is ended here. I must go as a seed that falls into new ground. But this, this England, these elm-trees, the grey wind with yellow leaves--it is so awful, the being gone from it altogether, one must be blind henceforth. But better leave a quick of hope in the soul, than all the beauty that fills the eyes.

It sounds very rhapsodic: it is this old house, the beautiful shafted windows, the grey gate-pillars under the elm trees: really I can’t bear it: the past, the past, the falling, perishing, crumbling past, so great, so magnificent.

Come and see us when you are in town. I don’t think we shall be here very much longer. My life now is one repeated, tortured, Vale! Vale! Vale! ♦ . .

D. H. Lawrence.

Garsington Manor, Oxford.

To Edward Marsh.                Wednesday (Undated).

My dear Eddie,—

Thank you very much for your letter. Oh, no, I only hoped you might lend me £10 or £15. Twenty pounds is the outside of hope. You see I have about £40—about £25 for passages would leave none for the necessaries I must buy here. Then we must have £10 each, to be allowed to land in New York. But with £20, 1 think—I am sure—I shall be able to manage. And I will give it you back, God willing, before many months are past. Thank you very much indeed for being so kind.

As for the novel, I am not surprised. Only the most horrible feeling of hopelessness has come over me lately—I feel as if the whole thing were coming to an end—the whole of England, of the Christian era: as if ours was the age only of Decline and Fall. It almost makes one die. I cannot bear it—this England, this past.

I am staying with Lady Ottoiine till to-morrow. Here one feels the real England—this old house, this countryside—so poignantly. I wonder if ever I shall have strength to drag my feet over the next length of journey. It isn’t my novel that hurts me—it’s this hopelessness of the world.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To Lady Ottoiine Morrell.                     Thursday.

My dear Lady Ottoline,—

I arrived home safely, in the rain, with my Hessians and my flowers. London does strike a blow at the heart, I must say: to-night, in a black rain out of doors, and a I ube full of spectral, decayed people. How much better and more beautiful the country is: you are very wise to be at Oarsington.

Frieda is delighted with the flowers, and my wonderful boots, and with the thought of the embroidery. What queer things to come home with! I hope the Hessians are seven-leagued boots that will carry me to the ends of the earth: to the Blessed Isles, to the undiscovered lands whose fruits are all unknown to us.

I am very glad I came down: it will always be a sort of last vision of England to me, the beauty of England, the wonder of this terrible autumn: when we set the irises above the pond, in the stillness and the wetness.

How cruel it is that the world should so have come to an end, this world, our world, whilst we still live m it, that we must either die or go away dispossessed, exiled in body and spirit.

Remember me to Julian and Philip. I hope al the flowers will grow and be beautiful. We shall see you again soon.

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.          nth November, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We have decided to go away to America, sailing on Wednesday week, the 24th. I have made inquiries and everything seems to be in order. But I hear the authorities seem to have an insane determination that nobody shall leave the country. Do you know whether it is necessary to get any further safeguard against their interference? It would be monstrous to be turned back at Liverpool. We are going second class, by the steamer Adriatic. White Star Line.

Shall we see you again? Are you coming up to town? I must go to see my sister in Derbyshire: either we shall go there for a week-end—Saturday and Sunday—or we shall go there on Tuesday, on our way to Liverpool. I will let you know.

We are horribly poor. I am rather frightened about the money. But pray Heaven we shall manage—if we land with about £20 or £30.

I want you to go and stay with —----. When I say she is

quite unreal, that is wrong of me. There is an unformed reality in her, very deep. I think she is a big woman. But of course her whole effort has been spent in getting away from her tradition, etc. Now she is exhausted. She has, in some sense, got away: but she has not got anywhere. She feels it bitterly. It is a bitter thing, only to have destroyed, not to have created. But she is pretty well spent now. Yet she still understands that there is the beyond. She is like an old, tragic queen who knows that her life has been spent in conflict with a kingdom that was not worth her life. Her life is in a way lost, yet not lost. She has not found the reality, because it was not to be found till she had pulled the temple down. But she has, for herself, pulled the temple down, even if she lies exhausted in the ruins. It is more than remaining safe in the temple.

If you know her, be patient and go to the real things, not to the unreal things in her: for they are legion. But she is a big woman—something like Queen Elizabeth at the end. Which is

my parting injunction about -------.

Also—this is my parting letter—you must get the intrinsic reality clear within your soul—even if you betray it in reality, yet know it: that is everything. And know that in the end, always you keep the ultimate choice of your destiny: to abide by the intrinsic reality, or by the extrinsic: the choice is yours, do not let it slide from you, keep it always secure, reserved.

I feel I must leave this side, this phase of life, for ever. The living part is overwhelmed by the dead part, and there is no altering it. So that life which is still fertile must take its departure, like seeds from a dead plant. I want to transplant my life. I think there is hope of a future, in America. I want if possible to grow towards that future. There is no future here, only decomposition.

I want you to reserve to yourself, always, the choice, whether you too shall come to America also, at any time. You have your children. Probably you will have to rescue them from their decadence, this collapsing life. You must reserve to yourself the power, at all times, to bring them away, you must not let them be drawn into this slow flux of destruction and nihilism, unless they belong to it. If John becomes wicked within the flux, then take him away into a new life; never mind how much it costs.

I will tell you about America. I shall try to start a new school, a new germ of a new creation, there: I believe it exists there already. I want to join on to it. So as the years go by, I will tell you how it is. And then you will know, if you must come away with John.

Your husband should have left this decomposing life. There was nowhere to go. Perhaps now he is beaten. Perhaps now the true living is defeated in him. But it is not yet defeated in you. You must watch your children, and the spirit of the world, and keep the choice of the right always in your own hands. Never admit that it is taken from you. Perhaps in the future Frieda and I can help you: remember we will always do so. I want to stake out an advance-post for your children to come to. Remember I am doing that, and that it is being done, unknown, without me, in America. o»o don t give John into this decline and fall. Give him to the future, if so his nature demands it: and I think it does.

I write to you about the things of the spirit. Remember Frieda and I will stand by you; and you must stand by us. Remember you keep the choice of life, for yourself and your children, and probably your husband, always in your hands: don’t ever relinquish it up. . . .

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead,

To Edward Marsh.

n Nov,, 1915.

Mr dear Eddie,—

Thank you very much for the letter and the twenty pounds. That was a nice letter from you. Only I feel so sad, at the present time, that I cannot be optimistic. I feel as if some hope were broken in my chest, that has never been broken before.

I will write to you as we have any definite plans: it will probably be quite soon.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

1, Byron Villas,

To J. B. Pinker

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London,

17 Nov,, 1915.

Dear Pinker,—

I cannot believe that the Authors’ Society will really do anything. If they will, so much the better.

No, I received no notice at all about the suppression of the Rainbow—the first intimation was from W. L. George, who had ’phoned up Methuen to ask why the advertisement was stopped. Then I had your letter.

You will arrange about the Italian Sketches. You know best.

I have had letters from a lot of people about the Rainbow— Oliver Lodge and others. I think we might make a good row.

But I wish I could go to America. I've got everything ready, and I want to go on the 24th. Must I stay for the proceedings about the Rainbow? Must I appear?—of course I want to do what I can for the book. Also I want to go away. I will stay if it is really any good.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

1, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To J. B. Pinker.

18 Nov., 1915.

Dear Pinker,—

I should like to know what Henry James and Bennett say of the book. I know Henry James would hate it. But I shou d like to know. And if they would like to give me a little money, I should be glad, I should be freer. But it doesn’t matter. I was very badly off. But Lady Ottoline Morrell sent me £30, so I shall have about £60 to buy passages and go to America.

I think it would be a really good thing to get the p protest from the authors—Bennett, etc. John Drinkwater came in just now—he is anxious to do something. Very man y people are in a rage over the occurrence. Will you organise a public protest, do you think?-—it would be best.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hampstead—Wednesday.

Post card to J. B. Pinker.

Dear Pinker,—

Could you send round to Philip Morrell, 44, Bed < quare, to-morrow morning, as early as possible, a copy c my

277 ment with Methuen? Mr. Morrell is going to ask a question to-morrow, in the House of Commons, about the Rainbow. I can’t come to lunch on Friday: I will look in to-morrow about 12.30 or 12.45—it doesn’t matter. I promised to see the Mrs. Ryan: I will be brief and discreet. Henry James might be very useful. Has he read the book? He might be very helpful if he could send a letter to Philip Morrell.

Yours,

D. H. Lawpence.

1, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.          28th November, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

You ask me to send you our news: but as there isn’t any there’s no excuse for writing. People are desultorily working about the Rainbow: I am struggling like a fly on a treacle paper, to leave this country. I am hoping to be able to scrape together a little money, so that we can go to Florida straight, instead of going first to New York. I don’t want to go to New York—not yet, not now. I would like to go to a land where there are only birds and beasts and no humanity, nor inhumanity-masks.

This is the plan and the prospect. A man will find out about a trading ship going to the Gulf of Mexico. We sail in this— soon. Then, if possible, we make for our destination in Florida—Fort Myers.

Fort Myers is a little town (5000) half negro—9 miles from sea, on a wide river rj miles wide—backed by orange groves and pine forests. An American here will give us letters of introduction to friends there. That is the plan. I hope to find the ship and to sail before Christmas. There is the other point —whether the English Government will let me go—I have had far too much already.

For the rest of the news: to-morrow we are going to Garsington for a day or two. I’ve got a new suit and Frieda has got a new coat and skirt. I have made her a hat, a sort of Russian toque— 278

out of bits of fur—so she looks very nice. She is also going to have a big warm coat, because it is so cold.

My heart is quartered into a thousand fragments, and I shall never have the energy to collect the bits—like Osiris—or Isis. In Florida I shall swallow in palm seed, and see if that’ll grow a new heart for me.

I want to begin all over again. All these Gethsemane Calvary and Sepulchre stages must be over now: there must be a resurrection—resurrection: a resurrection with sound hands and feet and a whole body and a new soul: above all, a new soul: a resurrection. It is finished and ended, and put away, and forgotten, and translated to a new birth, this life, these thirty years. There must be a new heaven and a new earth, and a new heart and soul: all new: a pure resurrection.

Now like a crocus in the autumn time,

My soul comes naked from the falling night

Of death, a Cyclamen, a Crocus flower

Of windy autumn when the winds all sweep The hosts away to death, where heap on heap The leaves are smouldering in a funeral wind.

That is the first poem I have written for many a day—-a bit of it—there’s much more. They burn the leaves in heaps on the Heath—and the leaves blow in the wind, then the smoke: and the leaves are like soldiers,

I don’t know why on earth I say these things to you: why you sort of ask me. But the conscious life—which you adhere to—is no more than a masquerade of death: there is a living unconscious life. If only we would shut our eyes; if only we were all struck blind, and things vanished from our sight, we should marvel that we had fought and lived tor shallow, visionary, peripheral nothingnesses. We should find reality in the darkness.                                           Q

Sometimes I am angry that I write these letters to you but then I’m often angry. I suppose you do really care about the difference between life and death. Vale!

D. H. Lawrence.

Garsington Manor,

Oxford,

To J, B. Pinker.

30 Nov., 1915 .

Deaf Pinker,—

Thank you very much for the £40. But where did it come from? Have you advanced it out of your own account? You shouldn't do that.

This place is so beautiful, so complete, and so utterly past, bygone, reminiscent, that it seems like a dying man seeing the whole of his past life in a flash, as he dies. But I look at the ruffled turkeys on the farm—there are wild turkeys in Florida.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Garsington.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.            1st December, 1915.

So vivid a vision everything, so visually poignant, it is like that concentrated moment when a drowning man sees all his past crystallised into one jewel of recollection.

The slow, reluctant, pallid morning, unwillingly releasing its tarnished embellishment of gold, far off there, outside, beyond the shafted windows, beyond, over the forgotten unseen country, that lies sunken in gloom below, whilst the dawn sluggishly bestirs itself, far off, beyond the window-shafts of stone, dark pillars, like bars, dark and unfathomed, set near me, before the reluctance of the far-off dawn.

The window-shafts, like pillars, like bars, the shallow Tudor arch looping over between them, looping the darkness in a pure edge, in front of the far-off reluctance of the dawn.

Shafted, looped windows between the without and the within, the old house, the perfect old intervention of fitted stone, fitted perfectly about a silent soul, the soul that in drowning under this last wave of time looks out clear through the shafted windows to see the dawn of all dawns taking place, the England of all recollection rousing into being.

The wet lawn drizzled with brown, sodden leaves; the feathery heap of the ilex tree; the garden-seat all wet and reminiscent.

Between the ilex tree and the bare, purplish elms, a gleaming segment of all England, the dark plough-land and wan grass, and the blue, hazy heap of the distance, under the accomplished morning.

So the day has taken place, all the visionary business of the day. The young cattle stand in the straw of the stack yard, the sun gleams on their white fleece, the eyes of Io, and the man with side-whiskers carries more yellow straw into the compound. The sun comes in all down one side, and above, in the sky, all the gables and grey stone chimney-stacks are floating in pure dreams.

There is threshed wheat smouldering in the great barn, the fire of life: and the sound of the threshing machine, running, drumming.

The threshing machine, running, drumming, waving its steam in a corner of a great field, the rapid nucleus of darkness beside the yellow ricks: and the rich plough-land comes up, ripples up in endless grape-coloured ripples, like a tide of procreant desire: the machine sighs and drums, wind blows the chaff in little eddies, blows the clothes of the men on the ricks close against their limbs: the men on the stacks in the wind against a bare blue heaven, their limbs blown clean in contour naked shapely animated fragments of earth active in heaven.

Coming home, by the purple and crimson hedges, red with berries, up hill over the heavy ground to the stone, old three-pointed house with its raised chimney-stacks, the old manor lifting its fair, pure stone amid trees and foliage, rising from the lawn, we pass the pond where white ducks hastily launch upon the lustrous dark grey waters.

So to the steps up the porch, through the doorway, and into the interior, fragrant with all the memories of old age, and of bygone, remembered lustiness.

It is the vision of a drowning man, the vision of all that I am, all I have become, and ceased to be. It is me, generations and generations of me, every complex, gleaming fibre of me, every lucid pang of my coming into being. And oh, my God, I

281                          L cannot bear it. For it is not this me who am drowning swiftly under this last wave of time, this bursten flood. . . .

But in the farmyard up the hill, I remember, there were clusters of turkeys that ruffled themselves like flowers suddenly ruffled into blossom, and made strange, unacquainted noises, a foreign tongue, exiles of another life.

In Florida they will go in droves in the shadow, like metallic clouds, like flowers with red pistils drooping in the shade, under the quivering, quick, miraculous roof of pine-needles, or drifting between the glowing pine-trunks, metallic birds, or perched at evening like cones on the red-hot pine boughs, or bursting in the morning across open glades of sunshine, like flowers burst and taking wing.

There is a morning which dawns like an iridescence on the wings of sleeping darkness, till the darkness bursts and flies off in glory, dripping with the rose of morning.

There is the soaring suspense of day, dizzy with sunshine, and night flown away and utterly forgotten.

There is evening coming to settle amid the red-hot bars of the pine-trunks, dark cones, that emit the utter, electric darkness.

Another dawn, another day, another night—another heaven and earth—a resurrection.

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                   3 Dec., 1915.

My dear Ottoline,—

You cannot conceive how dark and hideous London is to-day, mouldering in a dank fog. I am glad we have let this flat. Even were we staying in England, I should have to leave London.

We were so sorry the flowers were not with the berries, in Oxford, at the station yesterday, and so glad when they came this morning. They are on the table, under your embroidery, 282

which hangs on the wall. It is a great success, in its dark green frame. We love it: it is like a new presence in the house: it gives a new quality to the room: quite new. It is strange.

We had some fine hours, all of us together, didn’t we?

This morning Prince Bibesco came to see us. He was rather nice—really concerned about the injustice to the Rainbow. But I liked him: his nature is really rather fresh—but not deep. Perhaps in society he is less simple.

Carswell—a new barrister—very much wants to have the case of the Rainbow fought out. He says there is a clear and complete case of libel against ------- and----— also he says

that acting on Sir John Simon’s suggestion, one could have another copy of the Rainbow seized, and I could bring the whole matter into court, and have it thrashed out. But my spirit will not rise to it. I can’t come so near to them as to fight them. I have done with them. I am not going to pay any more out of my soul, even for the sake of beating them.

We hear of the Crown de Leon, a tramp steamer sailing on the 20th of this month, to the West Indies. Probably we shall go by that. It takes a month to reach its destination. But I don’t mind that. Heseltine wants to come with us, when we sail, if possible—and failing that as soon after as he can. Suhrawardy also wants to come. . . .

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, N, W.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.    Sunday, 3rd December, 1915.

My deab Lady Cynthia.,—

I am sorry we were away when you were up in town. Still, it was jolly to be at Garsington: it is in its way so beautiful, one is tempted to give in, and to stay there, to lapse back into its peaceful beauty of bygone things, to live in pure recollection, looking at the accomplished past, which is so lovely, but one s soul rebels.

We played and acted in the hall with the children. 1 here were hundreds of exquisite rags, heaps of coloured clot an

things, like an Eastern Bazaar. One can dress up splendidly. I wish you were there with us one time, we could all dress up. One can only be perfectly happy, now, in a world of makebelief. But that is very delightful. There was an Indian there— a lineal descendant of the Prophet, whose curse is a dreadful thing, and a young musician, and Bertie Russell. Of course we talked violently in between whiles, politics and India and so on. I always shout too loud. .......

Suhrawardy was my pair of Indo-Persian eyes. He is coming to Florida.

We are ready td go now, waiting for the last news of the ship, finally to book the passages. We think to go by the Crown de Leon, which sails from Glasgow on the 20th of this month, going to the Barbadoes, and to Trinidad, and to Demerara. She is a tramp steamer who carries a few passengers. I don’t know where she will eventually land us: but I don’t care. When we come ashore, we can ask: "Pray, what is this place?" And no doubt at last, like the Israelites in the desert, we shall come to some Canaan. I am really bound to Fort Myers in Florida: 1 have the letters of introduction to the important townspeople there: but it seems only a bird can come to the town, there is no railway and no regular ship.

I want you please to write to your friend in the Foreign Office and ask him what we need to do, what other permits we need to have, over and above our passports. Somebody says we must have another visa from the Foreign Office. And somebody else says I must go to a Recruiting Office and swear to serve my king and country, and be examined, and thus get an exemption. If I must do so I must. But it makes me angry to go and say: "I will serve my king and country’’ when, in the war of war, I won’t. It makes me angry also to be stripped naked before two recruiting sergeants, and examined. But I would rather have all these things than stop here. But do you please write this one more time to your friend in the Foreign Office, so I may know exactly what to do. And please let me know at once.

We have transferred the lease of this flat to another man, and most of the furniture is sold: not gone away, only promised. But after the 20th of this month, we have no place here any 284 more. The Crown de Leon: I wonder it we shall really sail by her, or by another—you must have something from the flat as a memento.

How are you, and how is Herbert Asquith? Is he better? I hope he remains just sufficiently unwell to be kept at home.

I think that there is just a chance of peace this winter. But I think it will not be taken, that the war will go on.

The Rainbow is going to come out privately, I believe. Are you still "bose," angry with everybody? I am not angry. Only I've got a cold and feel evanescent.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, N.W,

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                   7 Dec., 1915.

My dear Ottoline,—

I have written to Huxley to ask him to come here as soon as he is in London. I will see also if Brett will come to tea with us, without Gertler’s omnipresent guardianship.

I also think, that perhaps, in a little while, I can unite with the very young people, to do something. But first let them try their teeth on the world, let them taste it thoroughly as it is, so that they shall be ready to reject it. I feel my going away will only be a sort of retirement to get strength and concord in myself. I am pretty sick also, and must get robust again in spirit. Also this country must go through some stages of its disease, till I am any good for it, or it is any good for me. It is full of unripe ulcers, that must come out, come to a head, then perhaps they can be lanced and healed. It must work out the impurity which is now deep-seated in its Hood. ’ here is no other help for it.

Why are you so sad about your life? Only let go all this will to have things in your own control. We must all submit to be helpless and obliterated, quite obliterated, destroyed, cast away into nothingness. There is something will rise out oA it,

something new, that now is not. This which we are must cease to be, that we may come to pass in another being. Do not struggle, with your will, to dominate your conscious life—do not do it. Only drift, and let go—let go, entirely, and become dark, quite dark—like winter which mows away all the leaves and flowers, and lets only the dark underground roots remain. Let all the leaves and flowers and arborescent form of your life be cut off and cast away, all cut off and cast away, all the old life, so that only the deep roots remain in the darkness underground, and you have no place in the light, no place at all. Let all knots be broken, all bonds unloosed, all connections slackened and released, all released, like the trees which release their leaves, and the plants which die away utterly above ground, let go all their being and pass away, only sleep in the profound darkness where being takes place again.

Do not keep your will in your conscious self. Forget, utterly forget, and let go. Let your will lapse back into your unconscious self, so you move in a sleep, and in darkness, without sight or understanding. Only then you will act straight from the dark source of life, outwards, which is creative life.

I tell this to you, I tell it to myself—to let go, to release from my will everything that my will would hold, to lapse back into darkness and unknowing. There must be deep winter before there can be spring.

I will let you know when anything happens to our plans.

D. H Lawrence.

Do not struggle. Let go and become dark, quite dark.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London.

To J. M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield. 25 Nov., 1915.

Dear Murry and Katherine,™

I got your address from Kot.

First to explain the non-meeting. I said on my card “ Unless 1 hear from you, I will come at 8.zo." I got your card saying you would come to us. So I rushed home from town and we waited for you. There you are, wessel-brained as usual.

How are you and what are you doing? Send me a letter.

We were all ready to sail last Wednesday, when the business of the Rainbow kept me; the Authors’ Society promising to take it up. Philip Morrell asking a question in the House of Commons, etc. But I don’t know that anything will come of it. However, I am not sorry we stayed, because I am hoping to be able to sail straight to Florida, without going to New York. Oh, happy prospect if only it can be fulfilled. I heard from the American, no house on his estate; but he will give letters of introduction to Fort Myers—a little town on west of peninsula— 5000 people, many niggers—9 miles from sea, on a big river one mile wide; many fish, and quails, and wild turkeys: land fiat covered with orange groves and pine trees: climate perfect.

If only we can get there and settle, then you will come, and we will live on no money at all. The Rainbow is being published in New York. Pinker will try and get me a little money to go out with. If only it will all end up happily, like a song or a poem, and we live blithely by a big river, where there are fish, and in the forest behind wild turkeys and quails: there we make songs and poems and stories and dramas, in a Vale of Avalon, in the Hesperides, among the Loves. Meanwhile it is very cold in London, bleak, and nothing ripens, neither good nor evil, but goes bitter on the tree, with cold slowness.

I hope all is well with you: I will let you know when something decisive happens to us.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

1, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, N.W.

To J. M. Murry.                          4 ^c., 1915.

Dear Murry,—                                .

You are a miserable devil—always lamentoso. You feel sick at being ejected from your habitual surroundings—it is natural. But do look on the bright side!!

I wrote you a letter to Cook’s at Marseilles. 1 hope you got it. As you surmise, we are still here. But we are struggling 287 gradually free. I have let this flat—transferred the whole of the lease—unfurnished. I have got buyers for most of the furniture. So we’ve got to move from here. I've collected some money. I am on the track of a ship going to the West Indies. I have got letters of introduction to men in Fort Myers, Florida. And I hope to be allowed to sail on the Loth of this month, from Glasgow, by the Crown de Leon, going to Barbadoes, Trinidad and God knows where.

I think France must be very bad, as far as the people go.

I wish you were sailing with us on the Crown de Leon; if we go off in it.

The Rainbow is probably coming out in a private edition. There is a good bit of fuss in the literary world. They want me to stay and have a lawsuit. But I'm damned if I will, if I can but get off. At any rate we leave here before the 20th.

I see you all back in London, come the New Year. Perhaps we shall still be detained here—perhaps not. But of course we shall always be in connection, you and L Only for God’s sake, don't be lamentable. We will get along and have a good time yet—patience, mon ami—le diable est mourant.

Thank Katherine for her cards. London is vile beyond words; a fog that hurts one's inside. Praise God that you have a clear air. We have both got heavy colds.

I have found a nice man called Heseltine who will come to Florida—a musician, 21, very nice—also an Indian—very nice. We will have a happy time yet, we will blossom like the rose. At the present it is the heaviest of winters.

Love to Katherine and you from both of us.

D. H. Lawrence.

Don’t come back to London—be advised—it is so wretched.

1, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, N W

To Katherine Mansfield.           Sunday, 12 Dec., 1915.

My dear Katherine,—

Murry turned up on Friday, to my moderate surprise. He doesn't look well, tells us of his dreadful experience in France, 288 and is very chirpy. At the present I am not very much in sympathy with him, so I won't say any more about it. He came yesterday with Goodyear, whom I like, but who is on the same Oxford introspective line, who has an “inner life' to concern himself with—which bores me. I'm sick to death of people who are wrapped up in their own inner lives, inner selves.

We are on the point of departure, where to I don't know. We leave this flat on the 20th; the furniture is sold, the lease transferred altogether. So after the 20th we are free. We spend Christmas with my sister: c/o Mrs. Clarke, Grosvenor Rd., Ripley, Derbyshire. After that I don’t know what happens. I am afraid they will not let me leave the country, unless I get an exemption from service, which I haven t yet got. We may go somewhere in Somerset or Devon, I don’t know. We may even get off to Florida. It is on the knees of the gods, and I am not troubling. At any rate we leave London permanently. I cannot live here.

No doubt you hear of Murry's scheme for publishing books, the authors to be publishers. But what I wonder is, are there cither books or authors, at the present moment. There are Gilbert Carmans and Reresfords, but I have nothing to do with them. I intend to lie fallow for a bit. I know one or two very young people—20, 2r, 22—who seem to have something real in them, for a new phase. But it is necessary that these unite together; a perfectly new body of purpose, that is the only thing that will avail anything. Perhaps it will come—but nobody can force it into being. So for the time being, everything is unresolved, and must remain so until it resolves of itself. Mental decisions are of no use. It is a matter of urn-er ground development, development of new being in the roots ot life, not in the head.

One thing I know, I am tired of this insistence on the personal element; personal truth, personal reality. It is very stale and profitless. I want some new non-personal activity, which is at the same time a genuine vital activity. And I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimou: accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. It remains now 289

whether Murry is still based upon the personal hypothesis: because if he is, then our ways are different. I don’t want a purely personal relation with him; he is a man, therefore our relation should be based on purpose; not upon that which we are, but upon that which we wish to bring to pass. I am sick and tired of personality in every way. Let us be easy and impersonal, not for ever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us. I am weary to death of these dead, dry leaves of personalities which flap in every wind.

My dear Katherine, you know that in this we are your sincere friends, and what we want is to create a new, good, common life, the germ of a new social life altogether. That is what we want. But we must grow from our deepest underground roots, out of the unconsciousness, not from the conscious concepts which we falsely call ourselves. Murry irritates me and falsifies me, and I must tell him so. He makes me false. If that must always be so, then there is no relation between us. But we must try that there is a living relation between us, all of us, because then we shall be happy. Frieda sends her love, I mine.

D H. Lawrence.

t , Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, N.W.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                  12 Dec., 1915.

My dear Ottoline,—

Thank you for the letter and the pound. The last I did not want.

I hear Heseltine and Kouyoumdjian are coming to you to-morrow. Heseltine is a bit backboneless and needs stiffening tip. But I like him very much; Kouyoumdjian seems a bit blatant and pushing: you may be put off by him. But that is because he is very foreign, even though he doesn’t know it himself. In English life he is in a strange, alien medium, and he can't adjust himself. But I find the core of him very good. One must be patient with his jarring manner, and listen to the sound decency that is in him. He is not a bit rotten, which most young cultivated Englishmen are.

Murry is back, and I am rather out of sympathy with him. Bertie came. He is growing much better: he is going to become young and new. I have more hopes.

We leave here on the 20th, go to my sister’s in Derbyshire for Christmas, and then I don't know where. I must say I feel again a certain amount of slow, subterranean hope. It won't put forth any leaves, nor show any activity yet, I believe: but it seems to be full and nascent somewhere in the underearth of my soul. Probably we shall go to the West—Devon, Somerset— for a while after Christmas, I don’t know. I must let things work themselves into being. One can do nothing now, forcing is disastrous. I shall not go to America until a stronger force from there pulls me across the sea. It is not a case of my will.

I went to a recruiting station yesterday to be attested and to get a military exemption. But I hated it so much, after waiting nearly two hours, that I came away. And yet, waiting there in the queue, I felt the men were very decent, and that the slumbering lion was going to wake up in them: not against the Germans cither, but against the great lie of this life. I felt all the men were decent, even the police and the officials. It was at Battersea Town Hall. A strange, patient spirit possessed everybody, as under a doom, a bad fate superimposed. But I felt the patience rested upon slumbering strength, not exhaustion, and the strength would begin before long to stretch itself Iikc a waking lion. I felt, though I hated the situation almost to madness, so vile and false and degrading, such an ut ter travesty o action on my part, waiting even to be attested that I might be rejected, still I felt, when suddenly I broke out of the queue, in ace o the table where one's name was to be written, am * the hall away from all the underworld or this spectral submission, and climbed a bus, and after a while saw the fugitive sunshine across the river on the spectral sunlit towers Westminster, that I had triumphed, like Satan flying over the world and knowing he had won at last, though he had not come into even a fragment of his own. I feel somewhere that the triumph is mine, remote, oh very remote ana buri< un ground, but the triumph is mine. It is only the immediate present which frightens me and bullies me. In the long run I have the victory; for all those men in the queue, for those spectral, hazy, sunny towers hovering beyond the river, for the world that is to be. Endless patient strength and courage, that is all that is necessary—and the avoiding of disaster.

Let me only be still, and know we can force nothing, and compel nothing, can only nourish in the darkness the unuttered buds of the new life that shall be. That is our life now: this nourishing of the germs, the unknown quicks when the new life is coming into being in us and in others—I have hope of Bertie too—only patience, only patience, and endless courage to reject false dead things and false, killing processes.

With love from Frieda and me,

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.

Vale of Health, Hampstead, N. W.

Thursday.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I see you also are rather hostile to what I say, like everybody else. But I didn’t write for "average stupidity." And the lion and the lioness are at any rate better than "the universe consists in a duality, but there is an initial element called polarity, etc., etc."

As for the Rainbow being cheerful, I don’t think we’ve any of us the right to be cheerful. I think it is a true novel, and a big one, and as for the other people, if they can’t swallow it, let them spit it out. They are mostly impertinent, if not insulting. Thank goodness you weren’t that—either of those.

I never said the War was a blasphemy. I said "the blasphemy of the War is-—just as one could say "The blasphemy contained in Christianity is---The War is not a blasphemy:

but it contains a blasphemy,

Frieda has got a bad cold. Will you come here and see us?

Come any time to-morrow, or later, if you will send a p.c. You come to the Hampstead Tube Station, walk up the hill and along past the pond to “Jack Straw's Castle drop down the Heath on the path opposite the inn, at the bottom swerve round to the left, right into the Vale, and there is Byron Villas before your eyes.

The only comfort, in the long run, is the truth, however bitter it be. As for the maimed and wounded and bereaved— even for them the only comfort is the utter truth—otherwise their souls are hollow.

I don’t want the Signature to be a “success. I want it only to rally together just a few passionate, vital, constructive people. But they must consent first to cast away all that is of no use—all that is wrong. And we have been, we are, colossally wrong, so much so, we daren’t face it.

The Signature will get worse, not better, from the standpoint of comfortlessness with regard to the war, etc. So please, if you think we had better not send it to any of your responsible addresses, let me know.

Mary Cannan is here for a day or two—no, she goes away at 2 o’clock to-day.

But come and see us—Frieda wants to see you very much.

Yours,

D H. Lawrence.

You can come here by bus—to Hampstead Heat! termin i; —then walk straight forward up the hill till you come to tl e finger pointing to the Vale of Health, at the very top. Bus is best.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead, London.

To T. D D.                                Dec., 1915*

Deaf D.,—-

Edward Garnett was up here the other day, talking about you. I must write you a letter for Christmas. 1 was glad to hear that you and Mrs. D. were having a good time, and tha the children are all right.                                      , ,

We are going stormily on, as ever. Of course you heara of t le

29Z

suppression of the Rainbow. That was a ridiculous affair, instigated by the National Purity League, Dr. Horton and Co., nonconformity. Of course I achieved a good deal of notoriety, if not fame, am become one of the regular topics. But the whole thing is nasty and offensive. I heard that Hatchard's had sold their last copy of the Rainbow, sub rosa, for four guineas. So you may even have got an acquisition in that copy of yours.

The American edition will be out by now, I fancy, so we shall be able to get the book from New York.

We are leaving here directly—my proverbial restlessness. We took and furnished this little flat in June—now I have transferred the lease and sold the furniture. I can’t bear having a house on my head. I want to go to Florida for a while. This English winter suits me very badly. I think, perhaps, we shall go to Florida in a month or two’s time. In the meanwhile we are taking a farm-house on the Berkshire downs, which has been turned into a country place by some friends. Heaven knows how long we shall stay here. I find it impossible to sit still in one place.

At present I am laid up in bed with a very bad sort of cold. I wish to heaven the war would cease, so that one could feel more at rest.

We seem to have lived several little lives away, since you saw us last—known streams of different people—vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity. Mrs. Lawrence has seen her children once or twice, and has almost ceased to fret about them. I am having a book of Italian Sketches published in January, which I will send you.

That reminds me, I have long intended to ask you if you think I could easily get my MS. verses from Tellaro. All my poems are in little University notebooks, and in a brown Tage-buch of Frieda’s, left behind with the poor old Felice. You know that our Elide died? It made me frightfully miserable. Do you think you might write to the schoolmistress, Signorina Eva Rainusso, Leri ci, per Tellaro, Sarzana, and ask her to send to you all the books of MS. poems I left with Felice Fiori when I left Fiascherino? I forget how many there are—2 or z black, small note-books with red backs, and a brown Tagebuch, rather bigger—the note-books have the Nottingham University arms on them. If you could do this, and if you could send ten lire for Felice, the dear old soul, I should be so glad. I will send you a cheque the minute you let me know. And tell the maestra I am sending her a book. If there is anything I could send for you or Mrs. D. please let me know, I should be so glad.

With all good greetings from us for the Christmas.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

i, Byron Villas,

Vale of Health,

Hampstead, London,

To J. B. Pinker.                             16 Dec,, 19x5.

My dear Pinker,—

I am glad to hear about the Rainbow in America, and very anxious to see the book, to see if they have done anything to it. I shall hate it if they have mutilated it.

You know Philip Morrell is anxious to go ahead about the private circulation in England. So you will let him know about the American sheets, won't you. Even if they have made alterations, we might buy sheets and insert just those pages that are altered—no doubt it could be done.

I haven’t written a line these many weeks. It is winter with me, my heart is frost-bound. We’ll thaw it out one day. If only I could go away.

Tell Arnold Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels. A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction, and what he calls faults, he oeing an old imitator, I call characteristics. I shall repeat till I am grey—when they have as good a work to show, they may make their pronouncements ex cathedra. Till then, let them learn decent respect.

Still, I think he is generous.

I am laid up in bed with a violent cold, and wonder why one should ever trouble to get up, into this filthy world. 1 he wa stinks worse and worse.

Yours,

D. H. Lawfence.

ir Byron Villas,

Vale of Health, Hampstead.

To Katherine Mansfield..           Monday, 20 Dec., 1915.

My dear Katherine,—

Your letter came this morning. I am so sorry you are so ill. Yesterday Murry was here when the letter came—Kot brought it—and he was much upset.

Do not be sad. It is one life which is passing away from us, one "I" is dying; but there is another coming into being, which is the happy, creative you. I knew you would have to die with your brother; you also, go down into death and be extinguished. But for us there is a rising from the grave, there is a resurrection, and a clean life to begin from the start, new, and happy. Don't be afraid, don’t doubt it, it is so.

You have gone further into your death than Murry has. He runs away. But one day he too will submit, he will dare to go down, and be killed, to die in this self which he is. Then he will become a man; not till. He is not a man yet.

When you gel better, you must come back and we will begin afresh, it will be the first struggling days of spring, after winter. Our lives have been all autumnal and wintry. Now it is midwinter. But we are strong enough to give way, to pass away, and to be born again

I want so much that we should create a life in common, a new spirit, a spirit of unanimity between a few of us who are desirous in spirit, that we should add our lives together, to make one tree, each of us free and producing in his separate fashion, but all of us together forming one spring, a unanimous blossoming. It needs that we be one in spirit, that is all, What we are personally is of second importance.

And it is in its inception, this new life. From the old life, all is gone. There remain only you and Murry in our lives. We look at the others as across the grave. A death, and a grave lies between us and them. They are the other side of the grave, the old, far side, these------s and------s. We must not look

back. T here must be no looking back. There must be no more retrospection, which is introspection, no more remembering 296 and interpreting We must look forward into the unknown that is to be, like flowers that come up in the spring. Because we really are born again.

We have met one or two young people, just one or two, who have the germ of the new life in them. It doesn't matter what they are personally. Murry dismisses them with a sneer, for all that which is the past in them, but I hold on by that which is the future, which is gladdening.

We give up this flat to-morrow. For Christmas we go to my sister’s in Derbyshire: c/o Mrs. Clarke, Grosvenor Rd., Ripley, Derbyshire. We stay there till the 29th December. Then we go to the Beresfords' cottage in Cornwall, to live there till March. One or two others will come too. I want it now that we live together. When you come back, I want you and Murry to live with us, or near us, in unanimity; not these separations. Let us all live together and create a new world. If it is too difficult in England, because here all is destruction and dying and corruption, let us go away to Florida: soon. But let us go together, and keep together, several of us, as being of one spirit. Let it be a union in the unconsciousness, not in the consciousness. Get better soon, and come back, and let us all try to be happy together, in unanimity, not in hostility, creating, not destroying.

Love from me.

D H. Lawrence.

2, Hurst Close, Garden Suburb, N.W.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell. Wednesday. Postmark- 23 Dec,, 15.

My dear Ottoline,—

............ The man here is the manager—one of the managers—of the Oxford University Press, he gives me some of the Ajanta reproductions, - hey are so lovely, T must send you the folio. He will get it me cheaper, and I shall ask Bertie to pay half. They are for Christmas for you. I love them so much. We will all put our names in it, Frieda and Bertie and I. You can look at them many times and be happy whilst you see them, these Indian frescoes.

A thousand good wishes to you all, and love from Frieda and me.

D. H. Lawrence.

I liked Huxley very much. He will come to Florida.

c/o Mrs. Clarke,

Grosvenor Rd.,

Ripley, Derbyshire.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Thursday, 24th December, 1915.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We ought to have answered your letter before, and have thanked you for Frieda’s 10/-. She bought herself with it a tan suede hat with a little stiff brim, from Liberty’s, which suits her.

We are here till next week with my sister: both my sisters, in fact: the elder is here from Glasgow, with her child—a girl: the younger has a boy of a year. It is very queer to be here—makes me sad. I am fond of my people, but they seem to belong to another life, not to my own life. And the pathos of tiny children, in this age, is acute and painful. They are both nice children, poignant and direct; the world seems diabolical to me, with these small, new, fragile, pure children. I can’t bear it that the parents should have the children. The world is vile, when one looks at these tiny lives, so new and clear.

But enough grizzling—I’m not going to grizzle any more, while I live. I'm not going to lament and fret over the world any more. I'm not responsible for the world, as it is.

We are not going to Florida immediately. There are several others—young men and women—who are anxious to come with us, and we shall have to wait for them just a month or two. I am glad there are some others who want to come with us. They are all young, a new generation, a generation younger than you even. We want to make a new life in common, not a thing just for ourselves, a new life in common, a new birth in a new spirit, together. We shall do it, and we shall bring it off, and it will be good. I am going to be happy—really, really happy—we all are. It is a new thing which is in its inception.

In the meantime of our going to Florida we have a house in Cornwall. The flat in the Vale of Health is empty, the furniture sold or given away, the lease transferred to another man. We go back there no more. Again I am Vogelfrei, thank God— nothing but the trunks to bother us—no house nor possessions —thank Heaven again.

The novelist J. D. Beresford has lent us his house near Pad-stow, on the sea in Cornwall. We go down there next week. Some members of our Florida expedition are coming down too —we begin the new life in Cornwall. It is real. _______

Frieda sends her love to you, and thanks you very much for the jaunty tan hat she bought with your Christmas present.

I shall be glad when I go away again from here—this atmosphere of my boyhood. Nothing is more painful than to be plunged back into the world of the past, when that past is irrevocably gone by, and a new thing far away is struggling to come to life in one. But there will be the new life. And this love which goes back into the past, but not forward into the futurelike the love of the dead—is very painful.

With all good greetings.

D. H. Lawrence.

Ripley, Derbyshire.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell. Monday, 27 Dec., i9I5‘

My dear Ottoline,—

Your letter and parcel came this morning. The books are splendid: but why did you give me the book, the Shelley, you must value it? It is gay and pretty. I shall keep it safe.

Did you like the Ajanta frescoes? I loved them: the pure fulfilment—the pure simplicity—the complete, almost perfect relations between the men and the women—the most perfect things I have ever seen. Botticelli is vulgar beside them. ey are the zenith of a very lovely civilisation, the crest of a very perfect wave of human development. I love them beyond everything pictorial that I have ever seen—the perfect, perfect intimate relation between the men and the women; so simple and complete, such a very perfection of passion, a fulness, a whole blossom. That which we call passion is a very one-sided thing, based chiefly on hatred and Wille zur Macht. There is no Will to Power here—it is so lovely—in these frescoes.

We are here in Ripley—suffering rather. It is a cruel thing to go back into the past; to turn our backs on the future and go back to that which one has been. Tve just been differing violently with my eldest brother, who is a radical nonconformist.

Altogether the life here is so dark and violent; it all happens in the senses, powerful and rather destructive: no mind nor mental consciousness, unintellectual. These men are passionate enough, sensuous, dark—God, how all my boyhood comes back —so violent, so dark, the mind always dark and without understanding, the senses violently active. It makes me sad beyond words These men, whom I love so much—and the life has such a power over me—they understand mentally so horribly: only industrialism, only wages and money and machinery. They can’t think anything else. All their collective thinking is in those terms only. They are utterly unable to appreciate any pure, ulterior truth: only this industrial— mechanical—wage idea. This they will act from—nothing else. That is why we are bound to get something like Guild-Socialism in the long run, which is a reduction to the lowest terms— nothing higher than that which now is, only lower. But I suppose things have got to be reduced to their lowest terms. Only, oh God, I don’t want to be implicated in it. It is necessary to get the germ of a new development towards the highest, not a reduction to the lowest. That we must do, in Cornwall and Florida; the germ of a new era. But here, the reduction to the lowest must go on.

The strange, dark, sensual life, so violent, and hopeless at the bottom, combined with this horrible paucity and materialism of mental consciousness, makes me so sad, I could scream. They are still so living, so vulnerable, so darkly passionate. I love them like brothers—but, my God, I hate them too: I don’t intend to own them as masters—not while the world stands. One must conquer them also—think beyond them, know beyond them, act beyond them.

But there will be a big row after the war, with these working men—I don’t think 1 could bear to be here to see it. I couldn’t bear it—this last reduction. But here they think the war will last long—they are not like London.

At last, at last, one will be able to set forth from it all, into the uncreated future, the unborn, unconceived era. One must leave all this to finish itself: the new unanimity, the new complete happiness beyond—one must be strong enough to create this.

Love from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

We go to Cornwall, on Thursday. There is the beginning.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

Pads, tow, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Thursday, 30th December.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We came here to-night—a nice old house with large clear rooms, and such wonderful silence—only a faint sound o set and wind. It is like being at the window and looking out of England to the beyond. This is my first move outwards, to a new life. One must be free to love, only to love and create, a- d to be happy. One can feel it here, that it can come to pass—one is much nearer to freedom—the freedom to love and to be completely happy.

Let us have some news of you.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

This is the first move to Florida.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

Padstow, Cornwall.

To J. B, Pinker.                                i Jan., 1916.

Deaf Pinker,—

This is the new address for the time being. J. D. Beresford has lent us his house: for which may the gods shower blessings and much money on him.

Already, here, in Cornwall, it is better: the wind blows very hard, the sea all comes up the cliffs in smoke. Here one is outside England, the England of London—thank God.

Will Duckworths call the book Italian Days? It is by no means a brilliant title, but I should think it will do.

I got your letter too late to send you the American Rainbow, and now I have lost it—-don’t know where it can be. Perhaps you will have got one by now. Let me know, will you, what is to be done about it—re-publication.

If Duckworths hate Italian Days—they might like Italian Hours-—which is detestable, but for some reason, catchy, I believe. At least several women said to me: "I should want to buy a book called Italian Hours.” My God, what objectionable things people are!

But it is better in Cornwall.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

Padstow, Cornwall.

To J. D. Beresford.                           5 Jan., 1916.

Dear Beresford,—

We have been here a week, so I must report myself to you.

We love being here. There have been great winds, and the sea has been smoking white above the cliffs—such a wind that it made one laugh with astonishment. Now it is still again, and the evening is very yellow.

The house is always peaceful and a real delight. We live in the dining-room, and don’t use the drawing-room, at present. Emma is excellent, I think. We have a fine time, with her cakes

and bread and puddings. And most of the people seem nice— really very nice. There is a rare quality of gentleness in some of them—a sort of natural, flowering gentleness which I love. But then, alas, there is -------, whom I don’t like. He came in

—with his small eyes and his paunch—talking about how he turned the old woman out of this house, for he couldn t have a tenant like her—and about his property Truro way. But we have known the peasant type before—mean and stupidly cunning and base—so everything went off affably. One can’t take offence at a type—it’s no use. The offensiveness isn’t really individual.

We have walked to Padstow—the Lowestoft fleet going out is so pretty—and to the next bay north—and to-day right up on the downs, looking upon the country, upon St. Columb and beyond Wadebridge. I do like Cornwall. It is still something like King Arthur and Tristan. It has never taken the Anglo-Saxon civilisation, the Anglo-Saxon sort of Christianity. One can feel free here, for that reason—feel the world as it was in that flicker of pre-Christian Celtic civilisation, when humanity was really young—like the Mabinogion—not like Beowulf and the ridiculous Malory, with his grails and his chivalries.

But the war has come. Derby’s scheme has wrung their withers. They are very sad. Emma was telling us of her sister-in-law, who had just been stitching the armlet on her husband’s sleeve.

"It’s come now,” she said. We’ve never had it till new, bu* it’s come now. I'm sure, when I look at these buttons, I think ‘We’ve got the Kaiser to thank for these.’ Every stitch I put in goes through my heart.”

Which I think is rather beautiful, showing sincere gentleness and a power of love. The English women stitch armlets on freely enough: they have lost the power of love. But it does linger here.

I think I shall begin to write again here—it is so congenial to me. I must always thank you again for letting us come here it was such a blessing to me.

Best greetings from my wife and me, to Mrs. Beresford and the boy and you.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan. St, Merry n, Padstow, Cornwall.

To T. D. D,                               5 Jan., 1916.

Deaf, v.,—

I got your letter here, where we are staying for some weeks. It is a very jolly house on the sea—J. D. Beresford lent it us—do you remember his novel that you liked—The House in Demetrius Rd.? I like him better than his books—he's a nice man.

We shall be here at least till March—then I don’t know where we go.

I was glad to hear such good news of you and Mrs. D. Don’t get sent to Salonika, however: there seems to be a down on consuls there, just now.

The Cornish sea is rather lovely, so wild. It makes me think of Fiascherino here—another such a small rocky bay looking west. But, oh, Heaven, what a difference also!

Don’t, my dear D., be persuaded into Roman Catholicism. For an Englishman that is such a piece of retrogressive sentimentalism. I have ordered the two books by Carmichael to be sent to you, however, from Bumpus in Oxford St. I expect they will arrive duly. Only don’t, for God’s sake, slither into the easy slough of the Roman religion

I am writing myself a little book of philosophy—or religion— which will one day make you scratch your head—when it appears.

Thank you so much for getting me the poetry books. They can come along any time. I’m sorry you are hard up. I’m in a state of existing on charity. But I don’t care. I have dene the work; if they won’t pay me properly, then they must support me improperly.

All good luck to you, and remembrances to Mrs. D and the children. Frieda sends greetings.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn.

Padstow, Cornwall.

To Katherine Mansfield.                     7 Jan., 1916.

My dear Katherine,—

I hear Murry has gone to France to see you: good: also that you arc well and happy: benissimo!

Give John my love.

I love being here m Cornwall—so peaceful, so far off from the world. But the world has disappeared for ever—there is no more world any more: only here, and a fine thin air which nobody and nothing pollutes.

My dear Katherine, I’ve done bothering about the world and people—I've finished. There now remains to find a nice place where one can be happy. And you and Jack will come if you like—when you feel like it: and we’ll all be happy together—no more questioning and quibbling and trying to do anything with the world. The world is gone, extinguished, like the lights of last night’s Cafe Royal—gone for ever. There is a new world with a new thin unsullied air and no people in it but new-born people: moi-meme et Frieda.

No return to London and the world, my dear Katherine—it has disappeared, like the lights of last night’s Cafe Royal.

We, Frieda and I, both send our love, for the New Year, the Year 1 of the new world. The same also to Murry. The old year had to die.

But I’m not going to struggle and strive with anything any more—go like a thistle-down, anywhere, having nothing to do with the world, no connection.

Love to you.                        j-> j{ Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn, Padstow, Cornwall.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                   9 Jan., 1916.

My dear Ottoline,—

I got all your letters safely, and am very glad you liked Murry. He is one of the very few people I count upon.

305

We have been here a week, and 1 like it exceedingly. The sea rages under the black rocks, and the western sky is iridescent at evening, so that the water stretches far back into the distance, into the unknown. I have been much happier here. But two days ago another bad cold came on, which makes me feel queer as if I couldn’t see any further, as if all things have come to an end, and one must only wait for the new to begin. But it is rather terrible this being confronted with the end, only with the end.

Heseltine is here also. I like him, but he seems empty, uncreated. That is how these young men are. There seems to be no hope for life in the living themselves. But one always believes in the miracle, in something supernatural. I believe in something supernatural, which is not of human life, neither of religion. Except for this, there is only the end.

But the water that is so white and powerful and incomprehensible under the black rocks, that is not of this life. I feel as if there were a strange savage, unknown God in the foam— heaven knows what God it be.

When will you come and see us? We are here only till March. After that I don't know where we shall be. But come and see us here, because of the sea and the silence and peace and the out-of-the-worldness of it all.

Emma is a good soul, the housekeeper, and a good cook. The house is not too tiny. You would be fairly comfortable. Emma is really splendid.

I have written the first part of a short story, but I don’t know how to go on. You see one must break into a new world and it is so difficult. We are going to write, all of us together, a comedy for the stage, about Heseltine and his puma and so on. It will be jolly.

To-morrow Kouyoumdjian is coming down for a while. I hope we shall like him. He is at any rate more living than poor Philip Heseltine, who really seems as if he were not yet born, as if he consisted only of echoes from the past, and reactions against the past. But he will perhaps come to being soon: when the new world comes to pass. Meanwhile conscription hangs over his head like a sword of Damocles.

One has only to say to one's soul, be still, and let be what will be. One can do absolutely nothing any more, with one’s will. Yet still one can be an open door, or at least an unlatched door, for the new era to come in by. That is all.

There are violets here, they smell so sweet. It is quite warm. The wind is at last quiet. Soon my cold will be better, and one can go out and enjoy it all again. Frieda sends her love to you. She talks of your visit, planning. Remember me to Philip-— is he sad about the conscription? What is he feeling now? Greet the children from me.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn, Padstow, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell,          Tuesday {Jan. nth, 1916).

My dear Catherine,—

Never mind about the school: Glasgow seems a God-forsaken place. I am trying to get my sister to leave it.

But I’m sorry about your reviewing, because I believe you enjoyed the bit you had. And one does not want to be martyred.

I read Where Bonds Are Loosed. It has got some real go in it. But it is based on a mistaken idea that brutality is the desideratum. But let us hope the war will cure him of this idea. He seemed in his book to have real courage and vitality, but to be a bit stupid. But I forgive stupidity, for strength of feeling. Do keep on knowing him, if you can, and if you really like him, let me know him too. Don’t let him slip. Tell me about him, if he is any good, and if you think well, ask him to write to me.

The graveyard poem is very good. I do wish, however, you didn’t use metre and rhyme. It is verse which in spirit bursts all the old world, and yet goes corseted in rhymed scansion. Do leave it free—perhaps not this poem: the "there rhyme is good, so hard—but even here, do not use lair: break the rhyme rather than the stony directness of speech.

The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark and unlovely actualities is a stark directness, without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere. Everything can go, but this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry, to-day. That poem is very good, the best yet. My scribblings on it are only impertinent suggestions.

But you know it isn’t rhythmed at all, metrically. So why rhyme if you don't rhythm. I mean that for your other poems. This has got its own form as it stands. But in general, why use rhyme when you don't use metrical rhythm?—which you don't—you’d lose all reality if you did. Use rhyme accidentally, not as a sort of draper’s rule for measuring lines off.

The second poem is not good. It is again not created. Do it in free verse accidentally rhymed, and let us see.

I send you the Spoon River Anthology. It is good, but too static, always stated, not really art. Yet that is the line poetry will take, a free, essential verse, that cuts to the centre of things, without any flourish.

I like Cornwall very much. It is not England. It is bare and dark and elemental, Tristan's land. I lie looking down at a cove where the waves come white under a low, black headland, which slopes up in bare green-brown, bare and sad under a level sky. It is old, Celtic, pre-Christian. Tristan and his boat, and his horn.

I am writing erratically. I am laid up in bed with my wintry inflammation. But this is its last turn—I shall be solid again in a week. Greet Don from me—and Ivy.

Love.

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn, North Cornwall.

Post card to T.D. D.          (Postmark—15 Jan., 1916.)

Thank you very much for the slips of MS., also for the 3 little note-books which have arrived safely. There remains 308 only a rather big brown Tagsbuch note-book, with verses, which I should like. Have you got it?

Have you received the books I ordered for you from Bumpus in Oxford St.?

I've been rather knocked up this last month—how sickening it is.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

North Cornwall.

Monday, 17 Jan., 1916.

To J. M Murry and Katherine Mansfield.

Cart Miei Ragazzi,—

I am very glad you are happy. I aat is the right way to be happy—a nucleus of love between a man and a woman, ana let the world look after itself. It is the last folly, to bother about the world. One should be in love, and be happy—no more. Except that if there are friends who will help the happiness on, tant mieux. Let us be happy together.

I am always seedy nowadays—my old winter sickness and inflammation—very weary I get of it—sometimes contemplate my latter end. But it is always darkest before the dawn. 1 he New Year will come. Your spring is a little earlier than ours, that is all. But, oh dear, it is a long winter, of weather and lovelessness and discontent and sadness and everything: mats cela va finir.

I still like Cornwall. The house is a big, low, grey, well-to-do farm-place, with all the windows looking over a round of grass, and between the stone gate pillars down a little tamarisky lane, at a cove of the sea, where the waves are always coming in past jutty black rocks. It is a cove like ristan sailed into, from Lyonesse—just the same. It belongs to 2000 years back— that pre-Arthurian Celtic flicker of being which disappeared so entirely. The landscape is bare, yellow-green and brown, dropping always down to black rocks and a torn sea. All is desolate and forsaken, not linked up. But like it.

We are here only till March. Then I don’t know where

Heseltine is here—I like him—you will like him—also —---—,

whom I don’t care for really. But he will go soon.

Let us make some plans for March—let us live somewhere together. You make the plans this time, for us. I am done.

Much love from us to you both.

D. H. Lawpence.

Porthcothan,

Post card to T. D. D.               Saturday, 22 Jan., ’16.

The Tagebuch came to-day—the letter the other day. You were very miserable. But whatever possessed you to quote Goethe and “Reinheit”? What does one mean by "Reinheit"? Purity lies in pure fulfilment, I should say. All suppression and abnegation seem to me dirty, unclean. I didn’t like your letter. Why, when you are miserable, do you take the selfabnegating line? Why not kick a little, in some direction, instead?

I hope you didn’t think you had to pay for the books from Bumpus—I paid for them. Greetings from us—don’t get depressed.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

North Cornwall.

To W. E. & S. A. Hopkin.                 25 Jan., 1916.

My dear Sallie and Willie,—

My Rainbow copy was lost, so I had to wait till I could get this. However, here it is, with my love. I hope you will like it. A few little passages are left out, but nothing important.

We are here in an old, low, long house, with big forsaken-feeling rooms. The windows look down at the little cove of the sea, where the white waves come between black rocks. I love Cornwall. It is bare and desolate and like the beginning of the world, the old Promethean powers. You must come. I should like you to come when Lady Ottoline Morrell is here— I don't know exactly when she will be down, but in February, I think. I should like you two to meet.

I have been ill, but am getting better. It was my soulsickness after London and the state of things. Now I am forgetting everything.

I am doing the proofs of a book of Italian Sketches, and preparing a book of poetry, so you will have something else from my pen soon.

Be sure and write me all the news. Much love from Frieda and me to you both—also to Mistress Enid.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

Padstow, Cornwall.

To J. D. Beresford.                           i Feb., 1916.

My dear Beresford,—

Thanks for your letter. We heard from Barbara Low that you think of coming back in February. Will you tell me, so that we can leave Emma a few days to make ready for you. I don't know where we shall go. It looks as if we shall have to go to a little place Lady Ottoline Morrell will lend us, for we are very badly off. But I should like to stay in Cornwall. I like it so much. W e might afforc a cottage, 1 think.

It is quite true what you say: the shore is absolutely primeval: those heavy, black rocks, like solid darkness, and the heavy water like a sort of first twilight breaking against them, and not changing them. It is really like the first craggy breaking of dawn in the world, a sense of the primeval darkness just behind, before the Creation. That is a very great and comforting thing to feel, I think: after all this whirlwind of dust and grit and dirty paper of a modern Europe. I love to see those 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. It is not sunlight. mligh is really firelight. This cold light of the heavy sea is really the eternal light washing against the eternal darkness, a terrific abstraction, far beyond all life, which is merely of the sun, warm. And it does one’s soul good to escape from the ugly triviality of life into this clash of two infinities one upon the other, cold and eternal.

The Cornish people still attract me. They have become detestable, I think, and yet they aren't detestable. They are, of course, strictly anti-social and un-Christian. But then, the aristocratic principle and the principle of magic, to which they belonged, these two have collapsed, and left only the most ugly, scaly, insect-like, unclean selfishness, so that each one of them is like an insect isolated within its own scaly, glassy envelope, and running seeking its own small end. And how foul that is! How they stink in their repulsiveness, in that way.

Nevertheless, the old race is still revealed, a race which believed in the darkness, in magic, and in the magic transcendency of one man over another, which is fascinating. Also there is left some of the old sensuousness of the darkness, a sort of softness, a sort of flowing together in physical intimacy, something almost negroid, which is fascinating.

But curse them, they are entirely mindless, and yet they are living purely for social advancement. They ought to be living in the darkness and warmth and passionateness of the blood, sudden, incalculable. Whereas they are like insects gone cold, living only for money, for dirt. They are foul in this. They ought all to die.

Not that I've seen very much of them—I've been laid up in bed. But going out, in the motor and so on, one sees them and feels them and knows what they are like.

Hawken was very cross because Heseltine, who is staying with me, chopped down a dead old tree in the garden. I said to him (Hawken), "I’m sorry, but don’t trouble. It was so dead it soon would have fallen. And you may take the wood."

The young men are all being called now up round here. They are very miserable. There are loud lamentations on every hand. The only cry is, that they may not be sent out to France to fight. They all quite shamelessly don't want to see a gun. I sympathise perfectly with this,

The cursed war will go on for ever.

Don’t let us keep you out of your house for one moment. If you want to come in in a week's time, only let us know, and all will be ready for you. We love the house and we love being here. But we can leave at a day’s notice.

I have got ready a book of poetry here—quite ready—which I think is a great work to have done.

The Murrys write from France that they are very happy: for which I am very glad. They think of coming back in March.

My wife sends warmest greetings to Mrs. Beresford and the child, and to you, in which I heartily join.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn, Cornwall.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.             i Feb., 1916.

My dear Ottoline,—

Here I send you the MS. of the poems. It is complete except for that poem Snapdragon, which was published in the first Georgian Anthology. I will send you that on, and you will insert it in the right place, according to the index, will you? Tell me if you like the poems. You see they make a sort of inner history of my life, from 20 to 26. I ell me if the inscription will do.

You will find enclosed also three little MS. books, from which these poems were chiefly collected. 1 he black book is a new scribble—but the red college note-books—they are my past, indeed. Will you let them lie with my other MS. at Oarsington? But read the poems first in the typewritten MS., they will make a better impression.

I send you also Petronius. He startled me at first, but I liked him. He is a gentleman, when all is said. I have taken a great dislike to Dostoievsky in the Possessed. It seems so sensational, and such a degrading of the pure mind, somehow. It seems as though the pure mind, the true reason, which surely is noble, were made trampled and filthy under the hoofs of secret, perverse, undirect sensuality. Petronius is straight an above-board. Whatever he does, he doesn’t try to degrade and

dirty the pure mind in him. But Dostoievsky, mixing God and Sadism, he is foul. I will send your books back by degrees. A thousand thanks for them. And that Egyptian book of Mlle. Baillot’s is a real pleasure. Please give her my thanks for it.

I am getting better—at last I've got a solid core inside me. I've felt so long as if I hadn’t any solid being at all. Now I can put my feet on the ground again. But it is still shaky. I believe that milk casein stuff is very good, also the Brand's. . . . When do you think you may be coming down? We had a perfect day on Sunday, when we could see the ships far out at sea, and we were all so happy. But it has gone sad again.

Would you rather have had your title in the inscription? After all, it is to you the inscription is written, not to your social self.

Heseltine is gloomy about conscription. When one thinks out, away from this remoteness, how horrible it is! But there, it is no good: why should one waste oneself?

Frieda sends her love, and I mine. I hope you are feeling better.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

N. Cornwall.

To J. D. Beresford.                 Thursday, z Feb., 1916.

My dear Beresford,—

A thousand thanks for your letter. It is very good of you to write about "Trevogan": it looks a most delightful house. And of course we can pay some rent. While Heseltine stays with us he will pay half. And the Murrys talk of coming back in March to live with us. Of course they are broken reeds to depend on. But if they come we should want a bigger house, and we should stick to Emma. I like her very much.

Is the cottage on Constantine Bay that ancient shebeen right on the bay? That pleased me also, very much. I should be quite happy in a tiny cottage. But if Heseltine isn’t conscripted, and if the Murrys were to come, it would be too small. However, we shall know about all that in a fortnight. Meanwhile we shall stay peacefully and happily at Porthcothan, till you turn up. It would be nice if we were neighbours for the summer, and possibly for next winter also. I feel if I get fixed up down here, I shall stay longer than usual: six months is my usual limit.

If you see Sidgwick, please ask him if he would like my poems: they are very nice, and will make a 100-page book. If he would like them, will he talk to Pinker—Talbot House, Arundel St., Strand—about them. I don't a bit know where to take them to be published. ----is so unimpressive, ----is

a bit cheap, Harold Monro I don't like. So speak to Sidgwick, if you can, about them: somehow I feel he is a man with some being: not a cardboard box, like most of them.

My respects to Mrs. Beresford, and love to the boy.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn, North Cornwall,

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            7th February, 1916.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I didn't answer your letter about the Rainbow because I was ill, and didn’t know what to say. I have been in bed a long time. Maitland Radford came down from London to see me— he is a doctor. He says the stress on the nerves sets up a deferred inflammation in all the internal linings, and that I must keep very quiet and still and warm and peaceful. here was a sort of numbness all down the left side, very funny I could hardly hold anything in my hand. But now, thank Heaven, it is all getting better, and I feel my old strength coming back, like a pulse that begins to beat and sounds very deep and strong, as if it went to the very heart of the uncreated darkness. I am glad. I have felt very bad, so nearly disintegrated into nothingness. Now I can walk to the sea again and all that fever and inflammation and madness has nearly gone. But I feel very queer after it—sort of hardly know myself.

You ask me about the message of the Painbow.. I don’t know myself what it is: except that the older world is done for, toppling on top of us: and that it's no use the men looking to the women for salvation, nor the women looking to sensuous satisfaction for their fulfilment. There must be a new world.

Soon, in a few weeks, will come out my book of Italian Studies. I think it is interesting. It contains a plainer statement of a "message." I will send it you.

And soon after that, I think a new book of my poems is coming. I got my MS. books from Italy. They are old poems— but good

The war, the whole world, has gone out of my imagination. I feel like a sleeper of Ephesus who has waked up, not a hundred years after, but about five thousand years before. This Cornwall is very primeval: great, black jutting cliffs and rocks, like the original darkness, and a pale sea breaking in, like dawn. It is like the beginning of the world, wonderful: and so free and strong. I feel as if all that Europe were so long ago and so disremembered. It does not exist in me any more.

We are staying in this house until March 9th, and then I don’t know what will happen. I suppose we shall take a tiny cottage somewhere. We have very little money, and there won't come any more. I don't know what we shall do. But I don’t bother. I have lost the faculty just now; perhaps sheer selfpreservation. I wish we could go a long voyage, into the South Pacific. I wish that very much. But I suppose it cannot happen. I am afraid now of America. I am afraid of the people. I daren’t go there. My will won’t carry me either. So I don’t know what will happen. The money will last us a month or two. Something in me is asleep and doesn’t trouble.

I'm sorry this is all about myself. But I can’t talk about general affairs, they are so meaningless, and all I can tell you is just these things about myself. I wish there were miracles— I am tired of the old laborious way of working things to their conclusions. The seagulls here are so wonderful, large and white, with strong bent shoulders in the light of the sun. Why should one care, or will.

I am afraid you are frightened of the future, with Herbert Asquith in the army, and your young children growing up. But things are not in our will; we can’t help what it is. Still, there is something beyond, like this sea travelling in from the unknown and the gulls that cry sharply in the air.

Frieda seems pretty well and happy here—she sends her love.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn, N. Cornwall. To Lady Ottoline Morrell.           7 Feb., 1916.

My deaf Ottoline,—

Do not listen to Bertie about going to London. You cannot really do anything now: no one can do anything. You might as well try to prevent the spring from coming on. This world of ours has got to collapse now, in violence and injustice and destruction, nothing will stop it. Bertie deludes himself about his lectures. There will come a bitter disillusion.

The only thing now to be done is either to go down with the ship, sink with the ship, or, as much as one can, leave the ship, and like a castaway live a life apart. As for me, I do not belong to the ship; I will not, if I can help it, sink with it. I will not live any more in this time. I know what it is. I reject it. As far as I possibly can, I will stand outside this time, I will live my life, and, if possible, be happy, though the whole world slides in horror down into the bottomless pit. here is a greater truth than the truth of the present, there is a God beyond these gods of to-day. Let them fight and fall round their idols, my fellow men: it is their affair. As for me, as far as I can, I will save myself, for I believe that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting the falsehood of these personal times.

It was a beautiful day here to-day, with bright, new, wide opened sunshine, and lovely new scents in the fresh air, as if the new blood were rising. And the sea came in great long waves thundering splendidly from, the unknown. It is perfect, with a strong, pure wind blowing. What does it matter about that seething scrimmage of mankind in Europe? If that were indeed the only truth, one might indeed despair.

I am reading Moby Dick. It is a very odd, interesting book: to me interesting, the others can t bear it. I read the History of the East—it is a very bad little book. But something in me lights up and understands these old, dead peoples, and I love it: Babylon, Nineveh, Ashurbanipal, how one somehow suddenly understands it. And I cannot tell you the joy of ranging far back there seeing the hordes surge out of Arabia, or over the edge of the Iranian plateau. It is like looking at the morning star. The world is very big, and the course of mankind is stupendous. What does a crashing down of nations and empires matter, here and there! What is death, in the individual! I don’t care if sixty million individuals die. The seed is not in the masses, it is elsewhere.

I should like you to get me out of the library a history of early Egypt, before the Greeks: a book not too big, because I like to fill it in myself, and the contentions of learned men are so irritating. The text of Mlle.’s book is impossible.

When you feel it is the right time for you to come down here, I hope you will come at once. Frieda will be glad to see you. And these Cornish seas somehow relieve one’s soul of mankind.

I wish I were going on a long voyage, far into the Pacific. I wish that very much.

Thank you for the foods that came to-day. But please, when you are badly off, don’t spend any more money on me. But I am getting better; I feel the strength striking back into me, like a new strong pulse, with all the power of the uncreated darkness behind.

I can alter the adjectives in the dedication when the proofs come, if still we don’t like them. But I like them. I do not believe in this democratic spirit of stripping away nobility.

My love to you: I hope you too are feeling stronger. Frieda sends her love also.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn, North Cornwall.

To Mark Gertler.                      io February, 1916.

Dear Gertler,—

I got the books all right; thanks very much for them. Your letter was gloomy, and I have nothing to say that will cheer you up, otherwise I would have written sooner. Here we sit and watch the sea in the rain. It would be all right if the future were not so beastly just ahead. Heseltine, I expect, will be conscripted. We shall stay in Cornwall till our money is gone— which will take three or four months—then I think we may as well all go and drown ourselves. For I see no prospect of the war’s ever ending, and not a ghost of a hope that people will ever want sincere work from any artist. It is a damned life. 1 curse my age, and all the people in it. I hate my fellow men most thoroughly. I wish there could be an earthquake that would swallow up everybody except some two dozen people. Meanwhile we’ve got to watch it that we are not swallowed.

Let me know soon how you are and what you are doing. I, thank God, am better in health, after a long stay in bed. I am really feeling some real strength coming back into me. It is astounding how one slips down the hill and near to the edge of oblivion. How is your picture? How are you? I he day must come when work is not so deathly to us; it gets better with me! It used to be, as it is with you, a pure process of self-destruction. But that gets better. I can only work now when I feel well

I should like very much to see you and Kot down here. "Vou might come and stay a while when your picture is nishec Don’t exhaust yourself too much: it is immoral. You must see this country. Tell me what your possible plans are.

Is there any news of the Carmans? Frieda sends her love. Tell Kot that it rains so heavily I can’t go to the post-office to-day. We stay in this house till the ninth of March.

Let me hear from you immediately.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

North Cornwall.

To J. M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield. n Feb., 1916.

My dear Jack and Katherine.—

I did answer your letters some ten days ago. They posted it with only a penny stamp. I am very sorry: that may have delayed it. But you will have it now. I have been wondering why you didn't answer. Frieda wrote to Katherine separately, even before my letter: and I'm sure there was nothing censorious in either of us.

I have been thinking with much affection and some longing of you two lately. I feel you are my only real friends in the world. I have really been badly seedy this time. Maitland Radford came down to see me: says it is nervous stress sets up internal inflammations. One feels the slithery edge of oblivion under one’s feet. But I am much better now, and can go out again and walk.

We are in this house for 3 weeks longer—until March 8th. What shall we do afterwards? Shall we take a house down here in Cornwall, and keep Emma?—she is a most excellent housekeeper—the Beresfords want to sack her. Shall we all live together? Emma is a splendid woman—cheap, 5/- a week. So far, Heseltine has been here with us all along. We get on very well with him. But I don't know if he would stay on in Cornwall after March. It would perhaps be jolliest if it were us four alone. But that is as it turns out. We can live quite cheaply together. Here it costs us only about £2 a week, F. and me. Heseltine also talks of a publishing scheme. He would combine with you. I myself believe that there is something to be done by private publishing. We can set everything going if you come—at least we can try.

I have felt awfully sick and down. But Maitland Radford says I mustn’t bother about anything or I shall be worse ill. So I don’t trouble. But my soul is a rag.

I shall be very anxious to hear from you—write at once. Much love from Frieda and me.

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,' ' North Cornwall.

To Edward Marsh.                       12 Feb., 1916.

My dear Eddie,—

Cynthia Asquith writes me that somebody says I "abuse you.” If ever I have abused you to anybody, I am very sorry and ashamed. But I don't think I ever have: though Heaven knows what one says. Yet I don't feel as if I had. We have often laughed at you, because you are one of those special figures one can laugh at; just as I am, only I’m ten times more ridiculous. But I’m sure we’ve laughed kindly and affectionately: I know the Murrys and us, we've always laughed affectionately. I did feel rather bitter the way you took the war: "What splendid times we live in”: because the war makes me feel very badly, always. And I may have been furious about that: I must be more restrained. But I don’t think I've abused you, apart from the war, which is something special: and even for that I don’t think I have.

But whatever I have said, may have said, for I can’t remember, I always feel a real gratitude to you, and a kindness, and an esteem of the genuine man. And I’m sorry if ever I've gone against those true feelings for you. I have thought that it was best for us to keep no constant connection, because of your position in the Government, and of my feelings about the war. But that I do out of respect for your position.

However, if ever I have abused you, though I can't remember, then forgive me: for indeed I am not ungrateful, and I never want to abuse you. If the war makes us strangers, it does not, I hope, make us in the least enemies.

I have been seedy down here, and felt like dying. I must not get into such states. Next month will appear a vol. of my Italian Sketches, which I will send you. Only don’t say, as you said of The Rainbow: toujours perdrix. Because you know one suffers what one writes.

And a little later will come a book of poems. I know you don’t care much for my verses: but I’ll send them along when they appear.

It's been a bad time, this last year. I wish it were ended.

Frieda sends her regards, I mine.

D H Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

Not th Cornwall.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                   15 Feb., 1916.

My dear Ottoline,—

We love the counterpane. It is the kind of thing that really rejoices my heart. I am very fond of woollen things too— even more than silk, I think. I don’t think the pale blue and black are bad: they make me laugh. I don t know why, but the whole shawl gives me a sudden feeling of laughter. I really like it very much: and so does Frieda. We had puzzled over a word in one of your letters—countrypair, you wrote, I think— and wondered what it was you thought of sending us. How jolly it is to have this coloured countrypair. I want to wear it like a Red Indian.

I shall read the History of Egypt and tell you how I like it. I now send you back one or two of your books. The Dostoievsky lay in the window-seat and in the night the rain beat in and spoiled it. I am sorry. Perhaps I ought to buy you another. But you don’t like it very much. I love the book about St. Francis and Dante—or whatever it is—the Salimbene's Biography. I love to see these people as they were when the Christian idea was still only a graft upon their lives, had not entered in their blood. But what times to live in. I should think not two men in a hundred died a natural death then. It is always so interesting to see the original self in man being modified by a big universal idea. One has to recover the original self now.

I have nearly done the first, the destructive, half of my philosophy. At last it can stand. It is the last word. I am sure it marks the end of a great epoch: at least for me. When this chapter is typed I shall send you as much as is done, for you to read. I feel that probably you won’t like it, for a time. But do read it.

To- day we have a letter from Bertie: very miserable. He doesn't know why he lives at ail: mere obstinacy and pride, he says, keep him alive. His lectures are all right in themselves, but their effect is negligible. They are a financial success. But all the people who matter are too busy doing other things to come to listen. He lives only for fussy trivialities, and for nothing else.

That is the whole gist of his letter. I am sorry for him, but my heart doesn’t soften to him just yet: I don’t know why. I feel he is obstinate in going his own way, and until he ceases to be obstinate, all is useless.

I had a similar despairing letter from the Murrys. Something must have happened to the French mail—the mail to France—I had written them, and so had Frieda. I forgot to tell you, she has £130 a year from her father; he has what he makes. He can make quite a lot by his journalism. It is rather surprising that newspaper editors hold him in such esteem.

About —-----and M---- I tell him he ought to tell her. I

suppose he will. It is queer. He declares he does not like this one, P—— but he does really. He declares he wants her to go. But he is really attached to her in the senses, in the unconsciousness, in the blood. He is always fighting away from this. But in so doing he is a fool. She is very nice and very real and simple, we like her. His affection for M---- is a

desire for the fight because he is in the dark. If he were in the light he would want the dark. He wants M----for companion

ship, not for the blood connection, the dark, sensuous relation. With P----he has this second, dark relation, but not the first.

She is quite intelligent, in her way, but no mental consciousness; no white consciousness, if you understand, all intuition, in the dark, the consciousness of the senses. But she is quite fine and subtle in that way, quite, and I esteem her there quite as much as I esteem him.

Perhaps he is very split, and would always have the two things separate, the real blood connection and the real conscious or spiritual connection, always separate. For these people I really believe in two wives. I don’t see why there should be monogamy for people who can’t have full satisfaction in one person, because they themselves are too split, because they act in themselves separately. Monogamy is for those who are whole and clear, all in one stroke. But for those whose stroke is broken into two different directions, then there should be two fulfilments.

For myself, thank God, I feel myself becoming more and more unified, more and more a oneness. And Frieda and I become more and more truly married—for which I thank Heaven. It has been such a fight. But it is coming right. And then we can all three be real friends. Then we shall be really happy, all of us, in our relation.

I am better. I got a cold and my chest was a bit raw, but that is going again. Here the winds are so black and terrible. They rush with such force that the house shudders, though the old walls are very solid and thick. Only occasionally the gulls rise very slowly into the air. And all the while the wind rushes and thuds and booms, and all the while the sea is hoarse and heavy. It is strange, one forgets the rest of life. It shuts one in within its massive violent world. Sometimes a wave bursts with a great explosion against one of the outlying rocks, and there is a tremendous ghost standing high on the sea, a great tall whiteness. I hope it will be more restful by and by, and you will come down here.

I shall send you most of the books back, because we are so wandering.

We have got daffodils and little yellow narcissi, and blue-and-white violets, on the table, that the children bring us from the gardens. It is really spring. The willow catkins are already silver, very gleaming. We are going soon to look for another house. I wonder where we shall find it? Quite near, I think.

Heseltine is very keen about the publishing scheme. He has sent off a circular to be printed at his expense. Do you know, I believe he is one of those people who are born to be conveyors of art: they are next to artists, and they convey art to the world. I shouldn’t wonder if he made the publishing scheme a real success in the long run.

I feel quite anti-social, against this social whole as it exists. I wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these days. But my way of shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these social people of to-day, perhaps it is more satisfying. But I feel like an outlaw. All my work is a shot at their very innermost strength, these banded people of to-day. Let them cease to be. Let them make way for another, fewer, stronger, less cowardly people.

Frieda sends her love—my love to you.

D. H. Lawrence,

Porthcothan, St, Merryn,

N’. Cornwall.

To J., M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield. 17 Teb., 1916.

Dear Katherine and Jack,—

Your letters came this morning. We shouldn’t bind you: after our experiences, are we such tools? T he farmhouse is no more. But we shall look for a furnished place, first in Cornwall, then, if nothing nice here, then in Herefordshire. The Bei fords come back here on March 9th, so we must be housed by then. I will let you know. We will not take anything very expensive, so that if you don’t come, we can live by ourselves. Probably Heseltine will stay on with us: if he is not conscripted: and I shouldn’t think he will be.

This morning the proofs have come of the circular for the private publishing venture: The Rainbow Books and Music. It looks very well. I will send you a copy when the lot come. We want to begin by doing The Rainbow privately—-h has got some renown now—then go on and on. No more trivial things. 1 he whole hog.

And no more adhering to society. I am out of the camp, like a brigand. And every book will be a raid on them.

I’ve just read The Possessed. I find I’ve gone off Dostoievsky, and could write about him in very cold blood. T didn’t care for The Possessed: nobody was possessed enougt really t interest me. They bore me, these squirming sorts of people: they teem like insects.

I'll write you some "notes" on Dostoievsky—you can translate them into your own language, if they interest you.

1. He has a fixed will, a mania to be infinite, to be God.

2. Within this will, his activity is twofold:

(a) To be self-less, a pure Christian, to live in the outer

whole, the social whole, the self-less whole, the universal consciousness.

(b) To be a pure, absolute self, all-devouring and all

consuming.

That is the main statement about him.

His desire to achieve the sensual, all-devouring consummation comes out in Dmitri Karamazov, and Rogozhin, and, not so clearly, in Stavrogin.

His desire for the spiritual, turn-the-other-cheek consummation, comes out in the Idiot himself, in Alyosha, partly in Stavrogin.

There is the third type, which represents pure unemotional will: this is the third Karamazov brother, and Pyotr Stepano-vitch, and the young secretary man at whose house the Idiot at first lodges—he who is going to marry the young woman— Gavril, is [that] his name?

The whole point of Dostoievsky lies in the fact of his fixed will that the individual ego, the achieved I, the conscious entity, shall be infinite, God-like, and absolved from all relation, i.e. free.

I like The Idiot best. The Idiot is showing the last stage of Christianity, of becoming purely self-less, of becoming disseminated out into a pure, absolved consciousness. This is the Christian ecstasy, when I become so transcendently superconscious that I am bodiless, that the universe is my consciousness. This is the little Idiot prince. It is the ecstasy of being devoured in the body, like the Christian lamb, and of transcendence in the consciousness, the spirit.

Karamazov is concerned with the last stages—not nearly so far gone—of sensuality, of unconscious experience purely within the self. I reach such a pitch of dark sensual ecstasy that I seem to be, I myself, the universal night that has swallowed everything. I become universal, the universal devouring darkness. This is Dmitri Karamazov. This was Dostoievsky's real desire, to obtain this sensual ecstasy of universality. This is why Fattier Zossima bowed to Dmitri—Zossima is pure Christian, self-less, universal in the social whole. Dead, he stinks.

He was sadish because his will was fixed on the social virtues, because he felt himself wrong in his sensual seekings. Therefore he was cruel, he tortured himself and others, and goutait the tortures.

The Christian ecstasy leads to imbecility (7 he Idiot). 1 he sensual ecstasy leads to universal murder: for mind, the acme of sensual ecstasy, lies in devouring the other, even in the pleasures of love; it is a devouring, like a tiger drinking blood. But the full sensual ecstasy is never reached except by Rogozhin in murdering Nastasya. It is nipped in the last stages by the will, the social will. When the police stripped Dmitri Karamazov naked, they killed in him the quick of his being, his lust for the sensual ecstasy.

The men who represent the will, the pure mental, social, rational, absolved will, Ivan Karamazov, and Pyotr tepano-vitch, and Oavril, they represent the last stages of our social development, the human being become mechanical, absolved from all relation. When Stepan talks with the devil, the devil is a decayed social gentleman—only that. The mechanical social forms and aspirations and ideals, J suppose, are the devil.

The women are not important* They are the mere echoes and objectives of the men. l hey desire the sensual ecstasy, all of them, even the cripple in The Possessed ("My hawk, my eagle," she says to Stavrogin). They have the opposite wild love for purity, self-lessness, extreme Christianity. Ard they are all ultimately bound to the social convention—all the "great" women, that is. The cripple in The Possessed, and Nastasya FiJipovna, and Dmitri Karamazov s wor in, these desire only the sensual ecstasy: but all the while they admit themselves the inferior of the other Christian ecstasy: which is the social ecstasy.

They are great parables, the novels, but false art. They are only parables. All the people are fallen angels—even t he dirtiest scrubs. This I cannot stomach. People are not fallen angels, they are merely people. But Dostoievsky used them all as theological or religious units, they are all terms c f divinity, like Christ’s "Lower went forth to sow,’ and Bunyans Pilgrim's Progress. I hey are bad art, false tri* h.

I will write more if you want.

Love to you both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Don’t bind yourselves in the least about the house—in fact we will just move as for ourselves, and you come if you like later!

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

North Cornwall.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                      Sunday.

My dear Ottoline,—

Here then is the first half of my philosophy: remember not to read it on a spring like day, only on a winter-dark one.

Thank you for the Gilbert Murray book. I liked it. But I wish he were a little less popular and conversational in his style, and that he hadn’t so many layers of flannel between him and his own nakedness. But the stuff of the book interests me enormously.

Remember our new address: Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall. We are there on Tuesday.

Love,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

To J. D. Beresford,                         24 Feb.. 1916.

My dear Beresford,—

I ought to have written to you before about the cottage: but we have been so undecided. We don’t like Constantine Bay— it is a fag-end of the earth: and I don't like Havlyn very much: and there is no decent house anywhere else. So Mrs. Lawrence and I made an excursion to St. Ives and Zennor. We can have a house at Gurnard’s Head, near Zennor, St. Ives, for £1 a week. I think Heseltine will share it with us: and it is very beautiful down there—so we shall leave here next Tuesday, 328 and go for a week to the "Tinner’s Arms/’ Zennor, then move in. Emma will have plenty of time to cle^n the house; I hope everything will be well.

I don’t like these people here. They have got the souls of insects. One feels, if they were squashed, they would be a whitey mess, like when a black-beetle is squashed. They are all afraid—that’s why they are so mean. But I don't really understand them. Only I know this, I have never in my life come across such innerly selfish people, neither French, German, Italian, Swiss, nor English. I have thought French peasants vile, like hedgehogs, hedge-pigs. But these people haven’t any being at all. They’ve got no inside.

There are very few at Zennor, and they seem decent. I like Emma still. One has to keep them down. They are just like all the rest of people who have no real being? but only a static ego, they are the very bottomless pit, if one is to pour any kindness into them. The only thing to do is to use them strictly as servants, inferiors: for they have the souls of slaves: like TEsop.

What are the confessions to make? Chiefly, we stole a bottle of your gin, your good sloe gin. All the while, we hovered in temptation, and I was conscientious. Then last week conscience broke down. Hesel tine took a bottle, and I didn’t prevent him. We drank it all in one evening, and were very happy. Now I am very sorry to have robbed you, but I will get a bottle of whisky in place of it.

Then the door of the porch has come to pieces—or nearly to pieces. But that is really the weather. We haven’t done anything to it.

Then the cork of one of the hot-water bottles is broken: the screw stopper. Perhaps you could get another in town.

I don’t think there is anything else. By good fortune we have not broken much, nor destroyed much.

We are very grateful indeed to you for lending us the house. It has been a good time, our staying here; a time of getting well, and of discovering a new world of our own. I only wish you could exterminate all the natives and we could possess the land. The barbarian conquerors were wisest, really, '‘here are very many people, like insects, who await extermination.

It is very cold, terribly cold, and snowy. Don’t come back if it keeps so cold: it is terrible. But the snow doesn’t lie. And I pray Heaven for a warm wind.

My regards to Mrs. Beresford.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

N. Cornwall.

To J. M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield, 24th Feb., 1916.

My dear Jack and Katherine,—

Now don’t get in a state, you two, about nothing. The publishing scheme has not yet become at all real or important, to me.

Heseltine was mad to begin it—he wanted to get The Rainbow published. I felt, you don’t know how much, sick and done. And it was rather fine that he believed and was so generously enthusiastic. He is the musical one: the musicians he likes are Delius, Goossens, Arnold Bax, and some few others. I believe as a matter of fact they are good, and we are perhaps, outside ourselves, more likely to have good music and bad books, than otherwise.

This is what is done, so far: a circular, or letter, something like that Signature one, only bigger and better, is drawn up, and 1000 copies are being printed. It is to be sent to everybody we can think of. Heseltine pays for all this.

It states that either there is a sufficient number of people to buy books, out of reverence for the books themselves, or else real books will disappear from us: therefore it is proposed to publish by subscription such works as are not likely to have any effect, coming through a publisher, or which are not likely to be published at all in the ordinary way: it is proposed to issue first The Rainbow, at 7/6 post-free. Will those who wish to partake in the scheme fill up the enclosed form. Then follows a form for subscription, just to be filled in, and readdressed to Heseltine at his mother’s house in Wales. I want to announce your book after The Rainbow,

He has gone to London, and I haven't yet seen a printed leaflet. When I get one I will send it you.

This is all. You see it is Heseltine’s affair so far. I feel that he is one of those people who are transmitters, and not creators of art. And I don't think we are transmitters. I have come to the conclusion that I have no business genius. He is 21 years old, and I must say, I am very glad to have him for a friend. He lived here for seven weeks with us, so we know. Now don’t think his friendship hurts ours. It doesn’t touch it. You will like him too, because he is real, and has some queer kind of abstract passion which leaps into the future. He will be one with us. We must treasure and value very much anyone who will really be added on to us. I am afraid he may be conscripted.

And now, you two, for God's sake don't get in a state. I myself am always on the brink of another collapse, l begin to tremble and feel sick at the slightest upset: your letter for instance. Do be mild with me for a bit. Don’t get silly notions. I’ve waited for you for two years now, and am far more constant to you than ever you are to me—or ever will be. Which you know. So don't use foolish language. I believe in you, and there’s an end of it. But I think you keep far less faith with me than I with you, at the centre of things. But faith, like everything else, is a fluctuating thing. But that doesn’t disprove its constancy. I know you will slip towards us again, however you may slip away and become nothing, or even go over to the enemy. It doesn't make any difference. You will in the main be constant to the same truth and the same spirit with me. The personal adherence, the me and thee business, is subsidiary to that. We are co-believers first. And in our oneness of belief lies our oneness. There is no bond anywhere. I am not bound to agree with you, nor you with me. We are not bound even to like each other: that is as it comes. But we gravitate to one belief, and that is our destiny, which is beyond choice. And in this destiny we are together.

This is my declaration, now let it be enough. As for this publishing business, the whole of the work remains yet to be done. We will fight together when you come, Meanwhile let Heseltine take the vanguard.

We went out looking for a house, and I think we have found one that is good. It is about 7 miles from St. Ives, towards Land's End, very lonely, in the rocks on the sea, Zennor the nearest village: high pale hills, all moor-like and beautiful, behind very wild: 7 miles across country to Penzance: 25/- a week, eight rooms: a woman there who will clean for us.

We are going next Tuesday from here: address for the time being, "The Tinner's Arms, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.” Or just Zennor: it is only seven houses to the church-tower: really beautiful. We take the house for four months, I think: March-June inclusive; with the option of staying on, I hope.

You will come at the end of April, when it will be warm. Just at present it is very cold. That icy wind you mention did not touch us at Fiascherino, but if we climbed up the hills, it was there: terrible. It has been blowing here also, and a bit of snow. Till now the weather has been so mild. Primroses and violets are out, and the gorse is lovely. At Zennor one sees infinite Atlantic, all peacock-mingled colours, and the gorse is sunshine itself, already. But this cold wind is deadly.

I have been in a sort of "all gone but my cap" state this winter, and am very shaky. Also steering in my own direction with nobody to lend a hand or to come along, I feel very estranged. But when we set out to walk to Newquay, and when I looked down at Zennor, I knew it was the Promised Land, and that a new heaven and a new earth would take place. But everything is very tender in the bud, yet. But you will come along, in your own lime, soon, I hope. You’ve escaped the worst of this winter. It has been the worst: one has touched the bottom. Somehow I have a sense of a new spring coming very joyful from the unknown.

My love to you both.

D. H. Lawrence.

We shall be very badly off soon—and no incomings anywhere. I don’t know what we shall do. But I don't bother. It will turn out somehow. Do let the winter be gone, before Katherine comes to England.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

N. Cornwall.

To I. B. Pinker.                            25 Feb., 1916.

Dear Pinker,—

We are leaving here on Monday to go to the "Tinner's Arms, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.” Address me there, please, after the 28th.

I had a letter from ----, refusing my poems, also giving

an unasked and very impertinent criticism of the MS., together with instructions as to how to write poetry. I wrote and told him his letter was impertinent and foolish and presumptuous. Perish these important fools.

If Constable refuses the MS. also, take no notice. Send it back to me. But send the duplicate to America, will you? The world is so foul, one is almost suffocated. I he only thing is to get away into the furthest corner, from the smell of it.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Porthcothan, St. Merryn,

N. Cornwall.

To Mrs. J, D. Beresford.                       Monday.

My dear Mrs. Beresford,—

I write at once to assure you that it was not the bottle without sloes which we drank. It was a bottle with many sloes: most of which we ate. I should have been really distressed if it had been your special bottle. As it is, I am very sorry we drank this one, and must ask you again to forgive us.

You are quite right about the people, too. I wrote in a fit of irritation at them, they all seemed so greedy. But it is true, there is in them, as I felt at first, a very beautiful softness ano gentleness, quite missing in English people nowadays. And really I am, we are all very fond of---- I wish we could

afford to keep her on. I like her presence in the house: which is saying a great deal. I like her very much, in fact. And I don t think she is really greedy.

But these people, asking their three and four and even five guineas a week for a house, now, exasperate one past bearing.

We leave to-morrow morning, to catch the n.o train in Newquay. I hope the Gurnard’s Head place will turn out satisfactorily. If it does, we shall be delighted when you and Mr. Beresford and the boy come to stay with us, only too delighted. But at the present, I feel we are so much at the mercy of the heavens, that it seems a presumption to ask you. We haven’t taken the house yet, or anything.

I think you will find everything all right here. I have tried to substitute everything. There are one or two big cups, which I asked Mrs. Hawke to bring from Padstow, but she didn’t bring them. There will be enough coal and paraffin to last till you come, and there is a good deal of food m, for Emma. She will be quite ready for you, I am sure. Poor Emma—I hate to be unjust to her.

Tell Beresford it is time he ceased to read his reviewers; at his time of life. They are all ------ fools; or rather, they

are all fools without blood. But he looks as if he were coming into fame and prosperity. Let him not grumble. I shall be begging from him, in three years’ time, and he will be treating me handsomely. The old stars are setting, you are mounting up. As for me, I am an evanescent rainbow.

I wish we could afford to have Emma, to look after us.

Yours very sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

The snow did not lie here—now it is sunny. I have had another cold on the strength of the wind—my beastly health, I hate it.

Tinner's Arms, Zennor,

Nr, St, Ives, Cornwall, Sunday, 5 March, 1916. To J. M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield.

My dear Jack and Katherine,-—

We have been here nearly a week now. It is a most beautiful place: a tiny granite village nestling under high, shaggy moorhills, and a big sweep of lovely sea beyond, such a lovely sea, lovelier even than the Mediterranean. It js 5 miles from St. Ives, and 7 miles from Penzance. To Penzance one goes over the moors, high, then down into Mount’s Bay, looking at St. Michael’s Mount, like a dark little jewel. It is all gorse now, flickering with flower; and then it will be heather; and then, hundreds of fox gloves. It is the best place I have been in, I think.

I feel we ought to live here, pitch our camp and unite our forces, and become an active power here, together.

We have been looking for houses. There is nothing satisfactory, furnished. And I am terribly afraid to take a big place. I have very little money, and really, all my sources have dried up.

What we have found is a two-roomed cottage, one room up, one down, with a long scullery. But the rooms are big and light, and the rent won’t be more than 4/—. It isn’t furnished— but with our present goods, we shall need so little. One pays so little in rent.

The place is rather splendid. It is just under the moors, on the edge of the few rough stony fields that go to the sea. It is quite alone, as a little colony.

Sea

$ Farm

Tower house

—Other cottage

- 1

Our cottage

Moors

______

There are two little blocks of buildings, like tills made into a tower-room: so it is a long cottage with three doors and a funny little tower at one end. Guy home had it done for him and then never came. (He is a scamp.) The other block is at right-angles, and is two tiny cottages. But all is sound, done-up, dry-floored, and light.

all alone, a farm 5 mins, below. One block has three cottages that have been knocked into one, and the end room upstairs

kitchen

dining-room

second cot.

(upstairs tower)

our cot.

I shall certainly take the little cottage.

What I hope is that one day you will take the long house with the tower, and put a bit of furniture in it: and that Hesel tine will have one room in your long cottage; and that somebody else will have the second cot: that we are like a little monastery: that Emma is in your kitchen, and we all eat together in the dining-room of your house: at least, lunch and dinner: that we share expenses. The rent will be very little, the position and all is perfectly lovely. Katherine would have the tower-room with big windows and panelled walls (now done in black and white stripes, broad, and terracotta roof, by Guy Thorne, alias Ranger Gull), and Jack would have the study below, you two would have the very charming bedroom over the dining-room; then there are two bedrooms over kitchen and pantry. The tower-room is not accessible, save from Jack’s study.

There is a little grassy terrace outside, and at the back the moor tumbles down, great enormous grey boulders and gorse. It could be so wonderful. It is about 4 miles from St. Ives.

I don't want you to take it if you feel in the least uneasy: only we shall take our 2-roomed cottage, if possible, at once, and gladly await you, if you feel like coming. It would be so splendid if it could but come off: such a lovely place: our Rananim

Write and tell me how you feel. It seems to me we must strike some sort of a root, soon: because we must buckle to work. This here is the best place to live in which we shall find in England, I firmly believe. But we mustn’t go in for any more follies and removals and uneasinesses.

This country is pale grey granite, and gorse: there is something uralt and clean about it.

I wish you could fly over to talk things out: it is so tiresome, this long distance. I shall be very glad when you come back, and we can unite forces.

Much love to you,

D. H. Lawrence.

Our little cottage is only £53 year. The three-in-one is

£16 a year.                         ,

Tinner's Arms, Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To J. M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield. 8 March, 1916.

My dear Jack and Katherine,—

We have taken our little cottage for £5 a year and are getting ready to furnish. Of course we shall want very little, having the things left from Byron Villas,

Really, you must have the other place. I keep looking at it. I call it already Katherine’s house, Katherine’s tower. There is something very attractive about it. It is very old, native to the earth, like rock, yet dry and all in the light of the hills and the sea. It is only twelve strides from our house to yours: we can talk from the windows: and besides us, only the gorse, and the fields, the lambs skipping and hopping like anything, and seagulls fighting with the ravens, and sometimes a fox, and a ship on the sea.

You must come, and we will live there a long, long time, very cheaply. You see, we must live somewhere, and it is so free and beautiful, and it will cost us so very little.

And don’t talk any more of treacheries and so on. Henceforward let us take each other on trust—I’m sure we can. We are so few, and the world is so many, it is absurd that we are scattered. Let us be really happy and industrious together?

I don't know yet what will happen to Heseltine, whether he will be exempted. But I hope you will really like him, and we can all be friends together. He is the only one we can all be friends with.

But if you don’t want him to have a room in your house—of course he would share expenses—he could have one elsewhere. Of course he may be kept away indefinitely.

But at any rate, you two come, and we shall be four together. It is cheaper to furnish a little, and pay £16 a year rent, than to pay £75 a year for a furnished place. And I’m sure we can live happily at Tregerthen: Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives.

It is still cold. Snow falls sometimes, then vanishes at once. When the sun shines, some gorse bushes smell hot and sweet. Flocks of birds are flying by, to go to the Scilly Isles to nest, and the blackbirds sing in the chill evenings. We got big bunches of wallflowers in Penzance for a penny—we saw a man plucking them in a field—and they smell very good. But the wind still blows storms with snow out of the sea.

I heard from ——— still in the Pity-me sort of voice. He lies in the mud and murmurs about his dream-soul, and says that action is irrelevant. Meanwhile he earns diligently in munitions.

Do you think the war will end this year?

Much love from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

I suppose you have got my Monday’s letter telling you all about the house. Your place has seven rooms: kitchen, diningroom, study, and upstairs, tower-room and z bedrooms. It was 3 old cottages.

Your letter of the 4th has just come—Thursday. Good, all is well between us all. No more quarrels and quibbles. Let it be agreed for ever. I am Blutbruder: a Blutbriiderschaft between us all. Tell K. not to be so queasy. Won’t Farbman stick to your house? Much love from us both to you two.—D.H.L.

Tinner’s Arms, Zennor, '

St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.              9th March, 1916.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We have made another move: taken a little cottage for £53 year, under the moors, above the sea here. It is a splendid place. There we can live like foxes under the hill.

I don’t want to come and live near London. I should want to tie tin cans to the coat-tails of the people and make them look ridiculous.

But Frieda and I might be coming up for a few days soon. She ought to go to the dentist. If we come, and if you are in town, let us have a little carousal somewhere, a real little carousal.

I am bored by calamity. As you say, one’s imagination has gone dead to the war, and to all the troubles altogether.

It is all a question of the direction in which one looks. No old world tumbles except when a young one shoves it over. And why should one howl when one’s grandfather is pushed over a cliff? Good-bye, grandfather, now it’s my turn.

I feel the spring coming back, the youth surging in. We were born old, really, all our generation. All the dead, and all the soldiers, and all the good conscientious people, they were born grey-headed. Their hoary old souls in their young bodies: It is time they went down to the halls of darkness! It’s time to say good-bye for ever, and to turn the other way; like Orpheus when Eurydice sank back into Hell.

If one likes to think of Hell, then one hears a cascade of souls and lives pouring untimely down. But it is not untimely really, it is timely. Let them go.

If one turns the other way, to think of the spring, one is dazzled, it is so splendid; no matter how much roars over the edge of oblivion, behind one’s back.

The spring is really coming, the profound spring, when the world is young. I don’t want it to be good, only young and jolly. When I see the lambs skip up from the grass, into the sharp air, and flick their hind legs friskily at the sky, then really, I see how absurd it is to grieve and persist in melancholy. We can’t control the coming and going of life and death. Whep it is our time to go, we'll go. But when it isn’t our time to go, why should we fret about those whose time it is? It is our business to receive life, not to relinquish it.

When I look towards the spring, I do want to rise up and have done with miseries. It really is our turn to begin to dance round the fountains. This morning, the world was white with snow. This evening the sunset is yellow, the birds are whistling, the gorse bushes are bristling with little winged suns. Many birds go rustling by all day, excitedly, to reach the Scilly Isles, to nest. The new incoming days seem most wonderful, uncreated. Let the old days trail out and be gone, they are a bore.

So I think, living very cheaply and freely down here, there will be very few old bonds, very few restrictions, one can do pretty much as one likes. I look forward very much to the coming days. I need work hardly at all, we shall want so little, and we can do all the things we want to.

And I hope, one day, we shall have a gay time with you: I think it is owed to us. You must come to Cornwall for a bit later on. Do you think you will?

I hope this letter doesn't reach you first when you are sad.

Herzliche Grasse from Frieda.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.             25th March, 1916.

I'm afraid we can’t come to London—no money. What is more, I can't write stories to make money, because I don’t want to. Curse the idiotic editors and the more idiotic people who read: shall I pander to their maudlin taste? They bore me.

I should have liked to come up for a few days, for all that, to look at them. And I should have liked us to have some sort of festive meeting,

I dreamed last night, before your post card came, that I was 340

at some party or other of yours—and that you had other people there, most desolating outsiders. I couldn't describe to you the feeling of almost sordid desolateness caused by the established presence of those other people of yours, who are outsiders.

We have got our £5 cottage, and are perfectly happy in it. I have made a dresser with a cupboard below, and the cups hanging above: also shelves and a set of bookshelves. We are going to do all our own work. I am going to cover the spring on the hillside, and clean it, and we can live so cheaply and I love it. The situation is perfect, with a moor-slope coming down to the back door, and the sea beyond in the front.

It isn’t scenery one lives by, but the freedom of moving about alone.

I wish we could have afforded to come up—Frieda must go to the dentist. She is very busy and happy here—we are quite alone.

What news have you? Is Herbert Asquith still free?

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Tinner*s Arms, Zennor,

St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Katherine Mansfield.                       Saturday.

My dear Katherine,—

Your letter just come—no more bickering among us. And no good trying to run away from the fact that we are fond of each other. We count you two as our only two tried friends, real and permanent and truly blood kin. I know we shall be happy this summer* so happy.

I told you all about the house: the great grey granite boulders, you will love them, the rough primeval hill behind us, the sea beyond the few fields, that have great boulders half submerged in the grass, and stone grey walls. There are many lambs under your house. They are quite tame. They stand and cock their heads at one, then skip into the air like little explosions.

And your tower-room is all wood and windows, panelled, with 3 big windows, and cosy as can be.

34i

Don’t mind the having to furnish. You can do with very little. And I'm sure we shall live on at • regerthen a long while, years, a tiny settlement all to ourselves. And the war will end before next summer—before the summer that comes after this.

I will make Captain--a retired little old Captain, soft

like a child, with a mania for fussing—he is the landlord—I will make him put your house thoroughly to rights, before you come.

Much love,

D. H, Lawrence.

Kot gave me a Kuprin. It reads awfully well. But I don’t think much of these lesser Russians. Ribnikov is by far the best; but the Japanese is not created—he is an object, not a subject.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                  7 April, 1916.

My dear Ottoline,—

The Murrys have come and we are very busy getting their cottage ready: colouring the walls and painting and working furiously. I like it, and we all enjoy ourselves. The Murrys are happy with each other now. But they neither of them seem very well in health. That will come, however.

Our cottage is practically done. At last I am in my own home and feel content. I feel I have a place here. The cottage looks very nice. I made a dresser, with cupboard below, and shelves for plates above, also book-shelves. These are painted royal blue, and the walls are pale pink, and the ceiling with its beams is white. This is downstairs, a rather low, square room with thick walls. Upstairs looks really beautiful: a good-sized room with a large deep window looking at the sea, and another window opposite looking at the hill-slope of gorse and granite. Your embroidery hangs on the slanting wall of the big window, and the countrypair on the bed is brilliant and gay: it is very nice.

We have only these two rooms, and a long scullery-kitchen

with sloping roof at the back. But it is quite enough, there is all the world outside, the sea and moor-hijls quite open. The Murrys like it also.

Frieda wrote to you. I am glad she said what she feels. That is always best. Then if anything remains, it can begin to grow, free from the weeds. I do feel that the only thing to try for is a free, natural, unstrained relationship, without exclusions or enclosures. But it’s very difficult.

I did not thank you for Thucydides. He is a very splendid and noble writer, with the simplicity and the directness of the most complete culture and the widest consciousness. I salute him. More and more I admire the true classic dignity and selfresponsibility.

I have just finished reading Romain Rolland’s Life of Michael Angelo. Do you know it? If not, I will give it to you. In its way, I think it is good. Having reached the same point of overripeness in humble Christianity, as Michael Angelo had reached in proud Christianity, Romain Rolland is understanding. It is amazing how plainly one sees, in Michael Angelo, the transference from the great mediaeval and classic epoch of Power and Might and Glory to the great modern epoch of Service and Equality and Humility. Michael Angelo reverted back into the old Catholic form, like Vittoria Colonna. But he was the new thing as well. Only, it is quite true, he was more concerned with the End than the Beginning, with the Last Judgment. What he felt most was the downfall of the old God of Power and Might, the death of the God, the descent from the Cross, the body in torture. But he turned his eyes to the Great God of Power and Might, whose sons we are.

And now Romain Rolland, at the end of the very epoch which Michael Angelo initiated, looks back and sees only the sorrow and the charity and the Gethsemane ecstasy. Now it is time for us to leave our Christian-democratic epoch, as it was time for Europe in Michael Angelo’s day to leave the Christian-aristocratic epoch. But we cannot leap away, we slip back. That is the horror. We slip back and go mad. The world is going mad, as the Italian and Spanish Renaissance went mad. But where is our Reformation, where is our new light? Where is even our anathema? They had Savonarola and Luther, but we only slip wallowing back into our old mire of "Love thy Neighbour.” It is very frightening. In Michael Angelo’s day, Vittoria Colonna had a choice between Lutheranism, or even "Free Catholicism,” and the "Reactionary Catholicism.” Now there is no choice. There is no choice between new and old, only between old and old. It is so serious that one is hardly moved, one only wonders, and feels outside everything. What is the choice between Oxford and Cambridge, Philip Snowden and F. E. Smith? It is only one old hat or another.

Thank you very much for offering to help us with money. For the present we can manage. I wish I could always be sure of earning enough to keep us, but I can't. At the Renaissance, Art was holy, "A work of art is an act of faith.” People came from France and Holland and Germany to be present when Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment” was inaugurated. Now art is degraded beneath mention, really trampled under the choice of a free democracy, a public opinion. When I think of art, and then of the British public—or the French public, or the Russian—then a sort of madness comes over me, really as if one were fastened within a mob, and in danger of being trampled to death. I hate the 'public,' the ‘people,’ ‘society,’ so much that a madness possesses me when I think of them. I hate democracy so much. It almost kills me. But then, I think that ‘aristocracy’ is just as pernicious, only it is much more dead. They are both evil. But there is nothing else, because everybody is either "the people” or "the capitalist.”

One must forget, only forget, turn one’s eyes from the world: that is all. One must live quite apart, forgetting, having another world, a world as yet uncreated. Everything lies in being, although the whole world is one colossal madness, falsity, a stupendous assertion of not-being.

Murry will read Fylor's Primitive Culture before I return it. It is a very good sound substantial book, I had far rather read it than the Golden Bough or Gilbert Murray.

With affection.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.                   16th April, 1916.

My deaf. Catherine,—

I have been on the point of writing to you for some days, but we have been so unsettled, helping the Murrys to get into their cottage.

I am very sorry to hear of you seedy, and with that neuralgia. I have a great horror of pain, acute pain, where one keeps one’s consciousness. I always thank my stars that I don’t have those pains that scintillate in full consciousness. I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one’s whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.

I think you have been exhausting yourself, making onslaughts on yourself, for a long time now. I hope you will give yourse. peace now. One has to withdraw into a very real solitude, and lie low there, hidden, to recover. Then the world gradually ceases to exist, and a new world is discovered, wnere there at as yet no people.

I am very glad to hear of the novel. I firmly believe in it. I think you are the only woman I have met who is so intrinsically detached, so essentially separate and isolated, as to be a real writer or artist or recorder. Your relations with otner people are only excursions from yourself. And to want children, and common human fulfilments, is rather a falsity '01 you, - .nink. You were never made to *meet and mingle, but to remain intact, essentially, whatever your experiences may be. Therefore I believe your book will be a real book, and a woman s book: one of the very few. I often think of the Duse with her lovers, how they were keen and devouring excitements to her, but only destructive incidents, really, even D’Annunzio. I want very much to read your book.

I begin really to feel better, strong again. Soon J shall begin to work. I am waiting for a novel manuscript to come from Germany. But after this last lapse, one is slow and reluctant.                                                   .

It is queer, how almost everything has gone out of me, all the world I have known, and the people, gone out like candles. When I think of Viola, or Ivy, even, perhaps, the Murrys, who are here, it is with a kind of weariness, as ot trying to remember a light which is blown out. Somehow, it is all gone, both I and my friends have ceased to be, and there is another country where there are no people, and even I myself am unknown, to myself as well.

We have been very busy, doing our cottage, and helping the Murrys. I have made a dresser, which is painted royal blue, and the walls are pale pink; also a biggish cupboard for the food, which looks like a rabbit-hutch, in the back place. Here, doing one's own things, in this queer outlandish Celtic country, I feel fundamentally happy and free, beyond.

I hope you will be better. Don’t talk about me with those others. Frieda sends her greetings.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Wednesday, April 26th, 1916.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

It seems as if we were all going to be dragged into the danse macabre. One can only grin, and be fatalistic. My dear nation is bitten by the tarantula, and the venom has gone home at last. Now it is dance, mes amis, to the sound of the knuckle-bones.

It is very sad. but one isn’t sad any more. It is done now, and no use crying over spilt milk. "Addio” to everything. The poor dear old ship of Christian democracy is scuttled at last, the breach is made, the veil of the temple is torn, our epoch is over. Soit! I don't care, it’s not my doing, and I can’t help it. It isn’t a question of "dancing while Rome burns,” as you said to me on the omnibus that Sunday evening—do you remember? It is a question of bobbing about gaily in chaos. "Carpe diem” is the motto now; pure gay fatalism. It makes me laugh. My good old moral soul is creve.

Will you tell me, if you can, what it would be wisest for me to 346 do, at this juncture? Ought one to attest, and if so, what sort of job can I do? I don’t want to do anything; but what will be, will be, and I haven’t any conscience in the matter. If I have to serve, all right: only I should like a job that was at least sufferable. Do think a little, and advise me: or ask Herbert Asquith to tell me what I could do. I think it is all rather ridiculous— even when it is a question of life and death; such a scurry and a scuffle and a meaningless confusion that it is only a farce.

It is very lovely down here, the slopes of desert dead grass and heather sheering down to a sea that is so big and blue. I don’t want a bit to have to go away. But it will keep. And the cottage is very nice, so small and neat and lovely. There is one next door, the same as this, that you must have when the pot bubbles too hard out there in the world. Will you be coming this way, when you are making your round of visits?

I am still waiting for my book of Italian Sketches to appear. Now there is a strike among the printers in Edinburgh. But it won’t be long. It is quite a nice book. I will send you a copy.

I am doing another novel—that really occupies me. The world crackles and busts, but that is another matter, external, in chaos. One has a certain order inviolable in one’s soul. There one sits, as in a crow’s nest, out of it all. And even if one is conscripted, still I can sit in my crow’s nest of a soul and grin. Life mustn't be taken seriously any more, at least, the outer, social life. The social being I am has become a spectator at a knockabout dangerous farce. The individual particular me remains self-contained and grins. But I should be mortally indignant if I lost my life or even too much of my liberty, by being dragged into the knockabout farce of this social life.

I hope we shall see you soon. We might have some good times together—real good times, not a bit macabre, but jolly and full. The macabre touch bores me excessively.

Frieda is boiling the washing in a saucepan. I am, for the moment, making a portrait of T aimur-i-lang Tamerlane, the Tartar: copying it from a 15th-century Indian picture. I like it very much.

Mila salute di cuore.

D IL Lawrence.

My dear Gertler,—

I was glad to hear from you that things are going pretty well with you. It looks as if we were all going to be dragged into service one way or another, which is very damnable, .-tit am becoming fatalistic: it is no use kicking against the pricks. I don’t care very much what happens, so long as I get a moderately decent time.

Murry is troubled because it looks as if he were already conscripted: his exemption not final at all. But we know nothing definite yet. They are getting on with their house, which will be very nice indeed. Our cottage is complete, and is a little gem, I think.

It is very lovely here. I am sitting with my back against a boulder, a few yards above the houses. Below, the gorse is yellow, and the sea is blue. It is very still, no sound but the birds and the wind among the stones. A very big seagull just flew up from the east, white like lime-stone, and hovered just in front of me, then turned back in the sky. It seemed like a messenger.

The sun is very hot, it is like summer. Yesterday I saw an adder sleeping on the grass. She was very slim and elegant with her black markings. At last she was disturbed, she lifted her slender head and listened with great delicacy. Then, very fine and undulating, she moved away. I admired her intensely, and liked her very much. If she were a familiar spirit, she was a dainty and superb princess.

I am much better in health. This last week I have felt really well, as I have not been for many months. So am very glad. And I began a novel. I will only write when I am very healthy. I will not waste myself.

The Murrys are not very well in health. They will get better with the summer. They are not acclimatised here yet. I don't know what will happen to us all, whether we shall be torn away from here or not, by the army needs. I am quite happy here.

I wonder what things of mine remain in your studio: a few books and two primus stoves, I know. Is there anything else: I suppose you couldn’t find anywhere the pendulum of our little clock that used to hang on the wall in Byron Villas. It has got lost, and so the clock won’t go, which is sad.

We need the primus stoves now that the summer is coming on, when we don’t want fires. I should like my books too. I suppose you could not get a small wooden box from the grocer or somewhere, and send them off by the Gt. W. Ry. addressed to me. If you can’t do it, I must ask Mrs. Tarry, of 2, Byron Villas, to come up and do it for me: I don’t like to ask Dollie Radford any more. Let me know about this, will you:

The world is so lovely here, one wonders why men want to exert themselves, having wars and so on. It is a great bore. Why won’t they let us alone.

Ail good wishes from Frieda and me.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen,

Nr. St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.

.......... Did you not answer my letter because I asked you what to do about military service? Never mind, don’t want to listen. I take the question back. We’ll take what comes, and leave what doesn’t come. As for the rest, I hope I haven’t offended you any further—there seems to be a little adder of offence under every bush.

But adders are slim and princess-like things, in reality— there are many here.                          .

I feel that things are going to get better soon- in the world.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor,

St. Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.                            -9       J9i⁶-

My dear Pinker,—

I return here the agreement with Doran: this seems all right, and I am glad.

I am half way through a novel, which is a sequel to the Rainbow, though quite unlike it.

I have finished and returned the corrected proofs of A mores to Duckworth. He tells me he expects the Twilight in Italy to be out in a fortnight now.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                 24 May, 1916.

My dear Ottoline,—

I am sending back Manucci at last. I have read him all, except where, in the last volume, he becomes tiresome and polemical. He was of the greatest interest to me. At last I can understand something of the Indian Mohammedan nature and soul. I become more and more surprised to see how far higher, in reality, our European civilisation stands than the East, Indian and Persian, ever dreamed of. And one is glad to realise how these Hindus are horribly decadent and reverting to all forms of barbarism in all sorts of ugly ways. We feel surer on our feet, then. But this fraud of looking up to them—this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude—is disgusting. "Better fifty years of Europe” even as she is. Buddha-worship is completely decadent and foul nowadays: and it was always only half civilised. Tant pour I'Asie: it is ridiculous to look to the East for inspiration. I am glad to have read Manucci. One always felt irked by the East coming-it over us. It is sheer fraud. The East is marvellously interesting, for tracing out steps

back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.

They are fighting hard again, in France, I see. But I feel that the war is nearly over. One seems to have been fighting in the spirit every minute, wrestling with the devil. And I feel that the devil is thrown, in so far as the war is concerned. It will soon be peace, I think. Then for God knows what—what of a bout with the devil.

We have had several copies of the Berliner Tageblatt, Germany seems queer: she seems to have got over her great anti-Christian anti-democratic outburst, her great rage of sheer reaction in which she burst upon us. She seems now like a person who has been in a violent passion, and feels rather strange and vague and a little wistful, not at all beaten or guilty, but like one who has passed through a violent crisis and has come through a little dazed, new and wondering, if self-righteous. So that the war, as it was, at all events, has come almost to an end. Whether it will have a new phase, in which we shall roll with ecstasy in blood, get our fulfilment out of the hot bath of blood, like the communicants bathing in the sacrifice-blood, God knows. But I think not. I hope not.

Our turn has still to come, nevertheless. But it seems to me our real frenzy and passion of positive struggle will be at home, England fighting England. This is what it ought to be, in the fight to a finish. But this is what it won't be, if Col. Churchill and Co. have their way. We shall all be wrapped up like dogs to fasten on the body of Germany.

But I am afraid I bore you Old-Moore’s Almanacking.

The country is simply wonderful, blue, graceful little companies of bluebells everywhere on the moors, the gorse in flame, and on the cliffs and by the sea, a host of primroses, like settling butterflies, and sea-pinks like a hover of pink bees, near the water. I here is a Spanish ship run on the rocks just below—great excitement everywhere.

Unfortunately the Murrys do not like the country—it is too rocky and bleak for them. They should have a soft valley, with leaves and the ring-dove cooing. And this is a hillside of rocks and magpies and foxes. The walls of their house too are wet from the rain: though this could be put right So they talk of staying only a short while, then of going, perhaps, to the soft south side, near Penzance or Newlyn, not very far away. I am very sorry they don’t like it, because I like this country and my little cottage so much. I think I shall always keep this cottage.

I had the proofs of the poems. I crossed out all the rest of the dedication, leaving only "To Ottoline Morrell I thought you would prefer that, and it was best, seeing people are as they are, so jeering and shallow.

I have got a long way with my novel. It comes rapidly, and is very good. When one is shaken to the very depths, one finds reality in the unreal world. At present my real world is the world of my inner soul, which reflects on to the novel I write. The outer world is there to be endured, it is not real— neither the outer life.

With love.

From,

D, FL Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.

19 th June, 1916.

My dear Catherine,—

It is such a long while since we have heard anything of you; will you write back quite quickly, and tell me how things are with you and Carswell.

I have no particular news: except that I have to go and join the Colours in Penzance on the 28th. I shall go, and take my chance of being accepted. If I must be a soldier, then I must— ta-rattata-ta! It's no use trying to dodge one’s fate. It doesn’t trouble me any more. I'd rather be a soldier than a schoolteacher, anyhow.

I wish I could have sen t you my Twilight in Italy book. But I expected you to get it for review. Tell me if you liked it. Did you see the idiotic and false review in the last Times Lit. Supplement? Really, I do object to being treated like that. But,

oh dear, it wearies me far too much to hope to answer the fool according to his folly.                    ,

How are you both, in health? The last time, you were still very far from the mark. I suppose one’s soul gets tired, like a clock that won’t go. The world is such a blasted burden.

But I hope you are better. I remember in your letter you told me about--——-. I was very sorry. There is a sort of

civilised sordidness in these affairs that is far worse than bestiality. Is she all right now? She ought to go away irom Edinboro, so that she need not remember.

I remember in your letter also you said how you alternate between a feeling of strength and productiveness, and a feeling of utter hopelessness and ash. I think that is fairly well bound to be, because I think your process of life is chiefly exhaustive, not accumulative at all. It is like a tree which, feeling the ivy tightening upon it, forces itself into bursts of utterance, bursts of flower and fruition, using up itself, not taking in any stores at all, till at last it is spent. I have seen elm trees do this-covered, covered with thick flowering, making scarcely any leaves, taking any food.

But one has to live according to one’s own being, and if your method is productive and exhaustive, then it is so. Better that than mere mechanical activity, housework, etc. Tell me how the novel has got on. I think that is very important.

As for me, I have nearly done my new novel. It has come rushing out, and I feel very triumphant in it.

The Murrys have gone over to the south side, about thirty miles away. The north side was too rugged or them. And Murry and I are not really associates. How I deceive myself. 1 am a liar to myself, about people. I was angry when you ran over a list of my friends ’—whom you did no thin much of. But it is true, they are not much, any of them. I give up having intimate friends at all. It is a self-deception. But do somebody produced some real work. I am very anxious to see your book.

If I am not conscripted, and Carswell isn’t, I think we shall furnish a nice room in the Murrys’ house, and if you would like to come and stay in it, we should be glad. Barbara Low has an old invitation for part of her summer holiday—she is our only prospect in the visitor way. I like her enough.

It is very fine here, foxgloves now everywhere between the rocks and ferns. There is some magic in the country. It gives me a strange satisfaction.

Many greetings from us both to you and Carswell.

D H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.                             30 June, 1916.

My dear Pinker,—

I agree, it seems to me just as well, to bring out poems hard cn the heels of a book of sketches—they support each other. So if the Amores are ready by the end of July, let them come then, by all means. At any rate, that will perhaps ensure their appearance in September; this intention to publish in July.

I was going to write to you. I have finished The Sisters, in effect. I thought of writing to Duckworth and saying to him, the novel is done in substance, and I would send him the typed MS. in about six weeks’ time, and would he give me some money. Duckworth is so decent, I think it is best for him to publish ail my books. And I think probably he would give me enough money to get along with. I can manage on about £150 a year, here.

They have given me complete exemption from military service. I have come almost to the end of my stock of money. I think, if I said to Duckworth that I would offer him any books I write, during the next year or two, he might keep me going. What do you think?

I have a debt to you which no doubt I can pay after a time. Settled here at last, I can live cheaply enough. This money business disgusts me. 1 wish I had two hundred a year, and could send everybody to the devil.

I think the best thing to do would be to make some sort of arrangement with Duckworth. I like him because he treats my books so well; so there is no reason why we shouldn’t come to terms, and I give him my writings if he give me enough to live on. I want some sort of business contract like that, to free me from this sense of imminent dependence on a sort of charity.

Tell me what you think. Perhaps I had better write to Duckworth myself, so he will not think I am trying to squeeze money out of him.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor,

St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.                     9th July, 1916.

My dear Catherine,—

I never wrote to tell you that they gave me a complete exemption from all military service, thanks be to God. That was a week ago last Thursday. I had to join the Colours in Penzance, be conveyed to Bodmin (60 miles), spend a night in barracks with all the other men, and then be examined. It was experience enough for me, of soldiering. I am sure I should die in a week, if they kept me. It is the annulling of all one stands for, this militarism, the nipping of the very germ of one's being. I was very much upset. The sense of spiritual disaster everywhere was quite terrifying. One was not sure whether one survived or not. Things are very bad.

Yet I liked the men. They all seemed so decent. And yet they a11 seemed as if they had chosen wrong. It was the underlying sense of disaster that overwhelmed me. They are all so brave, to suffer, but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering. They are all so noble, to accept sorrow and hurt, but they can none of them demand happiness. 1 heir manliness all lies in accepting calmly this death, this loss of their integrity. They must stand by their fellow mam that is the moi to.

This is what Christ's weeping over Jerusalem has brought us to, a whole Jerusalem offering itself to the Cross. I o me, this infinitely more terrifying than Pharisees and Publicans and Sinners, taking their way to death. 1 his is what the love of our neighbour has brought us to, that, because one man dies, we all die.

This is the most terrible madness. And the worst of it all, is, that it is a madness of righteousness. These Cornish are most, most unwarlike, soft, peaceable, ancient. No men could suffer more than they, at being conscripted—at any rate, those that were with me. Yet they accepted it all: they accepted it, as one of them said to me, with wonderful purity of spirit—I could howl my eyes out over him—because "they believed first of all in their duty to their fellow man." There is no falsity about it: they believe in their duty to their fellow man. And what duty is this, which makes us forfeit everything, because Germany invaded Belgium? Is there nothing beyond my fellow man? If not, then there is nothing beyond myself, beyond my own throat, which may be cut, and my own purse, which may be slit: because I am the fellow-man of all the world, my neighbour is but myself in a mirror. So we toil in a circle of pure egoism.

This is what "love thy neighbour as thyself ' comes to. It needs only a little convulsion, to break the mirror, to turn over the coin, and there I have myself, my own purse, I, I, I, we, we, we-—like the newspapers to -day: "Capture the trade—unite the Bmpire—d bas les autres''

There needs something else besides the love of the neighbour. If all my neighbours chose to go down the slope to Hell, that is no reason why I should go with them. I know in my own soul a truth, a right, and no amount of neighbours can weight it out of the balance. I know that, for me, the war is wrong. I know that if the Germans wanted my little house, I would rather give it them than fight for it: because my little house is not important enough to me. If another man must fight for his house, the more’s the pity. But it is his affair. To fight for possessions, goods, is what my soul will not do. Therefore it will not fight for the neighbour who fights for his own goods.

All this war, this talk of nationality, to me is false. I feel no nationality, not fundamentally. I feel no passion for my own land, nor my own house, nor my own furniture, nor my own money. Therefore I won’t pretend any. Neither will I take part in the scrimmage, to help my neighbour. It is his affair to go in or to stay out, as he wishes.

If they had compelled me to go in, I should have died, I am sure. One is too raw, one fights too hard already, for the real 356 integrity of one’s being. That last straw of compulsion would have been too much, I think.

Christianity is based on the love of self, the love of property, one degree removed. Why should I care for my neighbour's property, or my neighbour's life, if I do not care for my own/ If the truth of my spirit is all that matters to me, in the last issue, then on behalf of my neighbour, all I care for is the truth of his spirit. And if his truth is his love of property, I refuse to stand by him, whether he be a poor man robbed of his cottage, his wife and children, or a rich man robbed of his merchandise. I have nothing to do with him, in that wise, and I don t care whether he keep or lose his throat, on behalf of his property. Property, and power—which is the same—is not the criterion. The criterion is the truth of my own intrinsic desire, clear of ulterior contamination.

I hope you aren’t bored. Something makes me state my position, when I write to you.

It is summer, but not very summery, such heavy rain. I tol 1 you the Murrys had gone away, to south Cornwall. Now she doesn’t like that. I believe she is in London at present. She is very dissatisfied with him, ,

We are keeping on their house for the rest of their year. It is 50 near, that if strangers came, it would be intolerable. So I am buying a very little furniture—it is so cheap and so nice here, second-hand—to furnish a sitting-room ana a bedroom, for the visitors. I think Dollie Radford is coming in about a week’s time, then Barbara Low. We get such pleasure, looking at old tables and old chairs: a big round rose-wood table, very large, 4 ft. 4 ins. diameter and solid, 10/-: three very nice birch wood chairs, y/6d.: an aimchair, 5/-: the sitting-room is furnished: it is an upper room, with b*g windows, and shelves.

It is such a pleasure, buying this furniture -I remembe’" my sermon. But one doesn’t really care, ’.'his cottage, that I like so much—and the new table, and the chairs—I could leave them all to-morrow, blithely. Meanwhile, they .ire very nice.

I have finished my novel, and am going to try to type it. It will be a labour—but we have got no money. But I an asking Pinker for some. And if it bores me to type the novel, I shan't do it. There is a last chapter to write, some time, when one’s heart is not so contracted.

I think yon are not very wise to go to the Hebrides with Carswell’s people—you would be so much happier with him alone—or with friends.

Greiffenhagen seems to be slipping back and back. I suppose it has to be. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the past smoulder out. One shouldn't look back, like Lot’s wife: though why salt, that I could never understand.

Have you got a copy of Twilight in Italy? If not, I have got one to give you. So just send me word, a p.c.

Frieda sends many greetings.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

I am amused to hear of Carswell's divorce case.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To T. D. D»                              ra July, 1916.

My dear I).,—

I was glad to have your letter and such good news of Mrs. D. and the children. We shall like to see the photographs, immensely, to see who is John, and what has become of Paddy and Biddy.

You and I, we seem born to differ. I can never see how my duty to my fellow man should make me kill another man. Which then is my fellow-man? How shall I distinguish him? And you are quite right, I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum of liberty to every individual? What do you think a nation is?—a big business concern? What is the raison d’etre of a nation—to produce wealth? How horrible! A nation is a number of people united to secure the maximum amount of liberty for each member of that nation, and to fulfil collectively the highest truth known to them. It is by fulfilling the lowest truth—that money is honour and glory—that we have come to war and pretty nearly to bankruptcy. If only life were not a horrible 358 wrestling for a limited amount of wealth, we should have none of these disasters. As for equal burdens—if you do not accept the Socialistic "equal distribution of wealth/’ how can you accept the conservative retrogressive "equal distribution of burden"? Each is a pure fiction. Let every man move according to his conscience—and the government which compels a man against his conscience is a dastardly cowardly concern.

You ask about the second half of the Rainbow. I have just rewritten it, and am typing it out by my own labours. You meanwhile are very busy in Milan, and much happier, I believe. It certainly would be a nice life, if they gave you a good job in Milan, and you could have Mrs. D. with you, and the children. Then in the big town, the Alps so near, it would be perfect. I am sure you are happier in Italy than you would be in England. Here the whole country seems to be striving to degrade and defile itself with the ugliest doings and the ugliest sayings conceivable. God save us.

As for my finances, they are as bad as ever. I am just asking my literary agent to lend me something. I hate that. But he will make money enough out of me later.

This penuriousness makes me wish I could get the rest of the things that I left in Italy with the beloved Felice: sheets, blankets, towels, clothing, and a few nice books. But I feel I can’t write for them: and my Italian is all going; and if the Fiori should have happened to use the things, sheets and blankets for example, I should hate even to suggest their giving them back. I suppose the Signorina Eva Rainusso said nothing to you of these things?

Have you got any later news of the Cochranes and Hunting-dons and the Pearses?

When you have some time to read, I will send you Tylor’s Primitive Culture, if you do not already know it. It is a most interesting book, better than 1 he Golden Bough, I

Remember us both very kindly to Mrs. D. when you write. Are you going to be permanently at Leghorn? Heaven knows when we shall all meet again.

Kind regards from Frieda.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Thank you very much indeed for sending me the manuscripts: though what they can be, I cannot conceive. My memory gets worse and worse.

Zennor, St. Ives,

Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.                    16th July, 1916.

My dear Catherine,—

I think you are right on nearly all your points. I want people to be more Christian rather than less: only for different reasons. Christianity is based on reaction, on negation really. It says, “Renounce all worldly desires, and live for heaven." Whereas I think people ought to fulfil sacredly their desires. And this means fulfilling the deepest desire, which is a desire to live unhampered by things which are extraneous, a desire for pure relationships and living truth. The Christian was hampered by property, because he must renounce it. And to renounce a thing is to be subject to it. Reaction against any force is the complement of that force. So Christianity is based too much on reaction.

But Christianity is infinitely higher than the war, higher than nationalism or even than family love. I have been reading St. Bernard’s Letters, and I realise that the greatest thing the world has seen is Christianity, and one must be endlessly thankful for it, and weep that the world has learned the lesson so badly.

But I count Christianity as one of the great historical factors, the has-been. That is why I am not a conscientious objector: I am not a Christian. Christianity is insufficient in me, I too believe man must fight.

But because a thing has been, therefore I will not fight for it. Because, in the cruder stage, a man’s property is symbol for his manhood, I will not fight for the symbol. Because this is a falling back. Don't you see, all your appeal is to the testimony of the past. And we must break through the film which encloses us one with the past, and come out into the new. All those who stand one with the past, with our past, as a nation and a

Christian people even (though the Christian appeal in the war is based on property recognition—which was really the point of my last letter) must go to the war: but those who believe in a life better than what has been, they can view the war only with grief, as a great falling back.

I would say to my Cornishmen, ' Don’t let your house and home be a symbol of your manhood.” Because it has been the symbol for so long, it has exhausted us, become a prison. So we fight, desperate and hopeless. ' Don't let your nation be a symbol of your manhood”—because a symbol is something static, petrified, turning towards what has been, and crystallised against that which shall be. Don’t look to the past for justification. The Peloponnesian war was the death agony of Greece, really, not her life struggle. I am just reading Thucydides— when I can bear to—it is too horrible to see a people, adhering to traditions, fling itself down the abyss of the past, and disappear.

We must have the courage to cast off the old symbols, the old traditions: at least, put them aside, like a plant in growing surpasses its crowning leaves with higher leaves and buds. There is something beyond the past. The past is no justification. Unless from us the future takes place, we are death only. That is why I am not a conscientious objector. The great Christian tenet must be surpassed, there must be something new: neither the war, nor the turning the other cheek.

What we want is the fulfilment of our desires, down to the deepest and most spiritual desire. The body is immediate, the spirit is beyond: first the leaves and then the flower: but the plant is an integral whole: therefore every desire, to the very deepest. And I shall find my deepest desire to be a wish for pure, unadulterated relationship with the universe, for truth in being. My pure relationship with one woman is marriage, physical and spiritual: with another, is another form of happiness, according to our nature. And so on for ever.

It is this establishing of pure relationships which makes heaven, wherein we are immortal, like the angels, and mortal, like men, both. And the way to immortality is in the fulfilment of desire. I would never forbid any man to make war, or to go to war. Only I would say, "Oh, if you don't spontaneously and 361 perfectly want to go to war, then it is wrong to go—don’t let any extraneous consideration influence you, nor any old tradition mechanically compel you. If you want to go to war, go, it is your righteousness.”

Because, you see, what intimation of immortality have we, save our spontaneous wishes? God works in me (if I use the term God) as my desire. He gives me the understanding to discriminate between my desires, to discern between greater and lesser desire: I can also frustrate or deny any desire: so much for me, I have a "free will,” in so far as I am an entity. But God in me is my desire. Suddenly, God moves afresh in me, a new motion. It is a new desire. So a plant unfolds leaf after leaf, and then buds, till it blossoms. So do we, under the unknown impulse of desires, which arrive in us from the unknown.

But I have the power to choose between my desires. A man comes to me, and says, "Give me your house.” I ask myself, "Which do I want more, my house, or to fight?” So I choose.

In nearly all men, now, the greater desire is not to fight for house and home. They will prove to themselves, by fighting, that their greater desire, on the whole, was not to fight for their nation, or sea-power, but to know a new value, to recognise a new, stronger desire in themselves, more spiritual and gladdening. Or else they will die. But many will die falsely. All Greece died. It must not be so again, we must have more sense. It is cruelly sad to see men caught in the clutches of the past, working automatically in the spell of an authorised desire, that is a desire no longer. That should not be.

It is a mistake for----— to have children (don’t tell her). For

her, that is a clutching at the past, the back origins, for fulfilment. And fulfilment does not lie in the past. You should be glad you have no children: they are a stumbling-block now. There are plenty of children, and no hope. If women can bring forth hope, they are mothers indeed. Meanwhile even the mice increase—they cannot help it. What is this highest, this procreation? It is a lapsing back to the primal origins, the brink of oblivion. It is a tracing back, when there is no going forward, a throwing life on to the bonfire of death and oblivion, an autumnal act, a consuming down. This is a winter. Children and child-bearing do not make spring. It is not in children, the 362

future lies. The Red Indian mothers bore many children, and yet there are no Red Indians. It is the truth, the new perceived hope, that makes spring. And let them bring forth that, who can: they are the creators of life. There are many enceinte widows, with a new crop of death in their wombs. What did the mothers of the dead soldiers bring forth, in childbed?—death or life? And of death you gather death: when you sow death, in this act of love which is pure reduction, you reap death, in a child born with an impulse towards the darkness, the origins, the oblivion of all.

Fneda’s letter is quite right, about the difference between us being the adventure, and the true relationship established between different things, different spirits, this is creative life. And the reacting of a thing against its different, is death in life. So that act of love, which is a pure thrill, is a kind of friction between opposites, interdestructive, an act of death. There is an extreme self-realisation, self-sensation, in this friction against the really hostile, opposite. But there must be an act of love which is a passing of the self into a pure relationship with the other, something new and creative in the coming together of the lovers, in their creative spirit, before a new child can be born: a new flower in us before there can be a new seed of a child.

D. H. Lawrence.

Thank Ivy very much for her offer. I shall probably send her a bit of MS. What is her address now? I will write to her.

No, I don’t wish I had never written that story. It should do good, at the long run.

We shall be glad to see you, most glad if you can both come.

Tell me what Ivy s name is.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall

To Catherine Carswell.                 io th August, 1916.

My dear Catherine,—

We shall be very glad to see you and your novel here "in the autumn"—that is very vague, though—say September.

I feel really eager about your novel. I feel it is coming under the same banner with mine. The us” will be books. There will be a fine wild little squadron soon, faring over the world. Nothing shall I welcome so much as books to ride with mine. Oh, to see them go, a gallant little company, like ships over an unknown sea, and Pizarro and his people breaking upon a new world, the books, now.

I thought of calling this of mine, Women in Love. But I don’t feel at all sure of it. What do you think? It was The Sisters, but May Sinclair having had Three Sisters it won't do.

Dollie Radford came and is gone. Barbara Low is here. They make me feel how far off the world is. It is lovely to bathe and be alive now, in the strong remote days.

Greetings to Cars well—there is no news.

Auf schoner Wiedersehen.

D. H Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To J. M. Murry.                         28 Aug., 1916.

Dear Jack,—

Thank you very much for your book on Dostoievsky, which has just come. I have only just looked in it here and there—and read the epilogue. I wonder how much you or anybody else is ready to face out the old life, and so transcend it. An epoch of the human mind may have come to the end in Dostoievsky: but humanity is capable of going on a very long way further yet, in a state of mindlessness—curse it. And you’ve got the cart before the horse. It isn’t the being that must follow the mind, but the mind must follow the being. And if only the cursed cowardly world had the courage to follow its own being with its mind, if it only had the courage to know what its unknown is, its own desires and its own activities, it might get beyond to the new secret. But the trick is, when you draw somewhere near the "brink of the revelation,” to dig your head in the sand like the disgusting ostrich, and see the revelation there. Meanwhile, with their head in the sand of pleasing visions and secrets and 364 revelations, they kick and squirm with their behinds, most disgustingly. I don't blame humanity for having no mind, I blame it for putting its mind in a box and using it as a nice little self-gratifying instrument. You’ve got to know, and know everything, before you "transcend" into the "unknown." But Dostoievsky, like the rest, can nicely stick his head between the feet of Christ, and waggle his behind in the air. And though the behind-wagglings are a revelation, I don’t think much even of the feet of Christ as a bluff for the cowards to hide their eyes against.

You want to be left alone—so do I—by everybody, by the whole world, which is despicable and contemptible to me and sickening.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            ist September, 1916.

. . . Whether we are alive or not, that is the question. My "indignant temperament," as you called it, has done for me, and I am dead to the world. Like the monks of Nitria, I am buried in the desert of Sahara, sit amid silence like St. Anthony. Avaunt Woman--—.

That is the whole story of the present. Of the past, of the world vanquished and forgotten—they gave me a total exemption from military service, otherwise I should be singing with the Cherubim now, instead of sulking amid the sands of Nitria. I had to go to Penzance and join up: was escorted by a little "Lump" (German word) of a sergeant, with many other condemned wretches. Three hours’ journey to Bodmin: spent the night in barracks with the rest and was let go in the morning. My blood cribbles with fury to think of it. I am no longer an Englishman, I am the enemy of mankind. Ihe whole of militarism is so disgusting to me, that----well, well, there is

silence after all.                                                 .

But I hate humanity so much, I can only think with friend-Jiness of the dead. They alone, now at least are upright and honourable. For the rest—pfui!

Here in Nitria there is great space, great hollow reverberating silent space, the beauty of all the universe—nothing more. The few visionary temptations: heather and blackberries on the hills, a foamy pool in the rocks where one bathes, the postman with barbed letters: they are the disordered hallucinations of temporal reality. St. Anthony is not deceived by them. In truth there is vast unechoing space where one goes forth and is free.

I send you a bit of the world that has passed away—my book of poems.

I suppose you are wearing black clothes for mourning—an ugly thought. I tell you, only the dead are real. For them one should wear a lovely blue. When I go to Penzance again I shall send you a tiny brooch of blue chalcedony. That seems to me the only thing one should wear to the dead, it is so beautiful and immortal. As for the living, they are really the terrible temptation of temporal reality.

Frieda talks of coming to London for a few days this month. I simply dare not. The thought of the masses of humanity frightens my very soul. I dare not be jostled into them. But before long when I am stronger than they, I shall come back.

Meanwhile, the monk of Nitria fitfully types out his novel, which is a sequel to the Rainbow.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen,

Zennor, St. Ives.

To Katherine Mansfield. Wednesday, 27 Sept., 1916.

My dear Katherine,—

You said I insulted you in my letter—well, I didn't.

I can only say to you, as I said this time last year, when your brother died—there is a death to die, for us all. As for me, I am Lazarus sitting up very sick in his sepulchre. At last, J think Frieda and I are really at peace with each other, lor ever. That too was a fight to the death. But being 366

dead, and in some measure risen again, one is invulnerable.

Then there is hope too. I know that, in the end, we will turn slap round against this world, and choke it. It is time to be subtle and unified. It is a great and foul beast, this world that has got us, and we are very few. But with subtlety, we can get round the neck of the vast obscenity at last, and strangle it dead. And then we can build a new world, to our own minds: we can initiate a new order of life, after our own hearts. One has first to die in the great body of the world, then to turn round and kill the monstrous existing Whole, and then declare a new order, a new earth.

This is the hope, and the life of one's soul. And do not doubt—in the end, slowly, subtly, by degrees, we will bring it about, and sing the psean of delivery before we die.

This is for Murry as well—with my love to both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Mark Gertler.                     27 September, 1916.

Dear Gertler,—

I would write, but there seems so much noise one is afraid to open one's mouth. I was glad to hear such good news of the roundabout. I want very much to see it, and look forward to having a photograph copy. It seems to me, the stark truth is all that matters, whether it is paint or books or life: the truth one has inside one; and away with their old lies, whether they are of vision or ideas.

I saw the Daily Mirror to-day—the Zeppelin wrecks, etc., how exhausted one is by ail this fury of strident lies and foul death. But less and less does the world matter to one—people, and all they say or do, life, all that is out there in ^he world—i ceases to have any significance. Nothing matters, in the end, but the little hard flame of truth one had inside oneself and which does not blow about in the draught of blasphemous living. It seems to me, things matter to one less and less and 367 less, till little remains to one but the pure abstraction within one, and that is inviolable.

Still, I know that there are some other people, who have the same abstraction, who live finally by the central truth, and by nothing of the loathsome outer world. And in the end, I hope we can add our spirit together, unite in essential truthfulness, and create a new well-shapen life out of the smashed mess of the old order—I do believe we can, in time. But we have to give ourselves time—heaven knows how long.

This is to tell you—and Kot—that the essential thing is not gone, that is in our relationship. It is only purifying itself and ridding itself of externalities and extraneous things. I will write the same to Gilbert, soon. Our hope in the central truth, and then in each other. And then we can create a new order of life, in the times after these.

Yours,

D. II. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To Mark Gertler.                        9 October, 1916.

My dear Gertler,—

Your terrible and dreadful picture has just come. This is the first picture you have ever painted: it is the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great, and true. But it is horrible and terrifying. I'm not sure I wouldn't be too frightened to come and look at the original.

If they tell you it is obscene, they will say truly. I believe there was something in Pompeian art, of this terrible and soultearing obscenity. But then, since obscenity is the truth of our passion to-day, it is the only stuff of art-—or almost the only stuff. I won’t say what I, as a man of words and ideas, read in the picture. But I do think that in this combination of blaze, and violent mechanised rotation and complete involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless human intensity of sensational extremity, you have made a real and ultimate revelation. I think this picture is your arrival—it marks a great arrival. Also z68

I could sit down and howl beneath it like Kot’s dog, in soullacerating despair. I realise how superficial your human relationships must be, and what a violent maelstrom of destruction and horror your inner soul must be. It is true, the outer life means nothing to you, really. You are all absorbed in the violent and lurid processes of inner decomposition, your inner flame.—But dear God, it is a real flame enough, undeniable in heaven and earth,—It would take a Jew to paint this picture. It would need your national history to get you here, without disintegrating you first. You are of an older race than I, and in these ultimate processes, you are beyond me, older than I am. But I think I am sufficiently the same, to be able to understand.

This all reads awkward—but I feel there ought to be some other language than English, to say it in. And I don’t want to translate you into ideas, because I can see, you must, in your art, be mindless and in an ecstasy of destructive sensation. It is wrong to be conscious, for you: at any rate, to be too conscious. “By the waters of Babylon I sat me down and wept, remembering Jerusalem.” At last your race is at an end—these pictures are its death-cry. And it will be left for the Jews to utter the final and great death-cry of this epoch: the Christians are not reduced sufficiently. I must say, I have, for you, in your work, reverence, the reverence for the great articulate extremity < art.

Perhaps you are right about sculpture—-I don’t know— probably you are, since you feel so strongly. Only, somehow, it seems to me to be going too far—over the edge of endurance into a form of incoherent, less poignant shouting. I say this, trying to imagine what this picture will be like, in sculpture. But you know best. Only take care, or you will burn your flame so fast, it will suddenly go out. It is all spending and no getting of strength. And yet some of us must fling ourselves in the fire of ultimate expression, like an immolation. et one cannot assist at this auto-da-fe without suffering. But do try to save yourself as well. You must have periods of proper rest also. Come down here and stay with us, when you want a change. You seem to me to be flying like a moth into a fire. I beg you, don't let the current of work carry you on so strongly that it will destroy you oversoon.

You are twenty-five, and have painted this picture—I tell you, it takes three thousand years to get where this picture is— and we Christians haven’t got two thousand years behind us yet.

I feel I write stupidly and stiltedly, but I am upset, and language is no medium between us.

With love from Frieda and me.

D. H. Lawrence.

I am amazed how the picture exceeds anything I had expected. Tell me what people say—Epstein, for instance.

Get somebody to suggest that the picture be bought by the nation—it ought to be—I'd buy it if I had any money. How much is it? I want to know—how much do you want for it?

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor,

St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.

iith October, 1916.

My dear Catherine,—

I’ve had a cold and been seedy since you went, so haven’t done anything—novel at a standstill till this very day. I've run on a bit to-day though, and am feeling much better.

I feel pretty happy inside, too. I believe we shall see some desired things come to pass, before we die. It only needs to be ready, like the Virgins with the lamps.

I do really think we shall see this old order collapsing even in the outer world—smashing right down. I heard to-day from my brother in Nottingham—he is an engineer, in the munitions. There seems to come from his letter a strange note, like revolution. I want to have some seed of a new spirit ready—I know the time is nearly come to sow it. We shall be like Noah, taking all the precious things into the ark, when the flood comes, and disembarking on a new world.

I do hope things will go well and increasingly with you and Carswell—-the new world. The novel is the first thing—I feel with mine, that when it is finished, I have knocked the first loop-hole in the prison where we are all shut up. But I shall do it—I feel a bubbling of gladness inside. Frieda and I are in accord—it needs a man and a woman to create anything—there is nothing can be created, save of two, a two-fold spirit. I don't believe in Don as a lawyer—I wish he would discover the unknown truth in himself. I suppose that'll come after the law.

It is wildly blowy here lately—I always expect to read in the paper in the morning that all England is blown clean and bare, and only a few people are hovering winged in the air.

All blessings to you both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To J. M. Murry.                          n Oct., 1916.

Dear Jack,—

I've been m two minds whether to write to you, these last few days—wondering whether you are in the leave-me-alone mood or not. You understand all right my violent letters, I know. When one says "I've done with him," well, there is an old "him" in all of us that must be done away with: an old me, an old you. But then there is a new young me, and a new you, taking place, and that is everything. Terribly and cruelly the old self dies in one, the old world cracks up and fails away piece by piece. But it is all beyond one’s will and one's control, one can only writhe and wait for the process to hurry up in one. But then there do come the days when the new self bubbles up and makes one happy. And then 1 know that what I hate in you is an old you that corresponds to an old me, which must pass away, the beastly thing.

I think that one day—before so very long—we shall come together again, this time on a living earth, not in the worl 1 or destructive going apart. I believe we shall do things together, and be happy. But we can't dictate the terms, nor the times. It has to come to pass in us. Yet one has the hope, that is the reality.

Frieda and I have finished the long and -----fight at last, and are at one. It is a fight one has to fight—the old Adam to be killed in me, the old Eve in her—then a new Adam and a new Eve. Till the fight is finished, it is only honourable to fight. But, oh dear, it is very horrible and agonising.

I do hope things are all right with you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To J, B. Pinker.

25 Oct., 1916.

Dear Pinker,—

I send you nearly the whole of the untyped MS. of the novel. I have very, very nearly finished—only the concluding chapter to do. I shall probably cut it down a little when I have the typescript—the whole novel.

It is a terrible and horrible and wonderful novel. You will hate it and nobody will publish it. But there, these things are beyond us.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.

31 Oct., 1916.

My dear Pinker,—

I send you the conclusion of the novel Women in Love (which Mrs. Lawrence wants to be called Dies Iras')—all but the last chapter, which, being a sort of epilogue, I want to write later—when I get the typescript back from you. You got the preceding MS which I sent last week, didn’t you?

Don’t let them type this too beautifully, so that my first half looks like a ragamuffin, will you?

I send you also a story, re-written from MS. I got a week or two back, from Italy—stuff done before the war—called The Mortal Coil. It is a first-class story, one of my purest creations,

but not destined, I fear, like the holy in the hymn, to land— On the golden strand— Where the ransomed in glory we see, I really grieve when I send you still another unmarketable wretch of fiction. But bear with me. I will write sweet simple tales yet. If only Guy Thorne would lend me his mantle for a week or two, or Lady Russell her muff! I wrestle with my angel, but cannot get him to give me a proper spirit. But patience, patience. We will yet cry Eureka, I have written the Smiths of Surbiton, I have found the philosopher’s stone, I am a thrice-blest driveller.

When I have written those stories which are yet unwritten, and they are sold, I shall go to Italy. I am tired of being unwell in England.

The English Review might print the Mortal Coil—so might those last Americans who wrote me—the cent-a-worders.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St Ives, Cornwall.

To Mrs. T. D. D.                        zi Oct., 1916.

My dear Mrs. D.,—

I was glad to have your card from Leghorn, telling us you were joyfully in Italy again with D. I wonder where you are now—back again in Milan?—and enjoying everything, I hope. What about the children?—though for my part, I think husbands and wives more important than children, so long as the latter are well looked after.

Here we are, still sitting lonelily over the sea like a couple of motionless cormorants. I have just finished a novel, which everybody will hate completely. But if I can only get a little money for it, I shall come to Italy. My health is miserable, damnable. I seem half my time, and more, to be laid up in bed. I think the terrible moisture of England does it: it has rained every day now for nine weeks. I think in Italy I should be better. So I shall try to come. What do you think?

I should not go back to Fiascherino—I couldn’t bear it. It 373

is always lacerating to go back to the past: and then to find our beloved old Felice more old, and unhappy for the death of poor Elide—no, I couldn't stand it, I should be a fountain of tears. I should like to go to Rome. I don’t know why, but one seems drawn to the great historic past, now the present has become so lamentably historic. So I want to go to Rome, and see if I should be better and happier there, then we should spend a day or two in Milan en passant, to see you and D. again: which would be a great pleasure.

I don’t know that there is any news that I can tell you. ----— is expecting an infant: everybody says “poor infant." But -------is happy and important at last. I think she feels

no woman ever had a child before, and she is the in ventress of he human race: which no doubt is quite the right spirit.

Of ourselves there is no news. Barring poverty and a few jolts, we are very happy together. Frieda is allowed interviews with her children occasionally: which makes things easier. I, you will not forget, have a beard: purplish red, people say. I must keep you reminded so you should not be shocked, when we arrive in Milan. How do you find Italy? Still pretty nonchalant and happy in itself, I hope. I should hate to come to a tragic country.

D, very nobly offered to lend me money: which, for some reason, scared me. I should feel a monster, taking money from a man with a wife and three children, and only his salary to keep them on. No, when I am forced to beg for a penny to throw between the teeth of the wolf at the door, I shall ask rich people for it: they will give it me: I don’t let myself be worried.

I shall address this letter to D., so that if you are come back to England he will read it and write to me.

Do you like Milan? I didn’t. But I’ve got a longing to go to Rome.

All good greetings from Frieda and me to both.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zenner,

St, Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.                7th November, 1916.

My dear Catherine.—

... I am glad you are beginning to reject people. They are separaters. They are a destructive force. They are like acid, which can only corrode and dissolve. One must shun them. The spirit they live by is the spirit of destruction and of putting apart. They bring this spirit into the house along with them, and it overcomes one. It is like a poison-gas they live in. And one is so few and so fragile, in one’s own small, subtle air of life. How one must cherish the frail, precious buds of the unknown life in one's soul. They are the unborn children of one’s hope and living happiness, and one is so frail to bring them forth. Shelter yourself above all from the world, save yourself, screen and hide yourself, go subtly in a secret retreat, where no one knows you, only Carswell and your own soul, hiding like a bird, and living busily the other creative life, like a bird building a nest. Be sure to keep this bush that burns with the presence of God, where you build your nest, this world of worlds, hidden from mankind: or they will drag your nest and desecrate all. Do not admit them, do not acknowledge any kinship with any of them, at all. You are not kin with them, any more than a bird is kin to a cat. They prey on one, that is all.

We have had here two Americans. Americans are as a rule rather dreadful, I think. They are not younger than we, but older: a second childhood. But being so old, in senile decay and second childishness, perhaps they are nearer to the end, and the new beginning.

I know now, finally:

(a) That I want to go away from England for ever.

(0) That I want ultimately to go to a country of which I have hope, in which I feel the new unknown.

Tn short, I want, immediately or at length, to transfer all my life to America. Because there, I know, the skies are not so old, the air is newer, the earth is not tired. Don’t think 1 have any illusions about the people, the life. The people and the life are monstrous. I want, at length, to get a place in the far west mountains, from which one can see the distant Pacific Ocean, and there live facing the bright west. But I also think that America, being so much worse, falser, further gone than England, is nearer to freedom. England has a long and awful process of corruption and death to go through. America has dry-rotted to a point where the final seed of the new is almost left ready to sprout. When I can, I shall go to America, and find a place. Then later you and Carswell will come. I know my Florida idea was right: it was quite right, all save the people. It is wrong to seek adherents. One must be single.

Don’t tell anybody what I say here. I don’t tell anybody but you. Frieda is quite with me, we two will move in silence. Then when you and Cars well feel the day has come, you will come also. Of course one must always wait for circumstance.

But don’t be cast down, don’t get used up. Above all, conserve yourself, and live only in marriage, not elsewhere.

I finished my novel—save the last chapter, which, a sort of epilogue, I shall add on later. I hated the typing, so took to scribbling in pencil. Then there was a lot of the original draft that I couldn’t have bettered. Pinkers are typing it out for me. When it is done, I shall send it on to you? Shall keep the title Women in Love. The book frightens me: it is so end-of-the-world. But it is, it must be, the beginning of a new world too. So must your book. How is it getting on?

Love from us both to you both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Z,ennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Saturday, nth November, 1916

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

We have been wondering about you for some time now. Did my last letter, that I sent to you to the Hotel in Brighton, along with my book of poems, put you oft from answering, or have things gone more amiss with you? I have often wondered if 376 you got the book of poems. As for the letter, that is how one feels, at a crisis.

Nothing is changed, outwardly, here. Frieda went to London and saw her children: and began to realise, I believe, that the mother-child relation is not so all-important; indeed, not profoundly important at all, touching the quick of being. It is, in real truth, one of the temporal, almost accidental connections, the connection between parent and children. But I suppose you will not agree to this at all. Then, we still hear from Germany: Frieda’s mother, being old and feeling the twilight of death in the air, very sad and wanting only comfort and reassurance, but Frieda's sisters still resistant and rather ugly in spirit. I must say, judging from these, I can’t feel that Germany wants peace yet, any more than England does. Their fulfilment is still in this ugly contending. But I think both countries are getting tired, emotionally tired. They won’t be able to work up the fine frenzy of war much longer. The whole show is too nasty and contemptible, essentially.

I have been seedy a good deal this autumn: seem to have spent a great deal of my time in bed. But I feel better now. Perhaps soon I shall come to London to consult a good doctor— if there is such a thing—and learn how to make the best of this bad job of health. Nevertheless, I feel much stronger and more established in my soul—really strong and single. I have finished a novel, sequel to The Rainbow. I think very highly of it, but I don’t suppose anybody will publish it—at least for some years to come. We are hopelessly badly off as far as money goes, though it never troubles me, so long as one is strong in one’s soul. Still, I suppose I shall have to make some sort of move about it—what, I don’t know. I think 1 would prefer to go to America—but it doesn’t seem very possible just now. As far as material things go, one can drift as necessity impels one. ...

Write and tell us your news. If I ever get to London again, I hope we shall see you. What is Herbert Asquith doing? How-does he feel now about the war, etc.? What was his book of poems like? Why didn’t you send me one? ....

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor,

St, Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.                           iz Nov., 1916.

Dear Pinker,—

I return the typescript of the story, The Mortal Coil. The novel I will send on in a week's time: not longer. Then I will send a batch of poems, for the American magazines. Then I have another short story on hand, which I shall finish when I’ve sent off the novel. The novel is really rather wonderful: something quite new on the face of the earth, I think. I wonder what it will seem to you.

I do hope, now, we can begin to make a little money, on stories, etc., in America. I am sure, if your American agent pushed them a little, he could place the stories. I am so tired of being always pinched and penniless and in bad health. When it is possible, I shall go to a warmer climate—to Italy. I feel so wretched as the winter comes on. Oh, and do send me a little more money. I am at the end of all I have.

The novel will have an epilogue—-a small last chapter. But that, I don't want to write until the whole is sent in to the printer: and heaven knows when that will be. But again, I don’t think this book is likely to be suppressed for immorality, like The Rainbow. God knows how it will go.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence,

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.           15th. November, 1916.

Both your letters came this morning: the second very cross. I will not speak of the war in the abstract any more. I will only say, in the particular, that for me the war is utterly wrong, stupid, monstrous and contemptible, and nothing, neither life nor death, makes it any different for me. For me, it is better to die than to do something which is utterly a violation to my 378 soul. Death is no violation nor ignominy, and can be thought of with sweetness and satisfaction. On the other hand, war cannot be thought of, for me, without the utmost repulsion and desecration of one's being. For me, the war is wrong, and nothing, neither life nor death, can make it right. But—here I submit—I am only myself. At last I submit that I have no right to speak for anybody else, but only for my single self. War is for the rest of men, what it is, of this I can say nothing, I can only speak of myself.

And it comes to this, that the oneness of mankind is destroyed in me. I am I, and you are you, and all heaven and hell lies in the chasm between. Believe me, I am infinitely hurt by being thus torn off from the body of mankind, but so it is, and it is right. And believe me that I have wept tears enough, over the dead men and the unhappy women who were once one with me. Now, one can only submit, they are they, you are you, I am I—there is a separation, a separate isolated fate. And never again will I say, generally, ‘‘the war ; only the war to me." For to every man the war is himself, and I cannot dictate what the war is or should be to any other being than myself. Therefore I am sorry for all my generalities, which must be falsities to another man, and almost insults. Even Rupert Brooke's sonnet, which I repudiate for myself, I know now it is true for him, for them. But for me it is not true, and nothing will ever make it so: least of all death, for death is a great reality and seal of truth: my truth, his truth. It is terrible to think there are opposing truths—but so it is. And I am mine, you are yours, it is so, in eternity as well as in time.

About money, suddenly ——— sends me £60 from America, which is enough. I shall begin to move towards Italy now—if they will let me go. Do you think they will let us go? But at any rate, we shall be in London for a few days, before very long, and I want to see you then. I shall try to go to Italy very soon, because especially now I feel torn off, it is hard to five here; and if I can help it, I will not die, in spite of all. "here is another life to live, here on earth, a different life.

I shall be glad to have Herbert Asquith’s poems. I feel a vivid little sympathy with him just now, also something new: though probably I shall hate some of his poems, as I'm sure he hates some of mine. But perhaps, when the war is over, and we come out of it, we can meet in a new way, and have a new unison, a happiness. Speriamo.

D. H Lawrence.

Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall, To J. B. Pinker.                            Friday.

Dear Pinker,—

I send you the MS. of another story—The Miracle—which is beautiful and ends happily, so the swine of people ought to be very thankful for it.

I am glad there is no more Methuen. You will do as you think best about the novel. I don’t suppose anybody will be dying to publish it, though it is a chef-d'oeuvre. Perhaps the faithful Duckworth will rise up and be noble: though I very much doubt his paying. The duplicate MS. shall come to you very soon. I lent it.

I shall be rather glad if nobody wants those little poems. Then I shall put them in the fire.

I am determined that I will have some money before long. I am sick of poking about in a corner, up to the neck in poverty. It is enough. I think America is my untilled field.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Saturday, 25th November, 1916.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

Thank you for your husband’s poems. I was glad to read them. At any rate he is not a deader, like Rupert Brooke: one can smell death in Rupert: thank heaven, not really here: only the sniff of curiosity, not the great inhalation of desire. (You won’t mind what I say.) I think Herbert Asquith is a poet— which is after all the most valuable thing on earth. But he is not writing himself at all here—not his own realities. Still, it is the writing of a poet, thank God. Only let him burst through the dry dead old self that is on him, like a shake, come out his fresh real self: and he is a poet and a leader. But it needs the death of an old world in him, and the inception of a new. Not Ares, not Aphrodite—these two are old hat, and not real in us (neither him nor you nor me). No gods but truth—that’s the motto. I hope that we shall be friends, one day, he and I— fighting together quite another kind of fight: the fight of that which is to come, not the fight of that which is passing away.

When are we going to have a shot at preparing this nation for peace? Peace and war lie in the heart, in the desire, of the people—say what you will. Germany, nations—are external material facts. The reality of peace, the reality of war, lies in the hearts of the people: you, me, all the rest.

We should say "enough of war" while yet we are alive. We should say enough of war, because the desire of something else is strong and most living in us. It is foolish to drop down at last in inertia, and let the war end so—in inertia. While we have the vitality to create, we ought to stop the fighting— otherwise, when the end comes, we are spiritually bankrupt. Which is final disaster.

I think that Germany—peace terms—allies—etc.—do not matter. What matters is the power in our own hearts, to create the new. Keep that and all is saved. Say that to your husband —he will probably accept it sooner from you.

Oh, and* do not think I blame the Government or howl at it. The fools who howl at the Government make my blood boil. I respect the Prime Minister because I believe in his real decency and I think Lloyd Georges, etc., are toads. I must here assert again that the war is and continues oecause of the lust for hate and war, chiefly hate of each other hate thy neigl bour as thyself —not hate oi Germany at all which is n. the hearts of people; and their worship of Ares and Aphrodite ("But a bitter goddess was born of blood and the salt sea foam")—both gods of destruction and burning down. But in many hearts, now, I fully believe that Ares and Aphrodite have ceased to be gods. We want something else: it is fulfilled in us, this Ares-Aphrodite business: let us have something else, let us have something else, let us make something.else out of our own hearts. Germany, peace terms, etc., don t matter. It is a question of the living heart—that only.

I wish to heaven it might be allowed to discuss peace with the country this winter. I am sure we could still save the life and hope. But let the Prime Minister be changed, let the Lloyd George and Carson fools come in and one can only leave the country (when it is possible) for ever, having left it in one's heart already. If it were possible to speak in the country this winter, we could save the living germ, I am sure. But it is our last chance. Failing this, one can only flee from the chaos and the orgy of ugly disintegration which is to come.

Don’t think of me as a raving impractical vain individual. To be material at this juncture is hopeless, hopeless—and worse than impractical. Only the living heart and the creative spirit matter—nothing else. Is one to be allowed to say so—or not? And do you believe it—or don't you?

Yours,

D. H Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall,

To Catherine Carswell.      Saturday, 2nd December, 1916.

My dear Catherine,—

I am glad you liked the novel—thanks for the suggestions. Gudrun's coat was supposed to be that pale and lovely bluish green which is a painter’s emerald green—really a beautiful shade. Is that still common? You might just put Thomas Bannerman instead of Sholto—or Balfour—any ordinary Scotch name. Gerald and his “as usual" is sarcastic if anything. I can’t understand his persistence in “dressing." But good to cross him out. I am very glad you make these suggestions. About Miss Andrews—she says she read the first chapter, so I suppose it is only fair to give her the whole. Let her have it when you and Carswell have done with it, will you? Your books just come—many thanks. They are all interesting.

I am so afraid to come to London—my state seems so shaky. J am sure I should be ill by the time the train was at Plymouth.

I keep on saying to myself "next week—next week"—and whenever the next week comes I am still incapable of starting. It is almost impossible, I find, for me to go further than Penzance: and even then I want to run back like lightning. It is a curious moral and physical incapacity to move towards the world. Yet I want to come to London: I must wait for the tide to turn in me.

We had Mendel—Gertler lent us his copy. It is a bad book— statement without creation—really journalism. Gertler, Jew-like, has told every detail of his life to Gilbert—Gilbert has a lawyer’s memory and has put it all down—and so ridiculously, when it comes to the love affair. We never recognised ourselves—or Frieda—but now I remember she must be Mrs. Lupton—or whatever it was—wife of an artist. I only glanced through the book.

It is beautiful weather these last days, still and soft. What a nuisance your in-laws are hovering round you again. But you will take them coolly, I know. As for Joanna, she seems to be coming on. I feel that when she is "out," when you have finished her, that will be an epoch closed in your life, and an epoch to begin.

I do want to come to London for spectacles and things— and to hear about the country, what everybody is saying and feeling. It seems to me a change is taking place again. I should like to come and talk—very much. The spirit is willing but the flesh is so weak. Do you know, when I think or getting into a big train to come a long distance, I feel I should faint. Either one is bewitched, or something. But this seems like a magic country with invisible walls, and one is kept in it by enchantment.

I shall be glad to hear what Don has to say—and am very grateful for his suggestions. I must come and talx to him, also, about the extant world, before he is conscripted or anything vile like that.

I feel you are better, on your legs again and ready to forge ahead. Good!

Oh, don’t think I would belittle the Russians. They have meant an enormous amount to me; urgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky—mattered almost more than anything, and

Z8z

thought them the greatest writers of ail time. And now, with something of a shook, I realise a certain crudity and thick, uncivilised, insensitive stupidity about them, 1 realise how much finer and purer and more ultimate our own stuff is.

Auf wiedersehen.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, Saint Ives, Cornwall.

To Mark Gertler.                       5 December, 1916.

My dear Gertler,—

I have owed you a letter for some time—but there is nothing to say, that we don’t know already. Like you, we have got £60—which solves the money difficulty for the time being. Thank you very much for offering to lend us. But it is a principle with me, to borrow from the rich as long as I can, not the poor. Always spoil the Egyptians as far as possible. I am better in health now, because I don’t work and don’t bother any more. One ought, like the fields, to lie fallow during the winter and neither work nor think, but only, in one’s soul, sleep. Can't you put your soul to sleep, and remain just superficially awake, drifting and taking no real notice, just amuse yourself like a child with some sort of play work? I have just made a pouffe—sort of floor cushion, square, and like a mound —and on the black cover, all round, I have stitched a green field, then house, barns, haystacks, animals, man and woman, all in bright-coloured stuffs—it looks very jolly and bright. That is a kind of play, which makes one busy and happy while one’s soul of contention sleeps. I wish you could take some of your sculpture rather like that.

Looking in a dictionary the other day I saw, ⁴⁴Sculpture: the lowest of the arts.” That surprised me very much—but I think perhaps it is true. Sculpture, it seems to me, is truly a part of architecture. In my novel there is a man—not you, I reassure you—who does a great granite frieze for the top of a factory, and the frieze is a fair, of which your whirligig, for example, is part. (We knew a man, a German, who did these big reliefs for great, fine factories in Cologne.) Painting is so 384 much subtler than sculpture, that I am sure it is a finer medium. But one wants the unsubtle, the obvious, like sculpture, as well as the subtle.

The war is beyond weariness; it has reached the stage of stony oppression. And though I think Asquith is by far a more decent man than Lloyd George or any of the others, yet I wish he would clear out, and leave them to it. The debacle would come the quicker. It is bound to come, the great smash-up in this country—and oh, oh God, if it would only come quickly. But it will never take place while Asquith holds the Premiership. He is too much the old, stable, measured, decent England. Alas and alack, that such an England must collapse and be trodden under the feet of swine and dogs. But so it is, by the decree of unalterable fate. .And therefore, the longer the old decency remains standing, the longer the tops of our heads will tickle, expecting it to come crashing down on us. It is this sword of Damocles business which one cannot bear. But sleep—sleep in your soul—everything will come, and will go, in the end.

I can't come to London, for some reason or other. I am like a ship becalmed, down here in this offing, waiting for some wind to blow me back to town, and into the world. I look like Elijah, or Elisha, whichever it was, for a cloud as big as a man’s hand—but see nothing. I can conceive myself down here, still waiting, an old, hooked-nosed, benevolent old man, living on crusts and charity. So be it—it’s very nice down here, much nicer than anywhere else. But when you write, tell me all the world-news you can.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Monday, nth December, 1916.

Here’s a pretty state of affairs—Messrs. Lloyd George and Lord Derby—funny—pretty! This is the last stage of all, that ends our sad eventful history. So be it.

Over Cornwall, last Wednesday and Thursday, went a terrible wave of depression. In Penzance market, farmers went 385 about with wonderstruck faces, saying, “We’re beaten. I'm afraid we’re beaten. These Germans are a wonderful nation, I'm afraid. They are more than a match for us." That is Cornwall at the present time. I must say, I too expect a national disaster before very long, but I don’t care very much. They want it, the people in this country. They want in their vile underneath way of working to scuttle the old ship and pitch everybody into water. Well, let them. Perhaps when we’ve all had a ducking in the sea of fearful disaster, we shall be more wholesome and truthful. At any rate, then I feel we shall be able to do something, something new. It is no use adhering to that old advanced crowd—Cambridge, Lowes Dickenson, Bertie Russell, young reformers, Socialists, Fabians—they are our disease, not our hope. We want a clean sweep, and a new start, and we will have it. Wait only a little longer. Fusty, fuzzy peace-cranks and lovers of humanity are the devil. We must get on a new track altogether. Damn Humanity, let me have a bit of inhuman, or non-human truth, that our fuzzy human emotions can’t alter.

1 send you MS. of a tiny book of poems, to see if you like them. If you do, and if they find a publisher, I think they might be a real success—and I would like to inscribe them to you—"To Cynthia Asquith." Damn initials. But that is just as you like.

We keep putting off our coming to London, but it is bound to be within a month’s time now—probably in early January. Then we must see where we are, how we stand, all of us. What we feel and what we are ready tor.

D. H. Lawrence.

The story "The Thimble" is being published in an American magazine called The Seven Arts.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.           19th December, 1916.

... I wonder if you could help me in another little matter? I have finished and sent in the novel, Women in Love, which is more or less a sequel to The Rainbow. It is a very fine piece of

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work, and I will stand by it for ever. But there is the same danger ahead as ever: it is, perhaps, almost as likely to be suppressed as was The Rainbow: which seems to me monstrous, a serious and profound piece of work like that. I wondered if I could dedicate it to some patron, in the old-fashioned way, and so secure it some patronage which would save it from the barkings of the little newspaper curs. Do you know anybody of any weight or importance, who would take it under his, or her, protection, so far as to accept a serious dedication? It is a much finer book than The Rainbow, and I would rather it were never published at all than insulted by petty dogs as that was. However, in your mad scurry of train-catching, you might think it over for me. . . .

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.               20th December, 1916.

My dear Catherine,—

No, we shan't come to town for a fortnight now, at least. It sounds too horrible. And the ——--— speech in this

morning’s paper is such an unsavoury dollop, that one wants to hide one’s head in a gorse-bush and pretend one is hidden. It is too disgusting. The man means nothing, stands for nothing, is nothing: and he mechanically does what Germany does, and the nation vociferously cries "Hear, Hear”: Do tell me what you think of it, and what the people are saying, and what Don and the Times people say. I feel I want to know the current opinion. I think, of course, that we are now just curving into the final maelstrom: in a few more months there will be no English nation, there will be a vast horde of self-interested mad brutes padding round seeking their own ends: a chaos, a horror. How long will it be oefore Li. G. ano the War Council have the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the Labourites tearing them into three morsels? Not long, I think. So, hurrah for the debacle: let it be soon, for suspense is intolerable.

What an ugly farce Christmas is this year. Will anybody

dare to sing carols, etc. Pah, it all stinks. What a pity you cannot poison--. What a blind mouth devouring

your life, Schoo her off—school

I am glad Don likes the novel. About the Gerald-Work part: I want it to come where it does: you meet a man, you get an impression of him, you find out afterwards what he has done. If you have, in your arrogance, writ him down a nobody, then there is a slap in the eye for you when you find he has done more than you have done. Voila! (I don't mean you, Catherine Carswell, of course.)

Don't hate Joanna: she is young: she will grow up: I hate nobody who will grow up. But the hideous wasters who will only rot in the bud, how I hate them. So Joanna is all right. She goes through her bad phases, as she ought. She is a kind of dead-nettle who looks a pure weed, and comes out with very quaint and happy bunchy flowers at the last minute. Patience! But I wish you got along with her: I am anxious to see her to the end. I feel she will gather up her skirts and fly like the wind to her conclusions, as the New Year comes in.

I believe Pinker will have some difficulty in getting the novel, Women in Love, published. Methuen, having had the MS., agrees to cancel the agreement. But it shows what the market value of the book is likely to be at the moment: the moment being from now onwards, indefinitely. For I believe that England, in spite of your woman friend, is capable of not seeing anything but badness in me, for ever and ever. I believe America is my virgin soil: truly. But patience, always patience. What a pity your Australian millionaire wasn't one of the heavenly babes who see and speak wisdom without understanding it. He might have given us £1,000 to publish our novels with. But I have no hopes of millionaires. I want to know what Don thinks of the latter half of the book. I must see his notes, too. Are they pencilled on the MS.?

I wonder when we shall see you. Everything seems in a state of unstable solution, ready to precipitate out at the least shock. It is a blessing there are one or two people in the world one can feel pretty safe with: for I have a horror of all the other trillions.

I feel we shall ail be meeting in a very little while. Hush! One feels quite portentous.

D< H. Lawrence.

I was wondering if it would be wise to try to get some well-known and important person to take the novel under his protection; that is, if I could dedicate it with a proper inscription, in the 18th-century fashion, to some patron whose name would be likely to save it from the yelping of the small newspaper curs. What do you think?

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall♦

To Catherine Carswell.               26th December, 1916.

Mv dear Catherine,—

Christmas, thank goodness, is over. I hated its coming this year: I nearly hated even presents. I feel awfully downhearted —down altogether. God alone knows what is upon us. I feel smothered and weary, and buried alive in the world, horribly buried alive. And when will the graves open? Oh, dear!

Miss Andrews and Robert Mountsier have come up and are staying till the end of the week. They are very nice, really. Yesterday we had a party with the Hockings, which was jolly. But my heart never felt so down in the dirt, as it does now. What is going to happen, what can we do, how can we move9 It is worse than any Laocodn with the snake round him. such a weight on one's arms and limbs and heart: an utter imprisonment in the tightening folds of this heavy serpent, and oneself impotent. How long will it go on?

I am afraid we shall not be able to come to London. Now they have put up the fare, it would cost the two of us £7 12s. 6d. to come and go. And we shall never have any more money, I verily believe. So we may as well stay down here and spend cur poverty in peace.

What is going to happen to Carswell? Do you know yet. I wonder if you feel as heartsick as I ao wit h ill .

I shall rouse up and send you some of your books back to-morrow.

Tell me if there is any news.

D. H Lawrence,

The rush mat looks so nice upstairs: Frieda very pleased.

Zennor, St. Ives,

Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.        Monday, It/r January, 1917.

My dear Catherine,—

1 never answered your last letter. We seem all to be pretty downed, floored. I feel myself awfully like a fox that is cornered by a pack of hounds and boors who don’t perhaps know he’s there, but are closing in unconsciously. It seems to me to be a crucial situation now: whether we are nabbed by the old vile world, and destroyed, or whether we manage, with the help of the unseen, to make good our escape. I am applying for reindorsement of my passports to New York. If I can but get it done, and if no other horror, like American exclusion, intervenes, I shall be off at once: this month, I hope. I feel it is really a question of to be or not to be. If we are to be, then we must move at once out of this into another world. Otherwise it is not to be.

My dear Catherine, for me the hour is crucial. But everything has its season. Perhaps your times are a little different. Perhaps—-this in answer to your last letter—-it is necessary for you and Don to have another bout, another round, to try another fall with this old world. Every man has his own times and his own destiny apart and single. It only remains for us to fulfil that which is really in us. For me, it is time to go:

“Time for us to go, Time for us to go . .

as the song is.

I don’t know why I go to America—except that I feel all right in going there. One instinctively takes one’s way, and it is all right. I feel we shall get off. I am not beaten yet. But don’t say anything about our going, will you?

Everybody refuses to publish the novel. It will not get done over here. I don’t care.

As a sort of last work, I have gathered and shaped my last poems into a book. It is a sort of final conclusion of the old life in me— and now farewell,” is really the motto. I don’t

much want to submit the MS. for publication. It is very intimate and vital to me. But I have got it very nearly ready. Would you like to see it? I will send it you if you would.

How is Joanna? My heart aches a bit for her: it is so wintry for her to come forth. Have patience and courage. Write for America if you can t write. I find I am unable to write for England any more—the response has gone quite dead and dumb. A certain hope rises in my heart, quite hot, and I can go on. But it is not England. It seems to me it is America. If I am kept here I am beaten for ever.

How are you yourself, and Don? The weeks go by very bitterly, don’t you find? They are hardly bearable.

The weather is cold down here also: but sometimes very sunny, as to-day. We live on tenterhooks, hoping for departure. You too will move away, when your time comes.

Do you see Esther Andrews? And how is she? We want her to go with us to America, and to the ultimate place we call Typee or Rananim. There is indeed such an ultimate place.

Don’t treat me as I have treated you, and make me wait a long time for an answer. Write soon.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.             8th January, 1917.

I didn’t answer your letter about Women in Love because it seems the book will not find a publisher in England at all. Indeed, nobody will print me nowadays, the public taste is averse from me. It is a nasty quandary. The books I have don’t sell, so it’s a bad look-out.

I wrote to Eddie asking him if he thought we could get passports to U.S.A. Of course we have the passports of November, 1915—but they won’t do, I believe. We have some friends going over to New York in March, and I should like to go with them. I am pretty sure of selling my stuff if I am

in America. I don’t want to write or talk about the war at all-only stories and literary stuff: because I think the war will end this year, and even if it doesn’t I can’t help it any more. I feel there is disaster impending for England. Not that I want to run away—only I feel useless, it is quite useless my trying to live and write here. I shall only starve in ignominy: should be starving now if an American hadn't given me £60.

After the Cornwallis-West affair—and how disgusting that is, how loathsome the attitude of the papers, how indecent the whole publicity—I know one ought not to ask for anything from you. But I believe it is quite legal for us to go to America: I am medically exempt, we are not spies, and I will neither write nor talk about the war to the Americans—they have nothing to do with it, it is our affair, alas! So just confer a little with Eddie about it, will you? I shall have just enough money to take us to New York if we can go on the first of March with our friends. And I can't go on living here on a miserable pittance which Pinker, my literary agent, will allow me. I can’t take a pittance from Pinker: it is too insulting and it is worse than useless my living in England any more.

I don’t think America is a paradise. But I know I can sell my stories there, and get a connection with publishers. And what I want is for us to have sufficient to go far west, to California or the South Seas, and live apart, away from the world. It is really my old Florida idea—but one must go further west. I hope in the end other people will come, and we can be a little community, a monastery, a school—a little Hesperides of the soul and body. That is what I will do finally. . . .

But in the end I will go far away and make a little new world, like a seed which drops in a fertile soil, and germinates with a new earth and a new heaven. I don't believe in practical life, nor this materialism, nor in submitting to falsity because there is nothing else to do.

O. H. Lawrence.

I hope we shall always be friends.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.                  Ht/r January, 1917.

Do you really feel more hopeful about the world? No, I don’t. I feel quite hopeless. But why should [one let] oneself be dragged down? That is the wrongness. One should have courage, and stand clear.

I feel there is nothing to do but wait, and when it is possible, go right away. The only way is the way of my far-off wilderness place which shall become a school and a monastery and an Eden and a Hesperides—a seed of a new heaven and a new earth. That is the only way.

I can’t come to London now because I have no belief in London. London must come to me—I can move itwards no more. I shall wait to go away, that is all. And I must economise my mere pittance of money.

It seems my novel won't find a publisher over here. I don’t wonder, seeing the state of the newspapers. J don’t ever want it to be published, better not. How is Joanna going?

Esther Andrews is still here. She makes me feel that America is really the next move. Not but what the Americans are awful. But the future can take place there—and it seems it can’t here.

Nevertheless, I wish we could see you. Essentially, I don’t want to see a soul in London, except you two and perhaps Hilda Aldington—and Robert Mountsier, who has gone back. But we must—and shall—have a meeting before long.

With love from both.

D H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.                       9 Jan» I9I7«

My dear Pinker,—

I suppose there is no news concerning any of my MSS. 1 don’t wonder at it, if no one will publish the novel. When I read the newspapers, I see it would be vain. It does 1 lot 1 t. > very much—later will be better. It is a book that will laugh last.

393

I want to go to America. It is necessary now for me to address a new public. You must see that. It is no use my writing in England for the English any more. I want to go to New York and write a set of essays on American literature, and perhaps lecture. It is no use my sitting cooped up here any longer. I feel I shall burst.

I can go to America if I can state definite work to do there. I am sure you can help me. I don't want to talk about the war, or peace, or have anything to do with that concern. I only want to be able to write and publish my own literary stuff, and to be in connection with some sort of public. It is useless here.

I have two friends going over to New York on the ist March, and I should be very glad if my wife and I could go with them.

My dear Pinker, I know you can help me. I hope you don’t feel uneasy about my work. I tell you it is true and unlying, and will last out all the other stuff. It is really necessary for me now to move under a new sky—it is a violation to be shut up here any longer.

I have got in my head a set of essays, or lectures, on Classic American literature. But I can’t write for America here in England. I must transfer myself.

Yrs.,

D. H, Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives,

Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.

16 Jan., 1917.

My dear Pinker,—

Thank you for promising to help me to go to New York. I must go soon. One’s psychic health is more important than the physical.

I think I can get passports for us if I can state definite business reasons for my going to America. It is here I want you to help me. You can give me some sort of credentials that it is necessary for me to be in New York for the publishing of the Twilight in Italy and the Rainbow and the Women in Love. I

think that would be enough. Do you know of anything else? You see I feel I must be under a new sky. AU the oxygen seems gone out of the vital atmosphere here, and one gutters like a suffocated candle. I want to get into contact with something new—not to talk or write about the war, nothing of that—but to start somehow afresh.

Tell me if you know anything else necessary for me to do.

D. H. Lawrence.

Margin Note.

I expect the MS. of the novel every day—when it comes I will send it to you post-haste.

Zennor, St. Ives,

Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.                             29 Jan., 1917.

My dear Pinker,—

I am going to apply immediately for my passports for America. Now as to definite reasons for my going: I hear they must be as convincing as possible. I shall give:

1. Ill-health.

2. Failure to make any money at all over here.

3. Necessity to place short stories, and literary articles, and poems, and to arrange with a publisher the publication of he Rainbow, which is ready for press but has been deferred, and of the novel Women in Love.

Then I shall refer to you for corroboration, if it is necessary.

Do you think this is all right? Tell me at once if there is anything you disagree to. 1 don't want to do anything at all without your knowledge. You have been good to me, and I am grateful.

Only I do want to go to America now—not so much for business—but I feel I can t breathe here. lere is an oppression cn one s breathing.

I expect you have that duplicate MS. by now. I am sorry it is so

I am doing out a last book of poems: real poems: my chief poems, and best, his will be the last book of poems shall

have, for years to come. I have reaped everything out of my old notebooks now. I think I shall call this: Poems of a Married Man. Would that do, do you think?

I shall send you the MS. in a week or so. But there is no hurry at all about publishing it.

There is no news of the novel?

D. H. Lawrence

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Mark Gertler.               Friday, 9 February, 1917.

My dear Gertler,—

It was bad news to hear from Kot that your father is dead. Not that death itself seems to me a calamity. It seems very much like going to sleep when one is thoroughly done up. But there is your mother left, and the others. It is a blessing you have your work. Take care not to be knocked up. These things do one a good deal of damage inside. To think of oneself, and cherish one's flame of life, is very necessary.

I feel as if we were all up to the chin in the flood of things. Let it rise a little higher and we are swamped, suffocated, done for. All the time, the foul world of mud is rising and trying to envelop us, to destroy the quick of independence and singleness which is in us. It is time for me to pray for the help of the Unseen, for I don’t know how much longer I can keep my head up.

You know we have applied for passports to America. Yet what is America, now? Nevertheless if they will give us the passports we shall sail directly, in an American ship. I believe that, barring mines, that is quite safe. And I don't feel very hopeful, now, about the passports. At any rate, we ought to know in a few days' time.

If we have to stay here, I too shall become a farmer. I shall help the man just below, whom I like. But I still hope to go away. In America, if we get there, I can make ready for you, if you want to come when the war is over.

My novel does not find a publisher. I don’t mind. What is the good of its coming out in a world like this?

I hear you are doing a big wood sculpture. I wonder it I shall ever see it. I should like to.

Frieda sends her love, and sympathy, with mine.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            12th February, 1917.

They have refused to indorse my passport. It is a bitter blow, because I must go to America. But I will try again in a little time.

How are you, and what are you doing? For me the skies have fallen, here in England, and there is an end. I must go to America as soon as I can, because to remain here now, after the end, is like remaining on one’s death-bed. It is necessary to begin a new life.

You mustn’t think I haven’t cared about England. I have cared deeply and bitterly. But something is broken. 1 here is not any England. One must look now for another world. 1 his is only a tomb.

I must wait, and try again in a little time. I don’t want to bother you with woes or troubles. Only I feel there is some sort of connection between our fates—yours and your children s and your husband's, and Frieda’s and mine. I know that sometime or other I shall pull through. And then, when I can help you or your husband or the children, that will be well. Because, don't hide away the knowledge, real life is finished here, it is over. The skies have already fallen. I here are no heavens above us, no hope. It needs a beginning elsewhere. That will be more true, perhaps, of Herbert Asquith and of John the Son, than of you. But it is a bit of knowledge not to be evaded even while one struggles through with the present.

I feel the War won’t be so very much longer. 1 he skies have really fallen. There is no need of any more pulling at the pillars. New earth, new heaven, that is what one must find. I don’t think America is a new world. But there is a living sky above. America I know is shocking. But there is a new sky above it. I must go to America as soon as ever I can. Do you think I don’t know what it is to be an Englishman? . . .

There is no news here, we seem as in a lost world. My health is fair. It is the old collapsing misery that kills one. Frieda sends her love.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives,

Cornwall.

Tc Catherine Carswell.

Sunday, 18th February, 1917.

My dear Catherine,—

I am sending you the book of poems to-day. I have put the title as you see. I have finished it to-day. It has meant a great deal to me. And I feel more inclined to burst into tears than anything. I can’t send this MS. to Pinker yet. I loathe him to have it. I loathe it to go to a publisher. I feel for the moment most passionately and bitterly tender about it. I wonder what it will seem to you—this book of poems. It will either seem much, or very little. I want you to tell me what effect it has on you. Because, perhaps I shall not send it to Pinker, perhaps I shall keep it by me, this MS., for some time to come. I must see how I feel about it later, and how it strikes you.

You must be in an upset, getting ready to leave your house. It must seem like the end of the world to you. Let us hope it is the beginning of a new world, rather. But the breaking off with the old is bitter.

Did we thank you for the Chinese coat come back, and the very good shortbread? But aren't you robbing Peter to pay Paul, sending us your good food?

It is a curious interval with me now. Now the poems are done, I feel I don’t know what next, or where next, or anything. I wish we were going to America.

The weather is most overwhelmingly lovely. I lay on the cliffs and watched the gulls and hawks in the perfect sky. Already the pigeons were cooing, and it was warm as summer. I feel I don’t know where I am, nor what I am. This is somnambulism, or a trance.

Don't forget, if ever you feel homeless, we shall be very glad to have you in the other cottage here. Count it as a place of your own, for you both.

This is the only complete MS. of the poems—so don’t lose it, will you? I want Hilda Aldington to have it next: she is 44, Mecklenburg Square, W.C. But I will write you again. I hope everything is going well with you and Carswell.

With love from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen,

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Harriet Monroe.

28 Feb., 1917.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

The copy of Poetry came to-day, with the notice of Amores. Thank you very much. I am sorry I forgot to inscribe my thanks to your magazine.

We can’t come to America yet, I am sorry to say. But we shall come.

Do you think you might ask Josephine Preston Peabody to give me a copy of her Harvest Moon? I will gladly send her a copy of either of my books of poetry in return. The bits you quote of her seem to me very real and valid. I should be glad read the rest. Most of your American verse I find ungenuine: it isn’t valid. Most of the people show off—something empty and noisy, as if they want to attract attention. It is all so blatant.

I have got together the MS. of a new book of verse: by far the best. I will not forget to mention Poetry in front.

Ask Josephine Preston Peabody about her book, for me, if you can, will you?

Yours very sincerely,

D, H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen,

Zennor, St. Ives,

Cornwall.

To Ernest Collings.                   Sat., z March, 1917.

Dear Collings,—

I was very sorry to hear of you laid up in hospital. But heaven knows, one wonders that anybody of any sensitiveness is left alive.

We have been here just a year, in a very nice cottage above the sea. I like this place very much. I was completely rejected from military service, thank God—for health. I know I should have died in a month. As it is, it is a struggle to go on living. The world is too foul, it poisons us. I don’t know what will become of us all. If only a better spirit, a new spirit, would come into men, and make them begin to make life real and fine, instead of only death. The tension of trying to keep a spirit of life and hope against such masses of foulness wears one right out.

No, there is nothing published of mine lately—save a story in this month’s English Review which I don't much care for. I have done a novel, which nobody will print, after the Rainbow experience. It has been the round of publishers by now, and rejected by all. I don’t care. One might as well make roses bloom in January, as bring out living work into this present world of man.

I wish there could be a new spring of hope and reality in mankind: I do wish a few people could change, and stand for a fresh and happier world. I suppose it will come, and we shall live through. That is our business, at any rate. We must live through, for the hope of the new summer of the world.

At any rate, don’t lose all your strength in illness. Save enough for when the change comes, the time to work for real happiness.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor. *

To Catherine Carswell.

Wednesday, 7 th March, 1917.

I have seven short articles—little essays—called The Reality of Peace. They are very beautiful, and, I think, very important. Something must be done with them. They are a new beginning. Shall I send them along to you, to see what you and Don think, and about publishing? Or shall I send them straight to Pinker? How much time have you? But they are very short.

What is happening to you?

Reply ar once, will you.

D. H. L.

To Catherine Carswell.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

Friday.

I send you the "Seven" to-day. I have promised them to Dollie Radford next. You won’t keep them long, because they are so short.

We must think hard about their publication. We must begin now to work for a new world, a creative peace.

Only Esther Andrews and Hilda Aldington have had the poems. Esther Andrews seems to feel very much with you about them—for which I am glad. Hilda Aldington says they won’t do at all: they are not eternal, not sublimated: too much body and emotions.

You will be having a bad time just now. Never mind, it is near to a new beginning.

Warn me again before you leave your house. The news of Herbert Watson made me feel ill.

D. II. Lawrence.

I wrote to Austin Harrison to ask if he would like to see the "Seven" for the English Review. Do you think that all right?

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.

19 March, 1917.

My dear Pinker,—

I am sending you seven little Articles called The Reality of Peace. I wrote to Austin Harrison about them: will you send them to him, to see if he will put them in the English Review. They are very beautiful and dear to me, I feel very delicate and sensitive about them. I intend to follow them up with more such chapters, to make a book. Perhaps in America the Yale Review would print them.

I have done my new book of poems and got it ready. That also is very precious to me. But it could not come out just now, the world is far too vile and horrific. Let there be just a little sign of a new dawn.

D. H. Lawrence.

Harrison must not cut the articles without letting me know first—if he takes them.

To Catherine Carswell.

Zennor, St Ives,

Cornwall.

1 st April, 1917.

My dear Catherine,—

What is happening to you by now—and to Don? Frieda told us all about you in your little rooms. I sincerely hope you are feeling better in health. It is all a question of hope, and peace of spirit. If one could have a real fresh hopeful spirit, one would be well in health.

There is this new Military Service Act, which makes me liable to mote re-examinations. But my soul is made up now: I will go to prison rather than be compelled to anything. I have had enough. I will not be compelled by these foul dogs, not to anything.

Austin Harrison will probably publish the Reality of Peace: at least some of them: for which I was very glad. I was sorry they did not mean much io you: disappointed. Because still, to me, they are very important. I still feel, if they are published, they will be effective. It is time something was done. It is time something new appeared on the face of the earth. It is time we abandoned our old selves and our old concerns, to come out into something clear and new, beyond humanity. We must establish ourselves in the absolute truth, and scorn this filthily contemptible world of actuality. We must do something—it is time to move away from our little selves into the flood of a real living and effective truth. We must have done entirely with the half-truths of actual life. They are leeches hanging on our souls. I feel like starting something somewhere: but hardly know yet where to begin. I believe there are peace demonstrations every Sunday in the Victoria Park. I think I am almost ready to set out preaching also, now: not only cessation of war, but the beginning of a new world. My dear Catherine, it is time to begin something like this. I feel on the brink of coming to London, but wait still a little while, for the definite impulse. It is really time for us to rouse ourselves now, to set out on the new journey.

Write and tell me what you think, how you are and how you feel. Frieda sends her love. She is very happy with the terracotta statuette, but I do not find it very good.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Mark Gertler.                           i April, 1917-

My dear Gertler,—

I was glad to hear from Frieda that you are well and happier. She sees a change in you, a newness and a certain peace which are everything. Also, she thinks the Bathing Scene wonderful.— I think the wrestlers interesting: but sculpture never quite satisfies me. It is not sufficiently abstracted. One resents the bulk, it frustrates the clarity of conception.

There is now the new Military Service Act, which makes me liable to be called up again. But I am so nauseated with the whole affair, that if they do bother me, I will go to prison rather than comply in the least. I will not be compelled—that is quite definite tn me: I will not be compelled to anything. I am sick of the whole ignominious show.

We are busy gardening, and I am writing short essays on philosophy. The pure abstract thought interests me now at this juncture more than art. I am tired of emotions and squirmings and sensations. Let us have a little pure thought, a little perfect and detached understanding. That is how I feel now. It may be Austin Harrison will put some essays of mine, The Reality of Peace, in the English Review. I hope he will. If so, you must read them. I am very weary of this world of ugly chaos. I am sick to death of struggling in a cauldron of foul feelings with no mind, no thought, no understanding, no clarity of being anywhere, only a stinking welter of sensations. One must get out of it somehow.

The weather is very cold: I wish it would turn warmer. I wish one could do something: I wish one could see where to lay hold, to effect something fresh and clear, just to begin a new state. You say "it is life, life is like it." But that is mere sophistry. Life is what one wants in one's soul and in my soul I do not want this wretched conglomerated messing, therefore I deny that that is life at all, it is only baseness and extraneous, sporadic, meaningless sensationalism.

Still I hover on the brink of moving from Zennor towards London, and still I do not get away. But all in good time. Let me know what you think by now.

D. H. Lawrence.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.

5 Acacia Rd., St. John's Wood, London, N.W.

Sunday, 22 April, 1917.

My dear Sallie,—

I hope you are feeling a bit better and a bit happier. When you rise fully into your new life, beware of seeing as the world sees, and thinking as the world thinks. "Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." Christ was right in all those things. It is necessary to go beyond the outer life, to the life of death and creation, and take one’s stand there, and let the world which intervenes have its own, merely secondary place, Even you, it is not really money which you need, to satisfy your unsatisfaction: it is the peace and fulfilment of the spirit, that which is ultimate, and beyond interference. Now that it is time for your resurrection, don’t drag the grave-clothes of the old state with you. The world doesn’t matter: you have died sufficiently to know that: the world doesn’t matter, ultimately. Ultimately, only the other world of pure being matters. One has to be strong enough to have the just sense of values. One sees it in the old sometimes. Old Madame Stepniak was here yesterday. I find in her a beauty infinitely lovelier than the beauty of the young women I know. She has lived, and suffered, and taken her place in the realities. Now, neither riches nor rank nor violence matter to her, she knows what life consists in, and she never fails her knowledge.

Come and stay with us as soon as you feel able. I shall leave London on Tuesday: stay perhaps a few days in Berks: then home to Cornwall. I hope you will get stronger.

Warm regards to Willie and Enid.

D H. Lawrence.

Hermitage, Berks.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.          Thursday, April, 1917.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

I didn’t ring you up, because on Sunday, suddenly, I collapsed with sickness, and was quite seedy. Then just as suddenly on Tuesday, my soul inspired itself and I got well. So, yesterday I came on here. To-morrow I am going back to Cornwall, thank God.

It was the evil influence of aggregate London that made me ill: suddenly I start to be sick. It is all very vile.

It is much best for you to go down to Stanway. The spring is here, the cuckoo is heard, primroses and daffodils are out in the woods, it is very lovely. I feel that the buds as they unfold, and the primroses come out, are really stronger than all the armies and all the War. I feel as if the young grass growing would upset all the cannon on the face of the earth, and that man with his evil stupidity is after all nothing, the leaves just brush him aside. The principle of life is after all stronger than the principle of death, and I spit on your London and your government and your armies.

Come and see us whenever you are near enough and feel like it. The state of your desperation is really a thing to be ashamed of. It all comes of submitting and acquiescing in things one does not vitally believe in. If you learned flatly to reject things which are false to you, you wouldn’t sell yourself to such deadness. One should stick by one's own soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors. I am out of all patience with the submitting to the things that be, however foul they are, just because they happen to be. But there will fall a big fire on the city before long, as on Sodom and Gomorrah, and will burn us clean of a few politicians, etc., and of some of our own flunkeying to mere current baseness. I feel angry with you, the way you have betrayed everything that is real, by admitting the superiority of that which is merely temporal and foul and external upon us. If all the aristocrats have sold the vital principle of life to the mere current of foul affairs, what good are the aristocrats? As for the people, they will serve to make a real bust-up, quite purposeless and aimless. But when the bust-up is made and the place more or less destroyed we can have a new start.

It is a very lovely day. Hope you are well.

D. H/ Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.            Monday, 7 May, 1917.

My dear Sallie,—

I should have written you before, but waited to see if Frieda would be well, so you could come at once and stay a few weeks.

406

I got back here about ten days ago, after having collapsed in London with the same sickness and diarrhoea that Emily had in Ripley. And I find Frieda, having progressed from her ptomaine poisoning to colitis—some sort of inflammation in the bowels—laid up quite ill. Nor does she seem to get much better. The doctor sent her medicine, and ordered her koumiss —fermented milk—but it doesn't seem to do much good. Everything in the world is wrong just now. Myself, I still feel shaky.

But I suppose we shall all quite suddenly recover, and then we really want you to come and stay. I will write you again in a few days, to say how Frieda is. I hope you yourself are keeping moderately well.

There was no hope of anything good in London: everybody seemed weary and helpless, drifting along in the worst kind of laissez-oiler. The government is quite, quite incompetent, yet determined to prosecute the war indefinitely. The military authorities are in the filthiest state of bloodthirstiness, it is all a just hopeless mess. As for the people, nowhere do I find them wanting anything good. They want to go on from bad to worse. It is impossible to believe in any existing body, they are all part of the same evil game, labour, capital, aristocrat, they are the trunk, limbs, and head of one body of destructive evil. How can one say, the head is to blame, but the trunk is blameless? They are all one thing.

Yet I feel that peace, that is, the end of the war, will come quite soon. I feel that it is a question only of weeks, now. There will be an end soon, though how it is to come to pass, I don’t know. Certainly not because England will bring it about.

Ah, well, we can only hang on till there is an end. At any rate, I will let you know as soon as Frieda is well enough, and then I hope you will come down at once. The flowers are all out, but the earth is very dry. • The bluebells won’t be here for another fortnight. I hope you will catch them at their best.

With very warm regards to you all from us both.

D H. Lawrence,

My dear Catherine,—

There isn't any news, either about the Reality of Peace or anything else. Only Esther Andrews has gone back to London, so I expect you will be seeing her soon.

We are having very beautiful weather, so hot and bright. I have never seen anything so beautiful as the gorse this year, and the blackthorn. The gorse blazes in sheets of yellow fire, and the blackthorn is like white smoke, filling the valley bed. Primroses and violets are full out, and the bluebells are just coming. It is very magnificent and royal. The sun is just sinking in a flood of gold. One would not be astonished to see the cherubim flashing their wings and coming towards us, from the west. All the time, one seems to be expecting an arrival from the beyond, from the heavenly world. The sense of something, someone magnificent approaching, is so strong, it is a wonder one does not see visions in the heavens.

I was glad to hear that the novel was going. When it is done, you will send it me, won’t you? It will be really something overcome, a phase surpassed in you, when the book is finished.

I am not doing anything, except garden, just now. Yesterday I began to type out the Peace articles—I want another copy— and I was recasting the second one. But suddenly I felt as if I was going dotty, straight out of my mind, so I left off. One can only wait and let the crisis come and go.

My gardens are so lovely, everything growing in rows, and so fast—such nice green rows of all kinds of young things. It looks like a triumph of life in itself. But these need rain, we are very dry on these slopes.

Frieda is much better in health these last two days. She sends her love. I hope the eggs won’t get broken. Send the box back, and you can have some more. I’m glad Don is all right. I’m sure the war will end soon. I wonder if I am a bit dotty.

D, H. Lawrence.

No news yet of the desk. Please send me the bill for packing —you are poor now.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall. •

To J. M. Murry.                         zz Maj;, 1917.

I was wondering if you will be going to Mylor this summer. If you are, you must come over and see us. What are your holidays? And what are you doing, save the office and living in Redcliffe Rd ? Tell me anything interesting, will you?

It is very quiet here: Frieda and I alone now. Frieda was very seedy with colitis, but is better: I am in bed for a few days, but reviving like a plant after rain. This spring has been very different from last: so dry and bright: no rain for weeks, always sunshine and dryness: no fog. Last Saturday is a year since the Mann* came in. Yet all is so different. The gorse is out in masses this year, and the blackthorn a great white smoke. I have three gardens: the little one, which is a gem: pansies and columbine and fuchsia as well as veg.: then the little field at the back of the red room is half garden: broad beans, etc., spinach, many beautiful rows: then in the field below, peas, beans, etc, I have worked hard. We should have mounds of vegetables. But it has been so dry, the little seeds in the field are backward.

There is no writing and publishing news. Philosophy interests me most now—not novels or stories. I find people ultimately boring: and you can’t have fiction without people. So fiction does not, at the bottom, interest me any more. I am weary of humanity and human things. One is happy in the thoughts only that transcend humanity.

I don’t know how I am going to earn money now: but 1 can’t care. I try to think of it, but can’t. The Lord will have to provide.

Write and tell me your news, and what you are thinking and doing apart from office. I don’t know why you have been in my mind lately.

You shouldn’t say you love me. You disliked me intensely when you were here, and also at Mylor. But why should we hate or love? We are two separate beings, representing what we represent separately. Yet even if we are opposites, even if at the

♦The Mann was a Spanish coal ship which ran aground in front of Tregerthen.

root we are hostile—I don’t say we are—there is no reason why we shouldn't meet somewhere.

I). H. Lawpence*

Send me any catalogues of cheap books you might have, will you? I have read all my books here, being laid up awhile. What are you doing with the Mylor house?

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.          Sunday, io th June, 1917.

My dear Catherine.—

What are you doing now, and how are you going on? I heard from Esther Andrews that she had been to see you, but she didn’t say much, except that you hardly think of the war. Which shows the war has passed out of you, which is a blessing. If only it would pass out of more people, be fulfilled and exhausted in them, so that they don’t partake of it any more, what a blessing it would be! Poor Esther Andrews is still too much in it, and too much out of it. The nervous fire of irritable opposition has not yet burnt itself out of her. I wish it had.

We are the same: have got Mrs.------here. She will only

stay a week now. That is really a week too long for me. But I grow philosophic to the minor evils. How very rich it is to be alone, without these other human beings. People are poverty and negation, to be alone is wealth uncountable. I shall be so glad when Frieda and I have got room again. What an obstruction one little being is.

What would be nice, would be if the few, very few people one liked could have the cottages round about, far enough away, and near enough. I wish you and Don had a cottage about 1 i miles from here.

How is he, and what is he doing? Is he in the fish’s belly, or out of it*⁵ This monstrous whale of a Mammon, it gulps ’em down. What a big belly the militarism has!

1 hey sent me my papers to be medically re-examined. I got an “unfit” note from a doctor here, and sent it back: don’t

know what the developments will be. War, and militarism, and the whole whale of authority, seems to have swum off from me and left me alone on a small peaceful island^ But it is an island exposed to bad storms.

How is Joanna? She ought to be grown up enough to be coming out soon. Have you nearly done?—and are you thrilled?

I am doing philosophy only: very good, I think, but a slow job. Still, I beat it out. I feel like the chorus in Great Expectations'

“Beat it out, beat it out, old Clem

With a dink for the stout, old Clem."

But I feel as if you weren't interested in philosophy just now. No news of anything being published, from me. Novel and poems lie by. What of Joanna?

I feel the war will end soon. But I have no plans. What are yours? I sit, a very tender nursling, on the knees of the gods.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St, Ives, Cornwall.

To Edward Marsh.

26 June, 1917.

Dear Eddie,—

Thank you very much for the cheque for £7. 15. It is a nice sum, and Georgian Poetry is a good goose, her egg is much appreciated, and I hope she will live for ever.

I got myself rejected again at Bodmin on Saturday: cursed the loathsome performance. As for flourishing, I should like to flourish a pistol under the nose of the fools that govern us. They make one spit with disgust. Only let the skies break, and we will flourish on top of the "times," and the time-keepers and the time-servers.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Higher Tregerthen, Zenner,

St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Eunice Tietjens.                         21 July, 1917.

Dear Eunice Tietjens,—

Your book of profiles from China came to-day. I have just read it. At least it is actual, thank God, true as far as it goes. But an inward boredness with all the phenomena of humanity and the humanised cosmos, revealed flatly, is the best. Only the Proem smacks slightly of the Brummagem quality of high falute and priggish self-seriousness, which makes Yankee things so detestable. The rest is quite honest. The Americans usually take themselves and their twaddle au si grand serieux. I am really thankful to see a book that is flat and honest and bored and rather disgusted.

One thing—the truth of evolution is not true. There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond. This is the greatest truth. A lily is a ne plus ultra: so also, a pure Chinaman: there is no evolving beyond, only a slipping back, or rather rotting back, through all the coloured phases of retrogression and corruption, back to nought. This is the real truth. Man was man in eternity, has been man since the beginnings of time, and is man in the resultant eternity, no evolution, only unfolding of what is man. And the same with the Chinaman: no evolution beyond the Chinaman, none, none, none. But I don’t pretend to define what is the Chinaman. (This in reference to your ricksha boy with the ears that suggest a horse’s ears.) There are animal principles in man, which totemism recognises, but these have nothing evolutionary.

But humanity is a bad egg: there is no more meat in it. As for republics, they are the imaginary chickens of an addled egg. Nothing will save us now: we must lapse sheer away from the extant world, reject it all, become indifferent, and listen beyond. It is no good balking at the given issues. The given issues are all old, old hat, bad egg. One must get beyond, and try for sheer understanding, inhuman.

I think the war will end soon: then I want to come to America,

with my wife: not for the American people, not for any Uncle Sam, but for the strange salt which must be in the American soil, and the different ether which is in the sky, which may feed a new mind in one. I hope, then, that we may come to Chicago.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.                            Z August, 1917.

Deap Pinker,—

Your letter and the poems came to-day. Truly the ways and the taste of publishers is mysterious and beyond finding out.

The only thing I feel strongly about is the Song of a Man who is Loved. Can you or anybody tell me why they want it omitted’ I'm sure Alice Meynell might print it without reproach. I don’t want to omit it. I send a copy of it. Please convince them they arc absurd on this point.

I will omit Meeting Among the Mountains, if they want it. But do ask them why they wish it. It has already been printed in the English Review, and in Georgian Poetry. 1 he Georgian Poetry public is a very big one, according to sales, and they are sure to be glad to come upon something they know already. The lines I will alter, though for some of them it is a great pity, spoiling the clarity and precision of the expression. I will look after my bad taste in Eve's Mass and Candlemass. Strange are the ways of man, strangest of all, the publishers.

Do convince them that the Song of a Man who is Loved is beautiful, necessary, and innocuous as a sprig of mignonette. If they still persist, make them say what they object to. For I cannot believe that this poem shall be omitted.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

P S.__Do you think anybody would care to publish as a little

book or pamphlet, the Reality of Peace, four numbers of which (out of seven) came in the English Review?

413

If Chatto’s leave out the Meeting Among the Mountains, I must leave out all reference to Georgian Poetry, which is a name which I am sure gives a good deal of sanction among a certain class.

P.P.S.—I have already changed all the lines and the two titles. There remain only the two poems to be decided on. Meeting I don’t feel strongly about—but the other I do.

Zennor, St Ives, Cornwall.

To J. B. Pinker.

30 Aug., 1917.

My dear Pinker,—

I return Chatto's agreement, signed and initialed. Don’t you think we might have had 20 per cent after the first 1000 or 20Q0? I always have hopes of the future. And I wish you could bring them to give me twelve, instead of six, presentation copies. Let me know when they fix the price, and the format.

I will send you on the MS. of At the Gates in a day or two. On second thoughts, I send it at once. You will see it is based upon the more superficial Reality of Peace. But this is pure metaphysics, especially later on: and perfectly sound metaphysics, that will stand the attacks of technical philosophers. Bits of it that might be very unpopular, I might leave out.

I am doing, in the hopes of relieving my ominous financial prospects, a set of essays on The Transcendental Element in American Literature. You may marvel at such a subject, but it interests me. I was thinking of speaking to Amy Lowell about it. Her brother is principal of Harvard, and she can touch the pulse of the Yale Review and things like that. We might get the essays into a periodical here in England—seems my only hope— I won't and can’t write Strand stories.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives,

Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.           3rd September, 1917.

There seems nothing hut futility in writing nowadays,

I guessed Herbert Asquith was all right, or we should have heard from one source or another: all right in health, I mean, nobody can be all right in mind, nowadays.

I am pretty well. Frieda has had bad neuritis in her leg: in bed a month with it, a complete cripple. To-day she seems quite well again, good as ever.

For the rest, what is there to say? I made wonderful gardens where things grew by magic: fat marrows, on plants that seemed as if they were going to roam till they encircled the earth; long, flat beans in festoons among red flowers, and a harvest of peas, myriads of rich full pods—and kohhabi, and salsify, and scorzonera, and leeks, and spinach—everything in the world, it seems. But we have had massive storms that have smashed my pea rows back into the earth. Sic transit.

We have been very quiet. There are near some herb-eating occultists: they fast, or eat nettles: they descend naked into old mine-shafts, and there meditate for hours and hours, upon their own transcendent infinitude: they descend on us like a swarm of locusts, and devour all the food on shelf or board: they even gave a concert, and made the most dreadful ools of themselves in St. Ives: violent correspondence in the St. Ives Times.

At present I am writing essays on The Transcendental Element in Classic American Literature. This is snuff to make Uncle Sam sneeze. But I sincerely hope to get a few dollars by it. My last shilling is singing "Larboard Watch Ahoy’ to my last halfpenny, as usual. But I forget. Chatto and Windus are going to bring out a book of verse of mine this autumn, and I am to have 20 guineas in advance of royalties. A little seed, you see, out of Chatto’s Lotus, scattered on my doorstep. Still, I persevere with the American essays.

Frieda has -discovered a genius in herself for making embroidered caps. If you sent her a band that just fits nicely

round your head, she might make you one. I hese caps are her W under stiick.

I am busy in the harvest, binding corn. Heaven and earth have passed away; apocalyptically I bind corn in the fields above the sea, and know the distance. There is no more England, only a beyond. As for me, I look around and cannot find myself hereabouts. But I have a whereabouts, elsewhere. Ou done?

I hope the children are good and well.

Addio!

D. H. Lawrence.

Zenner, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Catherine Carswell.           Wednesday, 8 Oct., 1917.

My dear Catherine,—

Here are the two essays you asked for. I had forgotten all about them. I shall send them on to the English Review: no doubt Harrison will print them—and it will mean a little money, which is the chief consideration now. Not that I am short, for the moment. But I believe the war is going to end soon, and I shall need some money then, if only for Frieda’s going to see her people.

I am very glad you are feeling so well and happy in the thought of a child. If you are happy in the anticipation, that is all that matters. There is no need to let a child make you less free—and it might make you much more so—sard come sard.

I have done the proofs of the poems. Chatto's are making quite a nice book of it. I suppose it will be out soon—next month. I am sorry they left out Song of a Man who Is Loved. Fools. They do these things for sheer bullying. The other things I didn’t mind so much.

I feel changes coming to pass in the world. I really think the war will end soon. Pah, people will be just the same. I hope to be able to go away afterwards.

The weather has been pretty bad. Do you remember how it rained when you were here this time last year! It has rained a good deal the same lately. I wonder where you will go after Bournemouth. We might meet then, when you leave.

I told you I took out the “Love Letters” from the poems.

We’ve got an old piano—did I tell you that?—and some very fine Hebridean songs—marvellous. Gray lent them us.

Frieda is well, so am I. There is not any news—I will lend you more philosophy later.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.             12th October, 1917.

My dear Lady Cynthia,—

Now comes another nasty blow. The police have suddenly descended on the house, searched it, and delivered us a notice to leave the area of Cornwall, by Monday next. So on Monday we shall be in London, staying, if possible c/o Mrs. Radford 52, Well Walk, Hampstead, N.W.

This bolt from the blue has fallen this morning: why, I know not, any more than you do. I cannot even conceive how I have incurred suspicion—-have not the faintest notion. We are as innocent even of pacifist activities, let alone spying of any sort as the rabbits in the field outside. And we must leave Cornwall, and live in an unprohibited area, and report to the police. It is very vile. We have practically no money at all—I don’t know what we shall do.

At any rate we shall be in London Monday evening. You can see us if you feel like it during the week.

This order comes from W. Western, Major-General i/c Administration, Southern Command, Salisbury. They have taken away some of my papers—I don’t know what. Jt is all very sickening, and makes me very weary.

I hope things are all right with you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Zennor, St. Ives, Cornwall.

To Cecil Gray.

12 Oct., 1917.

Great trouble in the land-police raiding the house this morning—searching for God knows what—and we must leave the area of Cornwall by Monday, and not enter any prohibited area. Come and see us at once. I have not the faintest idea what it is all about—curse them all.

D. H. Lawrence.

Z2, Well Walk, Hampstead, N.W.

To Cecii Gray.                       Wed., 17 Oct., 1917.

Caro mio Grigio,—

Got your card this morning—shall be thankful if we hear from your mother and can move into the flat on Friday: for it is prison and misery to be in other people’s houses. Failing the flat, Hilda Aldington offers us her room, 44, Mecklenburgh Square, so we shall go there.

London is not to be thought of. We reported to police here— they had heard nothing about us, and were not in the least interested-—couldn't quite see why we report at all. It is evident they work none too smoothly with the military. Saw Cynthia Asquith last night—she will do what she can for us, she says.

But oh, the sickness that is in my belly. London is really very bad: gone mad, in fact. It thinks and breathes and lives airraids, nothing else. People are not people any more: they are factors, really ghastly, like lemures, evil spirits of the dead. What shall we do, how shall we get out of this Inferno? ⁴⁴Pray not to die on the brink of so much horror," to parody myself.

I hope, if we have to stay in town, you will come up before long, to be a strength and a stay for us. One grasps for support.

⁴⁴To every brave cometh test of fire,

Blacker fate to be left behind——" you know your “Diarmid’s Lay/' or whatever it is. It's like that—only should be “cometh test of mud.’’ It is like being slowly suffocated in mud. Nevertheless, we will come out somehow. But I have never known my heart so pressed with weight of mud.

Write and let us know everything. Frieda sends her love.

D, H. Lawrence.

44, Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.i. To Montague Shearman. Monday, November, 1917.

Dear Mr. Shearman.—

We shall be glad to see you at your rooms, having heard of you so often from Gertler and Koteliansky. But I want you to help me if you will—and can. A fortnight ago the police suddenly descended on us in Cornwall, searched the house, and left us the notice to leave the area of Cornwall in three days, and not to enter any prohibited area and to report ourselves to the police. We don't know in the least why this has taken place. Of course my wife was corresponding with her people in Germany, through a friend in Switzerland—but through the ordinary post. When the house was searched, the detective dogs took away, as far as I can tell, only a few old letters in German from my mother-in-law," and such trifles—nothing at all. It is all ridiculous and boring and a nuisance. The order came from the competent Military Authority at Salisbury., I am told that the only way to find out why this has taken place, is to write to the Secretary for the War Office. But Campbell suggested first asking you if you could find out more directly, perhaps through Hutchinson. I want to know why this action has been taken against my wife and me. As far as I am aware, there cannot be any reason whatsoever for their attacking us. We are as innocuous as it is possible for anybody to be. I very much want to be allowed to go back to Cornwall. We have got the house there, and are rooted there. Perhaps you could ask Hutchinson if he could tell me what person or persons in the War Office Intelligence Department it would be possible or profitable to approach.

I hope this is not a nuisance to you. Take no notice if it is. I look forward to a meeting on Wednesday, anyhow.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

44, Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.i.

To Catherine Carswell.         Saturday, November, 1917.

My dear Catherine,—

I have just finished the novel. Yes, I think it is very good. The part re-written is very much improved. But it shakes me badly—with a kind of nerve-racking pain. Of course the one character you have not really drawn—not conceived even—is Lawrence Urquhart. You haven’t got it in. It wasn’t to be got in, in this book. The book ends strictly, with Louis and Aunt Perdy. Lawrence, in this end, is ex machina. But the book is good—and a complete whole. It only doesn’t really state the other problem-—the problem of what Urquhart really means to Joanna. But that is a dark problem, not to be written now. We will talk some things when we meet.

There is no news of my affairs. We live quietly here. I am kept indoors for the time being by a bad cold. Frieda also has a cold. It is London. I wish we could soon go back to Cornwall. But I can’t get any news of any sort.

We have got a much more definite plan of going away. There will be Frieda and I, and Eder and Mrs. Eder, and William Henry and Gray, and probably Hilda Aldington, and maybe Kot and Dorothy Yorke, We shall go to the east slope of the Andes, back of Paraguay or Colombia. Eder knows the country well. Gray can find £1,000. The war will end this winter. In that case we set off in the spring—say March. How do you feel? What about your coming with Don?—how do you feel? The coming of a baby is a complication.

But this plan at last will come off. We shall go. And we shall be happy. What about you and Don?

When shall you be in town? I fully hope to go back to Cornwall in a week or two. We ought to have a talk soon. I feel the crisis and the end is very near—we are breaking free—at last our plan materialises, really—we shall sail away to our Island—at present in the Andes—before long.

Let us know about you and Don, how you are and what you do, and what prospects there are.

With love from both of us.

D. H. Lawrence.

Call the book after the poem Frost Flowers.

44, Mecklenbwgh Square, W.C.i.

To Cecil Gray.                               Monday.

We are a little nearer to definiteness, but not much. These govt, people are the devil, with their importance and their “expediency” and their tyranny. But I believe we shall get back to Zennor next month.

I am not anxious to come back just now. One seems to be, in some queer way, vitally active here. And then, people, one or two, seem to give a strange new response. The Andes become real and near. Dr. Eder will come—something right in him. And he knows all that—Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia. He has relatives who have big estates in Colombia. We can get as far as these estates—rest there—then move on to find our own place. The Eder plantations are in the Cauca Valley, Colombia— towards the old Spanish town of Popayan, which is inhabited now only by Indians. I am convinced the war will end this winter. Italy, France and Russia will make it be so. In the spring we will sail off.

I hope this appeals to you as much as it does to me. I have been expecting to hear from you. You are so queer and evanescent, one feels one loses you a bit.

London is better-—since there are no air-raids, they are getting over their insanity. It seems to be going to pieces. It seems to be going all to pieces—everybody on the verge of disappearance from any stable reality whatsoever. But I don t do any work—none at all—only read and see people, i et in some queer way I feel we are getting along—by 'we T mean Frieda and you and me and William Henry. I should like you to meet one or two people. Do write and say how you are feeling—if you really feel like the Andes. It has become so concrete and real, the Andes plan, it seems to occupy my heart. I shall be bitterly disappointed if it doesn't mean much to you.

I wonder when you will come up. I feel we shall be here for a week or two more. The world feels as if anything might happen at any moment. And somehow I don’t want to be in Cornwall for the present.

Chatto said November 14 was fixed for publication cf poems.

Excuse this incoherent letter. I am keeping up a running conversation meanwhile.

Why don’t you write?

Love from both.

D. H. Lawrence.

To Cecil Gray.

44, Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.i. Wednesday.

You are only half right about the disciples and the alabaster box. If Jesus had paid more attention to Magdalene, and less to his disciples, it would have been better. It was not the ointmentpouring which was so devastating, but the discipleship of the twelve.

As for me and my "women," I know what they are and aren't, and though there is a certain messiness, there is a further reality. Take away the subservience and feet-washing, and the pure understanding between the Magdalene and Jesus went deeper than the understanding between the disciples and Jesus, or Jesus and the Bethany women. But Jesus himself was frightened of the knowledge which subsisted between the Magdalene and him, a knowledge deeper than the knowledge of Christianity and "good," deeper than love, anyhow.

And both you and Frieda need to go one world deeper in knowledge. As for spikenard, if I chance to luxuriate in it, it is by the way: not so very Philippically filthy either. Not that it matters.

I don t mind a bit being told where I am wrong—not by you or anybody I respect. Only you don’t seem to be going for me in anything where I am really wrong: a bit Pharisaic, both you and Frieda: external.

It seems to me there is a whole world of knowledge to forsake, a new, deeper, lower one to entamer. And your hatred of me, like Frieda's hatred of me, is your cleavage td a world of knowledge and being which you ought to forsake, which, by organic law, you must depart from or die. And my “women” represent, in an impure and unproud, subservient, cringing, bad fashion, 1 admit—but represent none the less the threshold of a new world, or underworld, of knowledge and being. And the Hebridean songs, which represent you and Frieda in this, are songs of the damned: that is, songs of those who inhabit an underworld which is forever an underworld, never to be made open and whole. And you would like us all to inhabit a suggestive underworld which is never revealed or opened, only intimated, only felt between the initiated.—I won’t have it. The old world must burst, the underworld must be open and whole, new world. You want an emotional sensuous underworld, like Frieda and the Hebrideans: my “women” want an ecstatic subtly-mtellectual underworld, like the Greeks— Orphicism—like Magdalene at her feet-washing—and there you are.

D. H. Lawrence.

44, Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.i.

To Joseph Maunsell Hone.                18 Nov., 1917.

Dear Hone,—

Campbell suggests my writing to you about my novel. There is a serious scheme for publishing it here privately by subscription, under the auspices of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. Campbell, however, and Koteliansky say that probably Maunsell would do it in Dublin, which would be better. The English publishers daren’t do it, although they would like to, because they fear it would meet the same fate as the Rainbow—which, I suppose you remember, was suppressed for its immorality.

Do please tell me at once if you think Maunsell would be likely to publish such a book of unlucky antecedents. If he would seriously consider it, I will send the MS. But otherwise, I would rather keep it and get on with the scheme of private publication by subscription over here. The novel is more or less a sequel to The Rainbow, and I think 111 call it Noah’s Ark.

Let me know as soon as you can.

Do you remember me from the Sei wood Terrace daysf I remember you, a sad and silent visitor. Hope things go well with you now.

D. H. Lawrence.

136, Earl’s Court Square, S.W.

To Montague Shearman.        Tuesday (December, 1917).

Dear Shearman,—

It doesn’t look as if we were going to finish our talk very quickly, after all. The people who own this flat want to come in directly—and as we have nowhere else to go, we think of going to the country—Hermitage, near Newbury—on Friday. And Wednesday evening and Thursday we are full up. Perhaps we shall have to snatch an odd evening later on. But I will let you know if we can manage to stay in town over this Friday— that was to be our evening.

I am very mad because to-day a detective has been round enquiring about me—from the Criminal Investigation Dept., if you please—asking for all information. Now this is impossible. I should like to get at the bottom of this. Perhaps you might help me this time—because I am infuriated at being followed and persecuted. The man said there had been a letter from Cornwall, and that was what he was come about. Now this is nothing to do with War Office—so do help me if you can to get at the bottom of it.

Yours,

D. H Lawrence.

13b, Earl's Court Square, S. IF.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.                Tuesday (1917).

It is a pity you wouldn’t come this evening—and you didn’t

424

write and say why, after all.

We are leaving here on Friday—going, I think, to Dollie Radford’s cottage in the country near Newbury.

But it seems we are never going to have any peace. T )-day there has been a man from the Criminal Investigation Department inquiring about us—from Gray. It is quite evident that somebody from Cornwall—-somebody we don’t know, probably —is writing letters to these various departments—and we are followed everywhere by the persecution. It is just like the Cornish to do such a thing. But it is very maddening. The detective pretended to Gray that I was a foreigner—but what has the Criminal Investigation Department to do with that Altogether it is too sickening.

Ask your man at Scotland Yard if he can tell you how I can put a stop to it—if there is any way of putting a stop to it. I hate bothering you—but really, this is getting a bit too thick. I shall soon have every department in the country on my heels for no reason whatever. Surely I can find out from the Criminal Dept, what the persecution is about?

Just write a letter to your man at Scotland Yard, will you? At least this last vileness against me I vught to be able to quash.

Address me at:

44, Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.i.

will you, unless you hear from me. Chat address will always find me.

I hate worrying you—but perhaps you will forgive me.

Frieda sends her love.

D. H. Lawrence.

c/o Mrs. Clarke, Grosvenor Rd., Ripley, near Derby.

To Mark Gertler.                  Saturday, 29 Dec., ’17*

My dear Gertler,—

I got your letter to-day here, we are staying in the Midlands with my sister a few days. I think we shall be in London r t Thursday—stay the night perhaps with Kot, then go to e Hermitage. I find I'm better and happier in the country. I don’t feel the cold very much—don’t mind it. We might see you on Thursday evening-—Kot will know. Carrington talked of coming to see us in Hermitage.

We must have some talks. For the last nine months nothing has interested me but thinking about "deep subjects, as you call them. But I find myself becoming more unsociable. As soon as I have promised to meet people I want to take to my heels in the opposite direction. It is only at rare sympathetic moments that I feel like talking.

I think the old way of life has come to an end, and none of us will be able to go on with it. We must either get out into a new life, altogether new—a life based neither on work nor love—or else we shall die. This is the end of us, in one self, and unless we can start right now, it is the end of us altogether. So it behoves us to lay fresh hold—no work or running away will help us. It is a hard job too—very- hard. But we have no choice.—The war will end before summer, and then, unless we have got some foothold on some new world of our own we are dished.—Yes, we will try to meet and talk. But my heart shuts up against people—practically everybody—nowadays. One has been so much insulted and let down.

• I’m afraid I can’t believe any more in Murry.

If it turns warmer, you might come and stay at Hermitage.

D. H. Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage,

Hr. Newbury, Berks.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            12th January, 1918.

Where are you now, and what are you doing? We are back here from the Midlands—where I just got the wrong kind of chill.

There is no news—I was dreaming of you two nights in succession, so must write. I dreamed you were a sort of prima ballerina—which is the translation of a cinema star, I suppose. How is that, the cinema?—You were very pleased with yourself, in my dream. Hope it isn’t a case of contraries. But also you were troubled by what, in dream language, was called your 426

“fat little boy.” Hope that is a contrary.

This cottage is not an ideal—cold, a little comfortless. I suppose we must be casting our eye around, for a flight again, before long.

Frieda sends her love.

D. H. Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr, Newbury, Berks, Sunday,

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.

Got your letter to-day—glad you like the poems—I myself think they are highly amusing and interesting—they might have quite a run—so why should I sell them out for £94 Why, America gives me £9 for three or xour poems Beaumont must make a different sort of agreement with me. I shall tell him. Would you have preferred to be inscribed with your title, not only your bare name? It is as you .ike.

I don’t know if I’ve had anything from the Literary Fund. The only thing I’ve ever had from any fund or body was £50, which I had two months after the war began and which came from the Authors’ Society, I believe, though whether they drew it out of the Literary Fund I don’t know. I believe Alfred Sutro got it for me. I am very willing to have £100 from any fund whatsoever—as for obligation, I shall certainly go on writing and I am not married to the censor. I have begun a novel now-done 150 pages, which is as blameless as Cranford. It shall not have one garment disarranged, but shall be buttoned up like a Member of Parliament. Still, I wouldn’t vouch that it is like Sons and Lovers: it is funny. It amuses me terribly.

Tell my well-wisher to get me the £100, which will be a great boon to me, as being a mere necessity, and not to mind about any obligation, which is surely infra dig. on the pai t of gentlemen. Why has the world become so ambidextrous that the left hand must always be implicated in what the right hand

does! Pah—people—pfui!

D, H Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury,

Berks.

To Cecil Gray.                                Thursday.

Dear Gray,—

I heard from Katie that Mrs. Fisher had come to Zennor, and that you were expected. How queer it will be for you to be back in Eosigran! It is queer even to think of it. On some sunny, gentle spring day when celandines are out, I should like to come back to Zennor, to Tregerthen. But it would only be an Ave atque vale, I think. I have left Cornwall, as an abiding place, for ever, I am sure. But I shall come back to see it.

Having been seedy this week, I have sat in bed, my usual style, and looked out of the window in front. There is a field— the thatched roof of a cottage—then trees and other roofs. As the evening falls, and it is snowy, there is a clear yellow light, an evening star, and a moon. The trees get dark. Those without leaves seem to thrill their twigs above—the firs and pines slant heavy with snow—and I think of looking out of the Tregerthen window at the sea. And I no longer want the sea, the space, the abstraction. There is something living and rather splendid about trees. They stand up so proud, and are alive.

I’m not writing anything—only sit learning songs, which I find a great amusement. I can read well enough to learn a song nicely in about a quarter of an hour—so I have already got off twenty or thirty. I don’t know why it amuses me so much more than reading or writing. So perhaps your opera will amuse you.

I had a letter from ---. But I didn't like it.

"These human relationships which now seem so important,” he says, “will, I know, soon become trivial, almost nothing. For soon I go to my Father. That is to say, in a short time I shall inevitably be sent to France, to that great holocaust of atonement for the wrongs of mankind”—which, to me, is a bit thick.

I am afraid I'm not very friendly lately. But one’s self seems to contract more and more away from everything, and especially 428 from people. It is a kind of wintering. The only thing to do is to let it be winter.

Remember me to Tregerthen, if yoti go there. Hope Bosigran will be good to you. Frieda sends greetings.

D. H. Lawrence.

Hermitage, Newbury.

To Cecil Gray.                                 Thursday.

Do look among my books in the cottage for my two MS. poetry books: one a German Tagebuch, brown, not little, hard covers—one a little fat common cheap account-book— like a milkman's book, but fat—with black shiny wash-leather down the back, and mottled boards. Beaumont worries me for a pretty-pretty book of verse—I might rake one out and make a little money.

We got your postcard—feel waves of Cornish malaise coming from the west. Don't you stay very long down there, if it worries you. It is a bit mystic—disintegrating, perhaps.

I think we shall go to the Midlands about April 3rd.

Let us have real news of you.

D II. L.

Take any books of your own—or anything you want.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Monday, 28th January, 1918.

I’m glad Herbert Asquith is physically safe so far, at least.

I believe he's charmed to come out whole.

We are here—perfectly uneventful. I am writing a set of essays for America, in the hopes that they may get published by the ninnies and blockheads of the public world.

I am looking on the world with an anxious eye and Providence. It is time this latter showed a little silver over the edge of this present very dark cloud of penury. If the war were only over, Frieda could get something from her people. Meanwhile I fix an anxious eye on Providence. But there, it s no use bothering.

I wonder if the Opera will really come again in February— and if we shall go. What will happen to us all next, I wonder?

It has been very warm—but almost more like autumn than spring: like early October, so still and languid—-‘ There’s nae luck aboot the hoose”—-only one doesn’t mind any more. Certain snowdrops are out in the garden and in the woods. And the birds sing very loudly at evening. One almost feels like a bird oneself, whistling out of the invisible,

A rivederci,

D. H. Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks,

To Lady Cynthia Asquith,   Tuesday, 12th February, 1918.

We may be coming up to London in about a fortnight’s time. Dollie Radford wants this cottage. So we are once more on the streets. As you infer, it doesn’t bother me much, the poverty— perhaps it ought to bother me more, and I should provide better. For the time has come when I shall have to turn beggar, or something. I find we have got exactly Six pounds Nineteen shillings m the world: and not a penny due. I have written to Pinker, my agent—he might advance me something— probably will, one day-—£20, I expect—but at present I can get no answer from him. An American woman said she was going to send—but that is. months ago. It is more a bore than anything else. But what to do, in ten days’ time, when Miss Radford will come here, I don’t quite know. You don’t think the War Office would now consider letting us return to Cornwall? I could bleed my sister once more to get down there. How stupid everything is. Gaudeamus igitur.

1 don’t know why I should bother you with this.

I dreamed last night that we had just arrived in Italy. So much for it, I am a great dreamer. It is time I found my Pharaoh—but the connection would have to be distant.

Probably we shall be seeing you in a fortnight's time—if you stay in London. What about those February Operas?

D. H. Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Near Newbury, Berks.

To Mark Gertler.                          21 Feb., 1918.

Dear Gertlfr,—

Thanks very much for your letter and the help from Shearman. I must say Shearman is very decent—much better than -— . But  -----went and sent me also £10 when you

told him, though really I don't want to take his money, when he has no prospects. But perhaps things will clear up.

As for my feelings—they won't interest you very much. About the world, I feel that nothing but a quite bloody, merciless, almost anarchistic revolution will be any good for this country; a fearful chaos of smashing up. And I think it will come sooner or later: and I wish it would come soon. And yet, somehow, I don’t want to be in it. 1 know it should come, and must come; yet I would like to go away, not to see it. But if I tried to go I suppose some whale or other would snap me up and carry me back like a gudgeon in its mouth, and cast me back on Britannia's miserable shores.

Then, as to work, I don’t think that to work is to live. Work is all right in proportion: but one wants to have a certain richness and satisfaction in oneself, which is more than anything produced. One wants to be. I think we need, not to paint or write, but to have a liberation from ourselves, to become quite careless and free. And we need to go away, as soon as we can, right to a new scene, and at least for a bit, live a new hfe—you and Campbell and Kot and Shearman and 1 neda and me—and whomsoever else you want—and in some queer way, by forgetting everything, to start afresh. We live now in such a state of tension against everything—you are also wound up in a dreadful state of resistant tension. Now I think, that between a few of us, this tension ought to go, we ought to be able to relax altogether, to be perfectly confiaen with each other, and free. As it is, if you meet me, at once there i a sort of tension between us, you holding out hard against me, I holding hard against you. 1 believe it wants only just a little change, and this tension of resistance could disappear, and we could be at peace with one another, at peace and free, and spontaneous, no need to hold our own each against the other in a tension of self-conscious self-insistence. I believe this could be so between Shearman and Kot and Campbell and you and Frieda and me—a kind of fulfilment, as if we were all complete beings, and therefore all free by being together, as in a new world.

So I always want to have a plan of going away after the war— anywhere that is not England—perhaps Italy—going away and living in one place, all of us, at least for a while. But it is no good, if work, or love either, seems to you to be the be-all and the end-all. Work and love are subsidiary. What one wants is a free, spontaneous, harmonious relation amongst ourselves, each of us being in some way a complete fulfilled being— whatever you think of this plan, we might try it for a holiday,

I am doing some philosophic essays, also, very spasmodically, another daft novel. It goes slowly—very slowly and fitfully. But I don’t care.

Don’t wear yourself down to the last thread, without hope of relaxing—that’s all.

I may come to London for a little while, in a fortnight, perhaps.

D. H. Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Montague Shearman.

2i Feb., 1918.

My dear Shearman,—

Thank you very much for the £10. Now' we need not worry any more; for the moment, at least. I have never been so tight put—for money and everything else-—damnable. But I don’t mind taking from you* no, I am glad to have the money from your hand. But I hate depriving you of it. One man's gain is another man’s loss. But I can’t help it. It is damnable people like Pinker, my agent, who dangle a prospective fish on the end of a line, with grinning patronage, and just jerk it away every letter, that make me see red. I've got quite a lot of murder in my soul: heaven knows how I shall ever get it out.

I may come to London for a bit, soon. That man Beaumont, in Charing Cross Rd., might do my novel. If I am in town, then we must have a quiet talk—perhaps without Marcus, who is a terrible young egoist, and breaks all the eggs into his batter.

1 always imagine what a lovely time we will all have together for a bit, when the war is over: perhaps in Italy, it is so cheap. Let us make a plan of this, shall we? You and Gertler and Kot and Frieda and me and Campbell and anybody else you like, go to Italy and have a house by the sea, and row and bathe and talk and be as happy as birds for a bit. It is owing to us. I shall have some money when the war ends.

D. H Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Newbury.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.        Friday, 8th March, 1918.

Long ago I put these little poems together, and asked you if you would like me to inscribe them to you. Then i held them back, because they are ironical and a bit wicked. But Beaumont asked me particularly for a book exactly this length—so I sent it you, to see if you would care to have it inscribed to you after all. Tell me what you think of the poems. If they make a bad impression on you, I will hold them track, I think. But in their own way—to me they are bitterly ironical—they are quite good, I think. If you like them, send them on to Beaumont— 75, Charing Cross Road—or take them to him, and I will write to him. But write me quickly about, as I promised Beaumon to let him have the MS. at once.

D. H. L.

But Beaumont wants only to give me £8 or £9 for them—I think it is too little—not worth having them published for so little.

Chapel Farm Cottage,

Hermitage, Newbury, Berks. To Mark Gertler.                      Saturday.

I’m glad that dirty business is settled, at least. J knew you would be all right. There is some mystic quality inside a few of us, which puts them off at once, these military mongrel-sniffers. One should say it was a guardian angel-—but it is rather an influence within the very being.

Money is a conundrum and will have to remain so. It is a sphinx riddle I shan’t attempt to solve. The sphinx can go hungry for ever, if it is going to wait for me to solve its problem. Je m'en fiche of everything.

I don’t feel like you about work. I go on working because it is the one activity allowed to me, not because I care. I feel like a wild cat in a cage—I long to get out into some sort of free, lawless life—at any rate, a life where one can move about and take no notice of anything. I feel horribly mewed up. I don’t want to act in concert with any body of people. I want to go by myself—or with Frieda—something in the manner of a gipsy, and be houseless and placeless and homeless and landless, just move apart. I hate and abhor being stuck on to any form of society.

D. H. Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Cecil Gray.                          12 March, 1918.

How are you finding Bosigran?—if you have got back there. I hope it is nice, now the weather is soft and sunny. I wrote to Capt. Short to say I wouldn’t keep on the cottages at Tregerthen—also I wrote to William Henry, to tell him the same news. But I have not yet quite decided what to do about the furniture. My sister gets furious if I say we may not go near her. Yet she does not find us a house. On the other hand, there are two charming cottages here—one down in a little village, fast asleep for ever: a cottage just under the hill, under the hazel-woods, with its little garden backing to the old churchyard, where the sunny, grey, square-towered church dozes on without rousing: the other on the hill touching the wood. Frieda of course is dying for one of these. And when we were down in Hampstead Norris yesterday, I quite shook with panic, lest we should actually go and take the cottage under the hill by the church. A real panic comes over me, when I feel 1 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, and never have a neighbour. This is a real after-the-war ideal. There is a gipsy camp near here—and how I envy them—down a sandy lane under some pine trees.

I find here one is soothed with trees. I never knew how soothing trees are—many trees, and patches of open sunlight, and tree-presences—it is almost like having another being. At the moment the thought of the sea makes me verily shudder.

I ebb along with the American essays, which are in their last and final form. In them, I have got it all off my chest. I shall never write another page of philosophy—or whatever it is—when these are done. hank God or that. ci it is absolutely necessary to get it out, fix it, and have a definite foothold, to be sure. Of course I think the world ought to hold up its hands in marvelling thankfulness for such profound and relieving exposition. And of course I see the world doing it.                                           ,

It is very spring-like# In spite of the fact thnt I thitik the war will last for ever, I believe this particular war with Germany won’t last so very much longer, on our part. Not that it matters; all the world—people won’t alter: and they won t die in sufficient quantities to matter. I have come to think that it is enough to lapse along pleasantly with the days. It is very nice. That is why the cottage in the village fills me with such panic. I believe I could go into a soft sort of Hardy-sleep, hearing the church chime from hour to hour, watching the horses at the farm drink at the pond, writing pages that seemed beautifully important, and having visits from people who seemed all wrong, as coming from the inferior outer worlds

But no doubt some new sword of Damocles is just spinning to drop on one’s head.

I don't know why you and I don’t get on very well when we are together. But it seems we don’t. It seems we are best apart. You seem to go winding on in some sort of process that just winds me in the other direction. You might just tell me when you think your process is ended, and we'll look at each other again. Meanwhile you dance on in some sort of sensuous dervish dance that winds my brain up like a ticking bomb. God save us, what a business it is even to be acquainted with another creature. But I suppose one day we might hit it off. Be quick and wind yourself to the end. The one thing I don’t seem to be able to stand is the presence of anybody else— barring Frieda, sometimes. Perhaps I shall get over it.

I shall ask you if I want any help at Tregerthen, in the removing. Meanwhile adieu. Frieda greets you.

D. H. Lawrence.

But I do loathe possessing things, and having another house. If only one could be an animal, with a thick warm hide, and never a stitch or rag besides. Nobody ought to own houses or furniture—any more than they own the stones of the highroad.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage,

Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To W. E. I lopkin.                       12 March, 1918.

Dear Willie,—

Ada told me you would write to Mr. Marsden about the house at Bole Hill. I wonder if you did so. It is a very pleasant little house, and I should love to have it—if only it might be empty. I should really like to come back now, and be not far away from all the old people. How nice it would be if we had the house at Bole Hill-—I used to stay there when Miss Marsden was alive—and you could come and see us, you and Mrs. Hopkin. But any little place, nice and separate, would do. I can t be jammed in among people any more. Frieda and I have lived so much alone, and in isolated places, that we suffer badly at being cooped up with other folk. Ada takes it very much 436 amiss that we don’t go and stay with her, to look round. But it is real purgatory to be in her little house, with everybody and everything whirling round. If she had really cared, surely she would have got someone to look out for a place for us. It is very nice here—Hardy country—like “Woodlanders”—all woods and hazel-copses, and tiny little villages that will sleep for ever. There are two such charming cottages that we could have here—one in the village, under the church, with fields slanting down, and a hazel copse almost touching the little garden wall: the other on top of a hill against a big wood. I am very tempted to take one of these places, they are so still and secure and peaceful for ever, as only the west country can be. But still I will wait, and see if something won’t turn up in Derbyshire or Hotts—wait till after Easter, perhaps.

We are very quiet here, with no particular news—nothing at least that one can write. I should be glad to see you an Sallie again, to have a talk. I should be really glad to live within reach. There are lots of things to say, nowadays.

Let me hear how you are. Remember us very warmly to Sallie. Do you see me returning to the Midlands, or do you not?                               „ „

D H. Lawrence.

Hermitage, nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Catherine Carswell. Easter Monday, 1918 [April ist].

My dear Catherine,—

I meant to have written you before. It is aosuru of Due worth to expect you to cut down the novel so ridiculously. But of course they shy at the cost of production. You know it would really cost £350 t0 bring it out now—as against £130 before the war. For this reason the publishers like little slight

We have no news—same poverty and incertitude. Bai ara Low has been here since Thursday—leaves to-day. I sht go to the Midlands next week; but whether to stay for some time, or only for a few days, I don't know. I feel horribly sick and surfeited of things.

Barbara said you were tired of the long wait. I am sure you are. I know exactly how it feels. I feel as if I had a child of black fury curled up inside my bowels. I’m sure I can feel exactly what it is to be pregnant, because of the weary bowel burden of a kind of contained murder which I can’t bring forth. We will both pray to be safely delivered.

Write to us and say how you are. My regards to Don. Frieda sends her love, with mine.

D. H. L.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage,

Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Cecil Gray.                            18 April, 1918.

My dear Grigio,—

I was up in the Midlands for a week last week—my sister negotiating for a little place for us—a bungalow on the brow of the steep valley at Via Gellia—near Cromford. We should have it furnished, for a year—my sister would pay for it—if the people agree to let. It is a nice place—with pleasant little grounds, and two rough fields. We should hear in a day or two about it. And then, if the people let it us, we shall go in a week or ten days’ time. It is quite open and free—you would have to come and see us there.

Frieda went to London and saw her children and it all went off quite pleasantly and simply, apparently. I feel unsettled here now, as if we must move soon. And we must move—the Radfords want to come here in May.

I have made a little book of poems that Beaumont asked me for—all smallish, lyrical pieces. I have been doing poetry for a few weeks now—I want to make a second little book. But it is exhausting to keep it up. The first book has 18 poems, it more or less refers to the war, and is called Bay. I don't know if Beaumont will really do it. The second would be different-—! would call it Chorus of Women, or something like that.

That’s all the news—except that yesterday there was deep snow, though the trees are in bloom. Plum trees and cherry 438 trees full of blossom look so queer in a snow landscape, their lovely foamy fulness goes a sort of pinky drab, and the snow looks fiendish in its cold incandescence. I hated it violently.

I hope we shan’t be bothered by the military. I believe as a matter of fact they have too bad an opinion of us—let us hope so. I don’t believe, moreover, that they will have the energy to comb out all those things that stick at all tight. There is a great exhaustedness coming,

Richard* sent me a line to say he was off to France. I believe he was glad to go. It is harder to bear the pressure of the vacuum over here than the stress of congestion over there.

I am reading Gibbon. I am quite happy with those old Roman emperors—they were so out-and-out, they just did as they liked, and vogue la galere, till they were strangled. I can do with them. I also read two ponderous tomes on Africa, by a German called Frobenius. He says there was a great West African—Zomban (?)—civilisation, which preceded Egypt and Carthage, and gave rise to the Atlantis myth. But he is a tiresome writer.

Let us hear from you.

D. H. L.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr, Newbury, Berks,

To Mark Gertler.                              Sunday,

Dear Gertler,—

We are going to Derbyshire this week—Thursday, I think— address: Mountain Cottage, Middleton, Wirksworth, Derby.

It is quite a pleasant little place—about two miles only from Wirksworth station—so when we get settled you must come, with or without the immovable elephant.

What is happening to you? I am getting through day after day—and becoming very weary. One seems to go through all the Ypres and Mount Kemmels and God knows what. In some blind and hypnotic fashion I do a few bits of poetry beyond that, I am incapable of everything—except I dig and set potatoes, and go walks with Frieda who is actually for

* Aldington, bearing to demonstrate her impertinent happiness, and daring to know her monstrous angry unhappiness. I don’t pretend to be "happy"—and for the moment don’t want to be. I am much too angry. My soul, or whatever it is, feels charged and surcharged with the blackest and most monstrous "temper," a sort of hellish electricity—and I hope soon it will either dissipate or break into some sort of thunder and lightning, for I am no more a man, but a walking phenomenon of suspended fury. I found a great satisfaction in reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—the emperors are all so indiscriminately bad. But unfortunately I only had the first vol. in the Oxford Classics—and there are seven such volumes. I must borrow the work from somewhere.

Also I have been reading another book on Occultism. Do you know anybody who cares for this—magic, astrology, anything of that sort? It is very interesting, and important—though antipathetic to me. Certainly magic is a reality—not by any means the nonsense Bertie Russell says it is.—By the way, is he in gaol?

We went for a walk this evening through the woods—and I found a dead owl, a lovely big warm-brown soft creature, lying in the grass at my feet, in the path, its throat eaten by weasels. It sticks in my mind curiously—as if something important had died this week-end—though what it can be I don't know.

I hope soon we shall get out of the state we are in, and have a jolly reunion somewhere, breathing free. Let us know how you are. And stick pins or something into Kot—I believe he’s getting into a state of gangrened inertia.

Frieda greets you,                    _ TT T

b    J                    D, H, Lawrence.

Hermitage,

To Catherine Carswell.              Sunday (April, 1918).

My dear Catherine,—

We are going away, I think on Thursday, to the new place.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton,

by Wirksworth, Derby.

I think it will be nice. It is in the darkish Midlands, on the rim of a steep deep valley, looking over darkish, folded hills —-exactly the navel of England, and feels exactly that. It is a smallish bungalow—with rather pretty little grounds— croquet lawn—and a field attached. Later, you must come with Don and the baby and stay there. Wouldn’t it be queer, the baby?

I am sure you must be tired to death. We feel the same, fairly hit right in the middle. One keeps some sort of a superficial wits, but I think it would be wrong to assume that one is quite sane just now. But I think it is a crisis—the storm is at its height—it will break soon. But the afterwards even one can’t contemplate. There seems no afterwards, in known terms. What will be will be, however, and I don’t care. We’ll come through by a gap in the hedge, if not by the gate. Your business is just to look after yourself—which is not so very easy even that.

This evening we went through the woods—and I found a dead owl at my feet, a lovely soft warm-brown thing. It seems a sort of symbol of something—but I don’t know of what. Also we found some very lovely big cowslips, whose scent is really a communication direct from the source of creation—like the breath of God breathed into Adam. It breathes into the Adam in me. Let us know how you are—our love to you both.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.          Tuesday, yth May, 1918.

We are here, feeling very lost and queer and exiled. The place is beautiful, but one feels like Ovid in I hrace, or something like that. I wish we could have gone back to Cornwall.

I wrote to you last week—but I suppose you were busy, weddings and so on—to ask you about — an< novel—and to tell you I received the MS. safely from Cadogan Square. I ell me what he had to say what fatui r, no doubt unpleasant.

44i                         Q

I should think Beaumont will be signing the agreement with Pinker for the poems—does it matter to you whether you see the MS. or not?

I wish there was some good news on the face of the earth.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby. To Catherine Carswell                 ist June, 1918.

My dear Catherine,—

We had Don’s card this morning—so glad the boy has come, and you are safe. We were thinking so hard of you on Wednesday—I nearly wrote, but thought silence is best. Blessings on the infant—and may it be blest. Also I hope you’ll soon be well. Will you really come here for a bit, in a little while-— all three of you? Yes, do. Frieda is making a gaudy little cover, for the child’s cot. What shall you call him? In the English Review to-day there’ll be a little War Baby poem, which I wrote for you—at least, with you in. my mind—and the infant, of course. I wonder if you’ll like it. Beaumont is doing a little book of my poems—called Bay, with this piece in it—at least, I have signed the agreement. If you like the poem, when I get the proofs, I shall initial it to the infant. (To Little T. C.) Shall I? But what will the initial be? Give him a Celtic name— like Geraint—or Gawain—which is Gavin in English.

I believe this month of June will see a turn in the tide of affairs, in the world, for the better. Let us hope we can all start off fresh.

It seems ages since we saw you—a real interval. It will be really on another shore, mystically, that we shall meet—-we shall be new beings.

Fell Don to be sure to let us know how you are—another postcard on Monday.

With love from Frieda and me,

Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby. To Lady Cynthia Asquith.          3rd June, 1918.

I dreamed of you so hard a few days ago, so must write, though there is no news to send. We are here with my sister, and two children—a very delightful boy of three, and a girl of seven. I am surprised how children are like barometers to their parents' feelings. There is some sort of queer, magnetic, psychic connection—something a bit fatal, I believe. I feel I am all the time rescuing my nephew and my niece from their respective mothers, my two sisters; who have jaguars of wrath in their souls, however they purr to their offspring. The phenomenon of motherhood, in these days, is a strange and rather frightening phenomenon.

I dreamed, also, such a funny dream. When I had been to some big, crowded fair somewhere—-where things were to sell, on booths and on the floor—as I was coming back down an open road, I heard such a strange crying overhead, in front, and looking up, I saw, not very high in the air above me, but higher than I could throw, two pale spotted dogs, crouching in the air, and mauling a bird that was crying loudly. I ran fast forwards and clapped my hands and the dogs started back. The bird came falling to earth. It was a young peacock, blue all over like a peacock’s neck, very lovely. It still kept crying. But it was not much hurt. A woman came running out of a cottage not far off, and took the bird, saying it would be a i right. So I went my way.

That dream is in some oblique way or other connected with your "Aura”—but I can’t interpret it.

Would you really like to come here—it’s a nice place really— you’d like it. But I feel as if I were on a sort of ledge half-way down a precipice, and did not know how to get up or down; and it is a queer kind of place to ask visitors to see you, such 3 ledge*

1 signed the agreement for the poems. V hen proc s come I’ll send them to you and you can tell me at once 11 th re is anything you’d like different. But tl ey re all right.

Poor Whibley, he is so good trying to get that money for me, 443

Will it come off? I hope so—but if not, never bother.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.           Monday, June 3rd, 1918.

My dear Sai lie,—

Ada came yesterday, and brought your things in a box. That was very good of you to send us these things—but too good, and extravagant. The salad dressing and cheese are a godsend in this heat—good salad dressing—and such nice little cakes.

Emily is still here, with her child, and with Jackie. She is staying another week, I believe. The children may stay another fortnight—and Ada would send Lily, her girl, in that case. When can you come again and see us? Come both as soon as you can, we can always put you up. And one has such a sense of uncertainty and fleetingness, it is certainly best to seize the very first opportunity.

Perhaps I shall come over to Eastwood one day before long— we might both come.

The very dry days have rushed the flowers through—but all our rhododendrons and peonies are out, and rock-roses very lovely on the fields.

I think with such regret of Whitsuntide, that those two days were so short. I feel a bit of the real mystic hatred of "business" —destructive hatred—when its power nips one as close as that. One's soul is a pure sheathed weapon nowadays. Ah, if one could unsheathe it, and stick it through a few million gullets— there might be no need of "business" then.

I am writing a last essay on Whitman—then I have done my book of American essays—salt on America’s tail, if only America would stay long enough to have her tail sprinkled. The Whitman essay reminds me of Willie.

Is there going to be a crisis this month?

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,           ' '

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby. To Catherine Carswell.            Monday, 3rd June, 1918.

My dear Catherine,—

I hope you won't think Frieda’s cover too wild and scaring for the poor infant.

I got you such a lot of flowers—but am so afraid they will die this hot weather. I love the yellow rock-roses: but they are so frail, I wonder if you’ll ever see them as they really are. I'm afraid they’ll be all withered. They are pure flowers of light— and they cover the dry, limey hills. The little blue and red bunch is milkworts: the wild columbines are wood-avens, I believe: the yellow pansies are mountain violets—they grow sprinkled close all over the tiny meadow just under the house, and so glittery standing on the close turf—like a Fra Angelico meadow. There is a bit of wood-ruff with a few forget-me-nots. We call it new-mown-hay. It smells like that if you crush it.

I do hope you are well as possible, also the infant.

Love.

Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.                17th June, 1918.

Are you so busy as all that, in your hospital? And does it make you happy?

If you come by the Gloucester-Birmingham-Edinburgh Express, on the Midland Railway, you pass through Derby: and Derby is only 12 miles from Wirksworth. So you see how near we are. Therefore you can come for a few days on your way. When do you think of going to Scotland?

I have had various forms of application, and letters of inquiry, from the Sec. of the Literary Fund—which I have filled in or answered, as the case may be, with considerable impatience. I long to send the impertinent and impudent questions to hell and further.

We have no news. I am very cross and disagreeable, even with myself, these days: don't like it at all.

We will meet you at the station, either Wirksworth or Oomford or Matlock—they are all near—when you come. Perhaps you will come to the one that is easiest for you.

D. H. L.

The Sec. of the Literary Fund will lay my application before his Committee on July 10th—curse him.

Mountain Cottage,

Middlelon-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Mrs. S. A. Hopkin.              26 June, 1918.

Mv dear Sall ie.—

You will be feeling quite lost with all your folk gone off to Scar boro'. Arabella also has left us to-day—in tears and grief. I hope she will come again soon—we became very fond of her.

We had such a good time at the week-end. Did your people enjoy it as much as we did? I can’t help wishing that Willie and Enid and Kitty had stayed here for this week, and gone on to the sea with you. It was so jolly when we were all together. And it is the human contact which means so much to one, really. Do you know, I quite suffered when they had gone away on Monday—and usually I am so glad to be alone.

I do wish you could have had a few really peaceful days here, as you promised you would. Don’t you think you might manage it when you come back from Scarborough? I find, for myself, nowadays, that change of scene is not enough—neither sea nor hills nor anything else; only the human warmth, when one can get it, makes the heart rich. One no longer takes one’s riches through the eye, I find—but in some subtler communication direct from being to being. And in a world where most of the human influence is now destructive and horribly humiliating, to be with people whose presence is an enrichment in the veins, is everything.

To-morrow a friend is calling, on her way down to London from Edinburgh—but staying only one night. I don’t know what we shall do at the week-end. I wish we had a nice soft motor-car that could fetch you over here. But we haven’t. And you will be dreadfully tired with the business. And of course Ada or somebody may be coming here. But if Frieda and I ever do happen in on you—will you please not make any bother of us. We are such simple people when we are by ourselves— and we really like that best.

I thought Willie and Enid both looked better on Monday— did you? They are both suffering the inevitable suffering of this crisis. It has to be got through.

Love from both of us.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksivorth, Derby.

To Catherine Carswell.             26th June, 1918.

My dear Catherine,—

Out of a sort of despair of the days, one lets the time slip by. How are you now, and what is your news? Are you better—and up—and going about? And is Johannes a happy boy? And is everything all right, in the immediate circle? I hope so.

We are alone again to-day for the first time for many weeks. The last fortnight Dorothy Yorke—Arabella, the American girl at Mecklenburgh Square—has been with us. She was very nice. She has gone back to-day. I feel, at this time, it is better to have friends near one—and children—otherwise one thinks too much and is too much exposed. We had my little nephew of three, and my niece of seven, for a few weeks—and I was very glad of their presence.

I have no particular news. Perhaps I shall get a bit of money from the Royal Literary Fund, next month. If I do we might come to London for a little time, to see you all again. I should like to see you again, and to see the newcomer for the first time. One’s heart gets very dry and weary with the day after day of this life—all suspense and tension and nullity and humiliation. There will come a break soon. I am very glad you have got the baby; you will be happy.

The flowers are nearly all gone—just wild roses, and meadow flowers. We have been for several long walks in this country. It is father fine. I hope you will come and see it before long. I feel, somehow, as if we should be seeing you again soon.

Frieda sends her love—greet Don from me.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby.

To Mark Gertler.                  26 June, 1918.

Dear Gertler,—

I suppose you are at Garsington now. Is it nice? Perhaps we should like to come to London for a while, next month. To see you all again. We will come if we get the money from that beastly fund.

How is Ottoline now? Do you think she would like to see us again? Do you think we might be happy if we saw her again —if we went to Garsington? I feel somehow, that perhaps we might. But tell me how it is—what you think.

We are alone again to-day for the first time for weeks—it is queer. I am very restless and at the end of everything. I don't work—don't try to—only just endure the days. There will cither have to come a break outside or inside—in the world or in oneself.

Tell me about Garsington and Ottoline. Remember us both to her. If you feel like it, you can come up here from Garsington. You come from Oxford to Birmingham, Birmingham to Derby, and then you are soon here. If it attracts you at all, do come.

Frieda sends her love.

D. H. Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby. To Cecil Gray.                        3 'July, 1918.

Our news is no news, as usual. Arabella is back in Mecklen-burgh. She was very nice here, we had some splendid walks in the country, and really enjoyed them. We get rather crowded with people. For the moment we are alone save for my little nephew, aged 3. Frieda as well, and about as happy and unhappy as you might expect.

I sent the American essays to a friend in London, who was going to put them with a "safe" friend to have them typed. The friend collapsed, and they are hung up. I don’t want them to go to the ordinary typist. So I don’t know quite what will eventuate. I’ll let you have a typed copy if ever I get one. I am still waiting proofs from Beaumont. He sent me New Paths—the anthology in which I figure, cum Richard cum Flint, etc. It is a very mediocre production, in all but paper and print. Of Maunsel and his philosophy nothing actually came. It may, after the war. The Oxford Press said I might do a school book, of European History. If only I could get books of reference, I would. I feel in a historical mood, being very near the end of Gibbon. The chief feeling is, that men were always alike, and always will be, and one must view the species with contempt first and foremost, and find a few individuals, if possible—-which seems, at this juncture, not to be possible—and ultimately, if the impossible were possible, to rule the species. It is proper ruling they need, and always have needed. But it is impossible, because they can only be ruled as they are willing to be ruled: and that is swinishly or hypocritically.

There is a great upset here about the munitions explosion near Nottingham—86 people answered the roll-call, out of 2000. The paper says 60 killed. So much for the paper.

There is raging influenza-—but not just here.

God knows how we shall all end up. Frieda sends her love to both.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby.

To Cecil Gray.                      22 July, 1918.

Dear G rigid,—

How are you now? I wish I could see you. Do you remember this time last year we talked of the Andes?—and you used to say you were not ready. There won't be any Andes. And I don’t suppose any of us were ready. But do you feel now as if the old world—or self-—were about cleared out of you?—a sort of—moi, apres le Deluge? When you feel like leaving Bosigran for a bit, you will come and stay here, will you, and we’ll see where we are.

I don't get any proofs or any MS. typed to send you. I want you to read the American essays when they are typed.

Is the Fish with you?—and for how long?

I have a man and wife wanting a house in Cornwall. Will you be letting Bosigran for the winter?

I don't think I shall ever come back to Cornwall now.

D. H. L.

We may go to London for a week or so in August.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Mrs. Nancy Henry.              26 July, 1918.

Dear Mrs. Henry,—

I send you the hrst three chapters. They are perhaps rather long, j’he others, some of them, will be much shorter. I wanted to make a serious reader that would convey the true historic impression to children who are beginning to grasp realities. We should introduce the deep, philosophic note into education: deep, philosophic reverence.

I ve no doubt your people won't like this style. I shan’t mind if they don’t want me to go on. But please tell me your own full opinion.

I wrote to Collard that my cottage is let.

I wonder what Vere has decided,

I haven’t any news yet about poems. It is always so slow. Have you heard of your husband?

Greetings from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby.

To Catherine Cars well.            3rd August, 1918.

My dear Catherine.—

I had been thinking so often of you these last days—so glad to hear your news peaceful and nice. Everything is very quiet here, for the moment—nothing to tell, at all.

But Frieda has promised to go to London on the 12th to see her children—and I may g" with her. I think we shall stay with Koteliansky. Thanks very much for offering the house. If it is not let, do you think Frieda might have it for a meeting place for her children once or twice—spend a day or two there—not sleep, just some hours per day?

I do wish we could come with you to the Forest of Dean for two or three days. I don’t know that Wye country. Do you think it might be done—from London to Ross and from Ross to Derby? I should like it so much. If it were possible, it would be about the 19th or 20th. And I do want you to come here for a bit. Let us think.

Love from both to you three.

D. H. L.

To J. B. Pinker.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby. 3rd August, 1918.

My dear Pinker,—

I am sending you the first of the Studies in C lassie Amen an Literature. There are six or seven more—these I will send in about a week’s time. Do read this essay on the Spiri o Place.” You will find one MS. complete—the other lacking the last eight pages. Would you let somebody type out these eight pages, and then you will have two copies.

I think we may really sell these essays, both in America and in England—and really make something with them. I have a feeling that they will make all the difference. Will you send Harrison this first essay at once? He might do it quickly. Let me know what you think.

I may come to London in a week or ten days’ time. If you are in London I will come and see you, shall I?

Really, I place my hopes of the world on these essays, so you will help me with them as much as possible. I know it has been a thankless job so far. But it won’t always be so.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Mountain, Cottage,

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby. To Donald Carswell.           Sunday, i Sept., 1918.

Dear Don,—

We got home quite nicely last evening—but a terrible crush in the train from Gloucester to Derby. It seems very quiet here—strangely quiet, though the rain blusters and the rain beats on this little house.

We were very happy with you, after the malaise of the first tumbling into that forest of Lydbrook—which for some reason is curiously upsetting. You were both awfully nice to us—it leaves a warm feeling. I hope you will be able to come here. I loved the walk to Simmond’s Yat—particularly through that parky place: also the Monmouth day—particularly the church by the Monrow bridge—the bright sunny town, and the tears in one’s inside because there isn't real peace—and then, very nice, the meal in the green riding: also our evenings.—They are good memories—worth a lot really. And it pleases me that we carried the child about. One has the future in one’s arms, so to speak: and one is the present.

If you would care to, I wish you would read the essays I left with Catherine. You will say I repeat myself—that I don’t know the terms of real philosophy—and that my terms are empty—the empty self—so don’t write these things to me, I know them beforehand, and they make me cross. None the less, read the essays and see if you find anything in them.

I imagine you in that vicarage room this evening—no more ⁴‘What are the wild waves saying?" for a bit.—But I hope you’ll come here in a fortnight.

Love, from us both, to Catherine and you, and little J. P.

D. H. Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.       12th September, 1918.

Are you in Scotland still⁰ We were away for three weeks— in London, and in your Gloucestershire—on the Wye. We wished you were at your Stanway.

Are you being a secretary really? Do you think there is anything that I could do—that I would do. I can type, rather badly—not shorthand. I feel the war is going to end And I would dearly love to be active, in the afterwards. And surely I am a valuable person. I only wish I were in Lloyd George’s position. I would love to have some of my own way. I’ve been shut up long enough. See if there is anything possible. Of course I know you can’t do more than just tell me what you think. I want to burst this sort of cocoon that I’m in—it is likely to prove a shroud, if I don’t. It is time I had an issue. And one can do nothing from here. As for the people - Labour itself—it is hopeless, as hopeless as Lloyd George or Balfour just the green half of the same poisonous apple. It’s awfully hard to find an issue.

Yesterday I got papers to be medically examined at Jerby on the 21 st. I sent them back—and said, how could they expect me to do anything, if I am still a black-marked person. I feel like hitting them all across the mouth. However, it comes to it, I suppose I shall submit to another medical examination. But beyond that, I submit to nothing. However, they would reject me again—it is not of any great importance.

The importance is the coming winter. I look at the months and know there must be a change. I can’t merely go on hanging on to nothing but the skin of my own teeth. I think I'd rather get myself arrested. But I m not going to be a martyr either— enough of those pitiful objects in the world.

We’ve kept some sort of a flag flying so far. Now I shall either have to begin to plant mine, or get off the face of the earth. But I go my own way, either way. Curse the sodden, abject men of to-day.

Hope things are well with you.

A toujours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby. To Mrs. Nancy Henry.             24 Sept., 1918.

Dear Mrs. Henry;—

I have got the story, and have read it through. You have put all the stuff into it right enough. But I'm afraid you haven’t created that subtle atmosphere of unbearable, nauseating or exalting terror, which you wanted. I doubt if it could be done, or conveyed from the mouth of a speaker, as you have done it. I think it would have to be in the third person: so that you can get the pure horrific abstraction of it, as it were. It is a story which, in its inner significance, makes me a little sick with the same kind of fear. I’ll see if I can gather myself together and write out a version: then I’ll send it to you and let you compare, and you can have another go if you feel like it. I am afraid, to tell you the truth, of tackling the story, because of the shock it will mean to do it. But probably I’ll try.

I got your other letter. Yes, I thought it good, and as far as I know, on the right track, nearly all. But one needs to be able to talk about those things. Philosophic realisation means to me painful, bitter, and rather sickening experience, so I rather shrink from it—except of course from the purely intellectual attitude, when it is more like a game of chess, extraneous and not rooted in the bowels. As you feel about your story, so I feel about the reality of the moon, for example. I can hardly talk about it, it goes so deep into one’s bowels and makes one a little sick.

I haven't heard from Vere—but it doesn't matter, as at the moment I am going over my American essays, which are coming back from the typist. The history can wait a bit.

Also on Thursday I've got to go up for medical re examination. It infuriates me to be pawed about by the swine. If I felt it were any good at all, I would send them to hell. But there is no spirit of resistance or freedom in the country, and I have only a contempt for martyrs. If only men roused up and stiffened their backbones, and were men. I wouldn’t mind how much I risked myself. But offer myself as a martyr of self-sacrifice I couldn’t do, it is too shoddy, too late.

Probably in a while we shall go to London again: it may be very dreary here. We must see what happens. In London we may really meet and talk. And I will let you know again soon about the story, if I can do it. It is the "over the edge” reality which makes me feel ill.

My wife sends her regards.

I). H. Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. 26th September, 1918.

Your poems: that miserable little Beaumont is waiting for some opportunity or other: they will come, certainly: ana I expect before Christmas. I’ll make him be definite. Meanwhile Seeker is bringing a little 2 6 volume almost immediately —called New Poems. I'll give it you when it comes. Your book Bay will be thin—about 20 pieces in it—but hand-printed and beautiful, 7,6 a copy. That is very nice.

Now as for me. These accursed people have put me in Grade 3. It kills me with speechless fury to be pawed by them. They shall not touch me again—such filth.

You know I have had all the training and spent three -years as a schoolmaster. I really know something about education. J want a job under the Ministry of Education: not where I shall be kicked about like an old can: I've had enough of that. You must help me to something where I shall not be ashamed. Don't you know that man Fisher? He sounds decent. Really try and get me introduced and started fairly. I need a start— and I'm not going to be an under-servant to anybody: no, I'm not. If these military canaille call me up for any of their filthy jobs—I am graded for sedentary work—I shall just remove myself, and be a deserter.

I've had enough of the social passion. Labour and military can alike do their dirty businesses to the top of their bent. I'm not going to squat in a cottage feeling their fine feelings for them, and flying for them a flag that only makes a fool of me. I'm out on a new track—let humanity go its own way—I go mine. But I won’t be pawed and bullied by them—no.

I don’t care much what I do—so long as it is nothing degrading. I would like to do education.

I shall come to London next week. We can all spend a winter in town, and do some jolly things. I want to have a good time with the individuals I care for—very few, they are.

Now even if you take some trouble for me—do it. You won’t regret it.

Frieda sends her love.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Katherine Mansfield. Friday [? late November, 1918].

My dear Katherine,—

This morning finds the world rather Macbeth-looking— brownish little strokes of larch trees above, the bracken brown and curly, disappearing below the house into shadowy gloom. But the fields to the well are grey-green and luminous almost like stone. On the lawn the moles have turned up a circle of strange black mounds, very magical. But I regret it. To-456 morrow I am going to Ripley and Eastwood, for the week-end.

My sister is at Ripley.                     ,

The wind is getting up. This place is a wind centre, I warn you.

If you come soon, you must sit tight on your courage, and not be daunted, then you’ll be all right. I should like Jack to come too.

The railway people, when one travels, seem rather independent and Bolshy.

Quick—sharp—get better.

D. H. L.

Please thank Ida Baker for the trouble she took for me.

One feels here like a man looking out from a fortress.

Bless my soul, the sun is shining—and Mrs. Doxey has just brought me a patriarchal cake of bread cooked in a frying-pan.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Harriet Monroe.

6 Dec,, 1918.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

I have received your letter and the November issue of Poetry. If you see Iris Tree, remember me to her.

I asked Amy to let you have a copy of my New Poems (so called by Seeker, the publisher)—in order that you might reprint any you liked. Has she not done so " I sent her proofs and asked Martin Seeker to send her two copies, but have heard nothing from her. I think you might find some little things you would like in it. I inscribed the book to Amy.

I send you a number of elegiac poems—some which I like best of any I have done. I feel a bit tender about them—don’t print them unless you feel them. They may seem nothing in Chicago.

England is gloomy. I think I shall come to America.

Greetings to you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Beaumont is doing these poems in a little volume de luxe— these I enclose you—I suppose they 1 be out in February.

Middleton.

To Katherine Mansfield. Thursday [? early Dec., igir".

My dear Katherine,—

I received your letter this morning. I want to write a few little things I have on my mind.

First, I send you the Jung book, borrowed from Kot in the midst of his reading it. Ask Jack not to keep it long, will you, as I feel I ought to send it back. Beware of it—this mother-incest idea can become an obsession. But it seems to me there is this much truth in it: that at certain periods the man has a desire and a tendency to return unto the woman, make her his goal and end, find his justification in her. In this way he casts himself as it were into her womb, and she, the Magna Mater, receives him with gratification. This is a kind of incest. It seems to me it is what Jack does to you, and what repels and fascinates you. I have done it, and now struggle all my might to get out. In a way, Frieda is the devouring mother. It is awfully hard, once the sex relation has gone this way, to recover. If we don't recover, we die. But Frieda says I am antediluvian in my positive attitude. I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man, and he must take this precedence. I do think men must go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for permission or approval from their women. Consequently the women must follow as it were unquestioningly. I can't help it, I believe this. Frieda doesn’t. Hence our fight.

Secondly, I do believe in friendship. I believe tremendously in friendship between man and man, a pledging of men to each other inviolably. But I have not ever met or formed such friendship. Also I believe the same way in friendship between men and women, and between women and women, sworn, pledged, eternal, as eternal as the marriage bond, and as deep. But I have not met or formed such friendship.

Excuse this sudden burst into dogma. Please give the letter to Jack. I say it to him particularly.

The weather continues dark, warm, muggy and nasty. I find the Midlands full of the fear of death—truly. They are all queer and unnerved. This flu. is very bad. There has only 458 been one flicker of sunshine on the valley. It is very grim always. Last evening at dusk I sat by the rapid brook which runs by the highroad in the valley bed. The spell of hastening, secret water goes over one’s mind. When I got to the top—a very hard climb—I felt as if I had climbed out of a womb.

The week-end I was at Ripley. Going, on Sat. night, the train runs just above the surface of Butterley reservoir, and the iron-works on the bank were flaming, a massive roar of flame and burnt smoke in the black sky, flaming and waving again on the black water round the tram. On Butterley platform—when I got out—everything was lit up red—there was a man with dark brows, odd, not a human being. I could write a story about him. He made me think of Ashurbanipal. It seems to me, if one is to do fiction now, one must cross the threshold of the human people. I've not done rhe Fox yet— but I've done The Blind Man—the end queer and ironical. I realise how many people are just rotten at the quick.

I've written three little essays, '‘Education of the People.” I told you Freeman, on The Times, asked me to do something for his Educational Supplement. Will you ask Jack please to send me, by return if possible, Freeman's initials, and The Times address, that will find him, so that I can send him the essays and see if he will print them. It will be nice if I can earn a little weekly money.

I begin to despair altogether about human relationships feel one may just as well turn into a sort of lone wolf, and have done with it. Really, I need a little reassuring of some sort.

D. H. L.

Do you know the poem—Heine, I think:

Aus alten Marchen. winkt es

Hervor mit weisser Hand,

Da singt es and da klingt es

Von einem Zauberland, Wo grossen Blutnen schmachten In goldnen Abendlicht Und traurig sich betrachten Mit brdutlichem Gesicht.

I only object to “traurig”—It fascinates me—if I remember it right.

Don’t you think you and Jack might come here for Christmas? Would you be well enough? I’ve been getting wood in the well-fields-—it’s rather beautiful, these dark, gleamy afternoons.

Middleton-by- Wirksworth.

To Katherine Mansfield.         Tuesday [December, 1918].

My dear Katherine,—

No, it’s damn well no good bothering about people. I had an S.O.S. from---—------to-day, and she wants her Jung.

Let her have it by the week-end, will you—post it to her direct—and print the address, dear Katherine, so that the Jewish Magpie shall not settle chattering on my roof. You will understand I can’t be chattered at.

I went to Ripley—found my poor sister rather sick and wretched. We must get her husband home, to do the work. I am writing to   —, though he’s no good—I mean, he will never lift a finger. Does Jack know anybody at the Ministry of Labour, who might tell us the best way to go about to get my brother-in-law out of the Marines? There is a special clause for one-man businesses, you know.

I also saw the Eastwood friends: one just on the point of dying. Katherine—on ne meurt pas: I almost want to let it be reflexive—on ne se meurt pas: Point! Be damned and be blasted everything, and let the----world come to its end.

But one does not die. Jamais.—I bolted home to Matlock in the train. The Derwent (the river at Matlock) rushes very fast. This for some reason gives me extreme pleasure. I believe it would you.

We must find some way, next year, of getting out of the world: and if Jack doesn't want to go, let him stay and write for The Nation. If we are self-sufficient, a few of us, what do we want with the world?

When do you think you will be strong enough to come up here? Don’t be long.

I M sending you The Times essays, in despair of ever getting the address. You will be cursing me, probably, for bothering you. But do read them and post them on at once if you can, for the sake of the publication,

I wrote the fox story—-rather odd and amusing. What is your story? Perhaps I'll send both the "Box" and the "Education" essays to Frieda, and she’ll bring them on to you. Let me see your story. Somehow I hate doing that European History for the Oxford Press. Curse it—why shouldn’t one do as one likes.

We’ll stand free and swear allegiance, anyhow, shall we?

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby♦ To Katherine Mansfield.           20 Dec., 1918.

My dear Katherine,—

So it is practically Christmas, and the shortest day. I wish you were better, so that we could kick off with a bit of a spree.

It snowed yesterday, and the dark valley was white. But it melted. To-day there is a powder of snow, and a slow sunshine. In the wild storm yesterday evening arrived my sister and her husband. They went again this morning at 7.0, and I watched them in the dark, slightly snowy greyness. We are going to Ripley on Christmas Day, after all—leaving here about 10.0. Think of us en voyage. They are having a turkey.

We went to Matlock yesterday, and got you this bit of the Derbyshire underworld. It is Fluor Spar—mined just near, and cut in Matlock. It is very difficult to cut. * here is a purple sort—the common name for this stone is Blue John—but it was too expensive to buy you a purple bowl. And I like this yellow one. It is a golden underworld, with rivers and clearings —do you see it? For some reason, it is like Derbyshire.

I have a sort of feeling that you are not very well. But to-morrow is the shortest day, and then the tide turns. I do so want to do nice gay happy things, to start at once. I hate work, and I don’t want to work—write, that is. I wish we’d had our Rananim—or got it. I should so love gaily and easily to mess about. I can't bear any feeling of any sort of importance in things any more. One wants to be nice and easy and insouciant.

The barber cut my hair and shaved me bald and made me look like a convict, clipping my beard: also gave me an ensuing cold.—Courage, mon ami, le diable vit encore.

I’m supposed to be doing that little European History, and earning my living, but I hate it like poison, and have struck. Why work?

I hope you won’t get this days and days before Christmas.

Oh, did you send Pinker the stories? I’ve had no acknowledgment from him. And------the Jung?

Greet Jack from me.

Many Christmas greetings—let’s be born ourselves. Jesus is a back number—time our star riz.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby. To Lady Cynthia Asquith.       22nd December, 1918.

I don’t know where, you are spending Christmas—but hope you will have a high and festive time, and that Michael will suitably enjoy himself. We are going across to my sister’s on Christmas Day, if ever I get so far—having got a bad cold, under which I crawl dismally for the time being. The weather is very dark and nasty, and Christmas is an institution that really should be abolished. I don’t want to hear of it, it wearies me—I suppose you will be in town, tripping round and refusing turkey. But one needs the spring to come, when the skies will lift a bit and one can wander forth. Sorry the play irritated you. Keep it as long as you feel any use in keeping it. I wrote four nice little essays for The Times, nicely curried. The Times refrains from e/en acknowledging their receipt. I chuckle a little to myself, when my cold leaves me enough energy. Ah, what a happy day it will be, when I need not write any more—except a letter occasionally. I am tired of writing. We heard from F.’s mother in Baden-Baden. I 462

believe her godfather—Frieda's—has left her a legacy—he should have done: he has just died. I suppose the Allies will swallow it: just the thing that would happen to us. But then my brother-in-law is now Minister of Finance for Bavaria, so he might hook out the fish for us. Oh, my dear, ----

if I had even £ioo a year I would never write another stroke for the public. Pray that I may get this provision.

I don’t know that my wishes for a festive Christmas are worth much, but here they are. F. sends also.

D. H. L.

c/o Mrs. Clarke, Grosvenor Rd., Ripley, Nr. Derby.

To Katherine Mansfield.            Friday, 27 Dec., 1918.

My dear Katherine,—

We got your parcel on Christmas morning. We had started off, and were on the brow of the hill, when the postman loomed round the corner, over the snow. It was all white and snowy and sunny, with a wind like an axe. I floated out my hanky for a flag over the snow, and Frieda dropped the tangerines in her anxiety to get the wheatsheaf unwrapped, and it was terribly cold and windy just on that edge. Frieda’s wheatsheaf looked so strange, such a queer indescribable darkish colour, somehow elephant, over the snow which is so candid in comparison. It was queer and like Africa, and a bit like a meteor. She has worn it on her yellow slip, with the red silk shirt and red coat, at our two parties here—but I can’t get used to it now, it seems like a little torch or brand of elejAant-grey, tropical, lush twilight. Funny how things disturb one. But my hanky fluttered very nice and lively. I wish you could have been there on the hill summit—the valley all white and hairy with trees below us, and grey with rocks—and just round us on our side the* grey stone fences drawn in a network over the snow, all very clear in the sun. We ate the sweets, and slithered downhill, very steep and tottering. The children had the tangerines and the fan.

We read your letter in the wind, dropping down to Cromford.

It made me feel weary, that we couldn't be all there, with rucksacks-—I'd got mine on—setting off for somewhere good, over the snow. It is disappointing. And unless one decorates one’s house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are all wall-eyed. I do so want to get out—out of England— really, out of Europe. And I will get out. We must do it.

There was hardly any snow in the valley-—all green, with the yew-berries still sprinkling the causeway. At Ambergate my sister had sent a motor-car for us—so we were at Ripley in time for turkey and Christmas pudding. My God, what masses of food here, turkey, large tongues, long wall of roast loin of pork, pork-pies, sausages, mince-pies, dark cakes covered with almonds, cheese-cakes, lemon-tarts, jellies, endless masses of food, with whisky, gin, port wine, burgundy, muscatel. It seems incredible. We played charades—the old people of 67 playing away harder than the young ones—and lit the Christmas tree, and drank healths, and sang, and roared —Lord above. If only one hadn't all the while a sense that next week would be the same dreariness as before. What a good party we might have had, had we felt really free of the world.

We had a second turn-to yesterday—and at half past eleven went roaring off in the dark wind to Dr. Feroze's—he is a Parsee—and drank two more bottles of muscatel, and danced in his big empty room till we were staggered, and quite dazed. To-night we are going back to Middleton—and I feel infuriated to think of the months ahead, when one waits paralysed for some sort of release. I feel caged, somehow—ana I cannot find out how to earn enough to keep us—and it maddens me.

Still, it might be very much worse. One might be tied tight to a job, or to a sickness. I do wish you were better. But you wand stronger. I long to make plans—new plans. But not Europe: oh, God!

I pledge you "the days to come?* »

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,           - ■

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby. To Catherine Carswell. Thursday, slyd January, 1919.

My dear Catherine,—

I wondered whether you were back: your letter came yesterday: the MS. to-day. The MS. doesn't matter at all. I have duplicates. No news here. Freeman sent me back my little essays. "I was deeply interested, but feel rayself rather out of my depth. I have consulted another opinion, and we feel that this is rather matter for a book than a supplement.” So be it. They are just cowards, and there one must leave 'em, all the lot of ’em. Je rrien fiche of the whole show. Barbara saw the essays—showed them to Stanley Unwin, who wants me to write as much again, and he will publish in a little book, and give me £15 down. So it is not waste. Meanwhile I am finishing my European History, for the Oxford Press: have only one more chapter. I shall get £50 down for that. We have sold up in Cornwall and shall live on the proceeds in the interim. I feel I am shaking myself free to get out of this country, for good and ever.

Frieda has had a bad cold—is rather better. She sends love. I’m sorry you had a bad time in Scotland—I always feel bad when I turn north. I think one should set one’s back to it, and to all the past, and strike out into a new line—if possible. I hope the pots won't disappoint you: they'll match the other things in your room.

By now I am utterly bored with social and political England —Europe too-—I don't believe in them in the least—none of ’em—don’t even want to any more. I’ve really fallen out of the reckoning, so I ought to be able to walk oil soon. It s all I want.

Glad J. P. is well again, in his native air. My God, teeth already! He’ll be smoking a cigarette in our faces before we know where we are.

Love from both.

D. H. L.

Mountain Cottage,

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Mrs. Nancy Henry.             23 Jan., 1919.

Dear Mrs. Henry,—

I'm sorry you have been so seedy. The very air has seemed a bit poisonous lately. I do hope you’re feeling better. Are you fit to go on with your work?

We are very quiet here—my wife been in bed with a cold— rather better now—I going on with the history. I have only one more chapter. Every chapter, I suffer before I can begin, because I do loathe the broken pots of historical facts. But once I can get hold of the thread of the developing significance, then I am happy, and get ahead. I shall need to revise rather carefully. But you'll see, when you get these 4 last chapters, the book does expand nicely and naturally. I am rather pleased with it. There is a clue of developing meaning running through it: that makes it real to me. I hope if you think of any other book I could do, you will propose me for it—if I am in England, that is.

I am tired of the state of things here, and want to clear out. As soon as one can travel I expect we shall go to Switzerland, then probably to Bavaria. Later I want to go on to America— south if possible—I am finished here in Europe.

Let me know how you are. Don't bother about the history till you feel free. Come and see us if you are in Derbyshire. We both send regards. Saluti a suo marito.

D. H. L.

Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derby.

To Mrs. Nancy Henry.          Monday, z Feb., 1919.

Dear Mrs. Henry,—

I am so sorry you have been laid-up, do hope you’ll get sound again soon. The weather is vicious, I think. I’ve been in bed a day or two also. Here the snow lies: it is rather lovely, but very cold.

I don’t know whether I ought to step in with advice. But I do think it would be unwise to give up your job, unless you have some other provision. Never has it been so difficult to make money by any form of art: never has the artist had such a bad chance: and never has the world been so coldly indifferent, never has it clutched its shillings more tightly. Everybody feels we are just marking time before a debacle, and nobody is going to waste one serious moment on art at all, or on charity. Your husband doesn’t know what the world is like now. It is not as it was five years ago. If you are going to put yourself in a position to starve, starve you actually will: have no illusion about it. The day has gone by when fairy godmothers stepped in. The tension of the struggle lor the possession of money grows so strong, that you must actually be on one side or the other, either earning or producing money, or you are less than nothing. And he, if he is going to produce music, let him produce it out of the courage of his own soul. That other business is a form of prostitution.

One should not prostitute oneself, even to art. he art can’t be vital, anyway—must be spurious. If you are wise you will keep your job: there are days coming when art will not save us: neither you nor me nor anybody.

I am glad you like the history. I send you here the last four chapters. I thought of calling it Movements in European History. Do you think that is all right? I suppose it will be anonymous—Ely won’t want my name and I ion t want it on the book, either. If a pseudonym is useful to the publisl s, we can apply one. Let me know about maps, will you 1 hate bothering you when you are knocked up.

Kindest regards from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Harriet Monroe.

i Feb,, 1919.

My dear Miss Monroe,—

I have received your letter and the proof of the poems, I am glad you liked them- I have written to ask Martin Seeker for a copy of the New Poems for you. I will post it to you myself. If ever you want his address, he is Martin Seeker, Publisher, 17, Buckingham St., Adelphi, London, W.C.

I have also asked Harrison to send you copies of the English Review with the essays on Classic American Literature which are appearing there. I wish you could tell me if you like them. J have worked at them for more than four years—hard work. They may not look it. I want them to appear America—-there are twelve essays in all.

You will send me Poetry. I always like to see it. The American tone usually sets the English back up: and I suppose the English tone sets the American back up, in literature, I mean. But I do believe America has a real will-to-live, and that attracts me most. It is not indecision which prevents my coming to America, but damnable circumstances. I do hope I shall see you and your Chicago this summer.

Excuse the crooked writing—I am laid-up for the moment.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Middleton.

To Katherine Mansfield.             Sunday, 0 Feb., 1919.

My dear Katherine,—

I send you I Promessi Sposi and Peru. I thought you would like the other two. I am very fond of George Sand—have read only Francois le Champi and Maitres Sonneurs and Villemer. I liked Maitres Sonneurs immensely. Have you any George Sand? And Mary Mann is quite good, I think. It is marvellous weather—brilliant sunshine on the snow, clear as summer, slightly golden sun, distance lit up. But it is immensely cold— everything frozen solid—milk, mustard, everything. Yesterday I went out for a real walk—I've had a cold and been in bed. I climbed with my niece to the bare top of the hills. Wonderful it is to see the footmarks on the snow-beautiful ropes of 468 rabbit prints, trailing away over the brows; heavy hare marks; a fox, so sharp and dainty, going over the wall: birds with two feet that hop; very splendid straight advance of a pheasant; wood-pigeons that are clumsy and move in flocks; splendid little leaping marks of weasels, coming along like a necklace chain of berries; odd little filigree of the field-mice; the trail of a mole—it is astonishing what a world of wild creatures one feels round one, on the hills in the snow. From the height it is very beautiful. The upland is naked, white like silver, and moving far into the distance, strange and muscular, with gleams like skin. Only the wind surprises one, invisibly cold; the sun lies bright on a field, like the movement of a sleeper. It is strange how insignificant in all this life seems. Two men, tiny as dots, move from a farm on a snow slope, carrying hay to the beasts. Every moment they seem to melt like insignificant spots of dust; the sheer, living, muscular white of the uplands absorbs everything. Only there is a tiny clump of trees bare on the hill-top-—small beeches—writhing like iron in the blue sky,—I wish one could cease to be a human being, and be a demon. Allzu Menschlich.

My sister Emily is here, with her little girl—whose birthday it is to-day. Emily is cooking treacle roily and cakes, Frieda is making Peggy a pale grey dress, I am advising and interfering. Pamela is lamenting because the eggs in the pantry have all frozen and burst. I have spent half an hour hacking ice out of the water tub—now I am going out. Peggy, with her marvellous red-gold hair in dangling curl-rags, is darting about sorting the coloured wools and cottons -scene de amille* It is beautiful to cross the field to the well for drinking water-such pure sun, and Slaley, the tiny village away across, sunny as Italy in its snow. I expect Willie Hopkin will come to-day.

Well—life itself is life—even the magnificent frost-foliage on the window. While we live, let us live.

D. H. L.

Emily’s nickname was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.

To Catherine Carswell.

Ripley.

Friday (Feb., 1919).

My dear Catherine,—

I couldn’t thank you before for the wine—it really started my inside into life. Thank goodness I am getting better—what a nasty disease—I have never felt so down in the mud in all my life—a putrid disease. I shall get out of bed for D hour on Sunday.

We want to find a cottage at the seaside. The Midlands will be the death of me. Do you know a place? We must meet in some nice place—life is too unbearably foul—we must meet and have a little happy time.

Thank D. for his letter. I'll write again.

D. H. L.

My uncle has now sent 2 champagne.

Ripley, Derbyshire.

To J. M. Murry.                             Thursday.

My dear Jack,—

I am very pleased about the Athenaeum—I do hope you will enjoy it and that it will be successful. Thank you for asking me to contribute—that pleases me, too. I should like to do it. But you must tell me exactly what you would like me to do, and I will try to be pleasant and a bit old-fashioned. I don’t mind if I am anonymous—or a nom de plume. When is it to begin? Tell me particulars as soon as you can—so that I can think about it while I am still not well, and make little ideas. That amuses me.

I've been awfully seedy and wretched with this ’flu—but am getting better. To-day I am going to make an effort to creep downstairs. In a week’s time I want to be taken back to Middleton. It is very shut-in here. When it is possible, we want to go to Munich. When do you think it will be possible? If other things fail I might go to Palestine with Eder. I must leave England—no use for me here any more. I am quite

at the end of everything here.

We may come to Hermitage in April-—perhaps you would come and see us there. I want to get on my legs and feel I am moving again-—moving into a new phase. A new phase starts now, for us all.

Write and tell me as soon as you can what you would like me to do, exactly, and when it is to begin.

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

c'o Mrs. Clarke, Grosvenor Road, Ripley, Derbyshire.

To Catherine Carswell.                Tuesday, Feb., 1919.

My dear Catherine,—

I got your little letter—did you receive mine, which must have crossed? I am getting well—but am so weak. I go downstairs to tea. On Sunday I am to be taken back to Mountain Cottage—only 20 minutes in a motor car. We have given up the seaside idea—shall stay at Middleton till I can travel, then go to Hermitage. I trust to see you there. I am glad you are all well, but imagine you feel a bit dreary. My God, how can it be otherwise? I long to get out of England. Eder is coming to Middleton to see us and talk about Palestine. Did you know that Murry is editor of the Athenaeum, which is to be revived I am to contribute. Good thing if I could earn a little weekly money.

I am glad J. P. is so flourishing. He is a satisfaction, at any rate. But life for us grown-ups is a dead rat, at present. I feel one must get out, by hook or crook—out into a new atmosphere. I suppose you have no plans,

When I can walk and feel a bit stronger, I shall be glad. I suppose in April we can go to Hermitage. Do come and see us there. Did you know the Campbells have gone to Ireland?—he has taken a job there. Soon there will be nobody left. Cynthia Asquith is going to have another baby—and feels doomed. Oh, Lord! Has Don got any briefs?

Don’t you wish we could make real wild departure plans

47i

Damn it- we've been buried long enough; like toads under a muck heap. Time we crawled out.

Did I ever properly thank you for the muscatel? It was so good, and so reviving. I liked it better than the champagne.

Come, I feel we've been down long enough. Time we got up. Let us have a meeting soon, and defy the devil. Don’t you feel you've been Hampstead-stifled, or England-stifled, long enough? Let us breathe.

Send me your news. Love from us both to you three. Write soon.

D. H. L.

Middleton.

To Katherine Mansfield.                        Thursday.

My dear Katherine,—

Deledda is very interesting—except the middle bit; in Rome: so is Martyrdom of Man. The latter I really knew—one has read so many fat books on Egypt and Africa and Gaul and what not. The Martyrdom would stand a good bit of correcting, really.

It is snow, snow, snow here—white, white, white. Yesterday was the endless silence of softly falling snow. I thought the world had come to an end—that I was like a last inhabitant of the moon, when the moon shed all its snow and went into a white dream for ever, slowly breathing its last in a soft, dim snowfall, silent beyond silence. Nobody comes, the snow is white on the shrubs, the tuft of larches above the road have each a white line up the trunk. Lord, Lord! Only the rabbit feet and bird feet are all over the paths and across the yard. I am still very limp with my cold—but F. is better. We got two newspapers to-day—occasionally the postman brings us one. Pretty place, London seems. It seems as if the dear old regime of happy industrial England is slowly and greasily melting like a dead thaw. I suppose it will take it ages and ages really to thaw itself out, yellow and slushy, without fire or swiftness, lapsing by the passive resistance of strikes. I hate it—but let it go.

Your last letter was cryptic. Do tell me what you mean by “The bowl and the tureen have come—but you will know by now." That is how you began—utterly mysterious. Also what is Murry's fame? I half expected to see in the newspaper Lloyd George, like another John in the desert, asserting of your John, “Behold him, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose—John Middleton Murry!"—but I didn’t see it. Please explain these deep things.

My sister Ada has got her husband home, out of the navy. I suppose my elder sister, whose husband is in hospital at the moment, will soon get him discharged, hen I really think we shall come to Hermitage—next month—to see the wild snowdrops—there are wild snowdrops—and the white violets, and the wood anemones—and the trees coming in bud, the plum blossom in the garden. I feel Hermitage would be a pleasant meeting ground—not so grim as here.

I think these two are the books that would amuse you most, for the moment. I think the others didn’t attract you. I got these from my sister.—There is a pheasant comes and lies by the wall under the gooseberry bushes, for shelter. He is so cold, he hardly notices us. We plan to catch him, by throwing over him the netted hammock. But for the sake of his green head and his long, pointed feathers, I cannot. We thought we would catch him and send him to you to eat. But when I lool at him, so clear as he is and formal on the snow, I am bound to respect a thing which attains to so much perfection of grace and bearing.

Love from both.

D. H. L.

I shall send your books back when Frieda has read them.

Mountain. Cottage,

Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derby.

To Harriet Monroe*                     ² March, 1919-

Deaf. Miss Monroe,—

I have received your letter and the cheque or seven gurnet which is very generous. I hope you got the New Poems I also the English Reviews. I am not sure if I should have acknowledged Poetry in the poems. Don’t be angry with me if have forgotten. I really will remember when I get Beaumont’s proofs: heaven knows when he will send them, for I believe he is in difficulties—money. Excuse the pencil. I have been struggling with the ’flu for a month and am still in bed—am getting better: a very nasty disease. As soon as I am well and Peace will be signed we are due to go to Germany where my dear old Frau Baronin mother-in-law sits in lament in Baden-Baden, my brother-in-law manages to weather the storms in Munich, and remain Minister of Finance to the new Bavarian republic, a cousin bobs up and down in Berlin, and so on. I want to come to America this summer, and I will if the gods are not too spiteful. At present, however, a voyage autour de ma chambre finishes me. You have got a big lake at Chicago, haven’t you? I should like that. I should like to see you all in Chicago very much indeed—after all, poetry is a great freemasonry.

I shall send you a copy of the Beaumont poems when they appear. Anne Estelle Rice has done drawings for them—do you know her? She is American.

The sun shines—the snowdrops are out in the garden, under the bushes. I long to begin life afresh, in a new country.

Mila saluti buoni.

D. H. Lawrence.

Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by- Wirksworth, Derbyshire.

To Mark Gertler.                       20 March, 1919.

Dear Gertler,—•

Here we are, deep in snow again. I am an irritable sort of convalescent. It would make me happy to paint. What I would best like to do is Uccello—those hunting and fighting scenes—I would like to copy them. But send me a book or two books, of reproductions, will you—anybody with “composition” and hard figures and topical interest. Don’t mind being bothered.— I shall send the books back safely.

In a month we come to Hermitage—I am not doctor-free till then. And then you will come and see us. I feel we must have great meetings, because great partings are probably imminent.

If you send an Uccello print, tell me the colours if you can— scarlet, trunk-hose, snow, tree-shafts—you know.

Lord, I am sick of this winter.

D. H. Lawrence

Tell me your news—I have none—nothing.

To Katherine Mansfield.                        Thursday.

Frieda said you were cross with me, that I repulsed you. I’m sure I didn’t. The complication of getting Jack and you and F. and me into a square seems great—especially Jack. But you I am sure of—I was ever since Cornwall, save for Jack—and if you must go his way, and if he will never really come our waywell! But things will resolve themselves.

I dreamed such a vivid little dream of you last night. I dreamed you came to Cromford, and stayed there. You were not coming on here because you weren’t well enough. You were quite clear from the consumption—quite, you told me. But there was still something that made you that you couldn’t come up the hill here.

So you went out with me as I was going. It was night, and very starry. We looked at the stars, and they were different. All the constellations were different, and I, who was looking for Orion, to show you, because he is rising now, was very puzzled by these thick, close, brilliant new constellations. Then suddenly we saw one planet, so beautiful, a large, fearful, strong star, that we were both pierced by it, possessed, for a second. Then I said, "That's Jupiter’’—but I felt that it wasn't Jupiter—at least not the everyday Jupiter.

Ask Jung or Freud about it? Never! It was a star that blazed for a second on one’s soul.

I wish it was spring for us all.

D. H. L.

Chapel Farm Cottage,

Hermitage, Hr. Newbury, Berks.

To Mrs. Nancy Henry.                          Wed.

Deaf Mbs. Henry,—

Many thanks for your letter and the MS. of history—and for your good efforts. I should have written before but am never sure where to write. We were coming to London this week-end —but Austin Harrison, of the English Review, is coming down. We shall come next week. Could we come to your rooms? Could you be in town next week-end? Could we have your rooms next Tuesday? I shall go back to Middleton soon, and do the history there. I can do it better there. We’ll stay in London about a week. Wonderful that there is peace. The first of the American essays is in this month's English Review— the next in next month’s. The rest of the MS. is out. Try and get hold of Mme. Blavatsky’s books—they are big and expensive—the friends I used to borrow them from are out of England now. But get from some library or other Isis Unveiled, and better still the 2-vol. work whose name I forget. Rider, the publisher of the Occult Review—try that-—publishes all these books. I think he is in Paternoster Row. But look in the Occult Review. You see, I never owned the books I had—and they are all big, 10/6 and £1:1:0. And they're not very much good. But try Rider’s: he has a good shop—Verewill tell you the right address.

The tiresome thing is to be so poor and to have to depend on precarious borrowing.

You will have your husband very soon. How strange peace is. Is it peace?

Kindest regards from both.

D. H. Lawrence.

ITALY AGAIN

“WOMEN IN LOVE”

CEYLON, AUSTRALIA,

NEW AND OLD MEXICO

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Eleanor Farjeon.                             Tuesday.

Dear Eleanor,—

I suppose you are back by now from Otford. I'm glad the Weingartner parcel went off. I am asking my sister-in-law about children's names. I am asking the Emergency C ommittee to tell me if one may post letters and parcels now direct to Germany, and if one may send what one likes. Have you any information?—is there any notice in the post office? I ell me if so.

Yesterday we went to look at a place for you: a nice little bungalow, like a little house—about 20 years old cosy, but small—also an old cottage, spoiled by having two big rooms, one up, one down, added to the end—and a good big orchard, garden and paddock effect—all the lot £400—would take less. The worst of it is it is right out of the world Summer tursi Green near Headley, nr. Kingsclere, Hants about 5 i dles from Newbury, 5 from Thatcham: a far-off end -of- the-world place, up a narrow, forsaken trough of a lane: don’t know it you’d like it—don’t think you would.             ,

A new venture in a small way— I he People s 1 leat e Society—Douglas Goldring—will do my play (D. V.) 1 ouc 1 and Go in the autumn. It might be nice. I may be in town soon— shall see you then.

Pop down and see us if you feel like it. Margaret expects you here the 1st week in August.

D. H. L.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Edward Marsh.                     ¹⁰ May,

Dear Eddie,—

Your letter has come this morning, with the- twenty pounds

from Rupert. Queer, to receive money from the dead: as it were out of the dark sky. I have a great belief in the dead—in Rupert dead. He fights with one, I know. That is why I hate the Oliver Lodge spiritualism—hotel bills and collar studs. The passionate dead act within and with us, not like messenger boys and hotel porters. Of the dead who really live, whose presence we know, we hardly care to speak—we know their hush. Isn't it so?

Thank you for thinking of me. Yes, I am happier now the war is fought with the soul, not with filthy guns.

I’ll send an inscribed copy of the New Poems. Shall I send Look! also?

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hermitage,

Nt. Newbury, Berks.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.                  ist July, 1919.

Sorry you feel all wrong: you should never go to the East Coast except with genial other people. Why stay there? Why not go to London at once?

Yes, we’ll see you in town—Deo volente. I am going up immediately—this week-end probably-—to see about our departing, and to apply for passports. It was a great mistake that we did not clear out in 1915, when we had those other passports. Still, there is nothing for it. One must keep one’s flag flying, and sail off for new scenes. Over here it really isn't any good hanging on or trying afresh. I’m sure I can make enough to live on in America, fairly easily. One day you will most likely come over there to see us, in some log hut out west— or out somewhere. Life let us cherish.

What is your husband doing, and what are your prospects? Don’t take them gruesomely—the world is big, once one gets out of one's little hole. The great thing is not to give in—not to lose one’s sense of adventure. Truly one is a dead failure at this life over here—I am—but there are lots of lives. I’ve not lived more than two out of my nine. That’s seven to the good; and life’s the only thing that matters, not love, not money, nor 478

anything else—just the power to Jive and be one’s own self. Love is heavily overweighted. I'm going to .ride another horse. I mean love in general—humanity and all. Life let us cherish. See you in town.

D. H. L.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Edward Marsh.                        7 July, I9r9«

Dear Eddie,—

Could you tell me if Robert Nichols is back from America?— and if so, what is his address? I want to ask him about America. I want to go there now—at last it will be possible. It is just hopeless, my trying to live here—I can’t. My publisher said he would arrange a lecture tour for me—I mean the New York publisher. I guess I should loathe trying to lecture on English and American novels—yet I'd do it, if only for the sake of try ing a new start in life, in another country.

Frieda wants to go to Baden-Baden to see her mother. She is applying now for a passport. I wonder if she'll get it. And then, as soon as she is off to Germany to her people, I shall struggle to New York. She can come over there when I've got a bit of a footing.

Tell me about Nichols—he’s a man I like, really, and he’ll let me know perhaps how it feels in America. I dread it horribly, but must go. Advise me of anything you can, will you?

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hermitage, Nr, Newbury.

To Eleanor Farjeon.                         9 July> I9I9*

Dear Eleanor,—

I was in town a day or two—but so short, and rushed, < should have told you.                               .

I am sending you an address which came this morning. You 479 have to get from the Emergency Committee, 27 Chancery Lane, W.C.2.

(1) Forms of application for vouchers: one voucher must

accompany each parcel.

(2) They return you a voucher, and you proceed with it to a

tradesman.

I found Selfridge’s very slow. Perhaps being on the spot you could see it was done quicker. Above all things they want stockings, sewing cotton, and soap: then for food, milk, cocoa, sugar, dripping, bacon—then beans or peas.

The parcels we ordered, June 14, were not sent till July 4. It is too bad. Tell me if you have any success.

I enclose all that my sister-in-law says about your poor woman—who must be a munition-worker or some such thing. Miinchen, full of artists, is a town of “fallen” women—Roman Catholic in that respect.

Hope to see you soon.

D. H. Lawrence.

Helen Thomas expects you at Orford this week-end. I liked her. The address is:

Fraulein Creszenz Weingartner,

Erzgiesserei-strasse 4, Riickgebaude II, Munich.

She has two small children, and one child she has adopted— all sehr verhungert,

I enclose you an application form for voucher. Address your letter “Parcels,” and enclose addressed envelope for yourself. Best to be quick. Ask for an information leaflet.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr, Newbury, Berks.

To J. B Pinker.                             10 July, 1919.

Dear Pinker,—

The letter about shortening the story, with the enclosure from Vivian Carter, came yesterday. Why it should be so many 480

days behind I don't know. I would rather do the cutting myself.

A man called Douglas Goldring wants to do my play, Touch and Go, in a People's Theatre Society venture. It may not come to much, but the idea attracts me. Also, he wants to publish the play in a series of "Plays for the People’s Theatre." I wish you would let me go ahead and do as I like with this play—on my own.

Probably in a few weeks’ time I shall go to America. But I will let you know.

Yrs.,

D. IL Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To J. B. Pinker.

io July, 1919.

Dear Pinker,—

I send The Fox by return. I wish I could have cut more—but I simply can’t, without mutilating the story.

I will tell Douglas Goldring to arrange with you in a little while. The thought of a People’s Theatre pleases me— probably it will fail—but it is a vital idea, anyhow. I want to talk with Goldring about it. He said he would ask Fagan to let them have the Court Theatre. They two might have a little understanding, even about the play itself. I should so like a People’s Theatre to materialise. Goldring will see you in due course.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence

Grimsbury Farm, Long Lane, Near Newbury, Berks.

To Martin Seeker.

2 Sept., 1919.

Dear Secker,—         .....

I have been editing, for a Russian fneno oj mine, a at amusing, not very long translation of a book of philosophy by one of the last of the Russians, called Shestov. It is by no means a heavy work—nice and ironical and in snappy paragraphs. Would it be in your line?

Yrs..

D. H. Lawrence.

Grimsbury Farm, Long Lane.

Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.           2nd September, 1919.

We are here for the time. F. waiting for her passport home.

How are you? We saw in the newspapers of the arrival of the third boy. Do you feel better, and happier? Do send a line.

D. H. Lawrence.

Chapel Farm Cottage, Hermitage, Nr. Newbury, Berks.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.           16th September, 1919.

Will Simon be called Peter, and super hanc Petram shall you found your fortress? I suppose we shall have to see you Madonnaing in the penny pictorials for a while. But beware, you know what comes to over-pictorialised ladies. Didn’t one fall through a skv-hght? Don’t Madonna for the Sunday press.

So I expect you are on your legs again, cast forth from the hallucinary Patmos of your bed. Simon! Simon! It has a Judaic sound. Better make a dart for the foam again, Aphrodite is better than any Judith, or than any Mary. Plus fiere. Loathsome Judaea*

What other news, save Simon? Are you richer? Are you glad to go back to Sussex Place? What is your husband doing? When I say richer, I merely mean "Bradburys.” Are you preparing to sally forth into the monde as a sort of young matron? Pfui!! Ah, bad! What is the new line? You’ll have to have a new line. Mere de trois. It’s a bit of a quandary. Capitoline Juno? Ox-eyed Hera? Ficheriel Mais toujours mere 482 de trois. Super ham Petram. That’s how it always is, nowadays. Fate attenzione al sasso. Mind the stone. Cave Petram.

No, I’m not angry with the world. I’ve got tired of being angry. I also want a new line. It’s time the world began to amuse me. I insist on being amused.

I believe in a little while I shall be having a sort of success: in America. Better spend it in England. Time one had a bit of fun.

Frieda, who still insists on "feeling" her trials, gets very cross, or weeps, when the letters come from Germany. She has set her mind on going: and she can't go. Another quandary. Patience is justified of all her children_____________________ Frieda will get her passport: quand nous avons change tout cela. But really I don’t care a jot about changing it.

Beaumont__________slowly filters through the poems. He must be nearing the end. Perhaps by Christmas he will actually spawn his production.

Martin Seeker will bring out Women in Love in the spring. Probably it will come out this autumn in America.

When I lunched with —----he says, "Isn't it remarkable,

how the poets are returning to Beauty!’ —he was afraid to walk with me up the Mall afterwards, and ran away like a respectable rabbit. What I want to know is, was it my appearance, or my reputation, or his? Bel Dio!

Pleasant mild autumn, many mushrooms, smoke from cottage gardens, chilly evenings, etc.—toujours perdrix no, not even that—toujours lapin en casserole.

When I am in town again—before long-—I will call at Sussex Place, if I am duly invited. Frieda sends her love: emotional goods not rationed.

D. H. L.

(No envelope or date, but Autumn, 1919) Hermitage.

To Catherine Carswell.                         Thursday.

My deab Catherine,—

I am preparing to go to Italy—selling my books in Reading I thought you and Don would like the De Quincey. When you are well off you can have him re-bound, and he will look r x. He is a very nice man—I can go on reading and reading him. I laughed over Goethe yesterday. I like him, De Quincey, because he also dislikes such people as Plato and Goethe, whom I dislike.

I went to the Midlands last week: my sister frail and seedy, but getting better. I’ve been stuck indoors with a cold this week.

I wonder if you would hate writing to your cousin in Rome to ask if she could find me a very simple room in Rome for a few days. I am going to Caserta, near Naples—hear of a farm there. I don’t seem to be able to get a ship, so shall go by land.

I shall come to London on Monday, most probably: stay with Koteliansky: shall ring you up and come and see you. Do hope you are all well: such awful weather—Frieda arrived in Baden.

D. H. L.

Albergo delle Palme, Lerici, Golfo della Spezia.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.           8th November, 1919.

Well, I’ve got so far—travelling now is the devil, if you can’t afford a sleeper. The train sits still half the time to hatch out her ideas for the next kilometre—Paris is a nasty city, and the French are not sympathetic to me. I stayed two nights on the way with rich English people ------O.B.M. or O.B. something

—parvenu, etc.—great luxury—rather nice people, really—but my stomach, my stomach, it has a bad habit of turning a complete somersault when it finds itself in the wrong element, like a dolphin in the air. The old Knight and I had a sincere half-mocking argument, he for security and bank-balance and power, and I for naked liberty. In the end he rested safe on his bank-balance, I in my nakedness; we hated each other—but with respect. But c'est lui qui mourra. He is going to die—moi, non. He knows that, the impotent old wolf, so he is ready in one half to murder me. I don’t want to murder him—merely leave him to his death.

I couldn't get further than this yesterday. O trains! The sea is marvellous—yesterday a blazing, blazing sun, a lapping Mediterranean—bellezza! The south! the south! The south! Let me go south—I must go south—why don't we go to the Pacific? Why don't we? Is it only snipe and pop-guns detain us, or something more?

Italy is still gay—does all her weeping in the press—takes her politics with her wine, and enjoys them. Great excitement over the elections—but lively and amused excitement— nothing tragic or serious.

I am going to Florence to-morrow. You can write me c o Thomas Cook and Son, Via Tornabuoni, Florence—or you can wait for another letter with an address. For your sleeplessness, move—there is nothing like it-—but move away from the old trimmings—move away.

The sea is under the window—the sea! My God what wouldn't I give to sail far off on it—south. What wouldn’t 1 give to be off to Nukehera or Numea. Bello, bello il mare! the sea! Let us go.

D. H. L.

Post card. (Postmark, 21.11.1919)

Pension Balestra,

5 Piazza Mentana, Florence,

To Catherine Carswell.                         Thursday.

Am here in the rain, waiting for Frieda, of whom I hear nothing yet.—Italy is rather spoiled by the war—a different temper— not so nice a humour by far.—I wrote again to Eilisina—hope for an answer. I expect we shall be here a week—then to Rome. The coat-lining was a treasure, I tell you—cold trains here.

D. H. L.

Presso Orazio Cervi, Picinisco, Prov. di Caserta.

Tc Mrs. R. P.

'16 Dec., 1919.

Deas Rosalind,—

Rome being vile, we came on here. It is a bit staggeringly primitive. You cross a great stony river bed, then an icy river cn a plank, then climb unfootable paths, while the ass struggles behind with your luggage. The house contains a rather cavelike kitchen downstairs—the other rooms are a wine-press and a wine-storing place and corn bin: upstairs are three bedrooms, and a semi-barn for maize-cobs: beds and bare floor. There is one teaspoon—one saucer—two cups—one plate—two glasses —the whole supply of crockery. Everything must be cooked gipsy-fashion in the chimney over a wood fire. The chickens wander in, the ass is tied to the doorpost and makes his droppings on the doorstep, and brays his head off. The natives are "in costume”—brigands with skin sandals and white swathed strapped legs, women in sort of Swiss bodices and white skirts with full, full sleeves—very handsome-—speaking a perfectly unintelligible dialect and no Italian. The village 2 miles away, a sheer scramble—no road whatever—the market at Atina, 5 miles away—perfectly wonderful to look at, costume and colour—there you buy your week’s provisions. We went yesterday. There is milk—also bread when you get it—also meat—no wine hardly—and no woman in the house, we must cook over the gipsy fire and eat our food on our knees in the black kitchen on the settle before the fire.

Withal, the sun shines hot and lovely, but the nights freeze: the mountains round are snowy and very beautiful.

Orazio is a queer creature—so nice, but slow and tentative. I shall have to dart round. We are having a little fireplace in an upstairs room—shall buy grass mats and plates and cups, etc.— and settle in for a bit. But if the weather turns bad, I think we must move on. At the moment a terrible commotion, bagpipes under the window, and a wild howling kind of ballad, utterly unintelligible—Christmas serenade. It happens every day now, till Christmas.

I believe you would enjoy it here—but what about the children? They are impossible. There isn’t anything approaching a bath: you’d have to wash them in a big copper boilingpan, in which they cook the pigs’ food.

If the weather turns bad, I think we really must go on, to Naples or Capri. Poor Orazio!

Be careful, when you travel, of thieves. Be careful even in a 486 sleeping car, of your small luggage. They have opened my bag, and stolen pen, 400 francs and things—also picked my pocket.

Frieda sends love.

D. H. L.

Presso Orazio Cervi, Picinisco, Prov, di Casetta, Italy.

To Martin Seeker.                               17 Dec.

Dear Seckek,—

The post comes once in a blue moon here. I enclose a letter from Koteliansky. I am perfectly willing to have the ‘ Foreword" omitted altogether—my foreword, that is. Let Koteliansky know, will you, what you decide. And please arrange a title page to suit him, will you. Ach, Achl these little, businesses! Every hen is occupied with her own tail-feathers.

I suppose I am to return to you the corrected proofs of the Shestov. If so, be so good as to let me have a duplicate set for America.

Be sure and tell me when you have the MS. of Women in Love—The Sisters if you like—and tell me what you are doing with it.

This place is off the map entirely—I tell you, the pos comes when a peasant happens to be coming down to the river -unless I scramble up an accursed goat’s climb of about 80 minutes, to the God lost village of Picinisco. However, d la guerre comme d la guerre.

Inform me of things. Send me a book to read, if yc ve got an interesting one nowadays.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Possibly Koteliansky returns corrected proofs to you. If so, tant mieux. For me, my foreword is what I think though it is immaterial to me whether you print or not. It is between you and Koteliansky, I suppose.

Palazzo Ferraro,

Capri, Italy.

To Martin Seeker.

27 Dec., 1919.

Dear Secker,—

Picimsco was too icy-mountainous—we escaped here: and, like you, we were rejected by the Sirens: the sea threw us back, we spent a night on board that rolling saucepan of a boat, off Sorrento. Now we have a little apartment here, right over Morgano’s, on the neck of Capri, looking to the sea and Naples on the right, the sea and space on the left: the duomo the apple of our eye, gall-apple.

Mackenzie seems well. This place is sympathetic for a time. But it seems to me like a stepping-stone from which one steps off, towards elsewhere: not an abiding place.

I hope you got the proofs of Shestov which I returned. Please send me a nice little vol. of corrected proofs, will you, for America.

Mackenzie said you thought of printing the Rainbow. Do that, and you have my eternal allegiance. He suggests it be called Women in Love, Vol. I, with a foreword by himself. I think Women in Love, Vol. I and Vol. II, is a very good idea. I am anxious to hear from you. If you do this, the Rainbow as a Vol. I of Women in Love, then I must make a sort of permanent agreement with you. I am waiting for MS. of a novel three parts done, Mixed Marriage, which I left in Germany before the war. This would make a perfect selling novel when I’ve finished it.

About Pinker. I should like to break with him altogether: shall I simply write to him to that effect, before I go any further? Can you give me any hint? Gilbert had a row with him and broke. I must do it.

D. H. Lawrence.

Palazzo Ferraro,

Capri, Italy.

To J. B. Pinker.                             27 Dec., 1919.

Dear Pinker,—

We are here for a time—moving out of Europe before long, I hope.

I think there is not much point in our remaining bound to one another. You told me when we made our agreement that we might break it when either of us wished. I wish it should be broken now. What bit of work I have to place, I like to place myself. I am sure it isn’t much worth to you.

Let me know, will you?

D. H. Lawrence.

Palazzo Ferraro,

Capri, Naples.

To Catherine Carswell.                      4 Jan., 1920.

My dear Catherine,—

I had your letter to-day—we have moved and moved in such a state of restlessness. I could not write letters. Picinisco was beautiful beyond words, but so primitive, and so cold, that I thought we should die. The mountains stood round in a ring, glittering white like devils. On the Saturday before Christmas it snowed all day long: so on Monday we did extricate ourselves: got up at 5.30, walked 5 miles to Atina, caught the post omnibus 10 miles drive to the only station, Cassino. We got to Naples, caught the Capri boat at 3.0 p.m The sea rose as we left the bay-—by 7.30 we came in to the shallow port of Capri, but the seas were running so high, the boats couldn’t come out to take us off. Back we had to go, to be all night rolling on board, in the semi-shelter of Sorrento. The Italians were sick: oh, dear: luckily we managed to keep all right.

We have got an apartment—two beautiful rooms and a kitchen we share—160 francs a month—at the top of this old palazzo, which has a staircase like a prison, not a palace. It is extremely beautiful—just on the very neck of the little town, on 489

the very neck of the island: we can touch the queer bubbly duomo, almost, from our balcony: all the island life goes beneath us: and then away on the right, the sea, Ischia in the distance, and the Bay of Naples: on the left the wide open Mediterranean. In each case it is a short mile down to the sea— but steep down. The narcissus flowers still are many in the rocks, but passing: sweet they are, Greece. A few pink cistus-flowers too. It is warm, but rather stormy. We have had one fire one evening—for the rest, we aren’t cold. Your plaid, however, is a valuable thing: and your little jersey a treasure for Frieda. They are just the things for Italy: to wrap oneself up indoors a bit. Naples—nice. There is a young and amusing Roumanian who fans his fornello so hard and seizes me to pour Socialism into me. It is pleasant and Bohemian. I wish you were both here: this is the life we could enjoy together.

We lunch or dine sometimes with --------, and he is

nice. But one feels the generations of actors behind him and can’t be quite serious. What a queer thing the theatre is, in its influence. He seems quite rich, and does himself well, and walks a sort of aesthetic figure—"head of the realistic school of England, isn’t he?” asks my Roumanian—walking in a pale blue suit to match his eyes, and a woman’s large brown velour hat to match his hair. It was a sight on New Year's Eve, when we were down in Morgano's cafe—the centre of Capri, downstairs. F. and I sat with an old, old Dutchman and a nice man called Brooks, drinking a modest punch, and listening to the amazing bands which come in, with the Tree, on New Year’s Eve: a weird, barbaric affair. The Anacapri lot intoned a ballad, utterly unintelligible, of about z8 verses, with the most amazing accompaniments. At about n.o came in------with

rich Americans—rather drunk. The Tiberio band came— --- took the tree and bobbed it in the faces of the Americans, and looked like Christ before Pilate in the act. The Tiberio boys, two of them, danced the Tarantella to the same grunting music—a funny indecent pederastic sight it was (Don will chase my spelling—I mean paederast!c). At midnight the ------ crowd ordered champagne and tried to look wine and womenish. But my God, it was an excruciating selfconscious effort, a veritable Via Dolorosa for -------, who felt his

stomach going. Oh God, the wild rakishness of these young heroes! How conscious they are of the Italian crowd in the background. They never see the faint smile of the same crowd —such a smile.—A glass of champagne is sent out to the old road-sweeper—de rigeuer (can’t spell). Meanwhile we sip our last drop of punch, and are the Poor Relations at the other end of the table—ignored—to our amusement. ------ is going

to begin to-morrow, at 10.30 precisely, "Rich Relatives.” He thinks Relatives, as an offset to Relations, so good.

Well, I find I am nearly as spiteful as the rest of Capri. This island is covered with a small brand of cosmopolitans—English, American, Russian, German—everything. The English-speaking crowd are the uttermost, uttermost limit for spiteful scandal. My dear Catherine, London is a prayer-meeting in comparison. We get it from Mary Cannan! Here we found her! And she is one of the decentest people here on this island— brings us butter and figs: butter costs 20 francs a kilo. But she is staying with an arch-scandalmonger—wife of a local judge of some sort—he's English. The stories Mary is told are incredible. We’ve got a long way to go, such mere people as us. It would be an interesting document, to set down this scandal verbatim. Suetonius would blush to his heels, and I iberius would feel he’s been a flea-bite.

Now for your news: good. Of one thing I'm certain, and that is, your novel is the best that Melrose or any of the rest of them has had the chance of seeing. I wonder if I could review it anywhere? But there, I should do it no good. But it’s coming out, and that'll hearten you to another shot, especially as J. P. will be growing up. We ll carry the field yet, you see if we don’t.

But about the £50—don’t give it to us, you really need it more.

Though in the next breath, I must lament the dearness of Italy: butter 20 francs, wine 3 francs a litre the cheapest sugar 8 francs a kilo, oil 7 or 8 francs a litre, carbone a ranc for two kilos—a porter expects ten francs for bringing one’s luggage from the sea—and so on. With the exchange at zo, it is just possible, and only just.

Still, you might come for Easter. How johy it would be. You could have a room with us here, independent and splendid. Nourish the idea.

I liked Ellisina very much: glad Fanny is all right again, hate these shocks: hope Don is feeling happy. A million good wishes.

D. H. L.

Palazzo Ferraro,

Capri, Naples.

To W. E. and S. A. Hopkin.                9 Jan., 1920.

My dear Sallie and Willie,—

To-day came the hanky and letters from Florence, after so long a time. But we have been straggling about—to Rome, to the wilds among the Apennines south of Rome—then here. The hanky is very lovely with its green sheen through the red: reminds me a good deal of grass going dark under, a heavy crimson sunset. The socialist Roumanian from next door, who would please Willie, save that his Italian is of a Roumanian and difficult brand, brought in the post, and with true socialistic communism must at once carefully fold the hanky and try it round his neck, looking very much pleased with himself, and cocking his black eyebrows. But I did not let him appropriate it.

Frieda came down to Florence about a month ago: a bit thinner for her vegetarianism, but very well: had enjoyed Baden-Baden. Everything is very short there—no fat, no milk, practically no meat, no coal. I must have some things sent from England. The French seem really foul, and some of these trials by the Allies of condemned German war-officials hideously unjust and Inquisitorial. Ah, Lord, the filthy world.

Florence was so nice: its genuine culture still creating a certain perfection in the town: Rome was tawdry and so crowded, I hated it. In Picinisco we got right into the wilds, where the ass lived on the doorstep and strolled through the hall, and the cock came to crow on the bent-iron washstand: quite a big, fine-looking house, but lo and behold, one great room Was a wine-press, another a corn and oil chamber, and as you went upstairs, half the upstairs was open, a beautiful barn full of maize-cobs, very yellow and warm-looking, The kitchen, a vaulted eave, had never been cleaned since the house was built. One ate one's meals on a settle in ‘front of the great chimney, where the pots swung on the hooks and the green wood sputtered. No one dreamed of a table, let alone a tablecloth. One blew up the fire with a long, long ancient iron tube, with a winged foot to stand in the ashes: and this tube was handed from person to person in the process of blowing up a blaze. Hygienics not yet imagined. Add to this, that all around circled the most brilliant snowy mountain-peaks, glittering like hell: that away below, on our oak-scrub hills, the air had a tang of ice, while the wild river with its great white bed of boulders rushed pale and fizzy from the ice: that there was no road to the house, but everything had to be piled on the ass and forded over the river: that the nearest shop was il hours away, the nearest railway 15 miles of terrific mountain road: and that on the Saturday before Christmas it snowed all day long: and you have it.

We fled here. We got on the ship—a little iron tub of a steamer—takes 4 hours to Capri. Of course the sea rose—we got to Capri, where there is no landing stage, in the darkness about 8.0 at night, after 5 hours’ wallowing: the sea so high, that when a boat came to take us off it almost hopped onto our deck, and then fell back into an abysmal gulf of darkness, amid yells unparalleled almost even in Italy. In terror, half swamped, it turned for shore, leaving us rolling with a lot of spewing Italians. We had to put back to mainland, and roll at anchor in the shelter of Sorrento till morning, when once more we pushed across to Capri, as the magnificent red dawn came up over the Mediterranean—and like sacks we were hurled into the curvetting boats.

However, here we are, high in this old palace, with two great rooms, three balconies, and a kitchen above, and an enormous flat roof, one of the most wonderful places in the world: Ischia, Naples, Vesuvius slowly smoking to the north—the wide sea to the west, the great rock of our Monte Solaro in front— rocks and the gulf of Salerno south. Below us, all the tiny jungle of Capri town—it is about as big as Eastwood, just from the church to Princess Street—oh, less than that, very tight and tiny. Below is the piazza, the little square, where all the island life throbs—across the little gulf of the street by the end balcony is rhe comical whitewashed cathedral.

The island here is about ij miles wide, we’re on the very neck-steep round ridge of the hill. Altogether Capri is about 4 miles by 2 miles: but really almost mountainous, sheer precipices above us even here. 1 here are heaps of cosmopolitan dwellers—-English, American, Russian by the dozen, Dutch, German, Dane—everybody on this tiny spot. Compton Mackenzie has a nice villa here and does the semi-romantic— but I lik<=* him, he’s a good sort: also we found Mary Cannan, who was Barrie’s wife: also Brett Young, a novelist with wife: and lots of other people if we cared to know them. But I prefer the Italians.

Italy is expensive, but works out with the high exchange about equal to England. It is warm—we have had two fires only, just two evenings. We are thinking of starting to bathe now in the sea, which is very beautiful.

There is a real Italian shop behind Mecklenburgh Square, where you can get good, or at least, real oil. But I forget the street. If I can get a sound vessel to send it in, I'll send you some from here. I’ll see about it.

My dear Willie, I thought Ada had sent those library books back long ago. I’ll write her.

I do wish you could come out here to see us. Couldn’t you manage it? It would cost only the fare. Thomas Cook and Son, Ludgate Circus, E.C.4, will do all your passport business, and tell you everything, if you write them. Why not plunge?

Frieda sends her love, with mine.

D. H. L.

Palazzo Ferraro,

Capri (Naples). '

To J. B. Pinker.                        10 January, 1920.

Dear Pinker,—

Thank you for your letter. Yes, I am grateful to you for all you have done for me in the past. But I am an unsatisfactory person, I know. And therefore it would be best for me to act just on my own responsibility. So do please let us conclude our agreement.

What things you have to return to me, please tell me. But don’t send any MS. to me here. I will arrange with my sister, or a friend, to keep the things for me.

I feel I have been an unpleasant handful for you, and am sorry.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Palazzo Ferraro, Capri (Naples).

To Martin Seeker.                     16 January, 1920.

Dear Secker,—

I had your letter with the offer for The Rainbow and Women m Love—and I talked it over also with Mackenzie. I had written to Duckworth asking him if he would sell back my copyrights: he replied he could not see his way to sell them back, but was ready to make me an offer for the re-publication of The Rainbow. I wrote and asked him what offer he could make. There it stands.

With regard to your letter—I should never sell The Rainbow for £200. I'd rather go back to my old arrangement with Duckworth, of royalty and £50 advance: or even no advance. The fact that I have no money would never make me jump at a lump sum. I have lived so long without money, that I know I can go on living without money, and £200 is really nothing to a man who has nothing. Moreover I believe in my books and in their future, and don’t really bother. Vogue la galere—she won't sink, anyhow, of that I'm sure.

But apart from this: I should like to join with you: I should like to be a part-publisher of my own work: I should like to be one in a real guild. Mackenzie and I get on with one another: also Brett Young.

I should like to be with you, because you really care about books. The thought of our being partners all in Secker & Co. pleases me, so long as we are really in sympathy, and so long as we are all free souls.

Mackenzie suggested £200 for 1 he Rainbow, £300 lor Women in Love, and £500 for the book which I am expecting— it is in the post now—and which I will call provisionally A Mixed Marriage: this total of £800 is to represent the sale of all copyrights until your books prove a return of £1,000, after which I am to resume my royalty of 20 per cent, the proceeds of which are to pass into the firm of Seeker & Co., until such time as I shall have, say, £2,000 invested in the firm--after which they are to be my own separate property. This, with minor provisions, is Mackenzie's scheme. And this seems to me pretty sound.

But I don’t want you to imagine for an instant that I am trying to force an issue, with Mackenzie’s help. I don’t want anything that doesn’t seem to you just and fair. But I want you also to treat me iustly and fairly. I hate tentative methods. I do like plain outspokenness. I don’t want to cadge anything. Tell me exactly and flatly what you think. In an affair like this, we have either to be a genuine alliance, a certain real accord between us: or else we must keep entirely to the old, purely commercial relationship, such as I had with Duckworth, and which I found always, with Duckworth, decent—or else we merely part.

Then, honestly, I think you are wrong about the title Women in Love. Everybody jumps at it, as an excellent title. The Rainbow and Women in Love are really an organic artistic whole. I cannot but think it would be well to issue them as Women in Love, Vol. I and Vol. II. The Rainbow must appear as a new book. Best give it a new title and make some few alterations. I should like to know what alterations you would suggest. As far as the legal proceedings of the suppression are concerned, Pinker could supply you with all information: so could that man—Thring, is it?—Secretary to the Authors’ Society. I was given distinctly to understand that the magistrate’s order destroyed only the existing edition: that any further edition would have to be proceeded against all over again, it could not be automatically suppressed. Best re-issue as a new book, with a new title, anyhow.—The magistrates proceeded on the reviews by James Douglas, in the Star, and one by Clement Shorter, I think in Pall Mall. The scene to which exception was particularly taken was the one where Anna dances naked, when she is with child. I don’t think it's very important, anyhow sufficiently past.

The MS. which is now in the post, coming from Germany, has lain in Bavaria since early 1914. It is a novel, two-thirds finished—quite unlike my usual style—more eventual—I am very keen to see it. I thought if I finished it, it would be quite unexceptionable, as far as the censor is concerned, and you might publish it soon after The Rainbow, if you liked—or leave it till Women in Love is also done.

These are just suggestions. Tell me just what you think. Let us either agree sincerely, or remain merely commercial, or break off. I wish we could meet, pity you are so far.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Pinker replied that, if I really wished, he would let me go. I have written to say I want to go. So I am as good as free in this respect. I want to act for myself.

Palazzo Ferraro,

Isola di Capri, Italy.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.            25th January, 1920.

I’ve been intending to write—but what with a post-telegrafonico strike, and now the railway strike, we have been cut off from the communicating world. I sit dearly waiting for an MS. which is in the post, and which will lie in the post till Doomsday, along with my Christmas parcels, my sweet cake and my nice mincepies from my sister, my pound of tea and my pound of coffee and my chocolates; all inestimable treasures in Italy: all, no doubt, gone down the throats of the post-tele-grafonico strikers. There is always a fly in the ointment, be it even spikenard, always a hair in the soup. So—doles far niente. Here I sit at the top of my palace, and do nothing, sweet nothing, except go out to lunch, or walk from one end of the island to the other. As for walking across it, needless: one bestrides the narrow world without being a Colossus. My palace roof, where F. and I hang the washing, is the very saddle of Capri on which we ride the island. It is Hiddigeigei’s roof: and this Palazzo Ferraro is the hub of island Capri.

Well—-as it happens, the weather is wondrous fine—brilliant, hot sun, brilliant, beautiful. I watched him go down red into the sea. How quickly he hurries round the edge of the horizon, as if he had an appointment away below. A lovely red evening. We went with our Signorina, from whom we rent this apartment, to look at the villa lo Smeraldo, of which she has the keys: it is to be let furnished. It is very beautiful, and we collected wood in the grounds, and made a fire in the drawingroom, and had a joyous tea, and danced on the marble floor while another Italian played the piano—altogether what one should not do—till the sun went down. It is a beautiful villa above the clear sea and the Faraglioni, all sun. I wish you came and took it. It costs 1,000 francs a month, which is about £20 at the present rate. Then you could let us have an apartment, and we'd rejoice in the land. There is a sort of little dependence-—a world of one’s own. Compton Mackenzie lives away below. He is amusing and nice. He talks also of the South Seas: and of my going: but alas, a sort of reclame trip, written up and voiced abroad and even filmed. Alas, I could not be filmed. I should feel, like a savage, that they had stolen my "medicine."

You ought to come to Capri—it isn't very cold, ever— particularly on the south side. You only need a fire some evenings—really: and you can get milk and butter in plenty, and with the exchange at 50 it costs perhaps a bit less than England. I believe I've got about £100 at the moment, so am rolling.

There are a few people—Mackenzie—and the Brett Youngs —also others—even too many.

I am going to the mainland, to look around for a little house; there doesn’t happen to be one empty here—only big ones. Do you know Capri? To look down the Salernian Gulf, southeast, on a blue day, and see the dim, sheer rocky coast, the clear rock mountains, is so beautiful, so like Ulysses, that one sheds one's avatars, and recovers a lost self, Mediterranean, anterior to us.

But Capri itself is a gossipy, villa-stricken, two-humped chunk of limestone, a microcosmos that does heaven much

credit, but mankind none at all. Truly, humanly, it is a bit impossible for long.                        ,

Of news—it is possible the Rainbow will be re-published shortly in London—then Women in Love. Beaumont has actually finished the Poems: but his edition on Japanese vellum-rubbish will still wait, for the leaves that have to be signed by me still lie here. I shall try again to post them to-morrow. If you see Eddie tell him I'll send him a copy, also that history, of which I've finished the proofs.

Italy is a ridiculous kingdom, politically, governs itself so badly, that one becomes indifferent to all political fates— Fiumes, Jugo-Slavakias and such like my-eye, and merely curses because there’s no coffee and no post. Meanwhile the sun shines brilliantly, and the sea ruffles its shoulders and doesn’t care, so why should I or anybody care? So many worlds have passed—but there’s only one Me.

Frieda greets you. We think, of course, of South Seas or of Africa. Do you know anybody in Africa, in a nice climate, who’d let me live on his land and help him—no wages or anything—but I should like to help a man to make some sort of a farm in Africa, and I can always keep us two by writing. I feel like advertising in the Nairobi Herald. More anon.

D H. Lawrence.

Palazzo Ferraro, Capri (Naples).

To Catherine Carswell.                      5 Feb., 1920.

My dear Catherine,'—

I had your letter at last—after all these strikes. Good news that the novel still goes well. Don't have a foreword if you can avoid it. But I believe at the bottom you quite like Melrose: he sounds a character. I shall be so interested to see the novel again: want to read it again.

I hope Don’s case really goes well and leads up to something. It is absolutely killing, I know, to keep wrestling with the void. I cap feel that he gets depressed. But one should not take the world too seriously. I wish you could both come out here to Italy and vegetate—why should one always strive and struggle.

Seeker wrote and said he would publish The Rainbow if I would sell him all rights for £200. Well, I won't, so he is furious. Now I am in communication with Duckworth, who will probably (touch wood!) publish it and give me the just royalty, which is all I want. Then he would do Women in Love also. Of course Duckworth is a bit timid. I wish he could be reassured some way or other. I feel that this is the time to make our grand-slam. I feel that we have stuck together through so much disappointment—now we ought to unite and make a success all together. Why shouldn’t you get away from London—why shouldn’t you write another novel, and make enough to live on? And why shouldn’t Don help us through The Times? I feel times have been hatefully hard for you. Now they ought to come easier. I'm sure once I start I can make money—then we’ll share mine. It won't be long, you see if it is.

I received from ----, after all these months, the little

book of poems he has been handprinting—17 months he's been at it. But he's non compos. You should see his letters. He hasn’t done a thing I want him. He’s left out poems, he left out the inscriptions, he left out everything. To my violent expostulations he writes inane imbecilities—the man is hopeless. Have you ever seen him? Such a silly-looking little book, I think it, Bay, except its beautiful paper and print. But oh, dear, the silly little woodcuts, so out of keeping with the poems, some of which I think really beautiful and rare. I wonder if you'd care about a copy.

Well, there we are. We went a little excursion on the mainland last week, down the Amalfi coast. I tell you it is lovely there—much lovelier than Capri. I am very sick of Capri: it is a stewpot of semi-literary cats—I like Compton Mackenzie as a man—but not as an influence. I can’t stand his island. I shall have to risk expense and everything, and clear out: to Sicily, I think. One gets to Palermo in twelve hours by steamer from Naples. So I think we shall go. My luggage hasn’t come yet—I heard of it from Turin. You know we’ve had three weeks railway strike.—And I can't get that MS. of a novel from Germany out of the post.—But come what may, I must clear out of this Cat-Cranford of Capri: too much for my nerves. No, I don't want to do a satire. It all just dries up one’s bowels— and that I don't like—I shall go and find a place in Sicily, and you will come for a few months, won’t you? J. P. runs about now—we can find him an Italian nurse. You could come by sea.

It is brilliant sunny weather. Do hope all goes well.

D. H. L.

Palazzo Ferraro,

To Martin Seeker.

Capri (Naples),

6 Feb,, 1920.

Dear Secker,—

Thank you for your letter. No, I don’t see in the least why I should raise any ill feeling: I don’t dream of it.

I am going on with Duckworth—hope it works out all right.

Will you send Brooks a copy of New Poems: I should like him to have them: J. Ellingham Brooks, Villa Ferraro, Capri.

Tell me one day what you are doing with New Poems.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicilia.

To Mrs. R. P.

15 March,

Dear Rosalind,—

I feel at last we are settled down and can breathe. Capri was all the time like a ship which is going to arrive somewhere, and doesn't. Here we are, in Sicily. We’ve got a nice big house, with fine rooms and a handy kitchen, set in a big garden, mostly vegetables, green with almond trees, on a steep slope at some distance above the sea—-looking east. I o the left, the coast of Calabria, and the Straits of Messina. It is beautiful, and green, green, and full of flowers. Capri was a dry rock.

I must say I like this place. There are a good many English people, but fewer than Capri, and not so all-overish—and one needn’t know them. It seems so peaceful and still and the earth is sappy, and I like the strong Saracen element in the people here. They are thin and dark and queer. It isn’t quite like Europe. It is where Europe ends, finally. Beyond is Asia and Africa. One realises, somehow, how non-European, how Asiatic Greece was—tinged with Phoenician.

Frieda loves this place. We don’t look at Etna—but Etna is a beautiful mountain, far lovelier than Vesuvius, which is a heap. We’ve got the house for a year. I think perhaps we might really sit still—more or less—for a year. But I believe the summer is very hot. Will you be still in S. Gervasio? Shall we plan to come and see you in the hot summer weather? We must meet in Italy, now we are here. Do you think you could manage to get to Taormina? There is a room if ever you could. I expect the babies will hold you faster here even than in England. We are always wondering how they are getting on in the new conditions.

I’ve begun to try to work—begun a novel—don’t know if it will ever end. How is -------'s divorce proceeding? It all

seems far away and unreal, doesn’t it—a weariness of the flesh. Things behind get more unreal every day. I feel one comes unstuck from England—from all the past—as if one would never go back. But then—who knows. Frieda sends her love. I do hope all goes very well.

D. H. L.

Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, (Messina), Sicily.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.             25th March, 1920.

I did get your letter forwarded from Capri. I have been in Sicily this last three weeks. We’ve taken this house for a year— very beautiful, quite big (for us)—out of Taormina on the green height over the sea, looking east—like it very much—like Sicily extremely—a good on-the-brink feeling—one hop, and you’re out of Europe: nice, that. Frieda loves her house and her little blue kitchen—rich Dutch people built it—it is a bit Dutch as well—cousins of Robert Trevelyan's wife—Hubrecht.

I should think — has sent you Bay--1 hear from my sisters they have received copies—and that the inscription is in. I had a copy in Capri, and that bewildered chicken ----

had forgotten the inscription-—among other of his forgettings. I abused him, and he said he would put it in. I hope you’ll like the poems: they are delicate, I think—in their own way, the rarest things I've done.

1 am so glad you are feeling gay. Quite right—one should. Mind you don’t slip again. Courage goes a long way. Stay gay, and don’t slip into that depression.

I am doing a novel-—amuses me—perhaps I shall even finish it.

The worst of Taormina is that it is a parterre of English weeds all cultivating their egos hard, one against the other. Imagine nettle overtopping dandelion, the languors and lilies of virtue here very stiff and prickly, the roses and raptures of vice a little weedy and ill developed. Save me from my countrymen.

Will you actually come to Italy? ’Twill be hot here by May, I expect. F. sends love.

D. H. L.

Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicily.

To Martin Seeker.

Easter Monday, 1920.

Dear Seckep,—

Yours of March 28th arrived this morning, and f reply by return. I agree to your proposal to publish Women in ove and The Rainbow on a royalty basis of 1/- per copy on the first 2,000, 1/6 to 5,000, and 2/- after that. Start with Women in Love if you wish: but only on condition that you publish The Rainbow within a reasonable time after the publishing of Women in Love.

Will you give me £100 on each book advance? That covers

the 2,000 at 1/-.

D H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchio.,

Taormina (Messina).

To Lady Cynthia Asquith.                7th May, 1020.

Had your letter the other day—glad you are well and gay. Fun if you came to Taormina this summer: but August and September are supposed to be monstrous hot. But perhaps you like heat. Anyhow, two hotels will be open, Bristol and San Domenico, and they’ll give you pension at San Domenico, the swellest place, for 40 ft incs a day—which is 10/-. The Bristol is only about 26 or 28 francs. We in our Fontana Vecchia are about ten minutes out of town, lovely and cool. We've had some sweltering days already—but our house with its terraces doesn’t get too hot: so many green leaves. Most of the foreigners have gone already. The Taorminese are lapsing into a languor and a sloth. I believe Sicily has always since Adam been run by a foreign incoming aristocracy: Phoenician, Greek, Arab, Norman, Spanish, Italian. Now it is people in hotels, and such stray fish as me. They, the natives, verily droop and fade out without us, though they hate us when the exchange is too high.

It is very dry here—all the roses out, and drying up, all the grass cut, the earth brown. There is a lot of land, peasant land, to this house. I have just been down in the valley by the cisterns, in a lemon grove that smells very sweet, getting summer nespoli. Nespoli look like apricots, and taste a bit like them—but they’re pear-shaped. They’re a sort of medlar. Wish you had some, they are delicious, and we've got tree-fulls. The sea is pale and shimmery to-day, the prickly pears are in yellow blossom.

I've actually finished my new novel, The Lost Girl: not morally lost, I assure you. That bee in my bonnet which you mention, and which I presume means sex, buzzes not over-loud. I think The Lost Girl is quite passable, from Mudie’s point of view. She is being typed in Rome at the moment, which is going to cost me the monstrous figure of 1000 francs. If the exchange goes right down I’m done.

Meanwhile Seeker is actually doing Women in Love and The Rainbow. That is, he is sending Women in Love to press at once, so he says—and The Rainbow to follow almost immediately, if all goes well. Of course he is rather in a funk, fearing the censor. I wish someone could hold his hand while he gets the thing through. If there’s any legal proceeding I shall have to pay for it. Lord, the world is a paltry place. The Great War has made cowards of us all, if it was possible.

However, we’ll hope for the best, and devil take the hindmost. Let’s hope my Lost Girl will be Treasure Trove to me.

Meanwhile, life at Fontana Vecchia is very easy, indolent, and devil-may-care. Did you ever hear of a Duca di Bronte— Mr. Nelson-Hood—descendant of Lord Nelson (Horatio)— whom the Neapolitans made Duca di Bronte because he hanged a few of them? Well, Bronte is just under Etna—and this Mr. Nelson-Hood has a place there—his ducal estate. We went to see him—-rather wonderful place . . . But perhaps you know him.

Tell me where do Dukedoms lie, Or in the head or in the eye—

That's wrong.

Tell me where are Dukedoms bred, Or in die eye or in the head.

If I was Duca di Bronte I'd be tyrant of Sicily. High time there was another Hiero. But, of course, money maketh a man: even if he was -a. monkey to start with. How are you? Frieda greets you. Salute your husband from me.

D. H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Messina.

To Catherine Carswell.                      12 May, ’20.

My dear Catherine,—

I had your letter yesterday—also, the day before, your photo -graph—a very good photograph indeed, I think, and very charming of you both, J. P. smiling his nice smile.

Glad things are going pretty smooth. Of course the Rouen villa sounds awfully attractive: but you d have to see it first, and see if it’s in repair: that’s the first thing. Then find out how heavy rates and taxes are: they're very stiff in Italy.—I wonder how the anti-British feeling is in France?—nothing serious, I should think. Heaven knows which way we shall be moving next. Depends which way the wind blows us. But one’s instinct is to go south, south—and away, away from Europe. Here we are almost on the last tip—and my face still looks south, as if one must step off into space somewhere.-----

I don’t know, however, what we shall actually do. J ve taken this place for a year—2000 francs for the year. It’s not enormous, anyway—only £25 with the exchange at 80. We might go away a bit in July and August, but come back some time in September. They say it is still very hot in September—could you make it towards the end?—or don’t you mind heat? It’s lovely and cool in this house.

If you really think of coming, then you can, if you like, pay the £50 into my account at the Law Courts Branch of the London County Westminster Bank—263, Strand-—and I’ll just keep it for you for the holiday. But, in any case, I won’t do more than just keep it for you till you want it.

I have signed agreements with Seeker. He is to publish first Women in Love, and is to give me £100 down, and usual royalties. After Women in Love he is to do The Rainbow, and give me £100 down 3 months after publication, but to deduct from my £100 all charges of any legal proceedings, if such should occur. He seems in a bit of a funk. If Don has spare time he might find out exactly the law. But perhaps he’s busy ■—and I hope he is.—Anyhow, I seem fairly sure of the £100 for Women in Love, pretty soon.

Then I’ve done my new novel, The Lost Girl. I think it’s quite amusing: and quite moral. She’s not morally lost, poor darling. It’s being typed in Rome—so dear, 1000 francs— alas for me! But post here is horribly slow. I had yours 21 April on 11 May—which is 20 days. Heaven knows what happens in the interim.

The weather is hot. Do you know what it is to be in a dry southern country—dry, like Africa? I never knew before.

But I like it. The sun is a bit overwhelming. Nearly all foreigners have left here already. To-day we are going down to the sea to bathe. But it is a good | hour down, and i hour up. Mary Cannan has a studio here—nice—for z more months. She is dying to go to Malta—rhe boat runs from Syracuse. But she can't go alone. So she wants us to go if she pays our ship fare—it's only 8 hours crossing. It might be amusing, for 4 or 5 days. But Malta isn’t wildly attractive, and I am doubtful if I want to spend the money.

Oh, your Melrose! But all these roses smell the same, no matter what their name. I believe publishing is a disease in itself—like many other professions. But your book should be cut now. I look forward immensely to reading it again. My lost girl marries an Italian.

I haven't heard lately of my Hist, of Europe (no, not the World! not yet). I did all proofs—but await revised proofs, for indexing. God knows what they’re doing. I see Touch and Go is out. Have you got a copy? I ordered you one. If they haven’t sent it, I’ll send one. Mila saluti to you both, and J. P.

D. H. L.

Great Britain Hotel,

Valletta, Malta.

To Martin Seeker.                       24 May, 1920

Dear Secker,—

We came here for two days-—kept here for eight by the Sicilian steamer strike.

Land of plenty, land of comfort—Britain, wheresoever found.

Bacon and eggs for breakfast.

But a horrible island—-to me: stone, and bath-brick dust.

All the world might come here to sharpen its knives.

What I really have to say:

Thinking about the title Women in Love. If you care to change it to Day of Wrath, I am willing.

507

Dies irx, dies ilia

Soivet saeclum in favilla.

That for the motto.

D. H. L.

Taormina Thursday next.

Fontana Vecchia, Taormina.

To Martin Seeker.                         12 June, 1920.

Dear Secker,—

Presumably Mackenzie will be bringing you the original MS. of The Lost Girl. I had a wire from Rome yesterday about it. I have the carbon copy, and am correcting it. There is not much to alter. Queer book, it is. Being out here, I find it good —a bit wonderful, really. But when I get a sort of "other people" mood on me, I don’t know at all. I feel I don’t know at all what it will be like to other people. Somehow it depends what centre of oneself one reads it from. I wish I could get it serialised—in England too. One must make some money these days; or perish. To my horror it cost 1,348 lire, typing— which I think preposterous. I sent a copy to U.S.A, with my landlord, but he is to hold it till I send him instructions. I will send you this carbon copy when you need it. Let me know.

D. H. L.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicily.

To Douglas Goldring.                      20 July, 1920.

Dear Goldring,—

I had your Reputations this morning: find it very witty and amusing. God, it is time those stuffed geese were carved: the old stagers, and semi-old stagers. In the end, I suppose I shall have you hacking at me, for an old bird.

So glad to hear of you out of town, eating raspberries and spitting forth venom and other profitable matter. We are still here: I live in pyjamas, barefoot, all day: lovely hot days of bright sun and sea, but a cool wind through the straits. We do 508

our own work—I prefer it, can't stand people about: so when the floors must be washed (gently washed merely) or when I must put my suit of pyjamas in the tub, behold me, in puris naturalibus, performing the menial labours of the day. It is very nice to shed so much. It is wonderful to be able to pass the days anyhow, without having to resist the weather and the elements. I find that in England one spends so much of one’s time merely holding out against the inclemency of the days: not to speak of the soul-stiffening one must perform, against a legion of windy-watery fools.

So you are getting quite rich. Good! I do hope you are taking it out of the mouth of the Murrys and Walpoles of this world. I am creeping on in my own measured way, cook and the captain bold, etc. But even we have a little bit more than usual.

Hence it is going to be busted. Frieda wants to go to Germany. It is still inhospitable to foreigners (so they say). Therefore she goes alone. And I shall move about Italy, seeing one person and another. Suppose we shall be back here in early October or Sept.: leave in about two weeks’ time.

I . finished a novel, The Lost Girl. Seeker’s got it, and is enthusiastic about it. "I am quite sure of your future.¹ What Jehovah is this squeaking? I am trying my head off to get it serialised—trying The Queen first. Seeker rather put out. He’s going to hold Women in Love and The Rainbow till this book is out: spring, I suppose. Oh God, the dribblers!

I shall send you a paste restante address. So glad you are flourishing like a green bay tree—and making wreaths for other people.

[Letter apparently incomplete.]

Villa Fontana, 1Tecchia, Taormina, Sicily.

To Mrs. R. P.                            16 Nov’> T9²⁰‘

Deap Rosalind,—

It rains with such persistency and stupidity here that one loses all one's initiative and remains cut off. Had your letter

this morning: hope you'll like The Lost Girl—or be a bit amused, anyhow. The libraries objected to page 256 (I think it’s that), so it had to be altered, for Seeker’s sake, and delay in issuing. You’ve probably got the unaltered.

No news: it only rams. I’ve been swotting Italian history: having finished proofs of the hist, for the Oxford Press, they ask for another chap, on Italian unification. Have read it all up, now proceed to write. Nothing else doing.

I’m copying a very amusing picture—“Lorenzetti’s Anacoreti nelle Tebaidi”—thousands of amusing little monks doing things in the Thebaid: like it very much: success so far.

Everywhere seems very far off. Sicily at the moment feels like a land inside an aquarium—all water—and people like crabs and black-grey shrimps creeping on the bottom. Don’t like it. Don't think Christmas would be any good here either. We shall be coming north in the spring—have promised to go to Germany-—perhaps do a book on Venice as John Lane asked me—perhaps Sardinia—who knows? Will let you know.

It is becoming almost impossible to live with other people in the house, I agree. That’s why, though I curse this rain, I really prefer the isolation. There is no contact, except one which makes one almost squeal with impatience.

Remember me to Eleanor: she’s just getting the worst of Italy. How are the children?—and Godwin and Analysis!

D. H. L.

To Eleanor Earjeon.

Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicily.

6 Decern., 1920.

Dear Eleanor,—

Yours arrived yesterday. I stayed at Hotel Cappuccini in Amalfi—terms 35-40 a day: very nice, charming old monastery and orange garden—I liked it. Hotel della Luna also good, and I believe a bit cheaper. Write for rooms. Don’t know bow you intend getting there—there is a bus fron Vietri station: 2 hours.

It has poured masses of water and still isn’t clear here— 510 vile—no sign of cotton except in umbrellas. I shall find you a room here in an hotel or pension-—housekeeping is so irritating and tiresome. Tell R. never to think of living in Sicily, though it's a pity she can’t see it. Tell me if you’d rather have a pension for about 22-25 a day, or a really rather nice hotel for 35?

Get your courage up for the railways, or pray for luck. They are usually vile south of Rome. You can go to Amalfi via Naples—Naples to Sorrento by steamer—Sorrento to Amalfi by carriage, fee about 35 francs. Don’t get stranded— particularly in Rome, without having engaged a room—though Amalfi season is the early spring—swanky then. It is beautiful. It’s no good thinking of rooms—one must go to hotels, and fairly good ones.

Hope it’s nice.

D. H. L.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicilia,

To Eleanor Far;eon.                        20 Jan , 1921.

Deaf Eleanor,—

Well, perhaps you’ll be glad you haven’t come to Sicily. It thunders and lightens for 24 hours, and hailstorms continually, till there is hail-ice thick everywhere, and it is deadly cold and horrid. Meanwhile the almond blossom is almost full out—a sea of blossom, would be, if it weren’t shattered.

I should like to talk to you: but feel myself shut up and I can't come unshut just now. I don’t like it.

We made a dash to Sardinia—liked the island very much— but it isn’t a place to live in. No point in living there. A stray corner of Italy, rather difficult materially to live in.

I have said I will keep this house on another year. But I really don’t believe I shall come back for another winter. The south is so lifeless. There’s ten times more "go" in Tuscany.

If I knew how to, I’d really join myself to the revolutionary socialists now. I think the time has come for a real struggle. That’s the only thing I care for: the death struggle. I don’t

care for politics. But I know there must and should be a deadly revolution very soon, and I would take part in it if I knew how.

Ask R. what book she means—The Moose? But that disappeared with Chapel Farm Cottage.

I enclose io francs for those stamps. I hope it is enough.

Tell me.

Let's hope we meet when something is doing.

D. H. L.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicily.

To Mrs. R. P.                          2 March, 1921.

Dear R.,—

Your letter yesterday. I don’t write because nothing happens. We went to Sardinia—it was an exciting little trip—but one couldn’t live there—one would be weary—dreary. I was very disappointed. So much so that I have been planning to go to America. You remember Mrs. Thrasher's farm—well, she still offers it. I don’t know if I shall get off. I have said so often I was going. We shall see. I have taken this house definitely till end of April—with option of continuing the year out. But I doubt very much if we shall stay after April. Only the house itself is so nice—just as Canovaia was nice.

We too have had hot sun and cold wind. The sun is dangerous these months-—it has a radio-chemical action on the blood which simply does for me. I avoid it. The thing is to keep cool—not get hot at all. Etna is looking extremely beautiful— with very heavy snow. I always wonder when she’s going to burst out. I don’t trust her.

Italy begins to tire me. I hear the official opinion now is that there will be no definite revolution or bolshing at all: that is going to resolve itself into the continual faction fights between socialists and fascist!—genuine Italian Guelph and Ghibelline business, and let the world wag elsewhere. Rather dull. But the thought of England is entirely repugnant. I promised to go and see my sisters, but I can’t cross the Channel. No, no—England is a mud-bathos.

D. H. L.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicilia.

To Curtis Brown.                        4th April, 1921.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Will you undertake to place my stuff? And will you let me know your terms? If so, make it for not more than five years, so that we needn’t be tied to one another.

There are three pieces of MS. in hand.

1. Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Of these two went to Squire of The Mercury; viz., Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers and Purple Anemones. These two poems and The Ass, are in handwriting. If Barbara Low has not done so, please send copies (typed) of these three poems to Robert Mountsier. No one has seen any of these poems, save Squire’s two.

2. Mr. Noon (Part I). Try and serialise this, and for serial purposes cut as much as you like. Seeker’s agreement claims the book. I enclose the said agreement: it is for five books, but Rainbow makes one of the five, and Lost Girl another: leaves three, of which here two.

3. Diary of a Trip to Sardinia (provisional title). Am sending photographs of first part—hope to send other photographs shortly of Sardinia itself. Try and sell this book to periodicals—or part of it. And I don’t care how much the editors cut it.

But before you do anything definite at all please communicate with

Robert Mountsier,

417, West 118 Street, New York City.

He has all my stuff in hand over there, trying to unravel a beautiful tangle of publishers and agreements and Pinker. Please work absolutely in unison with Mountsier.

I wish I’d come to you ten years back; you wrote me just too late. But now, don't tie me too tight—I get restive.

Am leaving Taormina on Saturday—wandering. But write c/o Thomas Cook, Piazza delle Ter me, Rome.

I enclose the Oxford Press agreement. I have received six presentation copies of the book, but have no idea what they are doing, especially as regards America. American rights are mine.

Shall I turn over to you all the back agreements? Very little remains to Pinker. Or shall we only go on with what lies ahead? Let us consider.

Luck to us.

D. H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicily.

To Douglas Goldring.                      4 April, 1921.

Dear Coloring,—

Very many thanks for your letter. I believe you’re right— so I’ll go to Curtis Brown. I’ve written to Barbara (she has various MSS. by now) saying they are to be handed over. See that C. B. makes a proper agreement with me. I’ll stick to him if he does me square and energetic.

Am leaving Taormina on Saturday: going eventually to Germany, where my wife is—Baden-Baden. But send me a line:

c/o Thomas Cook, Piazza delle Terme, Rome.

I'd like to meet you if you come within reach.

Oh, those babies. Poor Betty! But perhaps they’ll make her happy.

1 like Women in Love best of all my books. Glad you do too.

Wonder what your job will be like.

Yrs.,

D. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicily I

To Catherine Carswell.                      4 April, 1921.

My dear Catherine,—

Well, how are you?—I send you that history—you asked for it. Some of the chapters I think are good: first worst. Don't read it if it bores you.

I ll send you also a photograph of a portrait a Scotch woman —Millicent Beveridge—painted of me. She must have been at Glasgow art school about the same time as you—has lived long in Paris.,

Frieda is in Baden-Baden. Her mother was very ill, so she went—about a month ago. I am leaving Taormina on Saturday —Palermo—Rome—then perhaps a walking tour in Sardinia: then I don't know: to Germany probably. Suppose we shall come back here in autumn.

What are you doing? How are things going? Where shall you be all summer? I have worked a good bit, but not finished much. Yes—a book of very free poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers: a Diary of a Trip to Sardinia: and first vol. of a funny novel: but a tiny first vol. Quite a lot. Yet not much.

I sort of get indifferent to the world-—to God and man I almost said—down here. The South cures one of caring. Very good too.

How is Don? What doing? And John Patrick running about and getting a big boy. Aieee, we’re getting older, Catherine. It’s almost time I began to be middle-aged and famous. Pah! There’s not much spunk in the world, is there? Neither here nor there.

Well—I hope you’re going on nicely. Write if you feel like it to me:

c/o Thomas Cook,

Piazza dells Terms,

Rome.

It will always reach me.

If only I had money I should buy a Mediterranean sailing ship that was offered me: so beautiful. I hen you’d cruise with me.

I'm having Curtis Brown for an agent.

Many greetings to you three.

D. H. Lawrence.

Florence.

To Curtis Brown.                        ²² April, 1921.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I had your letter in Rome. I agree to be quite patient and fair.

The Seeker agreement I enclosed with photographs to Barbara Low. I am still struggling for photographs of Sardinia itself.—A friend of mine, Jan Juta, is just going to Sardinia to paint suitable illustrations for the book—in flat colour. I want you to wait for his pictures before you publish the book: for magazine publication go ahead as you think best. The title for the Sardinia book Mountsier objected to. I suggested others: Sardinian Films, for example. Do please work in everything in strict conjunction with Robert Mountsier.

I agree not to send anything to any publisher direct—only to act through you.

Go warily, but please go gently with —------.

My address will be:

Per Adr. Frau Baronin von Richthofen, Ludwig-Wilhelmstift, Baden-Baden,

Germany.

I shall probably be in London in July—I am going direct to Baden-Baden now.

My English things are not very tangled—my American business was the mess.

Good luck.

D. H. Lawrence.

Show Seeker the various MSS. as soon as you conveniently can.

Ludwig- Wilhelmstift,

Baden-Baden, Germany.

To Curtis Brown.                       28th April, 1921.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I had your booklet here: and a letter from Barbara Low saying she had handed you all MSS. Expect to hear from you shortly concerning these.

Robert Mountsier is coming to Europe: arrives Paris May 10th, and is proceeding to London. He will come to see you, and you can discuss the American side with him. If he is staying in Europe no doubt he will transfer all American business to you. But that is for him to decide.

I hear from the Oxford University Press that they have published the school book of mine, Movements in European History—nom de plume, Lawrence H. Davison. That one edition is sold out—but that they have not succeeded in placing the book with their American representatives. American rights, therefore, belong to me. You may like to discuss this with Mountsier. Please show him Humphrey Milford’s agreement. And I will write Milford as soon as I hear from you, telling him to deal in England with you.

Trust things are going satisfactorily.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawpence.

Ludwig- Wilhelmstift, Baden-Baden.

To Catherine Carswell.             17 May.

Have been here now three weeks—we have come out to a little inn, 3 miles from Baden, where we live for about 3/- a day each, minus extras. There is quite enough food again— plenty in fact—and we are very well done. The great woods, end of Black Forest all round, with the Rhine valley and the Vosges beyond. Germany quite friendly, but a bit depressing— sort of stupefied or numbed rather than anything else. But a great sense of magnificent, spacious country.—We sent the boy some little Black Forest toys last week: hope they arrive.— Am not quite sure how long we shall stay here—my mother-in-law much better, but shaky. How is your book getting on? I feel a stranger. I feel a stranger everywhere and nowhere.

D. H. L.

Hotel Krone, Ebersteinburg, Baden-Baden,

To Curtis Brown.                  Sunday, 12 June, 1921.

Dear Curtis Bpown,—

Please write to this address.

I wrote (write to-day) to Seeker, that if he cared for the Sardinia book, and if he could see his way to do the colour illustrations, I would try and accommodate him with regard to royalty and advance—J uta would not ask anything (unless a small royalty on sales or as you suggest here over 2000). And if you think it is no good bothering about periodicals, then let Seeker see Sardinia as soon as he likes. The illustrations would be mostly people—scenes; like the eggs in Cagliari— not landscape; and in flat colour-wash easy to reproduce. ill Seeker to say how many he could put in, if any—and I could make any arrangement with Juta privately, for payment. He won’t mind anyhow. But I simply don’t want to leave him in the lurch, if I think his illustrations are good.

Mountsier has first part of Aaron’s Rod. I must wait for him, and revise, before I can let you have MS. It is quite finished.

I hear that Hutchinson’s are friendly to me—if that is any use to you: and I ask Mountsier to turn over to you for them a short story, Fanny and Annie, of which I have no copy. All my loose MSS. in Taormina, alas—Mountsier has a complete understanding with you, I know: so he will tell you if he has the MS. I want to tell de Grey to make out the Medici agreement with you, as soon as I have your letter of advice.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Krone, Ebersteinburg, Baden-Baden.

To Curtis Brown.                           2 July, 1921.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

To-day your letter and Medici agreement; for both many thanks. I think the latter quite satisfactory. One must give and take. But I do regret loss of American rights.

Only I have written to de Grey that I want title altering to A History of Italian Painting for Children. I don't see how one Diirer can represent Germany, and Chardin or Lancret, France, and the awful Rembrandts, the mere Teiborch and Van der Goes, Holland. And I won’t say a word about pictures which are not included. The supply of illustrations is too unsatisfactory for a child's list of painting. Whereas there is a 5x8 fair representation of Italy. And the subject is quite big enough.

I return agreement, with word "Italian" inserted by me. I feel that it would prove just unsatisfactory to go out of Italy.

I shall want very few books—about four. But I'll write de Grey

I have five Juta drawings for the Sardinia book: they are very good, in flat brilliant colour, excellent. I expect three more from Juta: making eight. I sent these five to a man in Stuttgart, to enquire cost of colour-reproduction. He says the cost of engraving plates for the 4-colour process, size 13 x 10 cm., is 600 marks. The mark to-day is at 272. I asked de Grey for a quotation. Same plate in England costs just about £5. More than double. I have asked Max Schreiber now for the cost of 2000 printed copies, from one plate. When he replies I’ll tell you at once. He-—the colour-printer, quite a famous one—said the pictures were most original and perfect for reproduction. Now it seems to me we ought to be able to raise enough money for these—between England and New York. I wrote Seltzer yesterday. If there should be a magazine chance, the pictures could be printed on pages to fit. For a book, the size should be about 22 x 14 cm. book-page— picture 13 x 10 cm. I want this to be managed.

I expect Mountsier Tuesday—and we shall probably leave end of next week, for Constance and Innsbruck. Will let you know immediately Mountsier arrives and we decide.

One difficulty about importing pictures from Germany is the new Sanctions impost. Must think of it.

Scheme the pictures for me. They are really very new and good.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

p.5—On second thoughts I will keep the agreement till I have an answer from you and de Grey. I would much rathet have the book in my own name, if de Grey will agree. He can use it in full if he likes.

David Herbert Lawrence.

I would like ten presentation copies—ask for that.

Villa Alpensee, Thumershach, Zell-am-See, bei Salzburg, Austria.

To Curtis Brown.                    7 July, 1931.

Dear Curtis Bpown,—

I was very glad to get the two copies of Aaron's Rod this morning—beautifully typed and bound. Very many thanks. I was just beginning to be uneasy, having had no word from you.

Tell me, please, what the cost is, so that I can compare with what I pay in Italy.

I will return the whole MS. directly. But please see that Seeker’s date of publication does not precede Seltzer’s.

About the pictures. I am afraid I let myself be a little too much influenced by Mountsier: who, of course, quite rightly takes the purely American point of view. We must, however, keep our own point. I understand the pictures have gone to Seltzer. He will keep you fully informed of what he is doing. If Seeker will buy sheets and pictures from Seltzer, well and good. If not, let us make an agreement with the Medici Society, if they are willing. You will see to that, and I won’t interfere. Perhaps we can manage that The Mercury and The Dial print an extract with two or three pictures. That also I leave to you. We must not have the English side of the business subordinated too much to the American.

About magazines—I can’t help feeling a hatred of their ways and means and all that. But still am grateful to you and your magazine manager for all the trouble you have taken. Somebody told me there was part of the Whitman essay in The Nation.

About the Medici Society—I was sorry to have to make that sudden change. But I couldn’t know what lay before me till I had really started to plan the book. And when I had dimly made my plan, 1 found that the Medici supply of pictures for Holland, Germany, France and Spain was just quite hopelessly inadequate. One can’t write about pictures unless the pictures are there. I know it must have annoyed de Grey—who was in all things very nice and considerate. So I was sorry. But it is as I say.

I am not sure how long we stay here. The weather is hot again-—Florence would be intolerable. Yet I want to go south.

Mountsier dislikes Aaron’s Rod, and says it will be unpopular. That will be as it will be.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Alpensee, Thumersbach, Zell-am-See, bei Salzburg, Austria.

To Curtis Brown.

25 th July, 1921.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Mountsier has just read me a list of Poems and Studies in Classic Amer. Literature, etc. that you have been sending out to the various papers. Will you please tell your magazine man to go slowly: not to send out anything unless it seems really likely to suit the miserable periodicals. I know what the English weeklies and monthlies are, and have no hopes of ever selling more than an odd thing now and then. Therefore I would rather sell nothing than have the goods hawked round and cheapened in the eyes of a lot of little people.

I posted you part of the MS. of Aaron’s Rod, to get it typed for me. I hope you have received it safely.

And as I said before, while I want to keep a fairly close hand on _—.—, I don't want to let him down or be mean to him in any way.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Alpensee,

T burnersbach, Zell-am-See,

bei Salzburg, Austria.

To Catherine Carswell.                     3 August, 1921.

My dear Catherine,—

1 have been waiting to see whether I could really stay on here. You know we are with Frieda’s younger sister, Johanna, her husband, son and daughter. The villa is on the edge of the lake, we bathe and boat and go excursions into the mountains. The snow isn’t far. And the Schreibershofens are really very nice with us. And yet, I feel I can’t breathe. Everything is free and perfectly easy. And still I feel I can’t breathe. Perhaps it is one can’t live with people any more—en menage. Anyhow, there it is. Frieda loves it and is quite bitter that I say I want to go away. But there it is—I do.

There is a very nice flat we can have in Florence, for not very much. Only this terrific heat—when is it going to end? But, anyhow, I shall leave here about 12th August. If it keeps so hot I shall stay somewhere near Meran for a while, and perhaps look round and see if I might like to live there. I don't much want to go back to Taormina again. If the weather breaks, and it rains, I shall go to Florence. We should see you there anyway. We'll write more about that.

It is quite beautiful here. There is a very pleasant, largish peasant hotel which you would like: Lohningshof, Thumersbach, Zell-am-See. It is on this side the lake—across from Zell. And you eat d la carte, which is much more satisfactory in this part of the world. The ordinary inexpensive hotel here costs 600 krone a day—mounts up to about 700. You can buy almost anything, with enough krone. But the shops are empty —the land financially and commercially just ruined. There is very good white bread—but the food is monotonous. Still, you’d never know you were in a ruined land. The Austrians are as amiable as ever. Travelling is cheap, and quite easy, and the people honest and pleasant. September is a lovely month too, here. But when I have stayed out my month, I feel I shall have to go.

I hope Don didn’t mind my asking him to get the passport forms and fill up his part. Frieda's passport is so full, I don’t know how she is going to get into Italy. And both the passes expire end of September. We must get new ones in Rome.

I was very glad to hear the book was done: shall be interested to see it. You will probably now get into the real swing for writing.

I shall let you know my movements. We might even meet in Meran or Bozen. That is Italy now, but full Tyrol. It is never too hot here—but it must be pretty bad in town.

Au revoir,

D. H. Lawrence.

Z2, Via dei Bardi, Firenze,

To Nelly Morrison.                          i Sept,, 1921.

Dear Nelly Morrison,—

I had your letter yesterday. Everything goes well with us: we like your flat more every day: have all our meals on the terrace, when the wind isn’t too strong. I find it lovely and cool, and am writing a story about Venice. Later I want to write one about Florence and this house: modern, of course.

Is Venice very lovely just now? Writing about it makes me realise how beautiful it is.

Peggy is pretty well, I think. She’s not going to die of a broken heart, whatever else she dies of. So don’t flatter yourself. Yesterday Tina gave her a bath on the terrace here, in the red trough. She trembled and looked pathetic, but loved all the notice taken of her.

Poor Tina has trouble with her teeth, bad inflammation of the lower gums: looks a wretch and feels it, but is rather better now, after certain lotions, etc., from the dentist.

I tried Casanova, but he smells. One can be immoral if one likes, but one must not be a creeping, itching, fingering, inferior being, led on chiefly by a dirty sniffing kind of curiosity, without pride or clearness of soul. For me, a man must have pride, good natural inward pride. Without that, cleverness only stinks. But I will treat the battered volumes as gingerly as such crotte deserves.

Two days ago, Mrs. Gilbert Cannan arrived from Trance. She is an old friend. She was here when 7 ina was bathing Peggy, and drying the same Peggy in the shut-up bedroom— next the salotta here: Mrs. Cannan immediately began pining to come and stay in it for a week or two. She made me promise to write and ask you if you would let it to her for three weeks or a month, and she would engage to vacate it at once if you should need it or want it. She would have her meals with us, but I am not sure if I want a permanent guest. But do as you wish.

The plants are watered very regularly, and seem quite well.

Juta is due to arrive to-morrow in Florence.

Greet Gino, and be greeted yourself by us both.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Z2, Via del Bardi, Florence.

To Curtis Brown.                        i yth Sept., 1921.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Will you put these three poems with Birds, Beasts and Flowers: among the “Beasts.”

We leave here on Tuesday. Please write henceforth to Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicily. I hear Seeker is having trouble with Women in Love.

I hope you had a good holiday and are feeling well.

Yours,

D. H Lawrence.

Poems are “Fish.”

“Bat.”

“Man and Bat.”

To Catherine Carswell.                 Taormina, 29 Sept.

Did you take the plates for me from Haskard's?

We got home last night in a whirlwind and rain—but so glad to come to rest, I can't tell you—still, like this place best— the sea open to the east, to the heart of the east, away from Europe—i had your letter—it secured only a moment we saw you—but the sympathy is there. You must come here. The cloth has arrived in Austria, so all well. Love.

D. H. L.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taorminaj Sicily.

To Edward Garnett.                       17 Oct., 1921.

Deah Garnett,—

We got back here two weeks ago, and found the book, Grenzen der Seele, and your letter. I’m so sorry there are all these months cf delay.

I think Grenzen der Seele is really very interesting. But you know I am the last person in the world to judge as to what other people will like. Lucka’s study of the Grenzleute— the border-line people—as contrasted with the middle-people, seems to me very illuminating and fertile. The Grenzleute are those who are on the verge of human understanding, and who widen the frontiers of human knowledge all the time—and the frontiers of life. Strange, rather fascinating studies of Dostoievsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, etc. Quite fascinating if you like to read about books. But I've no idea what England likes to read, really. I won’t write direct to Cape now—it seems so late, and I don’t want the guinea. The only person Lucka really reverences at all is the genius, and reverences him the more according to the degree of purity of his genius, reverences him less according to the degree of his practicality. So he doesn’t think very highly of Napoleon—a Mittelmensch—and very highly of Shakespeare and Dostoievsky.

I was glad to hear from you again—wonder what you are doing—still looking after books, pruning them and re-potting them, I know.

I had heard about Bunny’s shop, but his marriage, no. So please write by return and say who she is and when the marriage took place and where the wedding was and is there a little Bunny by now, and is Mrs. Garnett pleased, and are you and do you flirt with your daughter-in-law? If you don’t,

then seriously something is wrong. Because I always think of you when a hornet hovers round the jam-pots after one has made jam. Only you're all badger-grey instead of striped. But a humming wasp ail the same.

I still feel battered after all the summer travels. Oh, travelling is hell—trains, etc. And the North always makes me feel just weak and hopeless. It’s a dreadful muddle. I’m so thankful to be back m the South, beyond the Straits of Messina, in the shadow of Etna, and with the Ionian Sea in front: the lovely, lovely dawn-sea where the sun does nothing but rise towards Greece, in the morning-past, and towards the east. Thank heaven, I need not look north, towards England or middle Europe.

I am collecting a book of short stories. Do please send me that Primrose Path story, and anything else you have. Or let them be typed out and send me the bill and the typed copies. I should be so much obliged. The Primrose Path story has never been published, and is probably good for a hundred dollars in America. I’ll share them with you when I get them.

Frieda sends many greetings. Will you ever come this way?

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S.—Greet Bunny from me—and all nice proper congratulations from us both.

I hear I am in worse odour than ever, for Women in Love. But, pah! what do I care for all the canaille.

Fell me David’s address, and I’ll send him a little present, just to keep him in mind that such tiresome people as ourselves are still in the world with him.

D. H. L.

To Catherine Carswell.

Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicilia.

Monday, 25 October, 1921.

My dear Catherine,—

So they don’t like your Camomile at all!—It may be the name, you know. Perhaps if you called it Gingerbread they’d sup it up like anything. To hell with them ail, anyhow. But 526

tell me the latest about it. I am always interested.—Their wry faces make me want the more to read the MS. Why ever didn’t you bring it along?

I have had Seeker very sick, over the John Bull article, and still worse, over a fellow who wants to bring a libel action because he says he's Halliday. Don’t know how it will all end. Snotty little lot of people.

I bet you are glad to get back. Travelling is peculiarly disheartening this year, I find. Not so much the inconveniences as the kind of slow poison one breathes in every new atmosphere.—I didn’t like Siena a bit. We had rather a lovely day in Rome, drove far out on the Campagna.— I was sick in Capri.—And now the very sight of a train makes me jib.— Yet I wouldn’t pretend to be serenely content. You wouldn’t believe me if I did. Italy has for some reason gone a little rancid in my mouth. May be just my mouth. And probably Italy—or Sicily, anyhow—is better than any other place even then. But I can’t get the little taste of canker out of my mouth. The people----

Here, of course, it is like a continental Mad Hatter’s teaparty. If you’ll let it be, it is all tea-party—and you wonder who on earth is going head over heels into the teapot next. On Saturday we were summoned to a gathering of Britons to discuss the erection of an English church here, at the estimated cost of £25,000 sterling—signed Bronte: which means, of course, Alec Nelson-Hood, Duca di Bronte. I didn t go, fearing they might ask me for the £25,000.

I am not very busy: just pottering with short stories. I hink I may as well get the MSS. together as far as possible. Feel like making my will also. Not that I am going to die. But to give myself a nice sense of finality.—Ask Don which regime: of Scots wears the tight tartan trews: the quite tight ones: if they wear them still, and if not, when they left off: if they wore them at all in the war-time: and if the officers also had them. I want a man in those tight trews in a story.—Also, will you tell me what then was the secret of the Etruscans, which you saw written so plainly in the place you went to? Please don’t forget to tell me, as they really do rather puzzle me, the Etruscans.

It is marvellous weather—I hear also in England. The place is very beautiful, and we go some rather fascinating wahd into the country. But I don’t really give a damn for any blooming thing. I haven’t heard from my sister, so don’t know if she has fetched her plates. I hope so. Did you hate carrying them? I never thanked that man for the Lady Gregory plays. But do you know I can’t read dear Lady Gregory: too much of the insipid old stew. I have only been reading Giovanni Verga lately. He exercises quite a fascination on me, and makes me feel quite sick at the end. But perhaps that is only if one knows Sicily.—Do you know if he is translated into English?—-I Malavoglia or Mastro don Gesualdo—or Novelle Pusticane, or the other short stories. It would be fun to do him—his language is so fascinating.

Tell me about the Camomile—and I hope all is well and happy. Greet Don. I must say I quite frequently sympathise with his point of view. Answer me my questions, and say what you are doing.

D. H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicilia,

To Edward Garnett.                      io Nov,, 1921.

Dear Garnftt,—

Thank you for the MS. of the story, which came to-day, I hope it was not a nuisance to you to send it.

No, I won't read Homer, my atom of Greek is too infinitesimal. But if you want to read Homer, I’ll send him you. Somebody made me a gift of him. And then, if you want to read Homer, why, you needn’t make the mistake of reading me.

No, my dear Garnett, you are an old critic and I shall always like you, but you are also a tiresome old pontiff and I shan’t listen to a word you say, but shall go my own way to the dogs and bitches, just as heretofore. So there.

I ordered Women in Love for you from Seeker. If he doesn’t send it you, go to 5, John St. and kill him at once. When

Z28

you get it, if you get it, and when you read it, if you read it, don’t for a moment imagine you are wrestling with the Iliad > Just remember that it is your young friend so-and-so, wipe away all your Homeric illusions, and bear nobly on.

It is lovely here, and the morning landscape is just like Homer. But only the landscape. Not man. I hope you will come one day.

If it is quite easy for you to find out, tell me what translations of the Sicilian Giovanni Verga have appeared in English. His two chief novels are I Malavoglia and Mastro don Gesualdo. Then the short sketches, the volumes, are Cavalleria Rusticana and Novelle Rusticane and Vagabondaggio and another. He is extraordinarily good—peasant—quite modern—Homeric—and it would need somebody who could absolutely handle English in the dialect, to translate him. He would be most awfully difficult to translate. That is what tempts me: though it is rather a waste of time, and probably I shall never do it. Though if I don’t, I doubt if anyone else will—adequately, at least.

I am glad Bunny is set up all right with a wife. Of course you’d say she was Irish even if she was a nigger as black as soot with lips like life-belts. But I’m sure she’s nice, Irish or not. I haven’t heard from him, so I can’t send him two antimacassars or a set of toilet-tidies until I do. O course he may have turned over a new leaf and started, ike John Bull, to disapprove of me. I hope not, it is so unoriginal.

I will send back the Grenzen der Seele,

Tell me if you come across any more MS.

Seeker is due to have all my next three boozs, but he may prefer to have novels.

Greet Mrs. Garnett—and I hope everything is lovely at the Ceame. Here the roses are just rushing into bloom, in masses, now the rain has come. But to-day is suddenly cold, it has snowed on Etna and on Calabria.

Saluti,

D. H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicilia.

To Donald Carswell.

15 Novem., 1921.

Deap Don,—

Many thanks for your letter: also to Catherine for hers. About the trews, that is all I want to know. Very good. ve done the story and can just correct it where it needs.

Am glad you’re going to earn money. What has Speyer done to forfeit his nationality?—or to make them say so?

I hear the weather is cold and awful in England. Here it has had a sharp cold touch. But now scirocco in hot billows of wet and clinging mist—and rain. Damn scirocco.

We’ve got no news except that a woman called Mabel Dodge Sterne writes from Taos, New Mexico, saying we can have a furnished adobe house there, for ourselves, and all we want, if we’ll only go. It seems Taos is on a mountain—7,000 feet up— and 23 miles from a railway—-and has a tribe of 600 free Indians who she says are interesting, sun-worshippers, rainmakers, and unspoiled. It sounds rather fun. I believe there’s a little bunch of American artists there, though. But that might make it easier just to live. Fun it would be if one could get a merchant ship to New Orleans or Galveston, Texas, and miss that awful New York altogether, don’t you think? Tell me if you know anything about such a place as Taos.—Of course I haven’t settled anything—and we have talked so often of a move, and never made it.—But don't tell anybody else, will you?

I am expecting every day Sea and Sardinia—the slight Sardinian travel book, from New York. It has got Juta’s coloured illustration. As soon as I get copies I’ll send you and Cath one. Also Seltzer is bringing out Tortoises, poems, as a chap-book, this month. I'll send that too when I get it. I wanted to send Cath the Adolf: the Rabbit Sketch: but have lost MS. and printed copy and everything. How the devil I’ve managed it I don’t know. Shall have to write to New York for a copy of the Dial, where it appeared. Ask Catherine another thing. Seltzer wanted to bring out the poem, Apostolic Beasts, as a chap-book too. (I know it should be Evangelic or Apocalyptic.) And he wanted, if so, to have a cover design representing the four beasts of the Evangelists—from the Apocalypse—Man, Lion, Bull, arid Eagle.—In mediaeval Missals and Books of Hours and such, sometimes one comes across fascinating diagrams of the four beasts. If ever you see one, tell me where and if it would reproduce for a cover design.

Everybody hated Aaron’s Rod—even Frieda. But I just had a cable from Seltzer that he thinks it wonderful. Maybe it is just a publisher’s pat. Anyhow it is better than a smack in the eye, such as one gets from England for everything—as Cath for her Camomile. If only she’d called it Rose-hearted Camellia, they’d have supped it up. Pah! canaille. Canaille, canaglia, SchweinhundereiI

The post is very bad here. One train fell in a river in Calabria, and all post and all luggage lost irretrievably: stolen, of course. Now the Fascist! and Communisti are at it in Rome. The Catholic Church is a deep one. It is trying to form a Catholic world league, political, and taking more the Communistic line. It is working hard in Germany and Austria and here—and in France—and also America, It may turn out a big thing. I shouldn’t wonder if before very long they effected a mild sort of revolution here, and turned out the king. It would be a clergy-industrial-socialist move—industrialists and clergy to rule in name of the people. Smart dodge, I think. If the exchange falls again they’ll effect it. i hen they 11 alb with Germany and Austria and probably France, and make a European ring excluding England. hat seems to be the idea.

Hope your ship is sailing nicely, and J. P. and all flourishing.

D. H. Lawrence.

There are clouds of all sorts of new birds in the garden, suddenly come south. And the storks are passing in the night, whewing softly and murmuring as they go overhead.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicily.

To Curtis Brown.

7th December, 1921.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I send you what MSS. are ready of the stories. The first part of The Fox was published in Nash's Magazine. The Captain's Doll is quite new. I am writing a third: The Ladybird—about the same length—30,000 words or so. These three I want to go in one volume by themselves. I will send The Ladybird as soon as it is done. These I call the three novelettes.

The true short stories I send are:

1. Samson and Delilah (Pub. English Review).

2. Fanny and Annie (Pub. Hutchinsons).

z. The Blind Man (English Review).

4. Hadrian—originally You Touched Me (Pub. in Land and

Water).

5. Monkey Nuts—unpublished.

6. The Horsedealer's Daughter—unpublished.

7. Tickets, Please—Strand Magazine.

8 The Primrose Path—unpublished.

Besides these I have two more short stories with the typist in Florence: hope to send them you in a few days. And then a last one—England, my England, I am working on. I think these will be quite enough short stories. If not, there are two animal sketches, Rex and Adolf, which I can send. Both have appeared in The Dial in America.

Seeker wants a book of short stories quick, for the spring. I think better let him have these little stories—not the three novelettes. Tell me what you think. I believe Land and Water cut You Touched Me (Hadrian). I will ask Mountsier to send a true copy from America. Wonder if you are back from America.

P.S.—I waited for the MSS. of the two other short stories, which I now enclose with the rest,

1. Tickets, Please: pub. in Strand Magazine.

2. Primrose Path: unpublished.

There remains now only England, my England, which was pub. in English Review but which I am re-writing. Also the "novelette"—The Ladybird—which is nearly ready.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicilia.

To Catherine Carswell.                    24 J any., 1922.

My dear Catherine,—

I had your letter: am sorry about the 'flu. I had it too, and it lasts such a long time. Thank goodness it did not keep me long in bed, but I've had it since Christmas and have hardly shaken it off yet. I believe it is partly an organic change in one's whole constitution—-through the. blood and psyche. We are at the end of our particular tether, and the breaking loose is an uncomfortable process.

My sister says you sent the plates so nicely and safely packed. She was so delighted with them. I do hope you didn't hate all the trouble.

I sent you the chap-book of Tortoises. Hope you have it. My sisters irritate me by loftily disapproving. I really am through with them: shall send them no more of my books. Basta!-—I had one or two copies of the American Sea and Sardinia: but Seeker is doing it in London, and I will have him send you a copy. He is buying sheets and pictures from Seltzer. It is quite amusing, I think.—He doesn't like my Aaron's Rod. That Rod, I’m afraid it is gentian root or wormwood stem. But they’ve got to swallow it sooner or later: miserable tonicless lot.—I am waiting to read the Camomile. Send me proofs if you have a double set, and I'll return them. I hope it's bitter, too.

I have once more gone back on my plan. I shrink as yet from the States. Ultimately I shall go there, no doubt. But I want to go east before I go west: go west via the east. I have a friend called Brewster, who went with wife and child from here last autumn to Kandy, Ceylon. He has got a big old ramshackle bungalow there, and is studying Pali and Buddhism at the Buddhist monastery, and asks me to come. So I shall go there. We had almost booked our passage to America, when suddenly it came over me I must go to Ceylon. I think one must for the moment withdraw from the world, away towards the inner realities that are real: and return, maybe, to the world later, when one is quiet and sure. I am tired of the world, and want the peace like a river: not this whisky and soda, bad whisky, too, of life so-called. I don’t believe in Buddhistic inaction and meditation. But I believe the Buddhistic peace is the point to start from—not our strident fretting and squabbling.

Then there is also a little Finn here called Nylander, J. W. Nylander. He was a sailor, then Captain of a tramp steamer. Then he wrote sea-stories, in Swedish. I read one volume, Seevolk, in German translation. He is about 50—has wife and child—and pension from the Finnish Government. But Finnish money is down like Italian. So they are very poor. They are returning to Norway at the end of March. He would very much like his stories translated to English: has written to an Englishwoman in Finland to do them. But then they would have to be put into proper literary shape. I said you might do that for him. The stories are all sea-stories: a bit soft, a bit weak, but not bad really. Since Norwegian-Scandinavian stuff is rather the boom, I thought if you wouldn’t mind the bother of going over the stories you might get some of the magazines to publish them. But if you think it is not worth your while, just say so. J. W. Nylander, Porta Catania, Taormina, until end of March: then Sloependen, near Kristiania, Norway, If you get on pleasantly by letter you might perhaps one day have a trip to Norway.—I have written to Mountsier and Seltzer about the stories in America. You would have to try and arrange simultaneous publication with Mountsier: Robert Mountsier, 417, West 118th Street, New York. If you do do the stories, don’t forget to write Mountsier to see what he is doing, will you—of course you would take a just percentage of any profits: and if America did your translation, too, then a percentage of that also. It might amuse you, and isn’t hard work.

The weather is vile here: really wicked. But one must possess one’s soul in patience. Now I hope you are well again, and J. P. and Don happy.

D. H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicilia.

To Curtis Brown.                        26 Jany., 1922.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Glad you are back: hope well and successfully back. But Miss Easterbrook and I got a lot done in the meantime.

This is answer to her letter of 20th inst.

1. I enclose both agreements, signed by me. You will look after them.

2. I enclose proof of “Almond Blossom” poem for the English Review.

3. Glad you have all the stories. For heaven’s sake—the English Review published England, my England, in 1915, under that title: although the story is entirely re-written. But best not to send it out again serially, unless with a note to that effect. Anyhow, no magazine will want it. For the rest of <he stories, all right.

4. You don’t enclose the letter from Mountsier which you mention, but I guess he has written me the same direct.

5. I can’t alter Hadrian, because I have nothing to alter it by. I will tell Mountsier to send a duplicate.

6. I didn't alter the original MS. at all, of Aaron's Rod. Or only a few words. I couldn’t. Seltzer sent me a clean typed copy of the book, begging for the alterations for the sake of the "general public” (he didn’t say jeune fille). I sat in front of the MS. and tried: but it was like Balaam’s Ass, and wouldn't budge. I couldn't do it, so I sent it back to Seltzer to let him do as he pleases. I would rather Seeker followed the true MS. if he will—and vogue la galere!

7. I have made no arrangement for the publication ot Studies in Classic American Literature, but Seltzer is booked to publish them in New York, so for heaven’s sake consult him, or I shall have more fat in the fire. I should rather like Cape to publish them. Is your MS. of these complete?

8. I can't go to America: another Balaam’s Ass. But when I try to turn my travelling nose westwards, grazie! he won’t budge. So, after vainly shoving and prodding the ass of my unwilling spirit, to get him on board and across the Atlantic, I have given up, and am writing to Cook’s at Naples to book berths on the Osterley, sailing from Naples, Feb. 26th for Colombo. I have a friend in Kandy learning Buddha in a monastery there—so I shall go with my wife there, for a bit. Wish me God-speed (not into the monastery).

9. Before I go I am asking Pinker to release to me what books of mine he still keeps the collecting rights over, and if he’ll do it, then I'll put everything, all my English publications, under your wing: if you’ll take them.

Meanwhile, BenediciteI

D. H. Lawrence.

I suppose you had Chatto’s letter which I forwarded! One for us, Miss Easterbrook, and be damned to them!

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicily.

To Curtis Brown.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I enclose a letter from Pinker. I want you to take over all my books: all the Duckworth books and the Seeker books, and have all accounts made out to you, and all payments. Then you’ll have all my English work in your hands. I’ll write to Duckworth to-morrow. Will you take everything under your wing?

Se vuole Dio—we are sailing from Naples on the Osterley, Orient Line, on 26th February, for Ceylon. The address in Ceylon is c o E. H. Brewster, “Ardnaree,” Lake View Estate, Kandy, Ceylon.

I am nearly half- way through the translation of a Sicilian novel, Mastro don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga. He just died— aged 82—in Catania. I think he is so very good. I have written 536 to the publishers, Fratelli Treves, of Milano, about copyright: but I hear there is no strict law between England and Italy—ask Seeker, I see he just published Tre Croci. I believe there was a translation of Mastro don Gesualdo, done by a Mary A. Craig, in 1893, I believe. But it will have disappeared. Will you find out about it? I will send you the MS.—all that is finished— before I leave. Afraid I shan’t have it done. Such a good novel. Verga is the man who wrote Cavalleria Rusticana.

I expect I shall have time for a reply from you. We leave this house on the 22nd for Naples. Any late letter you could post on the Osterley, or address to the S.S. Osterley, Orient Line, Naples, in partenza febbraio 26.

The story, Witch d la mode, hasn’t come from Pinker.

Think this is all this time.

D. H. Lawrence.

Fontana Vecchia,

Taormina, Sicily,

To Mrs. R. P.                                  Friday.

My dear Rosalind,—

Your letter yesterday. Our great news is that we are going to Ceylon—to friends who have gone and taken a bungalow near Kandy. He is studying Buddhism at the monastery. The address will be c o E. H. Brewster, ’Ardnaree, Lake View Estate, Kandy, Ceylon. I don’t know how long we shall stay or what we shall do, but I want to go. Am tired of tea-partying here. We are supposed to be sailing on the 26th of this month from Naples, by the Osterley, Orient Line, to Colombo. Isn’t it thrilling?

I don’t think I’d go to Austria with the babies if I were you. It is beautiful, but I was awfully depressed there, and not well. It is the life-exhaustion feeling. But you might like it. It is not wildly cheap—but fairly so. Innsbruck itself is no good: you'd have to go to a village round about: Mayrhofen, in the Zillertal; you might ask Perceval. Our place z.ell-am-csee is dear. B Douglas would know of a place. I hen Windeam said he had a lovely inn near⁻Bozen—Bolzano—in the mountains: and    an is lovely. Then the people here go to Asolo, north of Padua, and love it and say it’s cheap. But go to the Garda, because a lake is so lovely, plus the mountains. The steamers that will carry you here and there, quite cheap, are such fun. I loved the Garda. We were at Gargnano, half-way up. We were at a farmplace called San Gaudenzio—and loved it. I’ve forgotten the people’s names—Maria and Paolo. Maria, a strong peasant, does everything for you. A lovely place for children. But you ought to run up and look at it first. Stay at the Cervo inn, Gargnano— take steamer from Desenzano. Riva at the top of the lake is a jolly place, but might be hot. If I were you I’d go to the Garda. The mountains are lovely and wild behind. If you had a friend to explore. At the Cervo—a little hotel—was a German wife of the Italian proprietor—we liked her. We had a flat in the Villa Igea—she’d remember us—in 1912-13.

I have been busy translating Giovanni Verga’s Mastro don Gesualdo into English. Do you know Verga? Sicilian, so good: especially Gesualdo and I Malavoglia and some of the Novelle.

I am asking Seltzer to send you to Villa Ada a copy of the Canovaia Tortoise poems: also Sea and Sardinia. But it will take a while for them to come from New' York.

I get awfully irritated with theoretic socialism like Bertie’s.

You will be taking Bridget to Switzerland: you can look at the Garda then. On Como I stayed two years ago in Argegno, and liked it extremely. Such fun having excursions into the hills and then on the lake as well. There is a cafe-pastry-cook shop just opposite the quay in Argegno—with an English wife, and very friendly. They'd tell you about a pension. And Como is on your way.

I don’t a bit know how long we shall be in Ceylon—or what after. We were almost on board ship for America when I suddenly backed out—didn't want to go.

It's horrid weather here, and almond blossom full out.

I expect we’ll leave about the 20th from here. If you write at once we’ll get it. F. sends love. We ll meet again somewhere, that’s certain.                                                   «

D. H. L.

Grande Albergo, Santa Lucia, Quai Partenope, Napoli.

To Curtis Brown.

Deaf Curtis Brown,—

I sent you a letter saying, please agree to Seeker about Sardinia.

1 asked him please to make all accounts with you, and wrote the same to Duckworth, I hope too that you will soon make your first penny.

Treves wrote to me—I ought to have sent the letter. 1 hey said that all copyright was kept for himself by "il povere Giovanni Verga"—and that they would now revert to his heirs; that is his nephews—since Verga died in January. 1 reves are no longer the publishers of Verga. The publisher in London was J. R. Osgood, published the novels:

The Home by the Medlar Tree

(Z Malavogliaf) 1891

Mastro don Gesualdo 1893

translated by Mary A. Craig, first of these published America by Harper’s.

I wrote to Catania to Professor Zanboni, but he didn’t answer.

Treves told me very little—I don’t even know who publishes Verga now—they certainly did in 1920 still—but, anyhow, the publisher has no control over the copyright, apparently. Mrs. Carmichael will send you half the Verga MS.—we sail on Sunday—I am so sleepy, just come off the Palermo boat.

Sincerely,

D H. Lawrence.

p.S.—I presume you got the signed sheets for Seeker’s Women in Love special Seltzer copies. I consider he ought to pay me for those signatures, but if the gnat sticks in his throat ar 1 he doesn’t want to, let him go ahead without bothering don care.—D. H. L.

p.S.__Of course I want you to take control also of Seeker's little de luxe edition of Women in Love.

P.S.—Yes, of course, Mountsier keeps the American control.

R.M.S. “Osterley ”

To Mrs. R. P.                Wednesday, 8 March, 1922.

My dear Rosalind,—

Here we are on the ship—ten days at sea. It is rather lovely— perfect weather all the time, ship steady as can be, enough wind now to keep it cool. We went on shore at Port Said—and it's still like Arabian Nights, spite of all. Then I loved coming through the Suez Canal—5 miles an hour—takes 18 hours. You see the desert, the sandhills, the low palm trees, Arabs with camels working at the side. I like it so much. Now we are in the Arabian Sea, and expect to come to Colombo on Monday morning: 15 days’ voyage.

The ship is so pleasant—only about half full—or less—so plenty of room. We have come second class, and it is perfectly comfortable and nice, couldn’t want anything better. Alas, it cost £ 140 for the two of us. But I had to get out of Europe. In Ceylon we stay with friends. There are children on board having the time of their lives. I am translating Verga’s Mastro don Gesualdo, to pass the time. By the way I should be so glad if you would some time send me an old Italian novel or book that you have done with—if it is interesting. I should like to go on reading Italian. The people on board are mostly simple Australians. I believe Australia is a good country, full of life and energy. I believe that is the country for you if you had anything specific in mind. If we don’t want to go on living in Ceylon I shall go to Australia if we can manage it.

I ordered you Sea and Sardinia and Tortoises, I hope you will get them—the former from England, Seeker, the latter from America, which takes a long time.

Being at sea is so queer—it sort of dissolves for the time being all the connections with the land, and one feels a bit like a sea-bird must feel. It is my opinion that once beyond the Red Sea one does not feel any more that tension and pressure one suffers from in England—in Europe altogether—even in America, I believe—perhaps worse there. I feel so glad I have come out, but don't know how the money is going to behave. Can’t help it.

Write and tell me all that happens—’ Ardnaree," Lake View Estate, Kandy, Ceylon. It seems difficult in this world to get a new start—so much easier to make more ends. F. sends many greetings—she is a bit dazed by the sea.

D. H. L.

To Catherine Carswell.

“ Ardnaree” Lake View Estate, Kandy.

25th. March, 1922.

We are here and settling down—very hot at first—but one soon takes naturally to it—soon feels in a way at home—sort of root race home. We’re in a nice spacious bungalow on the hill above Kandy in a sort of half jungle of a coconut-palm estate—and cocoa—beautiful, and such sweet scents. The Prince of Wales was here on Thursday—looks worn out. The Perahera in the evening with a hundred elephants was lovely. But I don't believe I shall ever work here.

D. H. L.

“Ardnaree,” Lake View Estate, Kandy, Ceylon.

To Mrs. A. L. Jenkins.

28 March, 1922.

Dear Mrs. Jenkins,—

Well, here we've been for a fortnight—rather lovely to look at, the place-—but very hot—and I don’t feel at all myself. Don’t think I care for the East. Shall try going up to Nuwara Eliya next week. But this address always good,

I doubt if we shall stop long—two or three months: then come on. My mind turns towards Australia. Shall we really come and try West? I have a fancy for the apple-growing regions, south from Perth: have a great fancy to see apple trees in blossom: and to be really "white. I feel absolutely dead off Buddhism, cither Nibbana or Nirvana, Kama or Karma. T hey can have Buddha.

But we saw the Perahera and the Prince of Wales.

Tell me if you think we should like W. Australia—if not we’ll go straight to Sydney.

Greetings from my wife and me.

D. H. Lawrence.

°ArdnareeLake View Estate, Kandy, Ceylon.

To Robert Pratt Barlow.

zo March, 1922.

Dear Pratt Barlow,—

We have been here these last 18 days: the heat in the middle of the day rather overwhelming, but morning and evening delicious: the place beautiful, in its way very, the jungle round the house, palms and noisy, scraping and squeaking tropical creatures: good-looking, more or less naked, dark bluey-brown natives. But all a bit extraneous. I feel I don’t belong, and never should. I think next week we shall go up higher to Nuwara Eliya.

I wonder what you are doing. This will probably follow you to England. We were at the Perahera here for the Prince of Wales. It was wonderful, gorgeous and barbaric with all the elephants and flames and devil dances in the night. One realizes how very barbaric the substratum of Buddhism is. I shrewdly suspect that high-flownness of Buddhism altogether exists mostly on paper: and that its denial of the soul makes it always rather barren, even if philosophically, etc., more perfect. In short, after a slight contact, I draw back and don’t like it.

I wonder what you and Cunard thought of the last tirade at your house. Probably nothing. But I do think, still more now I am out here, that we make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America—as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we’re rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong. That is the conclusion that is forced on me. So I am making up my mind to return to England during the course of the summer. I really think that the most living clue of life is in us Englishmen in England, and the great mistake we make is in not uniting together in the strength of this real living clue—religious in the most vital sense—uniting together in England and so carrying the vital spark through. Because as far as we are concerned it is in danger of being quenched. I know now it is a shirking of the issue to look to Buddha or the Hindu or to our own working men, for the impulse to carry through. It is in ourselves, or nowhere and this looking to the outer masses is only a betrayal. I think too the Roman Catholic Church, as an institution, granted of course some new adjustments to life, might once more be invaluable for saving Europe: but not as a mere political power.

But this I know: the responsibility for England, the living England, rests on men like you and me and Cunard—probably even the Prince of Wales—and to leave it all to Bottomleys, etc., is a worse sin than any sin of commission.

Best wishes from my wife and me.

D H. Lawrence.

“Ardnaree,”

Kandy, Ceylon.

To Austin Harrison.

ii April, 1922.

Dear Harrison,—

I got the proofs of The Horsedealer’s Daughter here this morning. No good sending them back you 11 have printe 1 the thing doubtless by the time you get this.

I’ve been in Ceylon a month and nearly sweated myself into a shadow. Still it’s a wonderful place to see and experience. There seems to be a flaw in the atmosphere, and one sees a darkness, and through the darkness the days before the Flood, marshy, with elephants mud-grey and buffaloes rising from the mud, and soft-boned voluptuous sort of people, like plants under water, stirring in myriads.

I think I shall go on to Australia at the end of the month. Ask Curtis Brown for my address if you want it, will you?

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Kandy.

To Catherine Carswell.                   17th April, 1922.

We are sailing on at the end of the month to Australia—find Ceylon too hot and enervating, though it was lovely to look at it. The East is queer—how it seems to bleed one’s energy and make one indifferent to everything! If I don’t like Australia I shall go on to San Francisco. Now one is started, nothing like keeping going.

Yours,

D. H. L.

“Ardnaree,"

Kandy, Ceylon.

To Curtis Brown.                        22 April, 1922.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I cabled you to-day—sailing fremantle. Hope you got the cable. We sail for West Australia on Monday. Address me as I said—c/o Mrs. Jenkins, Strawberry Hill, Perth, West Australia.

The Orsova will bring the mail, but alas, we shan’t get it, as we sail by her. That means another month’s delay, don't wonder therefore if you get no answers to your letters.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

I expect Mountsier will send you shortly the first half of another Verga translation, of the Novelle Rusticane:—short stories of Sicily. I suggest as title the title of one of the stories "Black Bread’ ---Sicilian short stories by Giovanni Verga. I am

given to understand that this volume was never copyrighted by Verga. You might possibly sell some of the sketches to the magazines.

D H. L.

R M.S. “Orsova,”

to Fremantle.

We get there Thursday.

To Lady Cynthia Asquith. Sunday, 30th April, 1922.

Here we are on a ship again—somewhere in a very big blue choppy sea with flying fishes sprinting out of the waves like winged drops, and a Catholic Spanish priest playing Chopin at the piano—very well—and the boat gently rolling.

I didn't like Ceylon—at least I liked looking at it—but not to live in. The East is not for me—the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black bottomless, hopeless eyes—and the heads of elephants and buffaloes poking out of primeval mud—the queer noise of tall metallic palm trees: ach!—altogether the tropics have something of the world before the flood—hot dark mud and the life inherent in it: makes me feel rather sick. But wonderful to have known. We saw ----- at the —-      a tonely

little glum white fish he was sitting up there at the Temple of the Tooth with his chin on his hands gazing blankly down on all the swirl of the East, like a sort of Narcissus waiting to commit black suicide. The Perahera wonderful—midnight —huge elephants, great flares of coconut torches, princes like peg-tops swathed round and round with muslin -and then tomtoms and savage music and devil dances phase after pi ase and that lonely little white fish--- up aloft—and the

black eyes and black bright sweating bodies of the naked dancers under the torches—and the clanging of great mud-born elephants roaring past—made an enormous impression on me— a glimpse into the world before the Flood. I can t quite ge back into history. he soft, moist, elephantine prehisto as sort of swamped in over my known world and on one drifts.

But you said, not about India, but about us. No, I am not angry—-no more of my tirades—“the sea seems so big—and the world of elephants and buffaloes seems such a vast twilight— and by sheer or mere proximity with the dark Singhalese one feels the vastness of the blood stream, so dark and hot and from so far off. What does life in particular matter? Why should one care? One doesn't. Yet I don’t believe in Buddha—hate him in fact—his rat-hole temples and his rat-hole religion. Better Jesus.

We are going to Australia—Heaven knows why: because it will be cooler, and the sea is wide. Ceylon steams heat and it isn't so much the heat as the chemical decomposition of one’s blood by the ultra-violet rays of the sun. Don’t know what we’ll do in Australia—don’t care. The world of idea may be all alike, but the world of physical feeling is very different—one suffers getting adjusted—but that is part of the adventure. I think Frieda feels like me, a bit dazed and indifferent—reckless —I break my heart over England when I am out here. Those natives are back of us—in the living sense lower than we are. But they're going to swarm over us and suffocate us. We are, have been for five centuries, the growing tip. Now we’re going to fall. But you don’t catch me going back on my whiteness and Englishness and myself. English in the teeth of all the world, even in the teeth of England. How England deliberately undermines England. You should see India. Between Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs, etc., we are done—you asked me a year ago who won the war—we’ve all lost it. But why should we bother, since it’s their own souls folk have lost. It is strange and fascinating to wander like Virgil in the shades.

Don't buy Sea and Sardinia because I shall have to pay Martin Seeker for it. He must send it you. It will amuse you.

I'm glad the boys are well, and that Herbert Asquith likes reading other people’s books. That’s better than having to read one’s own: and it’s much better to be doing something than nothing. I merely translate Giovanni Verga—Sicilian— Mastro don Gesualdo and Novelle Rusticane—very good—to keep myself occupied. If your husband would like to read them—the translations—-tell him to ask Curtis Brown.

F. greets you.

D. H Lawrence.

Darlington,

West Australia.

To Curtis Brown.                        15th May, 1:922.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

We've been here in W. A. for a fortnight, and are taking the P< & O. boat Malwa on to Sydney on Thursday. I've had no mail for five weeks, but hope to get my letters from the Malwa in Perth before we sail. Don't write to me before I send you an address. We shall probably go on from Sydney across the Pacific, and I want to stop in the South Sea Islands a bit, if I can: and ultimately land in Taos, New Mexico-—where I was going first.

It’s queer here: wonderful sky and sun and air—new and clean and untouched—and endless hoary "bush" with no people—all feels strange and empty and unready. I suppose it will have its day, this place. But its day won’t be our day. One feels like the errant dead, or the as-yet-unborn: a queer feeling. It is not. And the people are not. And there is a queer, pre-primeval ghost over everything. Flinders Petrie says that a colony is no younger than its mother- country. In many ways it is older: more nerve-worn. Queer world altogether. Will send an address soon.

D. H. Lawrence.

“Wyewurk,” Thirroul, N.S.W., Australia.

To Mrs. A. L. Jenkins

28 May, 1922.

Dear Mrs. Jenkins,—

Well, here we are in a little house to ourselves on the edge of the cliff some 40 miles south of Sydney. It s a weird place with coal-mines near. I believe I wish I’d stayed in Darlington. In fact I’m sure I do. Australia goes from bad to worse in my eyes. Sydney and the harbour are quite one of the sights of me world. But the quality of the life is absolutely too much, or too little for me. Talk about crude, raw, and self-satisfied. If every American is a King or Queen, I'm sure every Australian is a little Pope all on his own, God's Vicar. * There is nothing better than me on earth,” he seems silently to proclaim, not with tongues of angels or tones of silver, either: and not always silently. I've got a bitter burning nostalgia for Europe, for Sicily, for old civilisation and for real human understanding— not for this popery of sacred "convenience -—everything is so convenient,” they keep telling you. They can keep their convenience.

And I shan t be able to leave till July—the Marama, July 6th at the earliest—and a poky little steamer. God, how I hate new countries. They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything. I do wish I had stayed in Western Australia. Trap tardl

You were so awfully nice to us, too—and here we don’t know a soul; nor want to. I found your letter to Mr. Toy—but don’t know if I shall present it. So much for gratitude from me. But I feel I simply can't face knowing anybody: it’s enough to look at ’em.

We shall go on to San Francisco: have taken this house “Wyewurk” (why not "Wireworks”?) for a month. Meanwhile my psalm is “Lord, remember David.” Of course F. is happy for the moment tidying the house.

Remember me nicely to Mrs. Gawler. Tell her I agree with her; I am a fool.

The Pacific is just under a little cliff—almost under the doorstep: and heavens, such a noisy ocean.

I am ordering you poems.

It would seem like sarcasm to ask you to come to Sydney. But if you feel like it, do come-—plenty of room here.

Many greetings from us both.

D. H. Lawrence

Had a letter from Mr. Throssell, husb. of Katharine Pritchard. Too late again.

Threw Dorothea and sonnets into the Ocean from the ship.— Malwa empty, and quite pleasant.

Thirroul,

South Coast, N.S.W.

To Catherine Carswell.                     -2.-2.nd June, 1922.

My dear Catherine,—

Camomile came last week—reached me here—the very day I sent you a copy of the American Aaron’s Rod. I have read Camomile, and find it good: slighter than Open the Door, but better made. Myself I like that letter-diary form. And I like it because of its drift: that one simply must stand out against the social world, even if one misses “life.” Much life they have to offer! Those Indian Civil Servants are the limit: you should have seen them even in Ceylon: conceit and imbecility. No, she was well rid of her empty hero, and all he stands for: tin cans. It was sometimes very amusing, and really wonderfully well written. I can see touches of Don (not John, Juan, nor Giovanni, thank goodness) here and there. I hope it will be a success and that it will flourish without being trodden on.

If you want to know what it is to feel the “correct” social world fizzle to nothing, you should come to Australia. It is a weird place. In the established sense, it is socially nil. Happy-go-lucky, don’t-you-bother, we’re-in-Australia. But also there seems to be no inside life of any sort: just a long lapse and drift. A rather fascinating indifference, a physical indifference to what we call soul or spirit. It's really a weird show. The country has an extraordinary hoary, weird attraction. As you get used to it, it seems so old, as if it had missed all this Semite-Egyptian-Indo-European vast era of history, and was coal age, the age of great ferns and mosses. It hasn't got a consciousness —just none—too far back. A strange effect it has on one. Often I hate it like poison, then again it fascinates me, and the spell of its indifference gets me. I can’t quite explain it: as if one resolved back almost to the plant kingdom, before souls, spirits and minds were grown at all: only quite a live, energetic body with a weird face.

The house is an awfully nice bungalow with one big room and z small bedrooms, then kitchen and wash-house—and a plot of grass—and a low bushy cliff, hardly more than a bank-—and the sand and the sea. The Pacific is a lovely ocean, but my! how boomingly, crashingly noisy as a rule. ] o-day for the first time it only splashes and rushes, instead of exploding and roaring. We bathe by ourselves—and run in and stand under the shower-bath to wash the very sea-ey water off. The house costs zo/- a week, and living about as much as England: only meat cheap.

We think of sailing on 10th August via Wellington and Tahiti to San Francisco—land on 4th September. Then go to Taos. Write to me: c/o Mrs. Mabel Dodge Sterne, Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. I am doing a novel here—half done it—funny sort of novel where nothing happens and such a lot of things should happen: scene Australia. Frieda loves it here. But Australia would be a lovely country to lose the world in altogether. I’ll go round it once more—-the world—and if ever I get back here I'll stay. I hope the boy is well, and Don flourishing, and you as happy as possible.

D. H. L.

Taos, New Mexico.

To Martin Seeker.                         19 Sept,, 1922.

Dear Secker,—

We got here last week and since then I have been away motoring for five days into the Apache country to see an Apache dance. It is a weird country, and I feel a great stranger still.

I have your letter of July 25. Mountsier says he is trying to publish Ladybird here, and that the book must by no means appear in England before it is settled. I got $1,000 from Hearst’s for Captain's Doll, for the International. And it is this kind of money I have to live on. England makes me about £120 a year: if I got no more than that I should have to whistle my way across the globe. Therefore America must have the first consideration. On the English crust I could but starve, now as ever.

I finished Kangaroo and wait for Mountsier to send me the typescript. Then I’ll revise it and let Curtis Brown have it.

Since last Christmas Curtis has paid less than £100 into my

bank for me. Well, if that is all England cares about my books, I don't care if England never sees them.

Of course I know it’s not your fault, and that it is thin rations for you as well as for me. But I can’ t help it. If America will accept me and England won’t, I belong to America.

I might do you another short story to fill up your Blind Man book. Seltzer is calling it England, my England. Let me know about this.

Do send me all the news. How is Compton Mackenzie?

Send me news of him.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Seltzer is just bringing out Fantasia of the Unconscious, and the short stories next month.

c/o Mrs. Mabel Sterne, Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A,

To Mrs. A. L. Jenkins.

20 Sept., 1922.

Dear. Mrs. Jenkins,—

Just a line to you to say we have arrived at last and have got our feet on earth again. I found your letter here—glad you seem settled.

We motored here 75 miles from Santa Fe across the desert— nearly shaken to bits. The house Mrs. Sterne built for us—a long adobe house, one room deep and one storey high, here on the Indian Reservation. It is quite smart inside, and sort of brown mud outside. The place is 6,000 ft. up, so one s heart pit-a-pats a bit. I haven’t got used to it yet. It is sunny, and hot in the sun, but the rain is beginning.

But still I haven’t extricated all of me out of Australia. In one part of myself I came to love it—really to love it, Australia. But the restless "questing beast’’ part of me hiked me out, and here I am.

We got pretty tired of the Tahiti, though she was comfortable. But the people uninspiring. We picked up a cinema rowd ai Papeete, all of them hating one another like poison, several of them drunk all the trip.

55i

Frieda is boiling wild plums that the Indians brought us—I must rush to supervise, of course. Wri’e again and tell us news. We’ll meet somewhere.

Many greetings from both.

D. H. Lawrfnce.

Taos, New Mexico,

U.S.A.

To E. M. Forster.

20 Sept., 1922.

Dear E. M.,—

We got here last week from San Francisco—from Sydney— Found your letter. Yes, I think of you—of your saying to me, on top of the downs in Sussex—“How do you know I’m not dead?” Well, you can’t be dead, since here’s your script. But think you did make a nearly deadly mistake glorifying those business people in Howard's End. Business is no good.

Do send me anything you publish, and I'll order Seltzer to send you two of my books which are only published here—one appearing just now.

Taos is a tiny place, 30 miles from the railway, high up— 6,000 ft.—in the desert. 1 feel a great stranger, but have got used to that feeling, and prefer it to feeling “homely.” After all, one is a stranger, nowhere so hopelessly as at home.

I think we shall stay here the winter, so when you feel moved to it, write again. Frieda sitting on an iron-grey pony jogging through the sage-brush still, out of her qualms, spoke of you and Brahma. I didn't care at all for Buddha. Sono morti della vera morte, quelle persone,

Saluti buoni,

D. H. Lawrence.

I've just come back from motoring five days into the Apache country, to an Apache feast. These are Red Indians—so different—yet a bit Chinesey. I haven’t got the hang of them yet. Here is a pueblo of the grain-growing Indians.

Tell Leonard Woolf he might like to publish my translation of Giovanni Verga's Novelle Rusticane, if he asks Curtis Brown for it.—D. H. L.

Taos, New Mexico.

To Harriet Monroe,                       23 Sept., 1922.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

Well, here we are in the fair middle of the New World: feeling a bit strange so far, but getting used to it. The desert is yellowish, and Taos mountain soft and unwilling, as I sit here and look at it. Like an unwilling woman. I should say, wouldn't you, the most unwilling woman in the world is Thais: far more unwilling than Cassandra. The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself. America affects me like that.

Alice Corbin came here along with us. I like her very much. But her mouth talks of freedom and her eyes ask only to have freedom taken away; such freedom. The Land of the Free. Thank God I am not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.

I am glad you publish Turkey Cock and Evening Land. Turkey Cock is one of my favourites.

When we come eastwards, I hope we shall see you. Meanwhile—AveI

D. H. Lawrence.

Taos, New Mexico,

U.S.A.

To W. Siebcnhaar.

25 Sept., 1922.

Dear Mr. Siebenhaap,—

Yesterday came your letters—two—and the first part of Max Havelaar. I read these chapters and liked them very much. I think your translation is perfectly splendid: you seem to me to have caught so well the true spirit of the thing. Really, it seems to me a first-rate translation. Only the poem, alas, comes out rather tedious. That particular kind of poem is very difficult to keep alive: even if it is very living in the original, which I rather doubt.

I shall wait till I get a few more chapters before forwarding the MS. to my agent, to put before the publishers. If only they won't say it is too ‘'old-fashioned.” That is the cry they raise against the Sicilian, Giovanni Verga, one of whose novels I translated, because I think him so good. They want things modern and thrilling: ah, they weary me.

We stayed a week in San Francisco, then came on here: motored about too miles across the desert from Larny, via Santa Fe. It is a weird country, this high desert plateau covered with pale, yellow-flowering sage-brush, broken by the deep canyons where the rivers flow, and again interrupted by the Rocky Mountains which in this part seem to sit ponderously on the plain. Taos is about 7,000 ft. above the sea.

We have got a very charming house on the edge of the desert, one mile from the Mexican plaza—the village—and three miles from the old Indian pueblo. There are about 600 Indians in the pueblo—very nice they are. We go riding on horseback with them across the space, and enjoy it immensely. Then on Saturday is their great “dance,” to which Indians come from a hundred miles round, Apaches, Navajos. We are all the time on the go: not still like in Australia.

Well, I hope we shall have good luck with the publishing of Max Havelaar. Vediamo! I shall look out for the rest of the MS.

My wife sends many greetings, with mine, to Mrs. Sieben-haar and to you. Remember me to Miss Curtis. I had a letter from Mrs. Jenkins, from London, She seems more contented now.

Best of wishes,

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Taos, New Mexico,

U.S.A.

To Catherine Carswell.

29th September, 1922.

My dear Catherine,—

Your letter from the “Tinner’s Arms” came last night. I always think Cornwall has a lot to give one. But Zennor sounds too much changed.

Taos, in its way, is rather thrilling. We have got a very pretty adobe house, with furniture made in the village, and Mexican and Navajo rugs, and some lovely pots. It stands just on the edge of the Indian reservation: a brook behind, with trees: in front, the so-called desert, rather like a moor but covered with whitish-grey sage-brush, flowering yellow now: some 5 miles away the mountains rise. On the north—we face east—Taos mountain, the sacred mt. of the Indians, sits massive on the plain—some 8 miles away. The pueblo is towards the foot of the mt., z miles off: a big, adobe pueblo on each side the brook, like two great heaps of earthern boxes, cubes. There the Indians all live together. They are pueblos—these houses were here before the Conquest—very old: and they grow grain and have cattle, on the lands bordering the brook, which they can irrigate. We drive across these "deserts"—white sage-scrub and dark green pinon scrub on the slopes. On Monday we went up a canyon into the Rockies to a deserted gold mine. The aspens are yellow and lovely. We have a pretty busy time, too. I have already learnt to ride one of these Indian ponies, with a Mexican saddle. Like it so much. We gallop off to the pueblo or up to one of the canyons. Frieda is learning too. Last night the young Indians came down to dance in the studio, with two drums: and we all joined in. It is fun: and queer. The Indians are much more remote than Negroes. This week-end is the great dance at the pueblo, and the Apaches and Navajos come in wagons and on horseback, and the Mexicans troop to Taos village. Taos village is a Mexican sort of plaza—piazza—with trees and shops and horses tied up. It lies one mile to the south of us: so four miles from the pueblo. We see little of Taos itself. There are some American artists, sort of colony: but not much in contact. The days are hot sunshine: noon very hot, especially riding home across the open. Night is cold. In winter it snows, because we are 7,000 feet above sea-level. But as yet one thinks of midsummer. We are about 30 miles from the tiny railway station: but we motored 100 miles from the main line.

Well, I'm afraid it will all sound very fascinating if you are just feeling cooped up in London. don’t want you to feel envious. Perhaps it is necessary for me to try these places, perhaps it is my destiny to know the world. It only excites the outside of me. The inside it leaves more isolated and stoic than ever. That’s how it is. It is all a form of running away from oneself and the great problems: all this wild west and the strange Australia. But I try to keep quite clear. One forms not the faintest inward attachment, especially here in America. America lives by a sort of egoistic will, shove and be shoved. Well, one can stand up to that too: but one is quite, quite cold inside. No illusion. I will not shove, and I will not be shoved. Sono io!

In the spring I think I want to come to England. But I feel England has insulted me, and I stomach that feeling badly. Pe.ro, son sempre inglese. Remember, if you were here you’d only be hardening your heart and stiffening your neck—it is either that or be walked over, in America.

D. H. L.

In my opinion a "gentle" life with John Patrick and Don, and a gentle faith in life itself, is far better than these women in breeches and riding-boots and sombreros, and money and motor-cars and wild west. It is all inwardly a hard stone and nothingness. Only the desert has a fascination—to ride alone— in the sun in the forever unpossessed country—away from man. That is a great temptation, because one rather hates mankind nowadays. But pazienza, sempre pazienza! I am learning Spanish slowly, too.

D. H. L.

Taos, New Mexico.

T o Willard Johnson.            Early Autumn, 1922.

Chere Jeunesse,—

Many thanks for the------book. I read it through. But

I’m sorry, it didn't thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems so would be. Think of the malice, the sheer malice of a Beardsley drawing, the wit and the venom of the mockery. I hese drawings are so completely without irony, so crass, so strained and so would-be. It isn’t that they've got anything to reveal at all. That man’s coition with a tree, for example. There's nothing in it but the author’s attempt to be startling. Whereas if he wanted to be really wicked, he'd see that even a tree has its own daimon, and a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. Beardsley saw these things. But it takes imagination.

The same with the text. Really, ------ might mutilate

himself, like a devotee of one of the early Christian sects, and hang his penis on his nose-end and a testicle under each ear, and definitely testify that way that he’d got such appendages, it wouldn’t affect me. The word penis or testicle or vagina doesn’t shock me. Why should it? Surely I am man enough to be able to think of my own organs with calm, even with indifference. It isn’t the names of things that bother me; nor even ideas about them. I don’t keep my passions, or reactions or even sensations in my head. They stay down where they belong. And really, ——— with his head full of copulation and committing mental fornication and sodomy every minute, is just as much a bore as any other tedious individual with a dominant idea. One wants to say: ⁴ Ah, dirty little boy, leave yourself alone.”

Which after all isn’t prudery. It’s just because one has one’s own genuine sexual experiences, and all these fingerings and naughty words and shocking little drawings only reveal the state of mind of a man who has never had any sincere, vital experience in sex; just as a little boy never has, and can t have had; so he’s itching with a feeble curiosity and self-induced excitement. Which is principally tedious because it shows a feeble, spunkless sort of state of things.

If------wasn’t a frightened masturbator, he’d know that

sex-contact with another individual meant a whole meeting, a contact between two alien natures, a grim rencontre, half battle and half delight always, and a sense of renewal and deeper being afterwards.--is too feeble and weak-kneed for

the fight, he runs away and chews his fingers and tries to look important by posing as mad. Being too much of a wet-leg, as they say in England, nakedly to enter into the battle and embrace with woman.

The tragedy is, when you’ve got sex in your head, instead of down where it belongs, and when you have to go on copulating

with your ears and your nose. It’s such a confession of weakness, impotence. Poor —---is sensually, if not technically,

impotent, and the book should have for its sub-title: Relaxations for the Impotent.

But there’s the trouble; men have most of them got their sex in their head nowadays, and nowhere else. They start all their deeper reactions in their heads, and work themselves from the top downwards, which of course brings disgust, because you’re only having yourself all the time, no matter what other individual you take as machine-d-plaisir, you're only taking yourself all the time.

Why don’t you jeunesse let all the pus of festering sex out of your heads, and try to act from the original centres? The old, dark religions understood. ’’God enters from below,” said the Egyptians, and that’s right. Why can’t you darken your minds, and know that the great gods pulse in the dark, and enter you as darkness through the lower gates. Not through the head. Why don’t you seek again the unknown and invisible gods who step sometimes into your arteries, and down the blood vessels to the phallos, to the vagina, and have strange meetings there? There are different dark gods, different passions. Hermes Ithyphallos has more than one road. The god of gods is unknowable, unutterable, but all the more terrible: and from the unutterable god step forth the mysteries of our prompting in different mysterious forms: call it Thoth, or Hermes, or Bacchus, or Horus, or Apollo: different promptings, different mysterious forms. But why don’t you leave off your old white festerings in silence, and let a light fall over your mind and heal you? And turn again to the dark gods, which are the dark promptings and passion-motions inside you, and have a reverence for life.

----seems to me such a poor, impoverished, self-conscious specimen. Why should one be self-conscious and impoverished when one is young and the dark gods are at the gates?

You'll understand if you want to. Otherwise it’s your own affair.

D. H. Lawrence.

Taos, New Mexico.

To Harriet Monroe.            Wednesday, 4 October, 1922.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

If there is time make the tiny alterations at the end of Turkey Cock.

What do I find? God knows. Not, not freedom—but freedom is an Illusion anyhow, as you suggest. A tension like a stretched bow, which might snap, but probably won't. Something a bit hard to bear. "Stiff-necked and uncircumcised generation"—That inhuman resistance to the Divinity—would be perhaps superhuman and 4th dimensional. But always resistance. Reminds me of the great cries of the Old Testament: "How long will ye harden your hearts against me? But who is Jehovah in this case? I don't know. An Almighty, however, not a Dove! A Thunderbolt, not a Logos.

Probably we’ll stay here all winter. I’d like to do a novel here.

Yes, I shall be glad to see you and Chicago: spite of terrors.

D. H. Lawrence.

Taos, New Mexico.

To W. Siebenhaar.                         25 Oct., 1922.

Dear Mr. Siebenhaar,—

I have Chapter 7 of Max Havelaar. I wish you’d done the whole book. One needs to have the whole, to get an impression. What there is, I like very much. I send it to my agent to-day, for him to place before the publishers. He will write you. He is: Robert Mountsier, 417, West 118th St., New York City.

It is wonderful here, with the aspens yellow on the Rocky Mts., the nights freezing, the days hot, the horses and asses roaming on the whitish, sage-brush desert. My wife and I ride all the afternoon, and love it. But it isn t sympatisch 1 ike Australia: more of the will.

Greet Mrs. Siebenhaar and be greeted.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To Catherine Carswell.               17th December, 1922.

My dear Catherine,—

This is late for Christmas. But I ordered you a copy of England, my England, which I hope you get in time.

You see, we have made a little move—only 17 miles. Taos too much. Mabel Sterne and suppers and motor drives and people dropping in. This is, materially, very fine. We have an old 5-room log cabin on this big wild ranch on the Rocky foothills—the snow mountains behind—a vast landscape below, vast, desert, and then more mountains west, far off in Arizona, a sky-line. Very beautiful. Trees all behind—and snow. The ranch people don’t do much—they are educated people—more or less—only three of them now—young man and wife, and his sister—name Hawk. Very nice and kind—live in house three minutes below—have about 125 head of cattle—and ranch 1,500 acres—but mostly wild. The coyotes come down howling at evening. We’ve got two young Danish artists in a tiny log cabin—they came along with us—and we all chop down trees for our burning, and go off riding together. Altogether it is ideal, according to one’s ideas. But innerlich, there is nothing. It seems to me, in America, for the inside life, there is just blank nothing. All this outside life—and marvellous country— and it all means so little to one. I don’t quite know what it is one wants because the ordinary society and "talk" in Europe are weary enough. But there is no inside life throb here—none —all empty—people inside dead, outside bustling (sometimes). Anyhow, dead and always on the move. Truly, I prefer Europe. Liberty—space—deadness. I’m expecting Thomas Seltzer and wife for Christmas—we go to Taos—also Mountsier. There will be an Indian dance at the pueblo—but the Indians are very American—no inside life. Money and moving about—nothing more. I suppose we’ll stay another three months here—then come east—come to Europe—perhaps via Greenland. I know now I don't want to live anywhere very long. But I belong to Europe. Though not to England. I think I should like to go to Russia in the summer. After America, it appeals to me. No 560 money there (they say). When you write to poor Ivy, ask her how it would be for me and Frieda to spend a few months in Russia—even a year. I feel drawn that way. Am not writing here. Kangaroo is due for February. I seem to have a fair sale over here—Women in Love going now into 15,000. Why do they read me? But anyhow, they do read me—which is more than England does.

Very many greetings from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To J. M. Murry.                     zo December, 1922.

Dear Jack,—

I had your letter yesterday. Heaven knows what we all are, and how we should feel if we met, now that we are changed. We’ll have to meet and see. I think of coming to England in the late spring or early summer: perhaps go down to Mexico City and sail from Vera Cruz. The longer I am in America, the less I want to go east, to Chicago, Boston or New York. Don't mind evading them, even if it is a mere evasion. Thomas Seltzer and wife are here: he’s a nice tiny man, I think I trust him, really.

It is good fun on this ranch—quite wild—Rocky Mts.—-desert with Rio Grande Canyon away spreading below—great and really beautiful landscape—looking far, far west. We ride off to the Rio Grande to the hot springs, and bathe—and we chop wood and wagon it in, and all that. But there’s no inside to the life: all outside. I don’t believe there ever will be any inside to American life—they seem so dead—till they are all destroyed.

Greet Katherine and I hope she is well in Fontainebleau where the kings used to be. "In my country we’re all kings and queens," said Mrs. ------, American woman, to the Duca’s

sister, in Taormina. And by Jove they are—of their own muckheaps, of money, if nothing else.

Mizpah!

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Valdez, New Mexico.

To Witter Bynner-                        19 Jan<>

Dear Bynner,—

Thank you tor the poem. I think I understand it.

Thank you also for being so nice to the Seltzers. hey did appreciate it.

I think we really may be coming by Santa Fe next month or in early March. I would like to go down to Old Mexico—in spite of Wilfred Ewart. I read Stephen Graham’s letter in the Santa Fe newspaper. Where is Graham now? I would like to find out from him just what conditions are in Old Mexico now, and have any advice he has to give—particularly about the journey from El Paso to Mexico City.

It's awfully nice of you to offer us your hospitality once more: our first and last roof in America. One can’t count hotels, they only have lids.

Greetings to you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Of course I wouldn’t pass by Santa Fe without trying to see you. I'll write in plenty of time.—D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico, U.S.A.

To J. M. Murry.                          2 Feby., 1933.

Dear Jack,—

I got your note just now, via Kot., about Katherine. Yes, it is something gone out of our lives. We thought of her, I can tell you, at Wellington. Did Ottoline ever send on the card to Katherine I posted from there for her? Yes, I always knew a bond in my heart. Feel a fear where the bond is broken now. Feel as if old moorings were breaking all. What is going to happen to us all? Perhaps it is good for Katherine not to have to see the next phase. We will unite up again when I come to England. It has been a savage enough pilgrimage these last four years. Perhaps K. has 562

taken the only way for her. We keep faith—I always feel death only strengthens that, the faith between those who have it.

Still, it makes me afraid. As if worse were coming. I feel like the Sicilians. They always cry for help from their dead. We shall have to cry to ours: we do cry.

I wrote to you to Adelphi Terrace the day after I got your letter, and asked Seltzer to send you Fantasia of the Unconscious, I wanted Katherine to read it.

She’ll know, though. The dead don’t die. They look on and help.

But in America one feels as if everything would die, and that is terrible.

I wish it needn’t all have been as it has been: I do wish it.

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa,

New Mexico.

To Harriet Monroe.                       io Feb., 1923.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

I have been thinking to see you. And now we are making up our minds instead of coming east, to go down to Mexico City in March: when I shouldn’t see you. But then I plan to return to New York at the end of May.

Anyhow I look on you as a friend.

I have made up the complete MS. of Birds, Beasts and Flowers and sent it to Seltzer. He will probably publish this spring. So don’t be long printing Mathew, which you have paid for. And if you want any of the New Mexico poems ask Seltzer to give you “Red Wolf,” or “Mountain Lion, or “Eagle” in New Mexico, or “Blue Jay”—any of the New Mexico ones. Mr. Mountsier is off on his travels again, so won’t be my agent. And in front of the Birds, Beasts MS. I put: Some of these poems have appeared in Poetry, etc.” Poetry first. It's the publishers who like to leave these little notices out. So if you write to Seltzer ever, just remind him.

Be greeted

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To J, M. Murry.                          25 Feb., 1923.

Dear Jack,—

I had your letter, with Koteliansky's last night.

And at the moment I can’t come to England. Something inside me simply doesn’t let me. I mistrust my country too much to identify myself with it any more. And it still gives me a certain disgust. But this may pass. I feel something must happen before I can come back.

We leave here in a fortnight. We are going down to Mexico City. I expect to be there by March 20th. Will write as soon as I have an address.

I ordered you various of my books, care of Koteliansky.

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To Gilbert Seldes.                          25 Feb., 1923.

Dear Gilbert Seldes,—

Your letter from Semmering last evening. We were in Austria in 1921. The Captain’s Doll ends in Zell-am-See. I often think of Austria.

Let Curtis Brown have Kangaroo as soon as you can, will you? (Not The K.) I don’t really mind if you mention it before it is published. It is usually publishers who have feelings about these things.

No, I am not disappointed in America. I said I was coming to Europe this spring. But I don't want to. We leave in a fortnight for Old Mexico. Perhaps I shall come back here. If you write, address me c/o Thomas Seltzer, 5, West 50th St.

But I feel about U.S.A., as I vaguely felt a long time ago: that there is a vast unreal, intermediary thing intervening between the real thing which was Europe and the next real thing, which will probably be in America, but which isn't yet, at 564 all. Seems to me a vast death-happening must come first. But probably it is here, in America (I don't say just U.S.A.), that the quick will keep alive and come through.

I got proofs of the Prof. Sherman criticism along with your letter. Hope it will amuse you.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

If you go to Vienna, look up Elizabeth Humes at the office of the American Commercial Commission. I'm sure you’d like her. My wife and I like her very much.—D. H. L.

Hotel Monte Carlo,

Av. Uruguay 69,. Mexico City. To Catherine Carswell.                  nth April, 1923.

Dear Catherine,—■

I had your letter here to-day. We have been in Mexico nearly three weeks: like it: are going to-morrow to Puebla and Tehuacan and Orizaba, to see if we should like a house to stay the summer. Every time I am near to coming to England, I find I don’t want to come—just yet. But I am never sure what I shall do in a month’s time. For the moment Russia seems very far away, and not very desirable. And my prosperity is only relative—especially with so many relatives in Germany. This photograph was taken on top of the old Pyramid of the Sun, at Teotihuacan. It is very impressive there—far more than Pompeii or the Forum. The peons, Indians, are attractive, but Mexico City rather ramshackle and Americanised. But there is a good natural feeling—a great carelessness. Do hope some of your plans come good.

D. H. L.

The third person is Witter Bynner, American poet.

Hotel Monte Carlo,

Av. Uruguay 69. Mexico D.F.

To J. M Murry.                     Thursday, April 27.

Dear Jack,—

I had your cablegram this morning: wonder when and how you are beginning. Do take a chapter from Fantasia. Arrange with Curtis Brown, he is my agent in England. I haven't a story handy—-if I sit down for a while here I want to write some. You might like that article of mine in the Dial—Feb.— called Indians and an Englishman—about the Apaches—Curtis Brown has it.

I found your letter when I got back from Orizaba. I don’t see you with another wife. But it will be as it will be.

I like Mexico, and am still uncertain of my movements. But feel sure I shall be in England before autumn. Only I may stay the summer here, and write a bit. I couldn't do anything in U.S.A. Lunching to-day with the Minister of Education here— they are good idealists and sensible, the present government— but I feel myself as usual outside the scheme of such things.

Hope you will let me know about the magazine, and good luck to it.

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

Zaragoza No. 4, Chapala (Jal.).

To Witter Bynner.                2 May, 1923 (afternoon).

Dear Bynner,—

Thank you for looking after F. and the mountains of baggage. We are already in our house—pleasant—near lake but not looking on it, on our own little garden: the first corner after the Villa Carmen, house next the dark trees. It belongs to the Hotel Pahnera.

The Palinera is the smartest hotel—I stayed at the Arzopalo, which faces the lake—manager, Winfield Scott, American. It’s shabby but pleasant—both charge 4 pesos a day, cheaper 566 for a long stay. There is a new hotel, Gran Hotel Chapala, charges 3 a day*

Chapala very pleasant—just enough of a watering place to be easy. We can bathe from the house.

There are camions to Guadalajara in 2 hours—several a day.

I must come in soon to go to the bank.

Face the unpacking.

Greet the Spoodle.

D. H. L.

Walk about 4 minutes east from Arzopalo, along lake front.

Zaragoza 4, Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.                        26 May, 1923.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Your letter of nth May. Note you have the £125 from Seeker for Kangaroo. Seltzer says he has sent Kangaroo, Birds, Beasts and Flowers and Mastro don Gesualdo to the printer, so proofs should not be long. I will let you have them at once when I get them. Have you made any final arrangements with anybody about Mastro don Gesualdos

John Middleton Murry is starting a new magazine— 18, York Buildings, Adelphi, W.C. 2. If he wants any bits of MS. of mine that you can let him have, please oblige him.

I've started a new novel here—scene in Mexico. I hope it will go. If it does I think I should have it finished in first rough draft by early July. Then I shall go to New York for a fortnight, and come to England in August. I hen we can talk about everything.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Zaragoza 4, Chapala

Jalisco, Mexico.

To J. M. Murry.                         26 May, 1923.

Deax Jack,—

Your letters of May 6 and May 9. I knew your wire must have cost a lot—hope you had my letter or used Fantasia anyhow.

Don’t know why I find it so hard to come to England: but I do. And when I meet Englishmen out here they make me sick. But they’re the wrong sort anyhow.

I wanted to do a novel. I sort of wanted to do a novel here. I could never begin in Mexico. But I have begun here, in Chapala. It’s a big lake 90 miles long, 20 miles across: queer. I hope my novel will go all right. If it does, I ought to finish it—in its first rough form—by end of June. Then seriously I want to come to Europe: via New York: stay there perhaps two weeks: be in London by early August. I really think I shall manage this. It was, I suppose, that undigested novel kept me back till now. But I won't any more say finally that I will do a thing.

I am having the first slight scene of my novel—the beginning of a bull-fight in Mexico City—typed now, and will send it in two days’ time. It is complete in itself. Use it or not as you like. Curtis Brown is my agent, settle with him.

About magazines, it is for you to judge. I had the one prospectus you sent. When the rest come, I will post them to people in America. I like the idea of a shilling monthly. But it’s no good my saying how I shall feel about it till I come.

It isn't that I am so very keen on leading a remote country life. And I loathe the “playboy” attitude to life. Oh God, there are so many playboys, not only of the western world. And I detest “having a good time.” But when I think of England, willy-nilly my gorge rises in a sort of profound mistrust. I suppose there's nothing to do but to come to England and to get it over.

Ask Curtis Brown to let you see the MS. of Novelle Rusticane —by Giovanni Verga. They are sketches of Sicily. I translated them and a novel. Mastro don Gesualdo, because I admire Verga so greatly. I’ll send you the tiny story, Cavalleria 568

Rusticana- or La Lupa if you like: also Verga. Seltzer is publishing Mastro don Gesualdo in the autumn—and I think Blackwell is doing it in England.

A man wanted me to have a banana hacienda with him here in Mexico. I suppose, anyhow, I'd better see England again first. And 1 feel, perhaps I ve no business trying to bury myself in out-of-the-way places.

No, I think in the long run perhaps The Ladybird has more the quick of a new thing than the other two stories. The Fox belongs more to the old world.

Frieda wants to come to England much more than I do. She has Devonshire on her mind,

D. H. L.

To Catherine Carswell.

Zaragoza 4, Chapala, Jal., Mexico.

'1th June, 1923.

Dear Catherine.,—

Your letter about the house to-day. That’s awfully nice of you: but see, we are still here. I felt I had a novel simmering in me, so came here, to this big lake, to see if I could write it. It goes fairly well. I shall be glad if I can finish the first rough draft by the end of this month. Then we shall pack up at once, go to Mexico City and sail from Vera Cruz for New York. Hope to be in England by early August. Where will you be then? I shall be glad to be back. But wanted to get this novel off my chest.

Auf wiedersehen

D. H. L.

Chapala, Wednesday.

To Knud Merrild.              (Postmark, 27 June, 1923.)

Dear Merrild,—

We were away two days travelling on the lake and looking at haciendas. One could easily get a little place. But now they are expecting more revolution, and it is so risky. Besides, why 569 should one work to build a place and make it nice, only to have it destroyed.

So, for the present at least, I give it up. It's ho good. Mankind is too unkind.

We shall leave next Monday for Mexico City'—and probably shall be in New York by July 15th. I don’t expect to care for the east: don't intend to stay more than a month. Then to England. It is no good, I know I am European, so I may as well go back and try it once more.

You had a bad time chasing round, Gotzsche told me. Perhaps now you will be able to make some money. I hope so.

But I really hope that before long we may meet again, all of us, and try to make a life in common once more. If I can't stand Europe we’ll come back to Mexico and spit on our hands and stick knives and revolvers in our belts—one really has to— and have a place here. But if Europe is at all possible, much better there. Because the Mexicans are rather American in that, that they would rather pull life down than let it grow up. And I am tired of that. I am tired of sensational, unmanly people. I want men with some honourable manhood in them, not this spiteful babyishness and playboy stupidity and mere greediness of most people. We will go on looking and preparing, you and Gotzsche and us, till we can really make a life that is not killed off as it was in Del Monte. Even if you have to go round the world before we can start, still we can wait and prepare. The "world" has no life to offer. Seeing things doesn’t amount to much. We have to be a few men with honour and fearlessness, and make a life together. There is nothing else, believe me.

Tell Gotzsche I will write to him. I will settle the bookcovers when I get to New York, never fear. I had a nice letter from Gotzsche's father.

Auf wiedersehen                    D. H. Lawrence.

Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico.

To M L. Skinner.                          2 July, 1923.

Dear Miss Skinner,—

I have often wondered if you were doing that novel. Your letter came this morning.

We are going up to New York next }veek, and maybe to England. I expect to find your MS. in New York. Then I shall read it carefully and see what publisher it had best be submitted to. If there are a few suggestions to make, you won’t mind, will you? I shall write as soon as I can get through.

Perhaps the best address is:

Care Thomas Seltzer, 5, West 50th Street, New York City.

I often think of Darlington—can see it in my mind's eye as plain as I see the lake of Chapala in front of me here. Perhaps we shall come back one day. The path down the hollow under the gum trees, to your mother's cottage: and those big ducks. Your mother didn't belong to our broken, fragmentary generation; with her oriental rugs in that little wooden bungalow, and her big, easy gesture of life. It was too small for her, really.

My wife sends many greetings.

Yours very sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

New Orleans.

To Catherine Carswell.                Sunday. July, 1923.

Back in U.S.A.—regret Mexico—staying here a few days— a dead, steaming sort of place, a bit like Martin Chuzzlewit dreary going up to New York by boat. 1 he Mississippi is a vast and weary river that looks as if it had never wanted to start flowing. Expect to be in England before September.

D. H. L.

To Knud Merrild.

Hotel de Soto, New Orleans, La. Sunday (Postmark, 15 July, 1923).

Dear Merrild,—

Here we are—got so far on the journey to New York. 1 he moment I am back in these states comes my old feeling of detestation over me again. But I no longer let it trouble me. I just resist them all the time, and shall continue to do so. Only one has to watch that in resisting them one doesn’t become hard and empty as they are. I want to keep myself alive inside, for the few people who are still living.

I expect we shall arrive in New York on Wednesday. I shall stay long enough to correct all proofs and get my MS. typed— then I suppose we shall go on to Europe. I am not very keen even on going to England. I think what I would like best would be to go back to Mexico. If we were a few people we could make a life in Mexico. Certainly with this world I am at war.

I dreamed last night of Pips. But I feel that she too was a false little dog, a bit of--.

New Orleans seems America—but more easy-going—same impudence, however.

Tell Gotzsche I will write him as soon as we are in New York.

D. H. L.

Care Seltzer,

5 W. 50th StNew York.

To J. M. Murry.                        7 August, 1923.

Dear Jack,—

No, I don't feel we are enemies: why that? I was disappointed with the apologetic kind of appeal in The Adelphi: but you most obviously aren’t my enemy in it. And anyhow you make a success of the thing: so what does it matter what I say?

I suppose I'll come back one day and stand on the old ground. But, as you say, not yet.

I wanted to send you that bull-fight beginning: but Seltzer didn t want it published, either here or in England, apart from the novel. I ve been very busy doing proofs here: of Kangaroo, my novel: and Birds, Beasts and Flowers, poems: and Mastro don Gesualdo, the Verga novel. I haven't arranged for the publication of any Verga in England.—Am glad you like St. Joseph’s Ass—I’ll try and send you something for October—now I shall have a breathing space.

Frieda intends to come to England: thinks to sail on the Orbita, Royal Mail Steam Packet Line, from New York, the i8th of this month—to Southampton. I wish you’d look after her a bit: would it be a nuisance? She will be alone. I ought to come—but I can’t. She thinks to stay in Mary Can-nan’s flat at 49, Queen’s Gardens, W. 2—if Mary continues in Worcestershire. F. wants to see her children. So I think I shall go to the mountains of southern California and perhaps down into Sonora. I don’t care at all for these eastern states— and New York just means nothing to me. At the moment this so-called white civilisation makes me sicker than ever: I feel nothing but recoil from it. Now I’ve reached the Atlantic, and see Liberty clenching her fist in the harbour, I only want to go west, to the mountains and desert again. So there I am.

If you want a poem for the Adelphi, and Seeker isn't ready with the publication of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, ask Curtis Brown for the MS.—or for a copy of the proofs. I expect Seltzer will have the book out about 20th Sept. Mary Carman is at present at Holme Lea, Cheltenham Rd., Broadway, Worcestershire. I asked her to let Kot know about her flat, if she’ll be in it or not, and about the key.

I’ll send you a copy of Mastro don Gesualdo when it’s out.

D. H L.

Care Seltzer,

5, W. 50th. St,, New York, To Knud Merrild                       7 August, 1923.

Dear Merpild,—

I have almost decided not to go to Europe. Frieda is sailing on the 18th to England. But I think I shall stay this side. I don’t want to go: don’t know why.

I think, when Frieda has gone, I shall come to Los Angeles. We might like to spend the winter at Palm Springs or among the hills. Or we might go again to Mexico. And I should like to see you and Gbtzsche and have a talk about the luture. If there was nothing else to do, we might take a donkey and go packing among the mountains. Or we might find some boat, some sailing ship that would rake us to the islands: you as sailors, myself as cook: nominal. Frieda, I suppose, will want to loin me again at the end of October. Meanwhile we will have made some plan or other.

Probably I shall be in Los Angeles about the end of this month. Then we’ll talk things over.

I care nothing for New York, and don’t get much out of New Jersey.

Tell Gotzsche and think of something. I wish we were rich enough to buy a little ship. I feel like that now: like cruising the seas. I am a bit tired of the solid world. But perhaps it is quite nice to do as your engineer friend does, and build an adobe house in the foot-hills.

Auf wiedersehen..

D. H Lawrence.

Thomas Seltzer, Inc.,

5, West 50th St., New York.

To J. M. Murry.                        iz August, 1923.

Dear jAcx,—

I have your letter.—No, I'm not coming yet—suppose it isn’t the right time. Let's wait a bit.

I liked this month’s Adelphi best. I like what you say about faith: one must have the faith to break an old faith.

You are as bad as I am, rushing to extremes. I don’t "hate” the Adelphi, because the first number disappointed me and got me on the wrong side.

But let us wait and be a bit patient. You know I’m not the calm sort.

.1 feel such a "sadness,” as Kot would say, about England and Europe, as if I'd swallowed a lump of lead. But let that digest away in my belly, and I'll be able to shake hands again. It's no good, till I can come with a cheerful soul.

And America means nothing to me. Yet I'm going right west again—I think to Los Angeles and into the mountains: perhaps to sail the Pacific. Do you remember our islands, and ships? Ask the Lord to take away this heavy feeling in my belly, that I have when I think of England and home and my people: or even when I think of Fontana Vecchia.

I think you understand Fantasia and Aaron all right. It's I—because the sense of doom deepens inside me, at the thought of the old world which I loved—-and the new world means nothing to me.

Frieda sails on Saturday on the Orbita, Royal Mail Steam Packet Line, to Southampton. She is due to arrive on the Sunday or Monday morning, 26th or 27th August—probably Sunday morning—she goes to Cherbourg first: the Orbita. I wish you would look after F. a bit. You know what a vague creature she is.

I suppose I’m the saddest, at not coming.

D. H. L.

Care Seltzer,

5, West 50th St., New York.

To Witter Bynner                       14 August, 1923.

Dear Bynner,—

You may be home by now and you may not. We are still here. Frieda sails on Saturday by the Orbita to Southampton. I’m not going. Where am I going? Ask me. Perhaps to Los Angeles, and then to the Islands, if I could find a sailing ship. Quien sabe?

It's pleasant here—the trees and hills and stillness. But it is dim to me. Doesn't materialise. The same with New York: like a house of cards set up. I like it best down at the Battery, where the rag-tag he on the grass. Have met practically nobody: and the same thing, nothing comes through to me from them.

Tell Spoodle the Horse came, and his red letter. The picture of the horse looks like a sobbing ass. The inside quite amused me—of the Horse. A little more guts, a little less indigestion.

Your plays came too. I had read them long ago—it seems long—and forgotten the titles: also Beloved Stranger. Many of these poems I really like.

It hasn't been hot here—quite pleasant. I wish things were real to me. I see the lake at Chapala, not the hills of Jersey (New). And these people are just as you said of New England— quenched. I mean the natives. As for the trains full of business men——

Tell me what you are doing. I shall probably leave for somewhere next week. I've booked F.'s passage and she’s setting off alone, quite perky.

Sends you greetings.

D. H. Lawrence.

Care Seltzer,

5, West 5ot/i Street, New York. To Catherine Carswell.                  izt/r August, 1923.

Dear Catherine,—

I'm not coming to Europe after all. Find I just don’t want to—not yet. Later.

Frieda sails on Saturday for Southampton by the Orbita— Royal Mail Steam Packet Line. She is due in Southampton on the 26th of this month: which is a Sunday. She will probably stay in Mary Carman's flat at 49, Queen’s Gardens, Hyde Park—that is, if Mary Caiman is still away.

I wonder when you will be back in town. Look after F. a bit. She will stay a month or so—then go to Germany—then come back here—or meet me wherever I am. I think I shall go to California, and either pack with a donkey in the mountains, or get some sailing ship to the Islands—if the last is possible. Perhaps by autumn I’ll decide to come to England— who knows! At present I can’t come.

Seltzer says he liked Open, the Door very much: he says Harcourt Brace deliberately neglected the Camomile and let it die: didn’t even tread on it. If you have another novel, try Seltzer: but why don’t you write a volume of criticisms, like Duse one? The World from a Woman’s Window. If you say what you absolutely sincerely feel, you’ll make a good book.

Au re voir.

The Miramar,

Santa Monica, Cal.

To M. L. Skinner.                       ' 2 Sept., 1923.

Dear Miss Skinner,-—

1 have read The House of Ellis carefully: such good stuff in it: but without unity or harmony. I'm afraid as it stands you’d never find a publisher. Yet I hate to think of it all wasted. I like the quality of so much of it. But you have no constructive power. If you like I will take it and re-cast it, and make a book of it. In which case we should have to appear as collaborators, or assume a pseudonym. If you give me a free hand, I'll see if I can’t make a complete book out of it. If you’d rather your work remained untouched, I will show it to another publisher: but I am afraid there isn’t much chance. You have a real gift—-there is real quality in these scenes. But without form, like the world before creation.

I am in California—but don’t suppose I shall stay long. Write me care Thomas Seltzer, 5, West 50th St., New York.

If I get this book done, we'll publish it in the spring. And if you agree to my re-casting this: then I wish you would take up that former novel of yours, about the girl and the convict— and break off where the three run away—keep the first part, and continue as a love story or romance, where the love of the girl is divided between the Irish convict and the young gentleman—make it a tragedy if you like—but let the theme be the conflict between the two kinds of love in the heart of the girl: her love for Peter (was that the young man's name?)— and her love for the Irish ex-convict. See if you can’t carry that out. Because of course, as you have it, the convict is the more attractive of the two men, but the less amenable. Only all that adventure in the N.W. is not very convincing. Keep the story near Perth—or Albany, if you can.

If you see Mr. Siebenhaar tell him I have hopes of Max Havelaar for the spring of next year too.

Best wishes to you all at Leithdale.

Yours very sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Post card to Willard Johnson.

Los Angeles, J2 Sept., 1923.

Don't ask me for letters—no pnedo mas. Am in Los Angeles —no fixed address—probably going Lower California, but it might be Pacific Isles—Frieda in England will join me when I get somewhere—saw eclipse yesterday—very impressive— also 7 destroyers on rocks—depressive—Los A. silly—much motoring, me rather tired and vague with it—came via Salt Lake—owe Bynner letter—will send address then—am on the move—just in from Santa Barbara.

D. H. L.

Los Angeles.

To J. M. Murry.                          17 Sept., 1923.

Dear Jack,—

I had your letter here—also the Adelphi. I like your little attack on Mr. Mortimer: very amusing. Do attack them. Go for them amusingly like this. Satirise them to death. That’s your job.

And gradually the Adelphi will get a concrete fortress-value, by slow building. Till now it has been a bit vague. Build a new place of skulls, the skulls of the imbecile enemy. That’s very necessary.

What made you put “da” in Verga’s name? Alas, he is just Giovanni Verga. Let’s hope nobody notices it.

I hope you got a copy of Studies in Classic American Literature. I think it will amuse you. Also Kangaroo and Birds, Beasts. I asked Seltzer to send you on an article I posted him, which the N. Y. Nation wanted—to send it you immediately it was typed— The Proper Study. I’m afraid I wrote it more with the Adelphi in mind than the Nation. I begin to see the Adelphi building up like a little fortress.—That lady into fox sluff is pretty piffle—just playboy stuff.

One has to be an absolute individual, separate as a seed fallen out of the pod. Then a volte-face, and a new start. Takes some risking. This classiosity is bunkum, but still more, cowardice. Son todos acobardados.

I think, this day week, I shall go down to Mexico. Perhaps I shall find a little ranch there. Put a new peg in the world, a new navel, a new centre. EsperamosI We’re hardly beginning yet.

America's awfully foolish and empty. But perhaps, if it went through a great convulsion, it would be the place.

Write care Seltzer. Wonder how Frieda likes London.

Salutil

D. H. L.

Los Angeles.

To J. M Murry.                         24 Sept., 1923.

Deaf Jack,—

I am setting off to-morrow with a Danish friend, down the west coast of Mexico, to look again for a place to live. I hope I shall find it. If I do you must come. You will have seen Frieda quite often. I'm afraid Europe won’t make her any the happier. I expect she'll be setting off again for here, by the time you get this.

California is a queer place—in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, npt fall of false effort. I don't want to live here, but a stay here rather amuses me. It’s a sort of crazy-sensible. Just the moment: hardly as far ahead as carpe diem.

I'll send you an address as soon as I get one. I'm glad to be going south. America exhausts the springs oi one's soul. I suppose that’s what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyway it doesn’t grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.

Griisse!

D. H. L.

Navojoa.

To Knud Merrild.                 Friday, 5th Oct. (1923).

Dear Merrild,—

Well, here we are still grilling in the sun of Navojoa. We came down yesterday from Minas Nuevas, over a road much worse than any Del Monte roads, and forty miles of it. I am bruised wherever I look. A circus follows us down the coast and the lions roar all night. The turkeys put their heads through the door—the doors are just wooden gates—and gobble in the bedroom at dawn. The people in the street linger to look in and see how you're sleeping. The horse-riding lady from the circus has the next room, and stalks about with yards of bushy hair sticking out, rather fat inside a violent dressing-gown. The hotel, being a hollow square, is as public as the street.

But we are going on to-day to Mazatlan, the port. On the whole, the west coast is a little too wild—nothing but wildness, as Gotzsche says. One wants a bit of hopefulness. These wild lost places seem so hopeless. But a man said he'd give me six or eight acres of land near Guay mar, near the sea, in a very wild, very strange and beautiful country, if I'd only build a house on the place. Queer country, with clouds of wild duck, and geese, and queer flocks of pelicans. But one feels so out of the world: like living on Mars. As if the human race wasn’t real. I don’t know what effect it would have on one in the end. G. is getting very red in the face with this fierce sun. He looks at these broken, lost, hopeless little towns in silent disgust. He speaks not one word of Spanish, and is altogether an onlooker.

When I look at the ranches, I doubt very much whether I shall ever try to live on one for ever and a day. But very nice to stay the winter.

We went to a big wild cattle hacienda—they are strange, desolate, brutal places: beautiful enough, but weird and brutal. I doubt if one could bear it: or if one wants to bear it.

I shall be glad to get some news. You write to Frieda, care Thomas Seltzer, 5, W. 50th St.—I don’t know where she is.

And send me the letters.

Hope things are going well with you.

D. H. L.

Navojoa, Sonora.

To Witter Bynner.                        5 October, 1923.

Dear Bynner,—

Here I am wandering slowly and hotly with Gotzsche down this west coast. Where F. is I don’t know.

This West is much wilder, emptier, more hopeless than Chapala. It makes one feel the door is shut on one. There is a blazing sun, a vast hot sky, big lonely inhuman green hills and mountains, a flat blazing littoral with a few palms, sometimes a dark blue sea which is not quite of this earth—then little towns that seem to be slipping down an abyss—and the door of life shut on it all, only the sun burning, the clouds of birds passing, the zopilotes like flies, the lost lonely palm-trees, the deep dust of the roads, the donkeys moving in a gold dustcloud. In the mountains, lost, motionless silver-mines. Alamos, a once lovely little town, lost, and slipping down the gulf in the mountains, forty miles up the awfullest road I’ve ever been bruised along. But somehow or other you get there. And more wonderful you get out again. There seems a sentence of extinction written over it all. In the middle of the little covered market at Alamos, between the meat and the vegetables, a dead dog lay stretched as if asleep. The meat vendor said to the vegetable man: ⁴ You’d better throw it out. The veg.-man looked at the dead dog and saw no reason for throwing it out. So no doubt it still lies there. We went also to haciendas—a cattle hacienda: wild, weird, brutal with a devastating brutality. Many of the haciendas are in the hands of Chinese, who run about like vermin down this coast.

So there we are. I think, when we get to Mazatlan, we shall take the boat down to Maryaniilo, and so to Guadalajara. It is better there. At least, there is not a dead dog in mid-market.

Write me a line care Dr. Purnell—I am a bad correspondent.

58i

Write to F., care Seltzer. She may be in America again by now.

There is a circus, and lions roaring all night.

This town is a busy new adobe nowhere under a flat sun of brass. The old town was washed out in 1915.

I have letters of introduction to people this way, and so see what it’s like.

Greet the Spoodle. Tell him to send me a line. Don’t take any notice of my intermittency.

D H Lawrence.

Hotel Garcia, Guadalajara, Jal,

To J. M. Murry.                         25 Oct, 1923.

Dear Jack,—

I had your letter from Switzerland yesterday. From Frieda not a word—suppose Germany swallowed her.

Yes, I think I shall come back now. I think I shall be back by the beginning of December. Work awhile with you on the Adelphi. Then perhaps we'll set off to India. Quien sabe?

Anyhow, though England may lead the world again, as you say, she’s got to find a way first. She's got to pick up a lost trail. And the end of the lost trail is here in Mexico. Aqui estd. Yo lo digo.

The Englishman, per se, is not enough. He has to modify himself to a distant end. He has to balance with something that is not himself. Con esto que aqui estd.

But I will come back—I won’t say home, it isn’t home— for a time. When a rope is broken, it’s no use tying a knot in one end. You have to tie both ends together. England is only one end of the broken rope. Hay otro. There's another. There’s another end to the outreach. One hand in space is not enough. It needs the other hand from the opposite end of space, to clasp and form the bridge. The dark hand and the white.

Pero todavia no. No aleanzan. Todavia no aleanzan., No tocan. Si debe esperar.

“Learn to labour and to wait.”                  ' '

Muy bien, Vengo y espero, Vengo y espero.

_                                          D. H. L.

I got Dove's Nest here. Thank you very much. Poor Katherine, she is delicate and touching—but not greatI Why say great?

Hotel Garcia,

(Thinking of Holly Bush House) Guadalajara, Jal., Mexico.

To Catherine Carswell.                 i₇th October, 1923.

Dear Catherine,—

.1 had your note and am glad you liked Kangaroo. I always order you a copy of all my books from Seeker. If you don't get all, it’s his fault.

Frieda says she likes England now, and it is my place, and I must come back. I wonder. We rode two days down the mountains, and got to Eztatlan. Mexico has a certain mystery of beauty for me, as if the gods were here. Now, in this October, the days are so pure and lovely, like an enchantment, as if some dark-faced gods were still young. I wish it could be that I could start a little centre—a ranch—where we could have our little adobe houses and make a life, and you could come with Don and John Patrick, It is always what I work for. But it must come from the inside, not from the will. And when it will be it will be, I suppose. It is queer, all the way down the Pacific Coast. I kept thinking: Best go back to England. And then, once across the barranca from Ixtlan, it was here again, where the gods may sometimes be awful, but they are young, here in Mexico, in Jalisco, that I wanted to be. And there is room—room for all of us if it could but be.

But let us watch; things, when they come, come suddenly. It may be my destiny is in Europe. Quien sabe? If it is, I'll come back.                     ¹

Hast a el dial

D. H. L.

Hotel Garcia,

Guadalajara, Jal., Mexico.

To M. L. Skinner.                         ist Nov., 1923.

Dear Miss Skinner,—

I have been busy over your novel, as I travelled. The only thing was to write it all out again, following your MS. almost exactly, but giving a unity, a rhythm, and a little more psychic development than you had done. I have come now to Book I V. The end will have to be different, a good deal different.

Of course I don’t know how you feel about this. I hope to hear from you soon. But I think, now, the novel will be a good one. I have a very high regard for it myself. The title, I thought, might be The Boy in. the Bush. There have been so many houses in print.

If possible, I should like to hear from you in time to arrange for publication in England and in America simultaneously in early April. As soon as ever I can, I will have a typescript copy sent to you, with your own MS. Your hero Jack is not quite so absolutely blameless an angel, according to me. You left the character psychologically at a standstill all the way: same boy at the beginning and the end. I have tried, taking your inner cue, to make a rather daring development, psychologically. You may disapprove.

But I think it makes a very, very interesting book. If you like, we will appear as collaborators—let the book come out in our joint names. Or we can have a single nom de plume—and we can go halves in English and American royalties. All, of course, if you approve. Then of course I’ve got the publishers to consider. They will insist on their point of view.

I wanted my wife to come and spend the winter in Mexico. Eut she has gone to London and won’t come back. She says England is best. So I shall have to go there. Write to me, care Curtis Brown, 6, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, W.C. 2.

My best wishes to you. I will order you a copy of Kangaroo.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Garcia,               . ,

Guadalajara, Jal., Mexico.

To M. L. Skinner*                     • 15 r/z Novem., 1923.

Dear Miss Skinner,—

I finished the novel yesterday. I call it The Boy in the Bush. I think quite a lot of it. To-day I am sending the MS. to my agent:

Curtis Brown,

6, Henrietta St.,

Covent Garden,

London, W.C. 2.

His cable address is Brown curt, London.

Curtis Brown will have the MS. typed, and the moment I get to London—I hope to be there by Christmas—I will go through it and have a copy sent to you.

Seltzer wants to do the book in New York in April: so that would mean Martin Seeker bringing it out at the same time in London. Seltzer suggests my name and yours as joint authors. I shall wait to hear from you.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Garcia, Guadalajara, Jal., Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.         ~ iZk-r November, 1923.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I am sending you to-day the chief part of the MSS. of a novel, The Boy in the Bush. Seltzer has the first part: he is having it typed and will send it to you. Please have tnis MS. typed so that it can be ready when I get to England: and have two carbon copies made.

It is an Australian novel—a young woman in West Australia —Miss M. L. Skinner, Darlington, W.A.—showed me a MS. when I was there—it had good stuff in it. I suggested she did things to it. Then in the early summer this year she sens, me 585 another MS. of a novel—I'll give it you when I come—and again the thing was a queer bewildered muddle. Because I liked the stuff of her book—she called it The House of Ellis— and because I felt a good deal of sympathy for her, I tackled the thing, and wrote it all over afresh. And here it is. It’s an interesting book.—She, by the way, published a sort of war novel, Letters of a V.A.D.—I think Heinemann. Not bad.

I am going on to Mexico City in a couple of days’ time—and then, as soon as I get a ship, coming to England. So I ought to be in London by Christmas.

Seltzer, by the way, wants to publish this novel—The Boy in the Bush—-in the spring, probably under my name and Miss Skinner’s together. I want Miss Skinner, if possible, to see the MS. before it is published. I wrote her two months ago.

I hope the MS. arrives safely.

Yours,

D. H Lawrence.

Hotel Monte Carlo,

Av. Uruguay, Mexico, D.F.

To Witter Bynner.                        17 Nov., 1923.

Deaf Bynner,—

We got here this morning—hotel just the same, save fewer guests.

All enquiring for you and the thin one—and for F. But Mexico seems cold and dark after Jalisco. I like Jalisco very much—the plain round Guadalajara. It is Pacific Ocean influence, without too much softness. I want to get a boat on, as soon as I can now, to England. God knows how long I shall stay there. This cold glowing morning in this city makes me think of it with repugnance. It was just nicely warm in Guadalajara. But we must bring penalties on ourselves. Perhaps later we 11 all meet and make a place in Jalisco: even Mabel Luhan. It’s terrible here, I can’t speak Italian any more, only bad Spanish. We had a flask of the very good Chianti for lunch. To-night we’re going out to dinner with the Brit. Consul-General at Tlalpam—all in evening dress. How’s that for 586 committing, suicide on the spot? My dinner-jacket is so green with over-ripeness—I’m going to look for Covarrubias. We ran across old Sass rrom Taos in Guadalajara plaza—like a lost chicken, and unable to get any word out. I miss you at the corner table—miss everybody and everything here. Don’t like it want to get out quick. This city doesn’t feel right—feels like a criminal plotting his next rather mean crime. Write to me care Seltzer. Tell Spoodle this is for him too: "Una arancia, ana banana, o doles di prugne?” Mine’s a banana. Hasta luego.

D. H. L.

Hotel Monte Carlo, Mexico. To Willard Johnson.                    19 Nov.

Dear Spoodle,—

I am off to Europe—la mala suerte. We sail, Gotzsche and I, on the Toledo, from Vera Cruz, on Thursday—three days hence—and I get to Plymouth about 12 Decern., he gets to Hamburg two days later. Well, I don’t care, since I've got so far. Chis city is a bit nervy and not in good spirits, and cold. From the roof this morning, Ixtaccilmatl and Popo clear in snow. The monkey, the parrot and the Chihuahua dog gone: but the large husband and the wife with a nose, still living upstairs. Not many "mariners" any more—more Mexicans, and less of a pirates of Penzance atmosphere. Everything a bit heavier. They expect more revolution—Calles and De La Huerta—probably a bad one. No business doing—and the common people a bit brutal. Oh, heavenly bolshevism. Tell Bynner to come down and see heaven descend to earth with a red rag. I'm the bull. But expected revolutions so often never revolve. I bought a serape in the Volador—dark brown with big white stripes and boca—eleven pesos. Shades of Hal! As yet I’ve not been able to think of anything to make the Horse laugh. Hope he’s not sobbing his way into a new year.

Dear Spoodle, I hope we shall all one day become quite nice people, and make a new spot on earth, more or less together. Meanwhile, I wander on, till my ass shall bray that the angel says no further. If yours is a Laughing Horse, mine is a slowly smiling donkey. Chi cammina, arriva. Which is, who goes, gets there. Anyhow, I keep on going.

Dear Spoodle, I think of you often affectionately, whatever I may say. Also of Bynner. We’ll meet again one of these bright mornings. I am sure Mexico will feel my tread once more—unless a bolshy bullet stops me.

A rivederci!

D. H. L.

Address—Care S. Koteliansky, 5, Acacia Rd., London, N.W. 8.

Mexico, D, F.

To Harriet Monroe.                       20 Nov., 1923.

Dfar Harriet Monroe,—

I am sailing in two days from Vera Cruz to England. In September I was in Chicago for a day: a queer big city with a sort of palpitation I couldn’t quite understand. But I hope to come again soon and to understand a little more.

Did you like Birds, Beasts and Flowers? I promised you a signed copy, and I will send it you from London.

Idella Purnell was cross when I saw her in Guadalajara because I gave her a poem which you had previously paid for. I hope you weren’t cross, too. I had completely forgotten.

Would it be a nuisance for you to send her a copy of the anthology in which the poem—“Nostalgia”—appeared, and at the same time, if possible, the number of Poetry in which the thing first saw light? You have her Palms address—Galeana, 150, Guadalajara. And send the bill to me care S. Koteliansky, 5, Acacia Road, London, N.W. 8.

I am still coming to Chicago—poco d poco. Am not very keen on going to Europe, if I must confess it.

D. H. Lawrence.

THE PH(ENIX

“Will the bird perish

Shall the bird rise?"

BACK TO MEXICO

SPOTORNO : VILLA MIRENDA LADY CHATTERLEWS LOVER” THE PAINTINGS, “PANSIES"

BANDOL, VENCE,

DEATH

tto, Heath St., Hampstead, N.W. 3.

I*o Witter Bynner.                 7 December, 1923.

Dear Bynner,—

Here I am—London—gloom—yellow air—bad cold—bed— old house—Morris wall-paper—visitors—English voices—tea in old cups—poor D. H L. perfectly miserable, as if he was in his tomb.

You don’t need his advice, so take it: Never come to Europe any more.

In a fortnight I intend to go to Paris, then to Spain—and in the early spring I hope to be back on the western continent. I wish I was in Santa Fe at this moment. As it is, for my sins, and Frieda’s, I am in London. I only hope Mexico will stop revoluting.

De profundis,

D. H. L.

no, Heath St., Hampstead, N.W. 3. To Witter Bynner.               20 December, 1923.

Dear Bynner.—

Frieda and I think of coming to New Mex. in early spring, on way to Old Mex. And Middleton Murry says he wants to come too, and probably another friend. How s that? I wrote to you, don't come to Europe, it’s awful. I hate being here —plainly—New Mexico is far, far, far better. Dead this side. Stay in N. M. Greet Spoodle and the Alices and be greeted by me and F. As I said to Spoodle, I get so cross with you for still being a democrat, but, hombre, there is the underlying affection.

D. H. L.

To J. M. Murry (with the present of a Phoenix seal).

Christmas, 1923.

Jack,—

Will the bird perish, Shall the bird rise?

To the old raven, in the act of becoming a young Phoenix.

D. H. L.

no, Heath St,, Hampstead, N.W. z.

To Willard Johnson,                9 Jan,, 1924.

Dear Spoodle,—

Yesterday came the Horse,* capering a trifle woodenly, and to-day a fall of snow. Enough bright white snow on the ground to make a bit of daylight. I've been here exactly a month, in London, and day has never broken all the time. A dull, heavy, mortified half-light that seems to take the place of day in London m winter. I can’t stand it.

However, with a bit of snow-brightness in the air, and a bit of a rather wooden neigh from the Horse in my ears, I pick up and write you a London letter.

Dear old Azure Horse, Turquoise Horse, Hobby Horse, Trojan Horse with a few scared heroes in your belly: Horse, laughing your Horse Laugh, you do actually ramp in with a bit of horse sense. I'm all for horse sense, oh Horse! Come down to it, and it's the Centaur. Good old Horse, be patted, and be persuaded to grin and to be a Centaur, getting your own back.

Even if you’re only a Hobby Horse, with a wooden head and a Spoodle on your broom-stick flanks, you’re welcome just now. Very welcome. Here s an apple. Be tempted, like

*The Laughing Horse, a periodical.

590

Adam and take it. And for the sake of all horses, be braver than Adam, who only bit a bite out and dropped the main. Eat up the whole gaudy apple, oh Horse. Let's have the Centaur back.

Dear old Horse, you'd never be azure or turquoise here in London. Oh, London is awful: so dark, so damp, so yellowgrey, so mouldering piece-meal. With crowds of people going about in a mouldering, damp, half-visible sort of way, as if they were all mouldering bits of rag that had fallen from an old garment. Horse, Horse, be as hobby as you like, but let me get on your back and ride away again to New Mexico. I don’t care how frozen it is, how grey the desert, how cold the air, in Taos, in Lobo, in Santa Fe. It isn’t choky, it is bright day at daytime, and bright dark night at night. And one isn't wrapped like a mummy in winding-sheet after windingsheet of yellow, damp, unclean, cloyed, ancient, breathed-to-death so-called air. Oh Horse, Horse, Horse, when you kick your heels you shatter an enclosure every time. And over here the Horse is dead: he’ll kick his heels no more. I don't know whether it's the pale Galilean who has triumphed, or a paleness paler than the pallor even of Jesus. But a yellow and jaundiced paleness has triumphed over here, the turquoise Horse has been long dead, and churned into sausages. I find it unbearable.

Let the Horse laugh. I'm all for a horse that laughs. Though I don’t care for him when he merely sniggers.

I'm all for a horse. It’s not even the Houyhnhnms. They aren’t blue enough for me. It’s a turquoise Centaur who laughs, who laughs longest and laughs last. I believe in him. I believe he’s there, over the desert in the south-west. I believe if you’ll cajole him with a bit of proper corn, he’ll come down to Santa Fe and bite your noses off and then laugh at you again.

Two-legged man is no good. If he's going to stand steady, he must stand on four feet. Like the Centaur. When Jesus was born, the spirits wailed round the Mediterranean: Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. And at the Renaissance the Centaur gave a final groan, and expired. At least, I seem to remember him lamenting and about to expire, in the Uffizi.

It would be a terrible thing if the horse in us died for ever, as he seems to have died in Europe. How awful it would be, if at this present moment I sat in the yellow mummy-swathings of London atmosphere—the snow is melting—inside the dreadful mummy sarcophagus of Europe, and didn't know that the blue horse was still kicking his heels and making a few sparks fly, across the tops of the Rockies. It would be a truly sad case for me.

As it is, I say to myself, Bah! In Lobo, in Taos, in Santa Fe the Turquoise Horse is waving snow out of his tail, and trotting gaily to the blue mountains of the far distance. And in Mexico his mane is bright yellow on his blue body, so streaming with sun, and he's lashing out again like the devil, till his hoofs are red. Good old Horse!

But talking seriously, Spoodle, man must be Centaur. This two-legged forked radish is going flabby.

The Centaur's lament! Not at all. The Laugh of the Turquoise Man-Horse. Let the forked radish do the lamenting.

In modern symbolism, the Horse is supposed to stand for the passions. Passions be blowed. What does the Centaur stand for, Chiron or any other of that quondam four-footed gentry? Sense! Horse Sense! Sound, powerful, four-footed sense, that’s what the Horse stands for. Horse-sense, I tell you. That’s the Centaur. That's the blue Horse of the ancient Mediterranean, before the pale Galilean or the extra pale German or Nordic gentleman conquered. First of all, Sense, Good Sense, Sound Sense, Horse Sense. And then, a laugh, a loud, sensible Horse Laugh. After that, these same passions, glossy and dangerous in the flanks. And after these again, hoofs, irresistible, splintering hoofs, that can kick the walls of the world down.

Horse-sense, Horse-laughter, Horse-passion, Horse-hoofs: ask the Indians if it is not so.

fell me the Horse is dead? Tell me the Centaur has died out? It may easily be so, in Europe here, since the Renaissance. But in the wide blue skies of the south-west, and far-away south over Mexico: over the grey deserts and the red deserts beneath the Rockies and the Sierra Madre; down the canyons and across the mesas and along the depths of the barrancas goes the Turquoise Horse, uneasy, bethinking hinisdf, and just on the point of bursting into a loud laugh, after all, laughing longest and laughing last.

Ask the Indians, if there isn’t a little blue foal born every year, in the pueblos, out of the old dark earth-coloured mottled mare. Tell me the Centaur can't beget Centaurs? —Ask the Indian, ask the Navajo, ask the Mexican under his big hat.

It’s no good. I’ve got to ride on a laughing horse. The forked radish has ceased to perambulate. I've got to ride a laughing horse. And I whistle for him, call him, spread corn for him, and hold out an apple to him, here in England. No go! No good! No answer! The poor devil’s dead and churned into Cambridge sausages. Flabby flaccid forked radishes, sausages, pairs of sausages in forked skins: these seem to drift about in the soup of the London air. There's no answer.

There's no blue cave to stable the Turquoise Horse, here. There's no dark earth-coloured mare to bear his foals. There’s no far-away blue distance for him to roam across. He’s dead.

And yet I've got to ride, centaur, on a blue stallion.

So, thanks be to the oldest of gods, comes a wooden little Laughing Horse sliding down from the blue air of the Rockies, riding on his hobby stick like a rocket, summonsing me to mount and away.

Hurray! Hup-a-la! Up we go! Like a witch on a broomstick, riding west.

D. H. Lawrence.

Frau von Richthofen, Ludwig - Wilhelmstift, Baden-Baden.

To J. M. Murry.

7 Feb., 1924.

Dear Jack,—

We've just got here—all snow on the Black Forest, but down in here only wet.

Europe gives me a Wehmut, I tell you.

We stay here two weeks—then back via Paris. I leafnt in New York that the income-tax must be paid by March 15th, and I still have no word from that miserable Seltzer.

I don’t know if you really want to go to Taos. Mabel Luhan writes she is arranging for it. You seemed to me really very unsure. You resent, aufond, my going away from Europe. C’est mon affaire. Je m’en vais. But you, in this interval, decide for yourself, and purely for yourself. Don't think you are doing something for me. I don’t want that. Move for yourself alone. Decide for yourself, in your backbone. I don’t really want any allegiance or anything of that sort. I don’t want any pact. I won’t have anything of that sort. If you want to go to America, bien. Go without making me responsible.

But if you want to go with Frieda and me and Brett—encore bien! One can but try, and I'm willing. But a man like you, if he does anything in the name of, or for the sake of, or because of somebody else, is bound to turn like a crazy snake and bite himself and everybody, on account of it.

Let us clear away all nonsense. I don't need you. That is not true. I need nobody. Neither do you need me. If you pretend to need me, you will hate me for it.

Your articles in the Adelphi always annoy me. Why care so much about your own fishiness or fleshiness? Why make it so important? Can't you focus yourself outside yourself? Not for ever focused on yourself, ad nauseam?

I met--Didn’t like him.

You know I don’t care a single straw what you think of me. Realise that, once and for all. But when you get to twisting, I dislike you. And I very much dislike any attempt at an intimacy like the one you had with-------and others. When

you start that, I only feel: For God’s sake, let me get clear of him.

I don’t care what you think of me, I don’t care what you say of me, I don't even care what you do against me, as a writer. Trust yourself, then you can expect me to trust you. Leave off being emotional. Leave off twisting. Leave off having any emotion at all. You haven’t any genuine ones, except a certain anger. Cut all that would-be sympathetic stuff out. Then know what you’re after.

I tell you, if you want to go to America as an unemotional man making an adventure, bien, allons! If you want to twist yourself into more knots, don't go with me. That’s all. I never had much patience, and I’ve none now.

D. H. L.

Ludwig- Wilhelmstift, Baden-Baden.

To J. M. Murry.                          iz Feb., 1924.

Dear Jack,—

I wrote Kot about the money for the publishing scheme. Get the thing ready so we can fix it up before we go—before I go. I don’t hear a word from Seltzer—he has only written once since I was in Mexico. I begin to feel a bit anxious. I expect I shall have to be in New York by about 10th March—so I shall be in London again by the end of this month at least. I think probably it’s best to get that MS. finished with. If we have to go a fortnight ahead, we can wait for you in New York. And Brett can go along with us, if she likes.

Sometimes I really get discouraged: quite discouraged altogether.

We leave here on the 20th for Paris.

It's a low-water mark.

But one must eschew emotions—they are a disease.

D. H. L.

(A bad pen!)

Ludwig- Wilhelmstift, Baden-Baden.

To Curtis Brown.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

We leave here on Wednesday for Paris—stay there a few days—Hotel de Versailles, 60, Bvd. Montparnasse—and come on the 26th to London.

I shall have to go at once to New York, as I can’t get any answer from Seltzer, whether he has put me any of the money

he owes me into the bank, and whether he will pay my income-tax. So I shall have to go myself. For six weeks I have had no word at all from Seltzer, in answer to my letters. I shall be thankful to hand over the business to your representative once I am over there.

I will call in and see you as soon as I am back.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Mrs. Luhan writes that your son will probably go to 1 aos.

Hotel Versailles,

60, Bvd. Montparnasse, Paris♦ To Curtis Brown.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Thank you for your letter. I shall come to London on Tuesday, and on Wednesday or Thursday come in to see you. If you should happen to be away, send me word care The Adelphi, 18, York Buildings, Adelphi.

I shall have to go to New York to get that MS. of the Mexican novel—and I must go down to Mexico if I am to finish that book for autumn—so probably I may as well go at once. But I'll talk it over with you.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Garland's Hotel, Suffolk St.,

Pall Mall, S.W.i.

To Witter Bynner.                       z March, 1924.

Dear Bynnep,—

We had your letter yesterday; wondered often where you were, No news from Spoodle yet.

We sail on Wednesday on the Aquitania for New York: arrive about March 12th. We shall stay a week or so—then come on to New Mexico. Seltzer has been behaving queerly. I must see to him. Hon. Dorothy Brett is coming with us—she is 596 deaf—and a painter—and daughter of Viscount Esher: I think we shall stay a while in Taos. I want to go back to Mexico— particularly I want to go to Oaxaca. What do you think of that?

We look forward to seeing you, and to making plans. Thankful to be leaving Europe—were in Paris and Germany.

Au revoir.

D. H. L.

Canard R.M.S. "Aquitania."

To J. M. Murry.                  Monday, 10th Match.

Dear Jack,—

We come to New York to-morrow. The sea is swinging and smoking now, in a cold wind since we came out of the Gulf Stream. But it has been a pleasant voyage, and we have missed none of the meals. The boat is very comfortable, only too big— like being in a town. Very quick, though—we make about 580 or 585 sea miles a day: very good going. Brett is very happy— insatiably curious—teas with doctor, etc. Frieda doesn’t really like the sea—the motion. I like to feel myself travelling. And it’s good to get away from the doom of Europe. I'll add a word in New York,

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

Tuesday afternoon.

Landed at last, and got all the things through customs—such a fuss! Don’t come in by New York if you can go to Galveston. And little ships are humanly much nicer than big ones. The passport officials looked askance at Brett travelling alone— called her "this girl.” I got so mad. Then they soon slowed down, quieted-up sharp. The Customs people were very nice— but oh, so long. We struggled up to 100th St. buried in luggage, in a taxi, in half a blizzard, snow and rain on a gale of N.E. wind. New York looking vile. Seltzer was at the wharf, though I hadn’t told him I was coming. He'd got it from Curtis Brown. He looks very diminished, and him so small already. Apparently his business has gone very badly this winter, and he has sleepless nights- So, it seems, might I. My money is at present in thin air, but I believe it will materialise bit by bit. Damn it all and damn everything. But I don’t care terribly.-—Brett just bewildered.—D. H. L.

Write to Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A.

We'll go next week. When you come, don’t declare anything on your customs declaration paper—put “Personal Effects and Clothing”—no more. Brett went and put “paints, artists' materials, Banjolette,” and I had to wangle out of paying duty. But the Customs people are nice enough.—D. H. L.

c/o Thomas Seltzer,

219, West too th St.

New York City.

To Harriet Monroe.                     12 March, 1924.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

We got here yesterday. I think we shall be going through to Taos on Tuesday or Wednesday—myself and my wife and a friend, the Hon. Dorothy Brett. I should like to see you, if you would tell me where—perhaps at Poetry's office for a cup of tea.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Taos, New Mexico.

To Harriet Monroe.                        8 April, 1924.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

Probably it's a long while since we were in Chicago—it seems only yesterday. It was awfully nice to see you and know you—I shall never forget the afternoon, that lake with a stripe of snow like a skunk’s nose. It was best before the other people came— but I liked the young man and his wife very much: and Mrs. Freer.

We find Taos very pleasant again—very beautiful—and the raging spirits somewhat soothed. My wife just calming down 598 after the depressing swirl of Europe, and Dorothy Brett blissfully happy on an old horse. Both sending you warm regards. I must say I am glad to be out Here in the south-west of America—there is the pristine something, unbroken, unbreakable, and not to be got under even by us awful whites with our machines—for which 1 thank whatever gods there be. If you come this way, come and see us. You can always have lots of room to yourself. Don’t forget.

Many greetings to you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Taos, New Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.                         io April, 1924.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

This just come from Seeker. It’s another of my literary mix-ups. Magnus was a man I knew in Italy. He committed suicide in Malta, after borrowing money from a nice and not rich Maltese whom I knew. Magnus left various MS. of not much value: one about his experiences in the Foreign Legion. In order to get some money back for Michael Borg, the Maltese, I wrote a long memoir of Magnus to go before the Legion book. I wanted very much to recover for Berg the eighty-odd pounds Magnus borrowed.

Magnus left a wife—but the MS. I think legally belongs to Michael Borg. Anyhow, there is that debt, which I know of personally.

Would you write and ask Michael Borg, 34, Fuori la Mina, Valletta, Malta, if he will accept the 50 per cent—or what he wants?

Ask Seeker to let you see the MSS. if you are at all interested. It is interesting.

Ask Seeker please to change Magnus’ name—have already suggested it to him: and to change all names—I have no idea where Mrs. Magnus is: I only know she had repudiated her husband before he died, and refused to pay any of his debts.

I don’t know what to answer Seeker about percentage, and especially about the American side. Will you settle it all? I suppose there won’t be a great sale for the book, and I don’t mind taking the io per cent up to 2,000. You judge if it is right. But we must let Seltzer know. Seltzer, by the way, had the MSS. for nearly two years—and it was by the merest odd chance I said to Murry—who was reading it out of curiosity— send it in to Seeker. You see, Seeker knew all the Florence and Capri part of it.

I asked Barnaby to cable the acceptance of Boy in Bush. Seeker will make Miss Skinner’s alteration—I asked him to: as far as he likes.

Seeker can leave out anything he likes from my MS. of Magnus, or from Magnus’ own.

Seltzer writing me>—very hurt. I hope you don’t hate all this trouble.

D. H. Lawrence. P.P.S.

I am writing Michael Borg now. Also to Seeker to deal entirely with you.

I wrote my sister-in-law in Munich to find me illustrations for Movements in European History and to Vere Collins, at the Oxford Press, to inform her of what he wants. They can communicate direct. Seltzer writes he would like to publish the new illustrated edition in America, when it is ready.

D. H. L.

I want you to let Barmby know at once about this Magnus thing, so he can settle as you think best with Seltzer.

D. H. L.

I shan’t get my Mexican novel finished this year—shall stay the summer here, I think.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To J. M. Murry.                        16 May, 1924.

Dear Jack,—

We learn from Brett that you are marrying a girl called Violet le Maistre on the 20th of this month—and I see by the calendar it is already the 16th. If you can settle down with her

and be happy I am sure it is the best for you. Better, as you say, than wild-goose-chasing in other continents. I hope you will have a nice place in Dorset, and make friends with your own destiny. I' m sure you can, if you will, take the rest of your life peacefully, with a wife, a home, and probably children. Anyhow, that’s what I wish you—an acquiescent, peaceful happiness.

We are out on Frieda's ranch, with three Indians and a Mexican carpenter, building up the log cabin—the 3-room one. It has been neglected for some years. You would like making adobe and so on, and the camp at evening—but I think you’d not feel comfortable in your skin, for long, away from England. It’s much better as it is, I'm sure of that. I think by the end of next week the houses will be done. There’s a two-room cabin where Mabel can come when she likes, and a one-roomer for Brett. We’ve got four horses in the clearing—and spring is just here—the wild gooseberries all in flower, and an occasional humming-bird, many blue-jays. But the vibration is so different. England is as unreal as a book one read long ago, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or something of that. Often, too, it is trying—one has to bear up hard against it. Then the altitude, about 8,600 ft,, tells on one for a time. The sun is setting and the pines are red, the Indians are just starting drumming. All good luck to you.

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa,

New Mexico.

To Catherine Carswell.                    18 May, 1924.

My dear Catherine,—

We have often spoken of you lately. I wonder what you are doing. We had your letter about your cottage and Don's job. That was mean, to take the job back again. You do have bad luck.

Did I tell you Mabel Luhan gave Frieda that little ranch-— about 160 acres—up here in the skirts of the mountains? We have been up there the last fortnight working like the devil, with z Indians and a Mexican carpenter, building up the 601

z-room log cabin, which was falling down. We’ve done all the building, save the chimney—and we’ve made the adobe bricks for that. I hope in the coming week to finish everything, shingling the roofs of the other cabins too. i here are two log cabins, a z-roomer for us, a 2-roomer Mabel can have when she comes, a little one-roomer for Brett—and a nice log hay-house and corral. We have four horses in the clearing. It is very wild, with the pine-trees coming down the mountain—and the altitude, 8,600 ft., takes a bit of getting used to. But it is also very fine.—Now it is our own, so we can invite you to come. I hope you’ll scrape the money together and come for a whole summer, perhaps next year, and try it. Anyway it would make a break, and there is something in looking out on to a new landscape altogether.—I think we shall stay till October, then go down to Mexico, where I must work at my novel. At present I don’t write—don’t want to—don’t care. Things are all far away. I haven’t seen a newspaper for two months, and can’t bear to think of one. The world is as it is. I am as I am. We don’t fit very well.—I never forget that fatal evening at the Cafe Royal. That is what coming home means to me. Never again, pray the Lord.

We rode down here, Brett and I. Frieda lary, came in the car. The spring down in the valley is so lovely, the wild plum everywhere white like snow, the cotton-wood trees ail tender plumy green, like happy ghosts, and the alfalfa fields a heavy dense green. Such a change, in two weeks. The apple orchards suddenly in bloom. Only the grey desert the same.—Now there is a thunder-storm and I think of my adobes out there at the ranch. We ride back to-morrow.—One doesn’t talk any more about being happy—that is child’s talk. But I do like having the big, unbroken spaces round me. There is something savage, unbreakable in the spirit of place out here—the Indians drumming and yelling at our camp-fire at evening.—But they’ll be wiped out too, I expect—schools and education will finish them. But not before the world falls.

Remember me to Don. Save up—and enjoy your cottage meanwhile.

Yours,

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa;

New Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.

7 June, 1924.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I return the signed contract for the Magnus book. Michael Borg also wrote in a very friendly way—as he ought—saying he'd had a nervous breakdown. Another!—You will automatically pay him half the royalties.

I wish, if you have not done so, you would send a copy of the Boy in the Bush contract to Miss M. L. Skinner, Darlington, nr. Perth, West Australia. She is dying to see it.

We’ve finished the hard work on the ranch here, and I'm hoping for a bit of leisure. I might even try a bit of my own work again.

I shall expect to hear from you from New York.

Yours,

(Signed) D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To Martin Seeker.                         11 June, 1924.

Dear Seckep,—

I had your letter—am expecting the proofs of the Magnus book.

Do a little thing for me, will you? Order Punch, for six months, to Mr. F. W. Gillett, at this address. And order a couple of periodicals for me—not highbrow, not London Mercury; the best of the popular magazines, like the Strand, or Hutchinson's, or the Bystander. I haven't seen one for years, and I think it would be good for me to know what popularity is. Order them for six months, will you, and send me the bill. I'll send you a cheque.

And if you have anything on your list, old or new, that you think we should like, send us something. There is nothing to read up here.

It’s suddenly midsummer and blazing hot. I like it. I think Frieda would like to turn me into a western farmer. Mais nonI

GrasseI

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Panch, Questa,

New Mexico,

To Rolf Gardiner.                          4      r9²4-

Dear Mr. Gardiner,—

I had your letter only last night. Duckworth’s knew I was in America. Curtis Brown, 6, Henrietta St., always has my address.

I would have done a notice of Har bottle, but now it is too late. Anyhow, I hope the book comes along. It will interest me.

Myself, I am sick of the farce of cosmic unity, or world unison. It may exist in the abstract—but not elsewhere. And we may all find some abstract ground to agree on. But as soon as it comes to experience, to passion, to desire, to feeling, we are different. And the great racial differences are insuperable. We may agree about abstract, yet practical ideas, like honesty, speaking the truth, and so on. And there it ends. The spirit of place ultimately always triumphs. An American of pure English descent is different in all his reactions from an Englishman.

To tell the truth, I am sick to death of the Jewish Monotheistic string. It has become monomaniac. I prefer the pagan many gods, and the animistic vision. Here on this ranch at the foot of the Rockies, looking west over the desert, one just knows that all our Pale-face and Hebraic monotheistic insistence is a dead letter—the soul won’t answer any more. Here, where we have the camp just above the cabin, under the hanging stars, and we sit with the Indians round the fire, and they sing till late into the night, and sometimes we all dance the Indian treaddance—then what is it to me, world unison and peace and all that? I am essentially a fighter—to wish me peace is bad luck— except the fighter’s peace. And I have known many things, 604 that may never be unified: Ceylon, the Buddha 'temples, Australian bush, Mexico and Teotihuacan, Sicily, London, New York, Paris, Munich—don't talk to me of unison. No more unison among man than among the wild animals— coyotes and chipmunks and porcupines and deer and rattlesnakes. hey all live in these hills—in the unison of avoiding one another. As for willing the world into shape—better chaos a thousand times than any “perfect” world. Why, you can’t even have a “perfect” camp on a Bucks common—Blarney!

j o me, chaos doesn’t matter so much as abstract, which is mechanical, order. To me it is life to feel the white ideas and the “oneness” crumbling into a thousand pieces, and all sorts of wonder coming through. It is painful—much more painful, and endured inwardly, than K.K. tests. But there it is. I hate “oneness,” it's a mania.

And what do I care, really, about all that stuff ? I am glad if White Fox and his K.K’ers have a good time. Chacun d son gout—and let him keep it. I have mine, and it’s different. I know there has to be a return to the older vision of life. But not for the sake of unison. And not done from the will. It needs some welling up of religious sources that have been shut down in us: a great yielding, rather than an act of will: a yielding to the darker, older unknown, and a reconciliation. Nothing bossy. Yet the natural mystery of power.

Anyhow, don’t bother. Accept what seems good to you, reject what seems repulsive; and don’t feel condemned or over-implicated. To hell with stunts—-when they cease to amuse.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Hunch, Questa, New Mexico.

To Martin Seeker.                        23 July, 1924

Dear Seckep,—

Am reading Passage to India. It's good, but makes one wish a bomb would fall and end everything. Life is more interesting 605

in its undercurrents than in its obvious; and E. M. does see people, people and nothing but people: ad nauseam.

I hope all goes well. F. will be writing again. Thank you very much for all the trouble you took for me.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa,

New Mexico, U.S.A.

To Rolf Gardiner.

9      1924-

Dear Rolf Gardiner,—

I thought Harbottle poor Stuff: snivelling self-pity, exasper-atedly smashing a few cheap parlour ornaments, but leaving the house standing stuffy, suburban, sterile, smug, a nice little upholstered nest of essential cowardice. White Fox, forsooth! White rat!

Bah! If ever you edit another paper, take up a hatchet, not a dummy teat of commiseration. What we need is to smash a few big holes in European suburbanity, let in a little real fresh air. Oh, words are action good enough, if they’re the right words. But all this blasted snivel of hopelessness and self-pity and "stars"—and "Wind among the trees" and "camp-fires"— and witanagemotery—It’s courage we want, fresh air, and not suffused sentiments. Even the stars are stale, that way. If one is going to act, in words, one should go armed to the teeth, and fire carefully at the suburbaniaas—like Wells, White Fox, Barrie, Jack Squire—even Murry—all the lot. Tiff! and down they go!

If it’s going to be Youth, then let it be Youth on the warpath, not wandervogelnig and piping imitation nature tunes to the taste of a cake of milk chocolate, and pitying itself and "all other unfortunates." To the rubbish heap with all unfortunates. A great merdel to all latter-day Joan-of-Arcism. God, God, God, if there be any Youth in Europe, let them rally and kick the bottom of all this elderly bunk. Not snivel or feel helpless. What’s the good being hopeless, so long as one has a hobnailed boot to kick with? Down with the Poor in Spirit1 A war!

But the Subtlest, most intimate warfare. Smashing the face of what one knows is rotten.

Murry said to me last year: "Lome, only come, and do what you like with the Adelphi.” I came in December. He went green at my first article, and—wouldn't print it. No, Lorenzo, you'll only make enemies.—As if that weren't what I want. I hate this slime of all the world’s my friend, my half-friend, anyway I'm not going to make an enemy of him.

Well, here's to you and your bygone Youth.

D. H. Lawrence

To Willard Johnson.

Just back from the Snake Dance.

One wonders what one came for—what all those people went for. The Hopi country is hideous—a clayey pale-grey desert with death-grey mesas sticking up like broken pieces of ancient dry grey bread. And the hell of a lumpy trail for forty miles. Yet car after car lurched and bobbed and ducked across the dismalness, on Sunday afternoon.

The Hopi country is some forty miles across, and three stale mesas jut up in its desert. The dance was on the last mesa, and on the furthest brim of the last mesa, in Hotevilla. The various Hopi villages are like broken edges of bread crust, utterly grey and arid, on top of these mesas', and so you pass them: first Walpi: then unseen Chimopova: then Oraibi on the last mesa: and beyond Oraibi, on the same mesa, but on a still higher level of grey rag-rock, and away at the western brim, is Hotevilla.

The pueblos of little grey houses are largely in ruin, dry raggy bits of disheartening ruin. One wonders what dire necessity or what Cain-like stubbornness drove the Hopis to these dismal grey heights and extremities. Anyhow, once they got there, there was evidently no going back. But the pue are mostly ruin. And even then, very small.

Hotevilla is a scrap of a place with a plaza no bigger than a fair-sized back-yard: and the chief house on the square a ruin. But into this plaza finally three thousand onlookers piled. A 607 mile from the village was improvised the official camping ground, like a corral with hundreds of black motor cars. Across the death-grey desert, bump and lurch, came strings of more black cars, like a funeral cortege. Till everybody had come—about three thousand bodies.

And all these bodies piled in the oblong plaza, on the roofs, in the ruined windows, and thick around on the sandy floor, under the old walls: a great crowd. There were Americans of all sorts, wild west and tame west, American women in pants, an extraordinary assortment of female breeches: and at least two women in skirts, relics of the last era. There were Navajo women in full skirts and velvet bodices: there were Hopi women in bright shawls: a negress in a low-cut black blouse and a black sailor hat: various half-breeds: and all the men to match. The ruined house had two wide square window-holes: in the one was forced an apparently naked young lady with a little black hat on. She laid her naked handsome arm like a white anaconda along the sill, and posed as Queen Semiramis seated and waiting. Behind her, the heads of various Americans to match: perhaps movie people. In the next window-hole, a poppy-show of Indian women in coloured shawls and glistening long black fringe above their conventionally demure eyes. Two windows to the west!

And what had they all come to see?—come so far, over so weary a way, to camp uncomfortably? To see a little bit of a snake dance in a plaza no bigger than a back-yard? Light grey-daubed antelope priests (so called) and a dozen black-daubed snake-priests (so called). No drums, no pageantry. A hollow muttering. And then one of the snake-priests hopping slowly round with the neck of a pale, bird-like snake nipped between his teeth, while six elder priests dusted the six younger, snake-adorned priests with prayer feathers on the shoulders, hopping behind like a children’s game. Like a children's game—■ Old Roger is dead and is low in his grave! After a few little rounds, the man set his snake on the sand, and away it steered, towards the massed spectators sitting around: and after it came a snake priest with a snake stick, picked it up with a flourish from the shrinking crowd, and handed it to an antelope priest in the background. The six young men renewed their snake as the 608

eagle his youth—sometimes the youngest, a boy of fourteen or so, had a rattlesnake ornamentally dropping from his teeth, sometimes a racer, a thin whip snake, sometimes a heavier bullsnake, which wrapped its long end round his knee like a garter— till he calmly undid it. More snakes, till the priests at the back had little armfuls, like armfuls of silk stockings that they were going to hang on the line to dry.

When all the snakes had had their little ride in a man’s mouth, and had made their little excursion towards the crowd, they were all gathered, like a real lot of wet silk stockings—say forty—or thirty—and left to wriggle all together for a minute in meal, corn-meal, that the women of the pueblo had laid down on the sand of the plaza. Then, hey presto!—they were snatched up like fallen washing, and the two priests ran away with them westward, down the mesa, to set them free among the rocks, at the snake-shrine (so called).

And it was over. Navajos began to ride to the sunset, black motor-cars began to scuttle with their backs to the light. It was over.

And what had we come to see, all of us? Men with snakes in their mouths, like a circus? Nice clean snakes, all washed and cold-creamed by the priests (so called). Like wet pale silk stockings. Snakes with little bird-like heads, that bit nobody, but looked more harmless than doves? And funny men with blackened faces and whitened jaws, like a corpse band?

A show? But it was a tiny little show, for all that distance.

Just a show! The south-west is the great playground of the white American, The desert isn’t good for anything else. But it does make a fine national playground. And the Indian, with his long hair and his bits of pottery and blankets and clumsy home-made trinkets, he’s a wonderful live toy to play with. More fun than keeping rabbits, and just as harmless. Wonderful, really, hopping round with a snake in his mouth. Lots of fun! Oh, the wild west is lots of fun: the Land of Enchantment. Like being right inside the circus-ring: lots of sand, and painted savages jabbering, and snakes and all that. Come on, boys! Lots of fun! The great south-west, the national circus-ground. Come on, boys; we’ve every bit as much right to it as anybody else. Lots of fun!

As for the hopping Indian with his queer muttering gibberish and his dangling snake—why, he sure is cute! He says he's dancing to make his corn grow. What price irrigation, Jimmy? He says the snakes are emissaries to his rain god, to tell him to send rain to the corn on the Hopi Reservation, so the Hopis will have lots of corn-meal. What price a spell of work on the railway, Jimmy? Get all the corn-meal you want with two dollars a day, anyhow.

But oh, dry up! Let every man have his own religion. And if there wasn’t any snake dance we couldn't come to see it. Miss lots of fun. Good old Hopi, he sure is cute with a rattler between his teeth. You sure should see him, boy. If you don't, you miss a lot.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To J. M. Murry.                            30th Aug.

Dear Jack,—

I’m sending Curtis Brown my article on the Hopi Snake Dance. No doubt it’s too long for you, but read it, anyhow, as it defines somewhat my position.

That trip to the Hopi country was interesting, but tiring, so far in a motor car. The Navajo country is very attractive—all wild, with great red cliffs bluffing up. Good country to ride through, one day. The Navajos themselves real wild nomads: alas, they speak practically no English, and no Spanish. But strange, the intense religious life they keep up in those round huts. This animistic religion is the only live one, ours is a corpse of a religion.

I think we go down to Mexico in about five weeks.

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Valdei

To Witter Bynner.

Taos County.

Saturday.

Dear Bynner,—

We ve finished all our hard work—and the little guest-house is ready. If you and Spoodle would like to come up for a week, let us know, and come. I think we can manage to be good-tempered and amiable for a while. And we can talk Mexico plans. I still feel very much drawn down there.

Only let us know a day or two ahead, then come. It is fresh up here, and not dusty. And as a rule, the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are, thank goodness, more or less at rest again, after 5 weeks’ slaving.

D. H. L,

Taos.

To Willard Johnson,                               Sat.

Dear Spoodle,—

We have been down here a few days—go back this afternoon. Clarence is here—and Mrs. Sprague—she’s a nice elderly woman.

In all these complicated triangly businesses of inviting and not inviting and coming and not coming I feel a bit disconnected. But if you come to the ranch and would like to stay a while and we feel it would be nice—why, let it be so. But let's let things evolve naturally of themselves, without plans or schemes or triangles vicious or otherwise. I'm tired of all that old stuff: I really am.

This sort of personal wingle-wangle has been worked to death. Let’s drop it, and say basta!

Clarence has got the lease of this two-storey house for Mabel's lifetime, so we’re taking out our things for him to move in.

Greet Bynner. Tell him to roll our way when he feels like it, without afterthought.

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Valdez, Taos County.

To Witter Bynner,                              Friday.

Dear Bynner,—

All right. When you want to come up, let us know, and if you wish, we’ll arrange for you to come straight out here, without staying in Taos at all. We are very rarely down there, either. And there is no one in the little guest cabin—nor likely to be. I understand your feeling. I myself am sick to death of personalities and personalisms and tittle-tattle and threads back and forth, like a lot of ravelled knitting, and oneself the kitten trying to pick one's way out of it. Basta! to it all, and ten times basta!

We keep fairly cool up here—but you’ll have more or less to camp, help with the chores and all that. You won’t be particularly comfortable. And of course society is strictly limited. But you can always depart when you’ve had enough, and in the meantime it’s not bad. I will keep my irritatingness in bounds, I hope.

Frieda sends a bright Hello! Brett a more stalky one.

D. H. L.

I rival the Spoodle in rags of paper.

Del Monte Ranch, Valdez.

To Witter Bynner.                             Tuesday.

Dear Bynner,—

All your three letters to-day. I’m sorry you are ill, and not coming. But do come—whenever you like—we'll have the house ready. We laughed a bit at the little fellow of gold—but amiably. We’re all absurd, and it’s better to be pleasantly so than poisonously so. As for difficulties, plus fa change, etc.

But come up before you—or we—go far away. I’ve not seen any of your poems or things about me. I never care, so long as it isn’t mean, what people say about me. I’ve really reached the point of realising that most people naturally dislike me— especially on second thoughts, they do. It’s just part of the chemistry of lite.

Spoodle may come to-morrow—quien sabe? It’s a world of maybes.

Yours,

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa,

New Mexico, U.S.A.

Post card to E. M. Forster.                 Summer 1924.

Don’t forget you are due to send me your novel. I want to read it. Saw Murry’s Bou-oum crit.—but even that is better than his miaow—anyhow, damn the universe and its echo—je m’en fiche. On pent toujours s’en ficher, meme de ‘Cunivers.

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa,

New Mexico.

To Miss Isaacs.                             6 Sept,, 1924.

Dear Miss Isaacs,—

Thank you for your letter.

I did an essay on The Hopi Snake Dance and feel rather deeply about the said essay. But no doubt it is far too long and far too speculative for your magazine. I don’t want to cut it down at all: not for anybody. But if you wish I will try to write a little purely descriptive essay such as the Corn Dance one. Mrs. Luhan can lend you pictures.

If, by the way, she calls in your office, and you have that Hopi Dance MS. from Curtis Brown—I told Mrs. M’Lord to send it you—and if Mrs. Luhan would like to read it, please let her do so.

I hope my wife and I may meet you, and all the Theatre Artists, one day.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Taos, New Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.

30 Sept., 1924.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I am sending you to-day the MS. of the novelette St. Mawr which I have finished this summer. It works out more than 60,000 words, I believe. With The Woman Who Rode Away and another story of out here that I am doing, called The Princess, it v/ill make a book. If anyone wants to do St. Mawr serially, they can cut it all they like, so long as the book form is complete. If you think it better, St. Mawr can be called Two Ladies and a Horse.

The Oxford Press apparently are going ahead with Movements in European History in the illustrated edition. They asked me for an Epilogue. Here it is. Will you hand it over to them? And perhaps you had better make a new contract for this new edition, what do you think? I am writing them direct about the illustrations.

We think to leave in a fortnight’s time. Write to me either: c/b The British Consulate,

1, Av. Madero, Mexico, D.F.

or else via Barmby. All Mexican letters come through New York. I am so bothered about Seltzer, who doesn't pay me. Otherwise all well.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To J. M. Murry.                            3 Oct., 1924.

Dear Jack,—

We had your letter. I'm glad you have a good time on the Dorset coast, with Violet. But don’t you become the "mossy stone* —unless, of course, you want to. And perhaps you will find fulfilment in a baby. Myself, I am not for postponing to the 614 next generation—and so ad infinitum. Frieda says every woman hopes her baby will become the Messiah. It takes a man, not a baby. I m afraid there’ll be no more Son Saviours. One was almost too much, in my opinion.

1 m glad you like the Hopi Dance article. All races have one root, once one gets there. Many stems from one root: the stems never to commingle or "understand" one another. I agree Forster doesn't "understand" his Hindu. And India is to him just negative: because he doesn’t go down to the root to meet it. But the Passage to India interested me very much. At least the repudiation of our white bunk is genuine, sincere, and pretty thorough, it seems to me. Negative, yes. But King Charles must have his head off. Homage to the headsman.

We are leaving here next week. There was a flurry of wild snow in the air yesterday, and the nights are icy. But now, at ten o'clock in the morning, to look across the desert at the mountains you’d think June morning was shining. Frieda is washing the porch: Brett is probably stalking a rabbit with a 22-gun: I am looking out of the kitchen door at the far blue mountains, and the gap, the tiny gate that leads down into the canyon and away to Santa Fe. And in ten days’ time we shall be going south—to Mexico. The high thin air gets my chest, bronchially. It’s very good for the lungs, but fierce for tender bronchi.

We shall never "drop in on one another" again; the ways go wide apart. Sometimes I regret that you didn't take me at what I am, last Christmas: and come here and take a different footing. But apparently you did wliat was in you: and I what is in me, I do it. As for —-----, there is just nothing to say. It is

absurd, but there it is. The ultimate son of Moses pining for heavy tablets. I believe the old Moses wouldn’t have valued the famous tablets if they hadn’t been ponderous, and millstones round everybody’s neck. It’s just Hebraic. And now the tablets are to be papier mdche. Pfuil carito! it's all bunk: heavy, uninspired bunk. Che lo sial—Kangaroo was never ------.

Frieda was on the wrong track. And now —---is sodden.

Despedida, despedida Eran fuentes de dolores——

The country here is very lovely at the moment. Aspens high on the mountains like a fleece of gold. Ubi est ille Jasons I ae scrub oak is dark red, and the wild birds are coming down to the desert. It is time to go south.—Did I tell you my father died on Sept. 10th, the day before my birthday?—The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers. There is no more hope northwards, and the salt of its inspiration is the tingling of the viaticum on the tongue.

Sounds as if I was imitating an Ossianic lament.

You can get me in Mexico:

c/o The British Consulate, Av. Madero i, Mexico, D.F.

But I want to go south again to Oaxaca, to the Zapotecas and the Maya. Quien sabe, si se puede!

AdiosI

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa,

New Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.                           8 Oct., 1924.

Dear Curtts Brown,—

We are packing up to leave here on Saturday—nth. I suppose we shall stay a day or two in Taos, then on to Mexico City. It is time to go. Last evening came a deep six inches of snow, that is thawing slowly to-day. It is very early, and summer will more or less come back, but it is the first real stroke from the paw of winter. Besides, I want to go. I always do want to go south, though here is lovely.

I sent you last week the typescript of St. Mawr—a long novelette. This week-end I will send you The Princess. It is being typed now. I guess it is 15,000 words. With The Woman Who Rode Away and St. Mawr it will easily make a book of three novelettes. But not gay, alas.

I enclose herewith the agreements with the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Keep my copy for me.

I m glad you saw------, I’m sure he's in a bad way, poor

devil: though he did help to bring it on himself, trying to be a big publisher when God cut him out a little one; if not tiny.

I wonder if you had a nice time m America. Innerlich, one usually has a tough time here, I think, though Ausserlich, it’s all right.

I liked Barmby, your N.Y. manager, very much, and all your people in London are awfully nice. But I do wonder how you make such big outfits pay. I’m afraid I don’t help much, that way.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To Catherine Cars well.                    8 October, 1924.

Dear Catherine,—

A long time since I wrote you, because I lost your address. Anyhow, I'm glad you are in the country with a place of your own.

We are packing up to leave here. Last night came the first snow: six deep inches. To-day it’s thawing dismally. It’s very early for snow. And no doubt the Indian summer will come back. But it’s a blow. The horses have come up, very miserable, want to be ridden. Weil, I shall have to ride down for the milk.

If the roads are passable, we shall go down to Taos on Saturday, stay a day or two, then go down to Mexico City. My spirit always wants to go south. Perhaps one feels a bit of hope down there. Anyhow, the White civilisation makes me feel worse every day. Brett will go down with us. But if we take a house, she must take a little place of her own. Not be too close. Here she has a little one-room cabin to herself. There is a 2-room guest-house: and still, a third sort of little log-barn we can make into a little house. It’s so much easier that way.

The summer has gone. It was very beautiful up here. We worked hard, and spent very little money. And we had the place all to ourselves, and our horses the same. It was good to be alone and responsible. But also it is very hard living up against these savage Rockies. The savage things are a bit gruesome, and they try to down one.—But far better they than the white disintegration.—I did a long novelette—about 60,000 words—about 2 women and a horse—St. Mawr. But it may be called Two Women and a Horse. And two shorter novelettes, about 15,000 words: The Woman Who Rode Away and The Princess. St. Mawr ends here. They are all about this country more or less. I believe Hutchinson’s are doing The Woman Who Rode Away (but cut down). They are all sad. After all, they’re true to what is.

Seltzer still hovers on the brink of bankruptcy, and keeps me on the edge of the same. But by being careful we manage to have two thousand dollars to go to Mexico with.

I don’t suppose we shall be back till end of April. Snow melts so late. I wonder if you'll be able to get over. I believe it would be just as cheap to come Hamburg-Amerika line Plymouth to Vera Cruz-Mexico. Maybe cheaper. But we’ll see.

I loathe winter. They gas about the Nordic races, over here, but I believe they’re dead, dead, dead. I hate all that comes from the north.

Poor Don, hope he has work, and that John Patrick flourishes. I ordered Boy in the Bush for you from Seeker, also Memoir of the Foreign Legion. I hope you had both.

The house is half dismantled: we are fastening the place up and leaving it. The snow is dropping wet off the pine trees, the desert seems decomposing in the distance—ugh! I must catch Aaron, my black horse, and ride down in the slush under these snow-dripping trees. Ugh!—But it's all in a lifetime.

F. sends her love, with many good wishes from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

To Witter Bynner.

Hotel Monte Carlo, Av. Uruguay, Mexico, D.F.

Friday.

We got in after midnight on Wed.—train so late—journey otherwise uneventful, and not unpleasant. You can buy ticket and book Pullman now in El Paso station—much easier. But the food in the Pullman the same swindle. There has been a good deal of rain here—country looks nice, and it’s almost chilly. The capital is shabby and depressed—no business doing—no money—everybody rather depressed—not a very nice feeling in the town. I think we shall go in a fortnight to Oaxaca. The English Vice-Consul has a brother a priest in the Cathedral Chapter there, and he would sponsor us! Ye gods! But the man says it’s very nice down there, and a perfect climate. If we stay, whatever will Idclla say! The Monte Carlo is almost unchanged, but not many guests. We chose to go upstairs—Hon. Dorothy Brett in your old room, we in the one inside where the monkey, the parrot, and the Chihuahua dog abode. With a bowl of candied fruit, a flask of Chianti, those coloured Majolica cups and tea, we only need you two to push back the clock. They’re very nice to us in the hotel.

D. H. L.

Monte Carlo Hotel,

Av, Uruguay, Mexico, D.F, To Willard Johnson.                     Sat,

Dear Spoodle,—

I suddenly remember I promised Mr. Hawk at Del Monte Ranch# Valdez, a typewriter ribbon for Smith Premier typewriter: and I clean forgot it. If you find one in Santa Fe, do please send it him with my compliments, and tell me how much it is.

Mrs. Nuttall came to lunch to-day—full of news about the murdered Mrs. Evans, etc. They expect more messes here— not revolutions, because nobody has any money to make one. But the place feels depressed.----------- telegraphed

me: he's gone to Cuernavaca, "to work." Damn his eyes and his work. Garnio is in Yucatan with the Carnegie Institute excavators—at Chicken Ita—digging up the dead instead of looking after the living. Have just written to Genaro Estrada, of the P.E.N. club here. Will let you know what he’s like when I've seen him, But expect nothing of this lousy city—I feel they’re all a bit of a fraud, with their self-seeking bolshevism. The Brit. Consul very attentive—the Vice has a brother a priest in the Chapter at Oaxaca. I think we shall go down there in a week's time: D.V. and all well. hey say the next revolution begins on Monday. We lunch to-morrow in Coyoacan, and dine in Tlalpam. Good for us. But I really feel cynical about these “patriots” and “socialists” down here. It's a mess. Tube-roses on the table very strong-smelling. F. got a sneezing cold. Making after-dinner tea, with ess. peppermint, on the spirit-lamp. Bought Mrs. Nuttall a doorknob to match, in the Volador. Very nice sarapes around: very nice: 16 pesos. Bought none yet, but have my eye on a fine white one, with brown markings. This city no go. For $50 got 101.50 pesos.

Vale!

D. H. L.

Hotel Monte Carlo, Av. Uruguay, Mexico, D.F.

To Witter Bynner.                         29 Oct., 1924.

Dear Bynner,—

Your letter to Frieda to-day about the deed. I think it's there all right, among the other deeds in the green iron trunk down at Del Monte, and I’ve written to Mr. Hawk asking him to send it you at once, registered, to Box 1061.

So you may buy that bit of land? A la guerre comme a. la guerre.

We’ve both had terrible colds like the one I had in Puebla, And if it's merely Mexico City, it’s not worth coming for. Chilly, reeking with influenza, and in bad spirits, the town. I think we go down to Oaxaca on Monday.--left

for Cuernavaca the day we got in, but apparently he too is no loss. Disagreeable, with no fun left in him, and terrified for fear he won’t be able to do his next great book, with a vivid Mexican background, before Christmas. A narrow-gutted “artist” with a stutter.

We lunched with the venerable Mrs.------: who has been

nine months in California without, apparently, bringing forth. But she was nice, and gave us lots of flowers. Dinner at Cozoucan, and drank absinthe, gin, pouilly, chablis, beaune, port, and whisky from beginning to end of an evening, and was not comforted. Genaro Estrada of the Pen club called on me— fat and bourgeois but nice, and I’m in for a supper at the Oriental Cafe on Friday evening, to meet the Pens. Don't like rhe thought of it one bit.

Want to get away into the country and be by myself.

Hope Spoodle is fine!

Give many salutes to Mrs. Hughes from us.

Let me know if you get the deed all right; then if you do it.

D. H. L.

Hotel Francia, Oaxaca, Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.                       14th Nov,, 1924.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I got the Blackwell agreement last night, and return it herewith. Better anyhow for Blackwell to set the book up himself. I am glad Cape is doing Mastro don Gesualdo.

I think we shall stay here a month or two—rent a house. This address will be good, though. Oaxaca is a little town in the south of Mexico—about 5,000 ft. up—with a perfect climate: sun and roses. At the moment the country around is quiet, so we shall be able to ride out and about a bit: though everybody is of course scared as to what will happen next, and any day may bring a so-called revolution. I called on the governor of the State—mon Dieu!

We met --------in Mexico City. He hates it here: has

gone to Yucatan. He'll hate it there. I didn’t like him. A bit rancid.

I hope I'll get my novel done this winter.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Francia,

Oaxaca,

Mexico.

To J. M. Murry.                       15 JVovem1924.

Dear Jack,—

We’ve been down here a week now—wiggled for two days on a little railway through the lonely, forbidding country. It's only 240 miles south of Mexico City, at that. Oaxaca (you pronounce it Wa-ha-ka) is a little town, about 30,000, in a wide valley with mountains round, lonely and a bit lost. It's not far from both coasts, but there's no railway. You can ride in 4 or 5 days, either to the Pacific or the Atlantic—if you don’t get shot. The country is always unsettled. They’ve spread such an absurd sort of socialism everywhere—and these little Zapotec Indians are quite fierce. I called on the Governor of the State, in the Palace. He is an Indian from the hills, but like a little Mexican lawyer: quite nice. Only it’s all just crazy. To-morrow he asked me to go out to the opening of a road into the hills. The road isn’t begun yet. That’s why we open it. And during the picnic, of course he may get shot.

It’s the chief market to-day—such a babel and a hubbub of unwashed wi’d people—heaps of roses and hibiscus flowers, blankets, very ni.ce wild pottery, calves, birds, vegetables, and awful things to eat—including squashed fried locust-beetles. F. and I bought pots and blankets—we shall move into a house next week, and are collecting bits of furniture from various people. It’s the house of an Englishman who was born here, and who is a priest in the Cathedral Chapter. Hon. Dorothy Brett will stay on in the hotel—the proprietress is Spanish and very nice.

But everything is so shaky and really so confused. The Indians are queer little savages, and awful agitators, pump bits of socialism over them and make everything just a mess. It’s really a sort of chaos. And I suppose American intervention will become inevitable. You know, socialism is a dud. It makes just a mush of people: and especially of savages. And 70 per cent of these people are real savages, quite as much as they were 300 years ago. The Spanish-Mexican population just rots on top of 622 the black savage mass. And socialism here is a farce of farces: except very dangerous.

Well, I shall try and finish ray Quetzalcoatl novel this winter—see what comes of it. The world gives me the grue-somes, the more I see of it. That is, the world of people. This country is so lovely, the sky is perfect, blue and hot every day, and flowers rapidly following flowers. They are cutting the sugar-cane, and hauling it in in the old ox-wagons, slowly. But the grass-slopes are already dry and fawn-coloured, the unventured hills are already like an illusion, standing round inhuman.

No mail here yet—let us know how you all are.

D. H. L.

This address is good.

Hotel Francia, Oaxaca, Oax., Mexico.

To J. M. Murry.

17 Novem., 1924.

Dear Jack,—

I sent you a letter two days ago, and yesterday came the little yellow cry from your liver. You were bound to hate —----,

and he you, after a while: though I don’t suppose the hate is mortal, on either side. The Adelphi was bound to dwindle: though why not fatten it up a bit. Why in the name of hell didn’t you rouse up a bit, last January, and put a bit of gunpowder in your stuff, and fire a shot or two? But you preferred to be soft, and to go on stirring your own finger in your own vitals. If it’s any good, to you or anybody, all right! But if it’s no good, what the hell!—It seems to me, the telephone-book magazine, and the pale yellow cri de Fame are equally out of date. Spunk is what one wants, not introspective sentiment. The last is your vice. You rot your own manhood at the roots, with it. But apparently it’s what you want.

The article you wearily mention is the Snake Dance article, suppose. If you really cared about it, I d tell Curtis Brown to 623 let you have it at the price you can afford to pay. But if you don't really care, what's the good?

Sometimes the American Continent gets on my nerves, and I wish I’d come to Sicily or South Spain for the winter. But as it is, I suppose we shall stay a few months here, since we re moving into a house to-morrow. But if I still feel put out by the vibration of this rather malevolent continent, I’ll sail from Vera Cruz and spend my last dollars trying the mushiness of Europe once more, for a while. It’s a fool’s world, anyhow, and people bore me stiffer and stiffer. Fancy, even a Zapotec Indian, when he becomes governor, is only a fellow in a Sunday suit grinning and scheming. People never, never, never change: that’s the calamity. Always the same mush.

But it’s no good. Either you go on wheeling a wheelbarrow and lecturing at Cambridge and going softer and softer inside, or you make a hard fight with yourself, pull yourself up, harden yourself, throw your feelings down the drain and face the world as a fighter.—You won’t, though.

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

Av. Pino Suarez 43, Oaxaca (Oax.).

To Witter Bynner.                         10 Dec., 1924.

Dear Bynner,—

Thank you for your letter and the poem: makes me wish I had seen that Buffalo dance. Dassburg said you were probably going to the Calles inauguration, so half expected to hear of you or from you in La Capital. Idella’s parcel, I heard yesterday only, went to Taos, was sent to Del Monte, and is enshrined in the green iron trunk. If you are ever really coming to Mexico, do, please, write to Mr. A. D. Hawk, Del Monte Ranch, Questa (or Valdez) and let him send you the parcel. I feel a bit stuck with it. I have not heard from Spud. We are here in a house—perfect town. Hon. Dorothy Brett is in the hotel. Heaven knows what we shall do in the spring. Frieda is 624

sniffing Europe-wards once more: her mother and children. If we go, it will be from Vera Cruz. But will let you know.

' Yrs.,

D. H. L.

Hon. Dorothy Brett has taken to photography.

Av. Pino Suarez, 43, Oaxaca,

To Curtis Brown,                      10th January, 1925.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Will you tell this woman she can do as she likes as far as I am concerned. You do as you think really best. I don’t quite see why Seeker rakes in two guineas, by himself.

I am sending you four articles—Mornings in Mexico— nice and short—via Barmby. By the way, The Contemporary Magazine—Cobden Sanderson’s quarterly—say they would like something of me in every issue, and I like them, so will you let them have any little thing they want.—Did Barmby send you a copy of The Theatre Arts with my "Hopi Snake Dance” article?—I am getting ahead with the Mexican novel. If heaven is with me, I should finish it this month. I had a good deal done from last year.—It will probably make you open your eyes—or close them: but I like it very much indeed. If I finish by the end of this month, then about 2nd February we shall go to Mexico City, to see about a ship. My wife feels she must see her mother, and my father died, and my sister keeps worrying to see me. So perhaps we ll be in England by March. I wired Barmby to proceed with Knopf for the next book—Seeker is good at changing his mind! I think we shall have to leave him less margin.—As for -------, if only he’d

have been open and sunpie with me, I d have borne with him through anything. But a furtive little flea who hides his hand from me, as if I were going to fleece him—whether fleas have hands and fleece or not—why—basta!

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Av. Pino Suarez, Oaxaca, Oax,

To Miss Isaacs.

io Jan., 1925.

Dear Miss Isaacs.,—

The two copies of Theatre Arts have come: thank you very much. I must say it's a very attractive production, and amazingly without printer’s errors. Makes one believe it can be done. Yes, I like my "IIopi Dance” extremely, in appearance. I’d rather see it in Theatre Arts than in among the ads. of those great and profitable periodicals that have so much space and so little room for anything. There’s never a dance down here. They’re terribly un-dancy, these Zapotec and Mixtec Indians. But when I see something that might do for you, I’ll have a whack at it and send it along.

The first copies you sent me have disappeared, I am afraid, for ever: along with various books, contracts, etc. The mail is letting me down.

Many thanks to you.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Av. Pino Suarez, 43, Oaxaca, Oax.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett. Monday Morning (1925).

Dear Brett,—

Your letter with------’s enclosed this morning. They make

me sick in the pit of my stomach. The cold, insect-like ugliness of it. I shall avoid meeting —----.

If Mexico City is so unpleasant we shall probably stay here an extra week or fortnight, and go straight to Vera Cruz. I don’t like the sound of it—you are right, I think, about King.

And a word about friendship. Friendship between a man and a woman, as a thing of first importance to either, is impossible: and I know it. We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half—say the delicate spiritual half alone—inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal.

It is halfness, or partness, which causes Judas. Your friendship for ------ was spiritual—you dragged sex in and he hated

you. He’d have hated you anyhow. The halfness of your friendship I also hate, and between you and me there is no sensual correspondence.

You make the horrid mistake of trying to put your sex into a spiritual relation. Old nuns and saints used to do it, but it soon caused rottenness. Now it is half rotten to start with.

When Maruca likes a man and marries him, she is not so wrong. Love is chiefly bunk: an over-exaggeration of the spiritual and individualistic and analytic side. If she likes the man, and he is a man, then better than if she loved him. Each will leave aside some of that hateful personal insistence on imaginary perfect satisfaction, which is part of the inevitable bunk of love, and if they meet as mere male and female, kindly, in their marriage, they will make roots, not weedy flowers of a love match. If ever you can marry a man feeling kindly towards him, and knowing he feels kindly to you, do it, and throw love after-------. If you can marry in a spirit of kindli

ness, with the criticism and ecstasy both sunk into abeyance, do it. As for -------, I don’t think you have any warm feeling

at all for him. I know your Captain------: there is a kind

of little warm flame that shakes with life in his blue eyes; and that is more worth having than all the high-flown stuff, And he is quite right to leave his door open. Why do you jeer? You’re not superior to sex, and you never will be. Only too often you are inferior to it. You like the excitation of sex in the eye, sex in the head. It is an evil and destructive thing. Know from your Captain that a bit of warm flame of life is worth all the spiritualness and delicacy and Christiikeness on this miserable globe. No, Brett. I do not want your friendship, till you have a full relation somewhere, a kindly relation of both halves, not in part, as all your friendships have been. That which is in part is in itself a betrayal. Your "friendship" for me betrays the essential man and male that I am, and makes me ill. Yes, you make me ill, by dragging at one half at the expense of the other half. And I am. so much better now you have gone. I refuse any more of this ‘ delicate friendship business, because it damages one’s wholeness.

Nevertheless, I don’t feel unkindly to you. In your one half you are loyal enough. But the very halfness makes your loyalty fatal.

So sit under your tree, or by your fire, and try, try, try to get a real kindliness and a wholeness. You were really horrid even with------; and no man forgives it you, even on another

man’s account.

Know, know that this "delicate" halfness makes evil. Put away all that Virginal stuff. Don’t still go looking for men with strange eyes, who know life from A to Z. Maybe they do, missing out all the rest of the letters, like the meat from the empty eggshell. Look for a little flame of warm kindness. It’s more than the Alpha and Omega; and respect the bit of warm kindliness there is in people, even-----— and------. And

try to be whole, not that unreal half thing that all men hate you for, even I. Try and recover your wholeness, that is all. Then friendship is possible, in the kindliness of one’s heart.

D. H. L.

Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong.

Av. Pino Suarez, 43, Oaxaca, Oax, To J, M. Murry.                  28 Jan., 1925.

Dear Jack,—

Brett sent on your letters. That seems to be an absolutely prize sewer-mess, of your old "group."

Mon cher, c’est canaillerie pure et simple. Je m’en fiche— without feeling pious about it.

You remember that charming dinner at the Cafe Royal that night? You remember saying: I love you, Lorenzo, but I won’t promise not to betray you? Well, you can't betray me, and that’s all there is to that. Ergo, just leave off losing me. Let’s wipe off all that Judas-Jesus slime.

Remember, you have betrayed everything and everybody up to now. It may have been your destiny. But in ---you

met a more ancient Judas than yourself. There are degrees within degrees of initiation into the Judas trick. You’re not

half way on yet. Even —---- is miles ahead of you. It's a

case of sauve-toi. Judas was a Jew, and you're not quite that, yet.

All i want to say is, don't think you can either love me or betray me. Learn that am not lovable: hence not betrayable.

Frieda and I may come to England in the spring. But I shall not want to see anybody except just my sisters and my agent. Last time was once too many.

One day, perhaps, you and I may meet as men. Up to now, it has been all slush. Best drop that Christ stuff: it’s putrescence.

We leave here in a fortnight: where for, I am not quite sure.

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

c/o The British Consulate,

Av. Madero 2, Mexico, D.F.

To Curtis Frown.                    15^ February, 1925.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Am still in Oaxaca—but was moved down to this hotel yesterday. Been having the devil of a time with malaria—think it’s got under.—That comes of hot winter sun! I hope and pray we can get up to Mexico City in a week's time, out of the malarial areas.—With luck we should sail for England from Vera Cruz on March 10th—land in England about March 25th. I shall bring the MS. of Quetzalcoatl with me, and you can get it typed out for me—then I can go over it. It is finished.

Had a long cablegram from Seltzer. Is it true you are going to Knopf? etc. I replied that St. Mawr was offered to Knopf, but that I didn’t see why, in the future, we couldn’t offer another novel to Seltzer, if all goes well, and I mean that. I don’t quite believe that it is good for me to be monopolised by one publisher in each country. I think two publishers stimulate the sales much better than one. For example, a more popular publisher than Seeker would, I believe, handle a little novel like St. Mawr much better than Seeker. I believe you think it wisest to put all one’s works into the hands of one publisher—but seriously, I don’t agree. One becomes like a special sort of medicine.—But we will talk this over when I see you.—Hold my mail for me. I hope Seeker has agreed to publish St. Mawr alone, without The Princess. I wrote him I preferred that.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Imperial, Mexico, D.F.

To Curtis Brown.                   2nd March, 1925.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Well, anyhow, we ve got out of the valley of Oaxaca: I was so ill down there, with malaria and ’flu.

We are due to sail on the Hamburg-Amerika boat Rio Bravo from Vera Cruz on the 17th—land in Plymouth about April 3rd. I think we shall stay down in Devonshire for a while, to get strong: doctors say I must be by the sea: too much altitude in these places. If there is anything urgent, a letter would get me on board the Rio Bravo at Plymouth: but there won't be: and I’ll write you at once: I'll bring the Quetzalcoatl MS. along, and have it typed in England.

Yours, auf wiedersehen,

D. H Lawrence.

Hotel Imperial, Mexico, D.F, To Curtis Brown.                 nth March, 1925.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

Still in bed here. Doctor made all sorts of examinations, blood tests, etc.: says I must not risk a sea-voyage nor the English climate, for some months: must stay in the sun, either here, or go to the ranch. So as soon as I can travel we shall go to the ranch. Write me there.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa,

New Mexico.

This is rather a blow indeed, it’s been a series of blows lately.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.

Kiowa, Saturday.

(1925)’

Dear Brett,—

There’s not much to say—and it’s no good saying much.

It's no good our trying to get on together—it won’t happen. Myself—I have lost all desire for intense or intimate friendship. Acquaintance is enough. It will be best when we go our separate ways. A life in common is an illusion, when the instinct is always to divide, to separate individuals and set them one against the other. And this seems to be the ruling instinct, unacknowledged. Unite with the one against the other, and it’s no good

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

Del Monte Ranch,

Questa, New Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.                       15th April, 1925.

Dear Curtis Brown,—-

I get so nagged at about Douglas’s pamphlet on me and Magnus, that I send you here Douglas’s letter to me on the business. I really think it ought to be printed: though I don’t care much. Use your discretion. But please preserve D.’s letter.

I bothered about that MS. only for the sake of those two Maltese. From 1921 to 1924 I tried to get the thing published. The New York publisher wanted to publish my introduction, alone, as an essay, without the Legion MS. I refused, and waited.

Having written half the book, surely half the proceeds are due to me.

As for Douglas’s co-writing—it’s a literary turn. Besides, Magnus re-wrote the whole thing, after I talked with him in 631

Montecassino. I really sweated to get that fellow money, and Douglas wouldn’t give him a cent.

I get more and more bored with my fellow-men.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch,

Questa, New Mexico, To Miss Pearn.                           17 April, 1925.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

Thank you for your letter. We were disappointed not to come to England; but, D.V., shall come in the autumn. And I am so thankful to be feeling better, I thought sometimes that I was never going to get out of Mexico, what with malaria, and a typhoid condition inside, and ’flu making my chest go wrong. However, we are on our own ranch, and though I feel still shaky—must lie down most of the time—I am rapidly getting better. It’s lovely spring weather up here, but very dry: though there was deep snow for some months. We’ve got an Indian and his wife to do for us: it is good to be quite quiet.

You’ve done awfully well with those difficult stories. The Princess and Mornings in Mexico are still wandering this side.

I’m not so very keen on giving those sketches to---—. It

seems to me, it’s always his friends who make attacks on me— like-------: and so often I can see -------words coming

out against me, through people who frequent him. I don’t like that kind of friendship. But you use your own judgment.

I wish I did some nice popular little stories. We’ll see how the summer goes with me. I feel it will be a long time before I do another novel.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch,

Questa, New Mexico, U.S.A. To H, A. Piehler.                   17 April, 1925.

Dear Sir,.—

I received your letter only last night.

The scene of tny Nottingham-Derby novels all centres round Eastwood, Notts (where I was born): and whoever stands on Walker Street, Eastwood, will see the whole landscape of Sons and Lovers before him: Underwood in front, the hills of I Derbyshire on the left, the woods and hills of Annesley on the right. The road from Nottingham by Wat nail, Moorgreen, up to Underwood and on to Annesley (Byron s Annesley)—-gives you all the landscape of The White Peacock, Miriam’s farm in Sons and Lovers, and the home of the Crich family, and Willey Water, in Women in Love.

The Rainbow is Ilkeston and Cossall, near Ilkeston, moving to Eastwood. And Hermione, in Women in Love, is suppose d to live not far from Cromford. The short stories are Ripley, W irks worth, Stoney Middleton, V ia Gellia ( i he W intry Peacock”). The Lost Girl begins in Eastwood—the cinematograph show being in Langley Mill.

I hope this will meet your requirements.

Yours faithfully,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To H. W. Mathews.

21 May, 1925.

Dear Sir,—                                 ,. , „,          .....

In answer to your letter of April 25th, which I have received only to-day, I wish to say that in my preface to the Memoir of the Foreign Legion there is nothing but the exact truth as far as any human being can write the exact truth. As ror Maurice Magnus’ MS., it is certainly authentic. I went over it with him in the Monastery of Montecassino. lhere is no 633

possibility of any fraud. Zis for his precise truthfulness, I would not answer. Yet I don’t think he lied in this memoir. He wanted to call it Dregs. Norman Douglas—who is the N.D. of the Florence episode in my introduction—wrote a sort of little pamphlet defending Magnus—and reproaching me. You can get it in London. But Douglas would not question any of the facts of the book—he only thinks I am hard on M. M. But in life, Douglas was much harder on him—very much.

Yours faithfully,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch,

Questa, New Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.                      26th May, 1925.

Dear Curtis Brown,

Your letter, and Seeker's, about the Douglas letter.

I don't want to bother any more about that business: neither pamphlets nor articles. When I was feeling sick, I felt sore. Now I am better, I don’t care what Douglas or anybody else says or pamphletises. They can go all their own way to oblivion, and if Seeker doesn’t reprint The Foreign Legion, I don't care a bit.

I’m sure you'll agree with me about this. I think public "controversies” infra dig., anyhow.

I did a play—a Bible play—David—which I’ll send you when it’s typed out. But I don't care about having it published.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

c/o Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico.

To Dr, Trigant Burrow.                    6 June, 1925.

Dear Dr. Burrow,—

I found your letter and the two reprints when I got back

here. I am in entire sympathy with your idea of social images. In fact, I feel myself that the Jewish consciousness is now composed entirely of social images: there is no new-starting "reality" left. Nothing springs alive and new from the blood. All is a chemical reaction, analysis and decomposition and reprecipitation of social images. It is what happens to all old races. They lose the faculty for real experience, and go on decomposing their test-tubes full of social images. One gl ts and fights for that living something that stirs way down in the blood, and creates consciousness. But the world won’t have it. To the present human mind, everything is ready-made, and since the sun cannot be new, there can be nothing new unci er the sun. But to me, the sun, like the rest of the cosmos, is alive, and therefore not ready-made at all.

I don’t wonder you haven’t got your book published. 1 hose Unconscious things of mine hardly sell at all, and only arouse dislike. I’m not going to bother any more about that side of things. People are too dead, and too conceited. Man is the measure of the universe. Let him be it: idiotic root-rule which even then is nothing. In my opinion, one can never know: and never—never understand. One can but swim, like a trout in a quick stream. As for the stones that sit tight and think they know, permanently—they are only swimming very slowly in a much slower stream—stupidly.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico♦

To Catherine Carswell.

20 June, 1925.

My dear Catherine,—

I was so ill down in Mexico—in Oaxaca-with malaria, fiu and tropical fever—I thought I’d never see daylight. So everything slipped. But we got back here abbut ten weeks ago, and I am beginning to be myself again But it was no joke. As far as prosperity goes—I have left Seltzer, who hang , like a creaking gate, long: and gone to Knop,, who is a better 635 business man. But of course I still have to live on what is squeezed out of poor Seltzer.

We’ve been busy here—-brought a stream of water from the Gallina Canyon—about two miles—to irrigate the field. But it’s so dry, for all that. The water just disappears. We have a black cow, whom I milk every morning and evening—-and Frieda collects the eggs—about eight a day-—from the eleven hens. Frieda’s nephew, Friedel Jaffe, is staying the summer with us—he helps. We had an Indian and wife to do for us, till last week: then we sent them away. '“Savages” are a burden. So a Mexican boy comes up to help: and even him one has to pay two dollars a day: supposed to be very cheap labour.

Lovely to think of cherry trees in bloom: here the country is too savage, somehow, for such softness. I get a bit of a Heimweh for Europe. We shall come in the autumn-—D.V.— and winter somewhere warm.

Who is the other boy you have with you? One of Goldring’s boys? I don’t know.

Glad you liked St. Mawr. In Mexico I finished my Mexican novel. It’s very different. But I think most of it.—Pity you don’t do any writing.

All good wishes from us both to you and the boy and Don.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch,

To Curtis Brown.

Questa, New Mexico.

23 June, 1925.

Dear Curtis Brown.—

I had your radiogram last night—it took three days by post, from the air station here in New Mexico.

I seem to remember that O’Brien does a sort of anthology of short stories each year, but whether English or American publishing I don’t know. I had thought that perhaps I would do a third long story, to go with The Woman Who Rode Away and The Princess, and make a vol. for America. But perhaps it would be better to leave it to you to decide. If this O’Brien

636

concern is a good one, and you think it best to let him have. The Princess, then agree with him. Anyhow, The Princess is used for England, already.

I expect by this time you have the MS. of the play David. It is a good play, and for the theatre. Someone ought to do it.

I think next week I'll send the MS. of The Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl), my Mexican novel, to the New York office, asking them to make the corrections on the duplicate and forward a copy to you at once. I consider this my most important novel, so far. Will you show it to Seeker? Perhaps he might set it up soon, if he likes it, in galleys. I should like very much to show it to a Mexican friend, in Mexico City, and have his opinion, before it is finally printed. I m a bit afraid to send the MS down there.

When is Barmby coming back to New York?

Knopf advertises that I shall henceforth publish exclusively with him. He's not justified in so doing. Seltzer writes an expostulation. I never made any ‘exclusive’ * promise to Knopf, and I don't think Barmby ever did.

Yrs,,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte P.anch,

Questa, New Mexico.

To Curtis Brown.                         3¹ Jutyt ¹9²5»

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I’m glad you are sweating after agriculture rather than literature, for a bit. It's more fun. My pursuit of both, out here, is spasmodic: but I put the salt on the tail of the agricultural bird occasionally. Anyhow, I milk my black cow Susan at 6.0 a.m. and after tea in the evening: and I irrigate when the water’s running: and I see to the rather small garden: and I chop wood. In fact, my wife and I are quite alone on this ranch now. But I get a Mexican or Indian when there’s any real work to do—heavy. And sometimes, in state, I set off wit my 637

wife and Hon. Dorothy Brett in the spring wagon, to go and shop the few things one can buy in Arrozo Hondo, ten miles off. We look a real old outfit, but the two horses are quite nice.

Pity you are leaving so early. We are due to arrive in New York about Sept. 15th: sail about the 30th. So I shall see you in London (D.V.). I’ll really bring myself to meet a few people in New York: at least, I say so now.

To-day I sent off the third copy of the play.

Hope you and Mrs. Brown are having a good time.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Del Monte Ranch,

Questa, New Mexico.

To M. L. Skinner.                      28 August, 1925.

Dear Mollie Skinner,—

I sent you a letter yesterday, and last night came yours telling me your brother was dead. He had no luck: one could see in his face that he never would have luck. Perhaps it's really true, lucky in money, unlucky in love. But as a matter of fact, I believe he really never wanted to make good. At the bottom of his soul, he preferred to drift penniless through the world. 1 think if I had to choose, myself, between being a Duke of Portland or having a million sterling and forced to live up to it, I'd rather, far, far rather be a penniless tramp. There is deep inside one a revolt against the fixed thing, fixed society, fixed money, fixed homes, even fixed love. I believe that was what ailed your brother: he couldn’t bear the social fixture of everything, It’s what ails me, too.

And after all he lived his life and had his mates wherever he went. What more does a man want? So many old bourgeois people live on and on, and can't die, because they have never been in life at all. Death's not sad, when one has lived.

And that again is what I think about writing a novel: one can live so intensely with one's characters and the experiences one creates or records, it is a life in itself, far better than the vulgar thing people call life, jazzing or motoring and so on.

No, every day I live I feel more disgust at the thing these Americans call life. Ten times better die penniless on a goldfield.

But be sure of my sympathy.

D. H. Lawrence.

Garland’s Hotel, Suffolk St., Pall Mall, 5.UA

To J. M. Murry.                           6 Oct., 1925.

Dear Jack,—

We're going up to my sister to-morrow: c/o Mrs. W. E. Clarke, Ripley (Derby)—so shan't be able to come down immediately, but when we come south again, in about a month’s time, then we can come and see you, if you are not in town. I expect we shall stay a month or so by the sea in Lincs.

I still feel queer and foreign here, but look on with wonder instead of exasperation this time. It’s like being inside an aquarium, the people all fishes swimming on end. No doubt about it, England is the most fantastic Alice-in-Wonderland country.

We shall go to the Mediterranean for the winter—I’ve an idea Ragusa, on the Adriatic, might be nice: real peasants still.

I hear poor Gertler is in a sanatorium. Have seen the Carswells and Eders, but no more of the old crowd—not Kot.

Hope you're all well and cheerful in the old coastguard station.

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

c/o Mrs. W. E. Clarke, Ripley, Derby.

To Martin Seeker.                              Friday.

Dear Secker,—

Oh, dear! The next to the last galley of Quetzalcoatl is missing: galley 156. Could you send it me at on :e I thir we shall stay here till next Wednesday.

6Z9

I still say, this is the most important of all my novels. But I hate sending it out into the world.

Been motoring all over my well-known Derbyshire. One of the most interesting counties in England. But I can’t look at the body of my past, the spirit seems to have flown.

In the proofs, the words serape is spelt half the time sarape. Both ways are correct, it’s an Indian word. But ought one to stick to one form? God knows why I changed. I began sarape, wrote serape for thirty or forty galleys, then went back to sarape. Bore!

I’ll come in to your office soon as we get back.

Greet all at Bridgefoot!

Tell the man, very nice man, in your office, I do mean what Ramon means—for all of us.

Wiedersehen.

D H. Lawrence.

73, Gower St., W.C. i.

Tc J. M. Murry.                   Monday (Oct., 1925).

Dear Jack,—

We gave up the idea of staying in England—we leave for Baden-Baden on Thursday.

Could you come up on Wednesday?—come here, we’ll see about a room for you. And I'll make no arrangements with anybody for Wednesday

I met the Constant Nymph and Rose Macaulay on Friday, also Wm. Gerhardi: he’s nice: said he was coming here tomorrow afternoon. You might meet him. Was in Oxford Press this morning. Humphrey Milford said he liked your Keats book very much: but not the Adelphi—must you really write about Jesus? Jesus becomes more unsympatisch to me, the longer I live: crosses and nails and tears and all that stuff! I think he showed us into a nice cal de sac. But there! England just depresses me, like a long funeral. But I cease to quarrel. No good kicking against the pricks.

Greetings to your wife and the child, from us both.

D. H. L.

c/o Frau von Richthofen, Ludwig- Wilhelms lift, Baden-Baden.

To J. M. Murry.                   Sat.1 31 Oct.

Dear Jack,—

I’m sorry I missed you—I hurried straight to the house, on the obvious way. I had such a nice bag of fruit for you to take home, with fresh figs and dates and Carlsbad plums. Bu perhaps you’d have hated carrying it, so heavy.

Just the same here—very quiet and unemerged: my mother-in-law older, noticeably.

I make my bows and. play whist with old Excellcnzcnt Abet Excellenzchen! cries my mother-in-law. Titles still in full swing here, but nothing else. No foreigners. Shades of Edward VII and Russian princes. The Rhine villages untouched and lovely: we had to motor from Strasburg: and the peasants still peasants, with a bit of that eternal earth-to-earth quality that is so lost in England. Rather like a still sleep, with frail dreams.

I read your November Adelphi. Don’t you see, there still has to be a Creator? Jesus is not the Creator, even of Himself . And we have to go on being created. 3y the Creator. More important to me than Jesus. But of course God-the- ather, the Dieu-Pere, is a bore. Jesus is as far as one can go with God, anthropomorphically. After that, no more anthropos.

Perhaps I'll write you a little article.

Regards to your wife and to the baby.

D. HL

We’re in the Hotel Eden—once really grand, now we only pay 9/6 a day, for food and all—each—and huge room witn bathroom. Try the Schwarzwald one day.

c/o Signor Capellero,

Villa Maria, Spotorno (Genova), Riviera Ponente, Italy.

To Curtis Brown.                       16 Novem., i₉25-

Dear Curtis Brown,—                        ,   . .

We got here yesterday—it's lovely and sunny, with a blu sea. and I’m sitting out on the balcony just above the san- s,

641 to write. Switzerland was horrid—I don't like Switzerland anyhow—in slow rain and snow. We shall find ourselves a villa here, 1 think, for the lime.

I am enclosing Seeker’s agreement for David.

I had your letter with copy of Knopf's this morning. I know Knopf doesn't like limited editions—and he also likes to be important. But it doesn’t seem to me to matter vastly. Seeker gets all the first edition sales, even if he doesn’t sell sheets. And anyhow, in the sunshine, one cares so very much less.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno (Genova).

To J. M. Murry.                 19 Novem., 1925.

Dear Jack,—

We've taken a house here till April—above the village and the sea—big vineyard garden, and castle ruins—nice—you know the kind of thing. The village isn’t anything to stare at, but there's the sea, and good walks in the hills.

I heard from Brett. She has got to Capri.

Did I tell you about a Dr. MacDonald, of Philadelphia, who did my bibliography? He's really nice—like a Canadian farmer, and quiet, and with energy. He is English professor at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, and he'd like to change his place, for a year, with an English professor. You know those school people—do you know anyone who would like the change? MacDonald specialises in Elizabethan pamphlets—he’s another for the Elizabethans: a very sound man, you'd surely like him.

I think you and Violet would like this place all right. Noli, the next village, was a mediaeval republic of fishermen, and quite a gem in its way, but too past to live in. I prefer the frayed edges, like here.

The Villa Bernardo is a three-decker—or a four-decker, with the contadino in the deeps—you could have bedroom and kitchen for yourselves, if you like—we rent the whole house— or there is this inn, the Albergo Ligure.

Saluti/

D. H. L.

Post card from Spotorno.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.          (Dec. 7,1925-)

Many thanks for the hooks: the 'ledgers are mostly gail imposing, I feel nothing could go in them but scandalous stories. Tve also the bit of MS. for Spud: but put enough stamps on your letters; I had 2.50 surcharge. Here it freezes, but is sunny. In France 14 degrees below zero. What price the ranch! Went to Alassio yesterday, to see F.’s daughter Barby. Alassio well begins: Alas! for it’s a chronic hole, awful!                                        D. H. L.

Murry has taken a flat in the Vale of Health for the winter Insists he’s coming here in January with Violet.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno, Prov. di Genova♦

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.               29 Dec., 1925.

Dear Brett,—                                   t

The hankeys came to-day and are very nice indeed. But 1 wish you weren’t so extravagant, preset ing.

Barby —-— is here since Christmas Day, mcei this time. She’s busy painting, has faint hopes of one day selling something. But the Slade took all the life out of her work. That Slade is a criminal institution, and gets worse.

We had a very mild Christmas Day—went down to the inn and had a turkey (my dinner) with Seekers and Capel eros.

. Now I’m waiting to hear any day from Curtis Brown, and know when he will appear. I shall meet him in en°* or Florence, and come on. It’s just possible, sti , won’t come. But mote possible, he will. He’s quite nice but absolutely a stranger, and fat, and over fifty: Dio We sort of let ourselves in for these things. If h > > will probably be next week, and then we d drift on fro Florence, Rome, Naples, to Capri, and he 11 have to go oat all alone* I dread the expense, rather! Why does everything cost, and nothing pay?

The weather has been sunny and lovely and warm. My cold is much better; Frieda says she’s now feeling limp. The devil's in it.

Knopf is publishing The Plumed Serpent on Jan. 23rd, so by then we ought to have our copies. Strange that the Porcupine hasn’t appeared.

I have a sort of feeling I should like to go to Russia, later in the spring. Nobody encourages me in the idea.

I send you another story, Glad Ghosts. It’s finished at last, and, usual woe, is much too long. Tell me what impression it makes on you. I am curious to know. I suppose you've about got through Sun. Don’t bother with the “Ghosts” unless you wish. Perhaps you are painting fast.

There’s no news. I haven’t heard from anybody—drew an almost blank Christmas. Just as well, for I hate these strained rejoicings.

Where did you stay in Rome? How dear was it, and was it nice? Ask Earl if he knows a moderate place. In Naples I suppose one goes to the Santa Lucia. But I'm going to be tight, on that trip with Curtis Brown. I mean money, not wine.

Tanti buoni auguri per il nuovo anno. Come va il Cristo del Mondo crocifisso? Le piacerebbe, sicuro, lo mettere finalmente alia Croce, un altra volta, ma I’ultima, questal Povero uomaccio, perche non aiutargli staccarsi! Cristo rifiutando alia Croce! Cosi lo farei io!

D. H. L.

To J. M. Murry,

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno, Pro. di Genova.

4 Jan., 1926.

Dear Jack,—

A la guerre comme d la guerre! Make up your mind to change your ways, and call the baby Benvenuto.

My dear Jack, it’s no good! All you can do now, sanely, is to leave off. A la vie comme a la vie. What a man has got to say is never more than relatively important. To kill yourself 644 like Keats, for what you've got to say, is to mix the eggshell in with the omelette. That’s Keats’ poems to me. The very excess of beauty is the eggshell between one’s teeth.

Carino, basta! Canto, deja, deja, la canzon, cheto! Cheto, cheto! Zitto, zitto, zitto! Basta la mossa!

In short, shut up. Throw the Adelphi to the devil, throw your own say after it, say good-bye to J. M. M. Filius Meus, Salvatore di Nessuno se non di se stesso, and my dear fellow— give it up!

As for your humble, he says his say in bits, and pitches it as far from him as he can. And even then it’s sometimes a boomerang.

Ach! du Heber Augustin, Augustin, Augustin—I don’t care a straw who publishes me and who doesn't, nor where nor how, nor when nor why. I'll contrive, if I can, to get enough money to live on. But I don’t take myself seriously, except between 8.0 and 10.0 a.m., and at the stroke of midnight. At other seasons, my say, like any butterfly, may settle where it likes: on the lily of the field or the horsetod in the road: or nowhere. It has departed from me.

My dear chap, people don't want the one-man show of you alone, nor the Punch and Judy show of you and me. Why, oh why, try to ram yourself down people’s throats’ Offer them a tasty tit-bit, and if they give you five quid, have a drink on it.

No, no! I’m forty, and I want, in a good sense, to enjoy my life. Saying my say and seeing other people sup it up doesn’t amount to a hill o’ beans, as far as I go. I want to waste no time over it. That’s why I have an agent. I want my own life to live. "This is my body, keep your hands off!

Earn a bit of money journalistically, and kick your heels. You’ve perhaps got J. M. M. on the brain even more seriously than J. C. Don’t you remember, we used to talk about having a little ship? The Mediterranean is glittering blue to-day. Bah, that one should be a mountain of mere words! Heave-O! my boy! get out of it!

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno (Genova).

To J. M. Murry.                   9 /an., 1926.

Dear Jack,—

Yes, I find the turn of the winter heavy too, and sometimes a struggle, and last year I nearly fell into the Styx. But I try as far as possible not to fight against the big currents. I don’t care much about having my own way any more, even with myself. All I want is to live and be well alive, not constrainedly half dead.

That's why I should say to you, oh, don’t bother any more about Jesus, or mankind, or yourself. Let it all go, and have the other sort of faith, as far as possible. I hate my enemies, but mostly I forget them. Let the Adelphi die, and say to it: Peace be to your ashes! I don’t want any man for an adelphos, and adelphoi are sure to drown one another, strangling round each other’s necks. Let loose, let loose!

I got my copy of Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine to-day. Did you get yours? A very handsome volume, my word! But if the doctrine inside isn’t amusing, downright amusing, it’s no good. Gaudeamus igitur!

It's very nice sunny weather here. The sun means a lot. It's almost the grace of God in itself. May a mackerel swallow the larvae of all Words!

Sta bene!

D. H. L.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno, Genova.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett. Saturday (Jan. 10th, 1926).

Dear Brett,—

I'm still struggling with my Glad Ghosts. Alas, and a thousand times alack, it’s growing long—too long, damn it! Even Sun is a bit too long.

Am in bed for two days with that cold on the chest. But it’s dissolving satisfactorily. Here, it’s cloudy, but not cold any more.

—    ——— is here, with ths —--family down by the

road. He's a nice gentle soul, without a thrill: his wife a living block of discontent—why, I don’t know, for she's not so perfect. But I think she’s ill. Myself, I feel like a chip-munk hibernating. I read Aldous Huxley's Along the Road, I’d send it you, but it’s Seeker’s copy. It's little essays about Italy— very nice in its way. He goes about in a 10-h.p. Citroen car, which seems to me a very good idea. If I could drive I might think of one.

F. is still charmed with her clothes. You should see her in the black step-downstairs coat and the bowler riding-hat! am swathed in the blue scarf, which if 1 were really a chippy I wouldn't be, only my own stripes.

' '                          D. H. L.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno, Prov♦ di Genova.

19 Jan., 1926.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.

Dear Brett,—

Just a line to thank you for the typescript of Glad Ghosts: the first bit of it.

Murry, I told you, wrote me impertinently about the Porcupine, that I was a professional heel-kicker, lucky I'm no a professional behind-kicker. Now he adds insult to injury, asking if I will allow him to print the essay on power, gratis, and various other things, gratis, in the Adelphi, 'as the gift of one man to another. o which can only say, as on writer to another, I will give you nothing paid for or unpaid

An impudent review of Porcupine in N. 'hark imes, wit large picture of me. Quelle canaille!

Hasta otra vezl

D. H. L.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno (Genova).

To J. M. Murry.

19 Jan., 1926.

Dear Jack,—

I would rather you didn't publish my things in the Adelphi. As man to man, if ever we were man to man, you and I, I would give them to you willingly. But as writer to writer, I feel it is a sort of self-betrayal. Surely you realise the complete incompatibility of my say with your say. Say your say, carol■— and let me say mine. But, for heaven’s sake, don’t let us pretend to mix them.

Yrs.,

D. H. L.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno (Genova). To The Hon. Dorothy Brett. 25 Jan., 1926.

Dear Brett,—

I haven’t thanked you yet for the second batch of Glad Ghosts—and your letter. I suppose you’ll be sending the last of it soon. When I write another story, I’ll send it on. At present I’m not doing anything. January is always a hard month to climb through: it was at this time last year I got ill. This year I'm doing my best to avoid it, and I really feel much better. I think Italy really agrees with me better than America does; I feel sounder, solider. My sister arrives on Feb. 9th— for two weeks. Frieda’s daughter Elsa on Feb. 12th. Barby is here since last Wed., and we’re settling down better—do paintings. I wish we could really make some nice trip, when our visitors have left. How is your Primrose Jesus getting on? I hear Murry’s Life of Jesus was to appear in one of Lord Beaverbrook’s papers—Sunday Times or something like that— it would have meant a nice bit of money. But apparently it’s not coming off. But he’s got plenty of money, really, property and investments—richer than all of us put together—Murry, I mean. The photographs include Martin Seeker and Rina’s posterior. I’ll send you Lord Dufferin’s Letters from High Latitudes to show you how nice a yacht can be. I bought a few of those little books, for our yacht. Even the books must be small! Keep it in case we ever do get a yacht library. I had a rather feeble review of Plumed Serpent from Times Lit. Sup. My American copy hasn’t come yet. Has your porcupine? You must be getting smarter and smarter in clothes. We, not! Hope you’re well and cheerful.

D. H. L.

Look out for your copy of Plumed Serpent—don’t let it go to Hotel Webster.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno, Genova, Italy.

l‘o Witter Bynner.                          27 Jon., 1926.

Dear Bynner,—

Caravan came to-day, and I have read it already, and like it very much. Surely you don’t think me an enemy of life? My single constancy is love of life! Caro, caro, is it quite true9 But it’s the only thing to be constant to, I'm with you entirely there; and against the old. But don’t you go and get old just now. Do you see me merely as a cat? Sometimes a cat, anyhow. I like these the best of your poems, that I know. They are more really you. Even serving happiness is no joke! I hope you won’t mind the little sketch of you in The PlumefSeip^nt. fdon’t Think" it’s unsympatHetfo^t only dislikes your spurious sc ofTsppinesS—the spurious side "oF it. . Happiness is a subtle

Believe me. I’m not the enemy of you. happiness: only of thp Talse money with which you sometimes sought to buy happiness -You must know what I mean: these poems are very sin e and really deep in life so you do know. I hope, one day, when I’ve shed my fur and claws, and you’ve acknowledged your own fur and claws, we may be two men, and two friends truly. I don’t know if I shall come back to America this year it’s a strain. I might go to Russia. Would you like to go wi

I’ve even learned my Russian A C. Frieda sends he greetings—hope everything goes well with you.

⁵                                  D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Bernardo,

Spotorno, Genova, Italy.

To Miss Pearn.                            29 Jan,, 1926.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

I am sending you to-day two copies of the story Glad Ghosts. 1 wrote it really for Lady Cynthia—but am not sure if it’s suitable: 14,000 words, anyhow. I shall send you next week a long story, The Virgin and the Gipsy, about 25,000 or 30,000 words. Seeker wants me to make another three-story book like The Ladybird, and he rather fancies Glad Ghosts and 7 he Virgin for two of them. But give me your advice, will you? You got a copy of Sun: wonder if you liked it? I sent the duplicate straight to New York, so no need to bother about that.

Will you please send one copy of Glad Ghosts on to Mrs. McCord: though I doubt if they’ll ever be able to use it.

It’s rainy to-day—all the almond blossom coming out. I like being in Italy again. Heard from Curtis Brown in Naples: sorry I can’t join him.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno, Genova.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett. 2 Feb., 1926.

Dear Brett,—

I got the whole of Glad Ghosts—and have sent it off. But they’ll never find a magazine to print it. They wrote that even Sun was too "pagan" for anything but a highbrow "review": Fools!

You are right. The London group are absolutely no good. Murry wrote asking me to define my position. Cheek! It's soon done with regard to him. Pour moi vous n’existez pas, mon cher.

It’s beastly weather, cold and rainy and all the almond blossom coming out in the chill. My sister arrives this day week— uesday—in Turin. I shall go up there to meet her. She stays two weeks, and I hope we shall get a trip to Florence and Pisa; and I pray heaven the weather may be different.

What are your plans? Ours are very indefinite. I don't feel like going back to America. I love the ranch, but I feel a revulsion from America, from going west. I am even learning a bit of Russian, to go to Russia; though whether that will really come off, I don't know. We might keep this house on till April. But I simply don't know what I shall do. I wish I wanted to go to the ranch again; but I don’t, not now. I just don't. The only thing is to wait a bit.

I’ve left off writing now; I am really awfully sick of writing. But now Frieda is at it, wildly translating the David play into German. She's even done it half. I wonder if it would be a great nuisance to you to post me my typewriter. F.'s daughter, Elsa, is a trained typist and knows enough German to type out this MS* from Frieda's rather muddled books. 1 tried to hire a typewriter in the village, but without success so far. But if you think it’s not safe to post mine, or a lot of trouble, don't bother, and we’ll try and get one, just for this job, from Savona. F.’s daughter, Elsa, is arriving next week also: but staying in the little Hotel Ligure while my sister is here.

If we go to Florence, you might have run up for a trip while we are there. But then, if you were going to England later on, it is a waste to come now. And we really might make a trip to Capri in March. It all depends on your plans for returning to tlic rniich*

I send a couple of snapshots—Rina Seeker takes them: they're good, for such a tiny camera, don’t you think?

Sorry the Brewsters snubbed your ‘ Jesus. Practise the tiger and the cheetah before you do your "Buddha." he beasts come first.

Remember me to everybody.

Spotorno.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.     Thursday, Feb. gth, 1926.

Dear Brett,—                                .

I’m in bed these six days with 'flu—don t see daylight yet. It gave me bronchial hemorrhage like at the ranch, o ' worse. The doctor says, just keep still. My sister came yesterday

651 a friend—Mrs, Booth—so they, too, are here in the fireless house. It pours with rain, is very cold, and has been like this, the weather, for nearly three weeks. My sister left Dover in bright sunshine, and a fine clear evening in Paris—no snow till Italy! F.’s daughter Elsa arrives in Ventimiglia to-night, Barby has gone to meet her. They come back to-morrow, stay in the little Hotel Ligure here till my sister has gone—she leaves on the 25th.—then they two move up here. But I like Earby.

Chapter of dismalnesses!

As for plans, I feel it's the Flood, the only thing is to build an Ark. I like that quot. from Keyserling: but otherwise there’s something snobbish and not quite real about his attitude. Though what you quote is right. He’s often very right. Only, shall we say, nerveless, after-life? I don’t like Buddha at the best: much prefer Hinduism.

I dreamed there had been a flood at San Cristobal and Aaron lay drowned and I could only find alive a bunch of weird, rather horrible pintos. I enclose William's letter. I don’t give up the ranch, not at all! And I don’t insist on Russia—not at all! I won’t go unless I want to worse than I do at this minute. Now, I say nothing and let the rain pour down and wait for the finger of the Lord.

So sorry to bother you about the typewriter. Pazienza! Aspetta! Aspetta pure!

D. H. L.

Ravello.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.

Sunday (Spring, 1926).

Dear Brett,—

This is to introduce Miss Williams and her father. I’ll hope you will do a few walks together,

We leave for Rome early in the morning. I will write from there. Meanwhile, don’t you mope and lie around, it’s infra dig. I he greatest virtue in life is real courage, that knows how to face facts and live beyond them. Don’t be--ish,

pitying yourself and caving in. It’s despicable. I should have thought, after a dose of that fellow, you’d have had too much desire to be different from him, to follow his sloppy self-indulgent melancholics, absolutely despicable. Rouse up and make a decent thing of your days, no matter what’s happened. I do loathe cowardice, and sloppy emotions. My God, did you learn nothing from--, of how NOT to behave? i ou

write the sort of letters he writes! Oh, basta/ Cut it out! Be something different from that, even to yourself.

D. H. L.

Hotel Palombo, Ravello, Golfo di Salerno.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.      Thursday (Spring, 1926).

Dear Brett—

Glad you got safely back. I'm sure it’s better for you there, where you have a few friends, than mooning in an unknown place.

One has just to forget, and to accept what is good. We can't help being more or less damaged. What we have to do is to stick to the good part of ourselves, and of each other, ana continue an understanding on that. I don't see why we shouldn’t be better friends, instead of worse. But one must not try to force anything.

Frieda wrote much more quietly and humanly she says we must live more with other people: which I think is true. It s no use trying to be exclusive. There’s a good bit in quite a lot of people. If we are to live, we must make the most of that, and not cut ourselves off.

I’ll let you know my plans, as soon as I make any. Just be quiet, and leave things to the Lord.

D. H. L.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno,

Prov. di Genova,

Italy.

To Catherine Carswell.                  4th March, 1926.

Dear Catherine,—

It has been a muddled unsatisfactory sort of winter. I am actually in Capri for the time. Frieda is at Spotorno with her two daughters.

I am sure you are right to give up that cottage. I am sure you are right to try putting John P. into a school. And I'm sure you are right to try to get free to work with your writing and make a way for yourself and family. I’m very glad you have decided. Let me know if I can help, with writing or anything. I am really glad you are cutting a bit loose again from cottage housekeeping. It’s somewhat a waste of time. Do the serial, and let’s see it.

Italy is very much the same. I still like it, it is nice to live in. But I’ve had ’flu, and the cold Tramontana wind gets my chest. I don’t a bit know what we shall do this year—but I doubt if we shall go to the ranch. It’s so far, and I feel I can't make any long efforts this year. I’m tired of straining with the world. Perhaps we shall come to England for the summer—• I don’t know. But I’ll let you know.

I ordered you a copy of The Plumed Serpent. I’m afraid you’ll find it heavy.

Remember me to Don and the boy, and I do feel you’re right in the moving and not setting up a fixed menage in London.

D. H. L.

Villa Bernardo, Spotorno, Genova.

To Curtis Brown.                  Easter Monday, 1926.

Dear Curtis Brown,—

I got back here day before yesterday—wandered round seeing friends for six weeks, and even then never got to Taormina. But I had a nice time: my wife stayed here with her two 654 daughters, who are with us for another fortnight. Wc leave this house about the 20th—and then go either to Germany or to Perugia or Cortona. I fancied I might like to do a book, half travel and half study, on Umbria and the Etruscans. ' he Etruscan things interest me very much. We might stay at Perugia for a couple of months and get material. But heaven knows if I ll really do it-—the book, I mean. I am off writing—even letters—and most of my last fortnight’s mail has gone lost.

Seeker wrote he’d sold out his private edition of David. I suppose you’ll arrange with Knopf to bring out a public, inexpensive edition over there, before the copyright goes wrong. I agree with Knopf, these private editions are a bit of a swindle —fifteen bob for that bit of a book!

Don’t mind if I have blank times when I don’t write—I am like that. Hope you’re feeling well.

D. H. Lawrence.

Florence.

To The Hon, Dorothy Brett.     Sunday, 24th April, 1926.

Dear Brett,—                       .

Here is Rachel’s letter—also very depressing! x ou 1 probably find them gone when you arrive. Don’t go up alone to our ranch; I expressly don’t want you to go up there alone. If you have somebody decent with you, well and good. I am a bit worried about the ranch, anyhow. I feel very strongly it would be better to have some responsible person living there— like Scott Murray. I almost wish I’d asked Rachel and William if they’d care to live there. I did just hint it, in my letter to them a week ago. I want you to be very careful and cautiously fee around for what would be the best. Don’t blindly dash into anything. But for myself, I definitely feel it would be best to have some good man living permanently up there and making a bit of a living off the place. It would really make it more liveable for all of us and make it more possible ultimately lor us to plant a Buddha Bo-tree or a bo-tree of our own, up there, mid forgather in its shade. It is what we ought to do ultimately. Meanwhile, we must build up to that. So ao think carefully for the future and let us gradually shape the ranch the way it ought to go, for the final best: when we' have the bo-tree as well as the pine trees.

It is rather depressing here—vile weather. Florence very crowded, irritable. I don’t like it much and don’t think I shall stay very long. But another week, anyhow. The two girls leave for London direct on Tuesday—then Frieda and I will have to decide what we do. Mabel writes she will come to Paris in May to see Gourdjieff in Fontainebleau. She thinks salvation lies that way. It may, for her.

If you get stuck for money, let me know. Any expenses incurred for the ranch, I will pay. But be careful and thoughtful, don’t do foolish things, and don’t buy unnecessary ones. All our means of all sorts are definitely limited.

D H. L.

I can’t stand Francis^ of Assisi—nor St. Clare—nor St. Catherine I didn’t even like Assisi. They’ve killed so much of the precious interchange in~Iife: most folks are haff dead, maimed, because of those blighters. The indecency of spnnk-Tftig good food with ashes and dirtying sensitive mouths

----- --- —             T) H L.

Pensions. Lucchesi,

Lungarno Zecca, Firenze. To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.                 Friday.

Dear Brett.—

We are here in the most atrocious weather, pouring cold rain all the time. I loathe it. And we are still undecided about Germany. If this weather continues, I shall go. I feel the North Pole would be better than Florence, in any more of this weather.

I just got your letter. Why have you let yourself run so low in cash? Io get to Santa Fe you need $150.00. The railway is about 9Z, the Pullman about 40, and food to buy. But see if Mabel won’t motor you over. Her Finney Farm is between Boston and New York. If you really get stuck for money, you’ll have to borrow from me. I’ll enclose a little note to Barmby.

You’ll have no one to meet you in Boston, and I think you must be met by somebody. Usually the Y.W.C.A. representative does it. I hope you got that letter from your father and from the Foreign Office—one can’t stand being badgered about. What a curse the world is!

F. and I will be here another week, so write here. Did you get the woolly lamb, sent from Spotomo, and a few little books Make your preparations carefully before you go. Ask about being met in Boston.

D. H. L.

Pensione Lucchesi,

Lungarno Zecca, Firenze.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.                 Wednesday.

Deaf Brett,—

Your letter about the wave of the sea to-night. Don’t you be saying bad things about the sea, you’ve got to sail on it just now.

The -------s hated leaving Italy. We miss them-^djjrt Jaiey

did make a tightness—that peculiar tightness that goes with more or less ordinary people—as if the landscape were .shin J--.

Perhaps now"we shall take a little flat m the country here-—outside Florence—for a couple of months, and I wander about to my Etruscans. I wouldn't care to live in Assisi—I was there—it’s too mtiseumish, not enough life in it now. I really preferred Perugia. But I suppose I shall only go round and find my Etruscans for a bit.

Did I tell you the Glad Ghosts story is appearing in the Dial.

I suppose this is the last letter that will catch you before you leave. Be wise and careful, and I feel you 11 be really all right. And when you’re on the other side, mak? wisdom and forethought your star. I don’t feel you 11 have any troubles, serious ones.                                                 , , .

Good luck, then, and a rivederci, and tante cose. and let s hope for good days, not far off, for us all.

D. H. L.

The rose of St. Francis is a paper one—every decent rose has a thorn or two.

Villa Mirenda,

San Paolo Mosciano,

To Miss Peam.

Scandicci, Florence, Italy, iz May, 1926.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

I send you a story, Two Blue Birds—probably to be another tribulation to you.

I also enclose Murry’s letter to me, as he wants to vindicate himself in your sight.

I had your note about the new Masses and Smile. Funny sort of home things find for themselves!

I feel bad about that strike. Italian papers say: “The government will maintain an iron resistance.’’ Since the war, I’ve no belief in iron resistances. Flesh and blood and a bit of wisdom can do quite enough resisting and a bit of adjusting into the bargain—and with iron one only hurts oneself and everybody. Damn iron!

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda,

San Paolo Mosciano,.

Scandicci, Firenze.

To W. Siebenhaar,                       13 May, 1926.

Dear Siebenhaar,—

I received the MS. of Max Havelaar a few days ago, and read it at once, and did a brief introduction, without waiting for your essay. The strike seems pretty bad, heaven knows when we shall get anything, beyond letters, out of England. So I shall send the MS. and introduction on to Knopf at once, as he seemed rather urgent.

I think your translation is excellent, so much in the spirit of the thing. And I came across no mistakes, except two slight slips which I altered. The only thing that pulled me up was the word “disgruntled.” You use it two or three times. Is it old enough to have been used in 1850? It feels modern to me, 658

but it may actually not be so. It is merely a question of avoiding an obvious anachronism.              >

We are here in the country, very quiet, and the spring is very lovely. I only hope the sunny weather will continue.

Best wishes from both.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, S. Paolo Moscia.no, Scandicci, Florence.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.        Sat., 15th May, 1926.

Dear Brett,—

You will be drawing near to America now. I hope the sea has been decent and the landing will be all right: shall be waiting to hear.

We've taken the top half of this old villa out in the country about seven miles from Florence—crowning a little hilltop in the Tuscan style. Since the rent is only 3,000 liras for a year— which is twenty-five pounds—I took the place for a year. Even if we go away, we can always keep it as a pied d ter re and let friends live in it. It is nice—looking far out over t xe Arno valley, and very nice country, real country, pine woods, around.

I am reading up my Etruscans, and if I get along with them shall go round to Perugia and Volterra, Chiusi, Orvieto, Tarquinia. Meanwhile we can sit still and spend little. I he re only one family of foreigners near—Wilkinsons—sort of village-arty people who went round with a puppet show, quite nice, and not at all intrusive. Then the tram is only

II miles, at Vingone, and takes us into Florence in j-hour. This is a region of no foreigners. The.only, thing tQ do is to sit still and let events work out. I count this as a sort of interval.

I shall wait to hear how you find the ranch and how it treats you. I do hope there’ll be somebody nice to go and live there too and help: you cannot be there alone. I often dream Azul, Aaron and Timsey. They seem to call one back, perhaps even more strongly even than the place. I don't know what in me, that I simply can’t think of coming back to America just now: something in the whole continent that rep s ■ e.

----wrote me, he expects his second baby in a fortnight —it may be here by now. But he is just the same—sort of underhand. I can't like him.

Earl found your papers—I have them here—I won't send them to the ranch till I know you are there.

We’ve had horrid weather—then five days’ sun—now again grey and trying to rain. I never knew a spring so impotent, as if it couldn't emerge.

Knopf is printing David in America, so there should be time for your cover. If you'd like to see them, write to her, Mrs. Blanche Knopf, 730, Fifth Avenue.

Things feel a bit dismal, with the strike in England and so on. There’s nothing to do but wait a bit, and see if one’s spirits will really rouse up and give one a direction.

I still mistrust Earl, in his letter to me, about India.

Remember me to everybody. It seems so far—I don’t know why.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Miss Pearn.                    22 June, 1926.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

I sent you a little western magazine, The Laughing Horse —D. H. L. number—thought it might amuse you—especially the adverts.—I like my Mediterranean poem—somebody might print it in a periodical

Seems to me there’s something you asked me, which I’ve forgotten.

Would you ask the dramatic department if they’ve any news cf the performance of David which was to be given by a private society—I forget which—in September. I think we shall be in England for August—hope we shall see you—and I thought I might look at some of the rehearsals, if they’re really going ahead. But maybe they're not.

We've planned to leave here for Baden-Baden on July 12th.

Hope all goes jauntily.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence, To The Hon. Dorothy Brett. 23 June, 1926.

Dear Brett,—

Your first letters from the ranch. What a bore the rats had done so much chewing! But I thought the mattresses had gone down to Del Monte! And Frieda brought some, though not all, of the silver along with her. I’m sorry, though, that you had so much hard work. One just doesn’t feel like drudgery, and I’m sure you hate being in an overall. But pray heaven, by now you are in your breeches and feeling like a real ranchero!

That scoundrel of an Azul, to run away! I can just see him. Were the others glad to have him back, or didn’t they care? I can just imagine them, this afternoon, standing in a bunch tinder the scraggy trees near the wire gate, whisking their tails. It’s an awful pity one can’t just stride over, in one huge stride. Then we’d be there to tea in the porch.

Here it is real Italian summer at last. Everybody sleeps from one till three. Nay, it’s quarter to four, and there’s not a peasant in sight on all the poden. But of course they get up at about 4.30 in the morning—we about six. I'm sitting on the little balcony upstairs—you can so easily imagine this old square, whitish villa on a little hill all of its own, with the peasant houses and cypresses behind, and the vines and olives and corn on all the slopes. It’s very picturesque, and many a paintable bit. Away in front lies the Arno valley and mountains beyond. Behind are pine woods. The rooms inside are big and rather bare—with red-brick floors: spacious, rather nice, and very still. Life doesn’t cost much here.

We go in to Florence once or twice a week. When we see Reggie Turner he always wants to be remembered to you. hey all think you very bold, to go out there to the ranch.

But you are quite right when you say one shouldn't pretend to belong to one place exclusively. Italy iis always lovely, and out there at the ranch it is always lovely. I am sure it is right for me to stay this year in the softness of the Mediterranean. But next year, an the spring, I want to come to the ranch, bef e the leaves come on the aspen trees, and the snow is gone.

If one could but stride over!

Is the messiness of the old corral passing away? Are there very many flowers? Will there be many raspberries? Were there still humming birds round the squawberry bushes or had they gone? Does the ditch run a nice stream?

Oh, by the way, tell me how much money you paid for cleaning the ditch, and for Azul, and all those things. Because I will pay for them. You’ll have no money. Don’t forget.

Has the old tree down at the well, the old fallen aspen, still put out leaves? I often think of it. And has the big greasewood bush grown over the track of the well, so that it pushes your buckets aside?

What place have the Rasmussens got, and what is he ambitious about?

I am very much better in health now I can go about in shirt and trousers and sandals, and it’s hot, and all relaxed. We live very quietly, picnic by the stream sometimes. I have finished typing and revising David in German—he was a job! Did I tell you I had the little typewriter taken to pieces and cleaned? It goes very nicely. But I’m glad it’s shut up again, it is an irritable thing, a typewriter.

Mabel said you were going to see her. May as well be friends with her. I did think her book good.

I believe it's coming a thunderstorm: too bad: it’s San Giovanni to-morrow, Florence's saint, and big festa-day.

Frieda doesn't want to go to Germany and England—says she wants to stay here. But probably we shall go.

Tante belle coseI

D. H. L.

We’re doing a fine embroidery—peacock, kid, and deer among the vines! Haw is the big picture?

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Martin Seeker.             Monday, 5 July, 1926.

Dear Seckef,—

In the hot weather, the days slip by, and one does nothing, and loses count of time. I have never answered your letter 662

about Sea and Sardinia. Every time I thought I’d said, it seems to me a good idea to do a 7 6 edition without pictures, and every time I forgot. But I hope you have gone ahead with it. Do you think it’s wise to start doing the other books as cheap as zs. 6d.? But we can talk about that when we come.

In the real summer, I always lose interest in literature and publications. The cicadas rattle away all day in the trees, the girls sing, cutting the corn with the sickles, the sheaves of wheat lie all the afternoon like people dead asleep in the heat. E piii non si frega. I don’t work, except at an occasional scrap of an article. I don't feel much like doing a book, of any sort. Why do any more books? There are so many, and such a small demand for what there are. So why add to the burden, and waste one’s vitality over it? Because it costs one a lot of blood. Here we can live very modestly, and husband our resources. It is as good as earning money, to have very small expenses. Dunque----

And then we’re silly enough to go away. We leave next Monday, the 12th, for Baden-Baden (c/o Frau von Richthofen, Ludwig-Wilhelmstift), and I expect we shall spend August in England. A friend is finding us a little flat in Chelsea. So we shall see you and Rina, and I hope we’ll have a pleasant time. I want to be back here for September and Vendemmia, because I like it best here. The Tenente still writes occasionally from Porto Maurizio, where he is transferred: rather lachrymose and forlorn. And we had a post card from your suocera.

Reggie Turner came out the other day: he says he's doing that book. But I doubt if he’ll ever finish it.

My sisters write extremely depressed about the strike. England seems crazy. Quos vult perdere Deus----1 Well, it’s

not my fault. But building your life on money is worse than building your house on sand.

Remember us both to Rina.

A rivederci!

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandied, Firenze, To The Hon. Dorothy Brett. 7 July, 1926.

Dear Brett,—

Your letter to-day, saying the hay is cut. That will be wonderful having a haystack, and being able to throw down the bunches of hay to the horses in winter, as I have done at Del Monte. I feel Kiowa is gradually growing into a real self-respecting ranch again. Friedel—he is in Berlin—sent us a photograph of the wagons with Indians and horses: very nice: gave one a wish to be back, too. For some things, I wish I was really there. I would love to see the flowers, and ride up the raspberry canyon, and go along the ditch with a shovel. Then something else, I can’t find out what it is, but it is something at the pit of my stomach, holds me away, at least for the moment. It is something connected with America itself, the whole business—yet of course I feel the tree in front of the house is my tree. And even the little aspens by the gate, I feel I have to keep my eye on them

But I'm awfully sorry you have so much work to do. It would be really better to have Trinidad or somebody. And be sure to tell me how much you spend for labour, for the ditch and the hay and those things. And I’ll send the money along.

Here it is full summer: hot, quiet, the cicadas sing all day long like so many little sewing machines in the leafy trees. The peasant girls and men are all cutting the wheat, with sickles, among the olive trees, and binding it into small, long sheaves. In some places they have already made the wheat stacks, and I hear the thresher away at a big farm. Fruit is in: big apricots, great big figs that they call fiori, peaches, plums, the first sweet little pears. But the grapes are green and hard yet. It seems there is a great deal of fruit.

We have met various people: nobody thrilling, but some quite nice. Lord Berners came out to tea. Do you know him? He was Tyrwhitt, or something like that. He asked us to stay with him in Rome in October, and be motored round to the Etruscan places. We might try a day or two. He was very nice: and apparently rich, too rich: Rolls-Roycey.

We leave here next Monday—the 12th I am sorry to go, 664 except that the heat is a bit soaked in thunder, and heavy, and I think a little time rather high up in the Black Forest would be fresh and nice. How I should love to breathe the air at the ranch and to taste the well-water! What a pity there is such a strange psychical gulf between America and Europe! One has to undergo a metamorphosis and one can’t always bear it. We are due to spend August in England, then in early Sept, come back here. I shall be glad to be back. 1 haven't done any of my hill-towns yet. I must do them in the autumn. I was so busy with bits of things. Seeker and Knopf want me to write another novel, but I'm not going to lay myself waste again in such a hurry. Let the public read the old novels. The Knopfs are in Europe, but don’t suppose we shall see them. He says: “It becomes harder and harder to sell good books.” Then let him sell bad ones. The way for us to do is to live economically, so we don’t need much money—that’s how we live here: £300 a year would do me. Then one is independent of them.

How are your headaches? I hope the heat doesn’t give you them. Occasionally I get one, an odd stunner.

Remember me to Rachel—also to Betty and Bobby. Is Bobby bad at all, or just a threat? I'm sorry she’s not well.

My sisters in England are very depressed about the coal strike: no business doing, more ruin ahead. What a misery!

They’ve translated The Plumed Serpent into Swedish. Hope it’ll bite them. How much butter do you get from the cow? Does she run and hide as Susan did. Eggs are abundant here: seven liras a dozen, which is about 26 cents. How are you for money? Let me know. I like the seal to your letter. Where did you find the bird? Does Aaron still have a running eye? And Azul’s jaw? The poor creatures! Is Prince a mild lamb with you?

D. H. L.

c/o Frau von Richthofen,

Ludwig- Wilhelmstift, Baden-Baden, To Rolf Gardiner.                 17 July, 1926.

Dear Gardiner,—

I was glad to get the circular letter and to realise that your Youth efforts had not gone entirely to the wall. I am very much inclined to agree that one must look for real guts and self-responsibility to the Northern peoples. After a winter in Italy—and a while in France—I am a bit bored by the Latins, there is a sort of inner helplessness and lack of courage in them: so willing to go on deceiving themselves: with the only alternative of emigrating to America.

I expect to be in England for the month of August, perhaps we can arrange a meeting. And I can hear all about this new grouping. Let me know where you will be.

And don’t be too ernest—earnest—how does one spell it?— nor overburdened by a mission: neither too self-willed. One must be simple and direct, and a bit free from oneself above all.

Hoping to see you then.

D. H. Lawrence.

To Rolf Gardiner.

c/o Frau von Richthofen, Ludwig-Wilkelmstift, Baden-Baden.

Thursday, July, 1926.

Dear Rolf Gardiner,—

Your letter to-day: as usual, like a bluster in the weather. I am holding my hat on.

But do let us meet. We arrive in London on July 30th— and go to a little flat, 25, Rossetti Garden Mansions, Flood St., Chelsea, S.W. 3. We shall use it as a pied d terre. Myself, I have promised to spend some time with my sisters on the Lincs, coast—and to go to Scotland—various things.

I believe we are mutually a bit scared. I of weird movements, and you of me. I don’t know why. But if you are in London even for a couple of days after the 30th, do come and see us, and we can talk a little, nervously. No, I shall ask you questions like a doctor of a patient he knows nothing about.

But I should like to come to Yorkshire, I should like even to try to dance a sword-dance with iron-stone miners above Whitby. I should love to be connected with something, with some few people, in something. As far as anything matters, I have always been very much alone, and regretted it. But I can't belong to clubs, or societies, or Freemasons, or any other damn thing. So if there is, with you, an activity I can belong to, I shall thank my stars. But, of course, I shall be wary beyond words, of committing myself.

Everything needs a beginning, though—and I shall be very glad to abandon my rather meaningless isolation, and join in with some few other men, if I can. If only, in the dirty solution of this world, some new little crystal will begin to form.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Baden-Baden.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.               29 July, 1926.

Dear Brett,—

Simply pouring with rain! The Rhine valley all in floods. We leave to-night, via Strasburg, Brussels, Ostend, for London: through the night. It makes one shiver.

Your letter came rolling in—we are always quite thrilled by your descriptions of the ranch and life. How lovely the flowers must be! There are strawberries, but you don’t mention raspberries: here there are many in the woods, a o-day came Rachel's letter to Frieda: she says rain and cold by you also. What one needs is an ark. I am going to begin making a collection of pairs of animals. Seriously, it’s awful! And what will England be like? I shan’t see Murry, he is too much, or too little, for me. Think I shall see the Sitwells and Rolf Gardiner—do you remember how he wrote two years ago to the ranch? As for the play, I know absolutely nothing of it so far—and have very few hopes.

I am not doing any work at all: feel sufficiently disgusted with myself for having done so much and undermining my health, with so little return. Pity one has to write at all.

Did you see Glad Ghosts in the Dial? Amusing. Smile! That little sketch of the dead wife came in the English Nation. In the Adelphi, the Life of Christ is relegated to the back pages, and our little friend is discovering he is a pantheist: without a Pan, however: fryingpantheist!

A dwindling of money all round! And it rains, rains! I left the typewriter in Italy. If I go to Scotland, shall I call on your father?

D. H. L.

Bailabhadan, Newtonmore, Inverness-shire,

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.             14 August, 1926.

Dear Brett,—

So this is your Scotland. It is rather nice, but dampish and northern, and one shrinks a trifle inside one's skin. For these countries one should be amphibian. Grouse-shooting began day before yesterday—an event for those who shoot, and a still bigger one for those that get shot. The heather is out, the bell-heather dying. But the bluebells are best, they are very lovely, so big and tangled and blue. However, I have decided not to buy an estate in Scotland, etc., etc.

Au revoir, '

D. H. L.

Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire♦

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.             26 August, 1926.

Dear Brett,—

I’ve been here a few days with my sisters, came on from Scotland. It's rather nice—quite common seaside place, not very big, with great sweeping sands that take the light, and little people that somehow seem lost in the light, and green sandhills. I'd paint, if I’d got paints, and could do it. I like it here, for a bit. Frieda is coming up for a fortnight or so. They don’t begin rehearsing David till early September; I suppose I’ll have to cast an eye on it, though I feel rather reluctant. Somehow, I feel it will be a sham.

I wonder how you are getting on at the ranch, and if the moving difficulties have settled themselves. I expect to hear in a day or two; and Frieda will bring me my little bag, with cheque books, etc. I don't know why, but everywhere seems so far off, from England. The ranch doesn’t seem far off from Italy. From here it seems like the moon. Even Germany and Italy, here, seem as if they don’t exist. But we shall go back to the Villa Mirenda some time in Sept., though probably towards the end.

England seems to suit my health. I feel very well here. But I don’t write a line, and don't know when I shall begin again. I shall have to do something or other, soon.

Remember me to Rachel, and all the others. I do hope you’re having a good time. It’s rather cold here—-but fine. Tante cose!

D. H. L.

Sutton-on-Sea.

To Rolf Gardiner.

12 Sept., 1926.

Dear Rolf Gardiner,—

I sent back Schbpjertsche Pause yesterday, to Lansdowne Rd. I read most of it, and was interested. Only the schoolmaster part bored me. Schoolmasters are terribly important to themselves: have to be, I suppose,

We leave here to-morrow—and by Thursday I expect to be in London: at 30, Willoughby Rd., Hampstead, N.W. z. Let me know if you will be in town, and we can meet. I expect to stay till towards the end of the month.

I feel the whole thing is a Pause just now. Let’s hope it’s Schopferische.

Hope you had a decent time after all.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Miss Peam.

9 Oct., 1926.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

Here we are back at home-—nice to sit in the big empty-rooms and be peaceful. They finished bringing in the grapes on Wednesday, so the whole place smells sourish, from the enormous vats of grapes downstairs, waiting to get a bit squashy, for the men to tread them out.

I am thinking about my own activities. I shall try just to do short stories and smaller things. Do you think any of the papers or magazines would care for me to do a review now and then? They could choose the book. But they’d have to make it clear, whether I could say what I wanted or not.

And now, don't be very bored if I inflict a little burden on you. A friend to whom we are under a bit of an obligation in friendship, asks me if I can offer this sketch of hers to some periodical. But I don’t know any periodicals. Do you think it’s any good trying it anywhere? If. not, just tell me, and I can hand on your verdict.

Where did you go in Derbyshire? I was even there myself, but on the Matlock and Chesterfield side, for a bit. I hope you’re feeling good and brisk. Here it is hot and sultry— shouldn’t mind a breath of cold air.

Greetings from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Just got your letter about the Tribune and critical articles. I should quite like to do any book that they think would be my line—only they would need to specify the book and the kind of article they want.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence, Italy.

To Rolf Gardiner.                         n Oct., 1926.

Dear Rolf Gardiner,—

We got tired of London and of feeling cooped up, and came back here. It is rather lovely, very warm, like summer, grape harvest just finished, and enough room in the house to spread oneself.

I wonder very much what your singing tour was like, and still more, what the Schleswig camp will be like. Let me know. I am sympathetic, fundamentally, but I feel how very hard it is to get anything real going. Until a few men have an active feeling that the world, the social world, can offer little or nothing any more; and until there can be seme tangible desire for a new sort of relationship between people, one is bound to beat about the bush. It is difficult not to fall into a sort of preciosity and a sort of faddism.

I think, one day, I shall take a place in the country, somewhere, where perhaps one or two other men might like to settle in the neighbourhood, and we might possibly slowly evolve a new rhythm of life: learn to make the creative pauses, and learn to dance and to sing together, without stunting, and perhaps also publish some little fighting periodical, keeping fully alert and alive to the world, living a different life in the midst of it, not merely apart. You see, one cannot suddenly decapitate oneself. If barren idealism and intellectualism are a curse, it's not the head's fault. The head is really a quite sensible member, which knows what’s what: or must know. One needs to establish a fuller relationship between oneself and the universe, and between oneself and one's fellow man and fellow woman. It doesn't mean cutting out the “brothers-in-Christ” business simply: it means expanding it into a full relationship, where there can be also physical and passional meeting, as there used to be in the old dances and rituals. W e have to know how to go out and meet one another, upon the third ground, the holy ground. You see, you yourself go out intensely in the spirit, as it were, to meet some fellow men. But another part of yourself, the fighting and the passionate part, never issues—it seems to me-—from its shell. may be all wrong, don’t take any notice if I am. W e need to come forth and meet in the essential physical self, on some third holy ground. It used to be done in the old rituals, in the old dances, in the old fights between men. It could be done again. But the intelligent soul has to find the way in which to do it: it won’t do itself. One had to be most intensely conscious: but not intellectual or ideal.

Let us think about it, and make some sort of start if it becomes possible. No use rushing into anything. If one can be sensible oneself, one will become the focus, or node, of a new sensibility.

Anyhow, tell me about the Schleswig camp.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze.

To M. & A. Huxley.            n Novembre, 1926.

Dear Marta and Aldous,—

Many thanks for the photographs. I think gli autori figure too often.

I've already painted a picture on one of the canvases. I’ve hung it up in the new salotto. I call it the “Unholy Family,” because the bambino—with a nimbus—is just watching anxiously to see the young man give the semi-nude young woman an gros baiser. Mol to moder no!

Hope it's nice at Cortina—it has emptied rain on us for days—but there’s a clear moon this evening.

Haven’t seen a soul. No news. Tante cose.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Rolf Gardiner.                    3 Decern., 1926.

Dear Gardiner,—

I was glad to get your letter—wondered often about the Baltic meeting—sounds a bit dreary. I think it’s hardly worth while trying anything deliberately international—the start at home is so difficult. But the song-tour sounded splendid.

I m sure you are doing the right thing, with hikes and dances and songs. But somehow it needs a central clue, or it will fizzle away again. There needs a centre of silence, and a heart of darkness—to borrow from Rider Haggard. We'll have to 672

establish some spot on earth, that will be the fissure into the underworld, like the oracle at Delphos, where one can always come to. I will try to do it myself. I will try to come to England and make a place—some quiet house in the country—where one can begin—and from which the hiker, maybe, can branch out. Some place with a big barn and a bit of land—if one has enough money. Don’t you think that is what it needs? And then one must set out and learn a deep discipline—and learn dances from all the world, and take whatsoever we can make into our own. And learn music the same; mass music, and canons, and wordless music like the Indians have. And try— keep on trying. It's a thing one has to feel one’s way into. And perhaps work a small farm at the same time, to make the living cheap. It’s what I want to do. Only I shrink from beginning. It is most difficult to begin. Yet, I feel in my inside, one ought to do it. You are doing the right things, in a skirmishing sort of way. But unless there is a headquarters, there will be no continuing. You yourself will tire. What do you think? If I did come to England to try such a thing, I should depend on you as the organiser of the activities, and the director of activities. About the dances and folk music, you know it all, I know practically nothing. We need only be even two people, to start. I don’t believe either in numbers, or haste. But one has to drive one’s peg down to the centre of the earth: or one’s root: it’s the same thing. And there must also be work connected—I mean earning a living at least earning one’s bread.

I'm not coming to England for the Widowing oi Mrs. Holroyd. I begin to hate journeys—I’ve journeyed enough. Then my health is always risky. You remember the devil s cold I got coming to England in August. I ve always had chest-bronchial troubles and pneumonia after-effects—so have to take care*

How well I can see Hucknali I orkard and the miners. Didn’t you go into the church to see the tablet, where B, heart is buried? My father used to sing in the Newstead Abbey choir, as a boy. But I’ve gone many times down Hucknali Long Lane to Watnall—and I like Watnall Park—it’s a great Sunday morning walk. Some of my happiest days I ve spent haymaking 673

in the fields just opposite the S. side of Greasley church— bottom ofWatnallHill—adjoining the vicarage: Miriam’s father hired those fields. If you’re in those parts again, go to Eastwood, where I was born, and lived for my first 21 years. Go to Walker St.—and stand in front of the third house—and look across at Cnch on the left, Underwood in front—High Park woods and Annesley on the right: I lived in that house from the age of 6 to 18, and I know that view better than any in the world. Then walk down the fields to the Breach, and in the corner house facing the stile I lived from 1 to 6. And walk up Engine Lane, over the level-crossing at Moorgreen pit, along till you come to the highway (the Alfreton Rd.)— turn to the left, towards Underwood, and go till you come to the lodge gate by the reservoir—go through the gate, and up the drive to the next gate, and continue on the footpath just below the drive on the left-—on through the wood to Felley Mill (the White Peacock farm). When you’ve crossed the brook, turn to the right through Felley Mill gate, and go up the footpath to Annesley. Or better still, turn to the right, uphill, before you descend to the brook, and go on uphill, up the rough deserted pasture-—on past Annesley Kennels—long empty— on to Annesley again. That’s the country of my heart. From the hills, if you look across at Underwood wood, you’ll see a tiny red farm on the edge of the wood. That was Miriam’s farm—where I got my first incentive to write. I'll go with you there some day.

I was at my sister's in September, and we drove round—I saw the miners—and pickets—and policemen—it was like a spear through one's heart. I tell you, we’d better buck up and do something for the England to come, for they've pushed the spear through the side of my England. If you are in that district, anywhere near Ripley, do go and see my sister, she’d love it. Her husband has a tailor's shop and outlying tailor’s trade amongst the colliers. They’ve "got on," so have a new house and a motor car. But they’re nice.

Mrs. W. E. Clarke,

"Tores tin,”

Gee St.,

Ripley (Derby).

Ripley is about 6 miles from Eastwood, by tram-car.

You should do a hike, from Nottingham-Nuttall-Watnall - Moorgreen reservoir - Annesley - Bledworth or Papplewick and across Sherwood Forest, Oilerton, and round perhaps to Newark. And another do., Langley Mill to Ripley, Ripley to Wingfield Manor (one of my favourite ruins), Crich, and then down to Whatstandwell and up again to Alderswasley and so to Bole Hill and Wirksworth and over Via Gellia, or keep on the high ground from Crich and go round Lansley Moor round to Matlock Bridge, or where you like. But it’s real England—the hard pith of England. I'll walk it with you one day.

Tell me what you think of Mrs. Holroyd, if you see it.

If they give David in mid-March, I shall come to England in mid-February. Then I hope to see you properly.

Keep the idea of a centre in mind—and look out tor a house not dear, because I don’t make much money, but something we might gradually build up.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

“Mrs. Holroyd" was an aunt of mine—she lived in a tiny cottage just up the line from the railway-crossing at Brinsley, near Eastwood. My father was born in the cottage in the quarry hole just by Brinsley level-crossing. But my uncle built the old cottage over again—all spoilt. I here’s a nice path goe down by the cottage, and up the fields to Coney Grey farm then round to Eastwood or Moorgreen, as you like.

Villa Mirenda, Scandied, Florence, Italy.

To Dr. Trigant Burrow.

Christmas Day, 1926.

Dear Dr. Burrow,—

Many thanks for the paper—Psychoanalysis in Theory ana in Life. It’s the first thing I’ve read for a long time that isn t out to bully somebody in some way or other. It is true, the essentia self is so simple—and nobody lets it be. But I wonder you ever

get anybody to listen to you. My experience of people is, as soon as they think themselves clever enough to read a book or hear a lecture, they will only pay attention to some bullying suggestion in which they can take part-—or against which they can raise an equally bullying protest. Really one gets sick of people—they can't let be. And I, who loathe sexuality so deeply, am considered a lurid sexuality specialist. Mi fa male allo stomaco! But I was really glad to hear a real peaceful word for once. You never thought you were writing a Noel, Noel! carol, did you? But sometimes your sentences are like Laocoon snakes, one never knows where the head is, nor the tail.

Tell me some time—--it seems rude—-what old nation you belong to—England? Wales? surely not Jewish at all (that's not prejudice—only the psychology isn't Jewish).

Best wishes for the New Year.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze.

To M. Huxley.                         28th Dec., 1926.

Dear Maria,—

Glad you got the book. Wc had 2 Christmas tree and all the peasants—27 of them! They liked it, and were nice. Then we had the Wilkinsons out one evening, but have seen nobody else. I find I'm best alone—unless I can choose rather squeamishly, but perhaps it's not really good for one.

We shall stay here if not howked out. I shall probably have to go to London for the play David at end of February. But probably shall come back here. I like it here. I told you we’d fixed up the salotto nice and warm, with matting and stove going and Vallombrosa chairs. If you find a villa, find one between here and Galuzzo, if you can, so I can walk over.

I meant to thank you properly for those canvases; they were such a boon. My Boccaccio picture of the nuns and the gardener is finished—very nice and, as Wilkinson says: Well,

not exactly nice!—on the long canvas—and the third picture, the “Fight with an Amazon,” is nearly done. So you see how you set me up! I'm really grateful.

I hope Aldous is flourishing—and the boy. I see odd bits about him—pere, not fils—in the papers-—but journalists are all canaille.

Which reminds me, they played my Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd and I believe they hated it, and somebody says I ought to write about the class I come from, I've no right to venture into the Peerage—people educated above their class, etc.! O tra-la-la! La gente invidiosa e la bestia pin maleducata ancora. Come mai!

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.                9 Feb., 1927.

Deaf Brett,—

Horrid the time you had with —---— and-------

there’s a certain impotence about modern men, which runs to smuts. But no good bothering. The poor things have prurient itch. Anyhow, I gather from Mabel’s letter you are settled down and cosy again. For my part, people don’t mean much to me, especially casuals: them I’d rather be without.

So you’re in snow again, gleaming! I don’t care for snow. It shines so cold on the bottom of one’s heart. Here it’s a fierce cold wind, olives splashing like water, but sunny. I don’t mind when the sun shines. We are pretty comfortable indoors.

Thanks for the Marriage book—what a feeble lot of compromises! It’s no good talking about it: marriage, like homes, will last while our social system lasts, because it's the thing that holds our system together. But our system will collapse, and then marriage will be different—probably more tribal, men and women being a good deal apart, as in the olc puel- o system, no little homes. It all works back to individual property, even marriage is an arrangement for the holding o; property oge , 2 bore! But what a feeble lot of writers: no guts! No---the colliers would say. That's how they are, though.

I’ve nearly done my novel-—shall let it lie and settle down a bit before I think of having it typed. And I challenge you to a pictorial contest. I'm just finishing a nice big canvas, Eve dodging back into Paradise, between Adam and the Angel at the gate, who are having a fight about it—and leaving the world in flames in the far corner behind her. Great fun, and of course a Capo lavoro! I should like to do a middle picture, inside Paradise, just as she bolts in. God Almighty astonished and indignant, and the new young God who is just having a chat with the serpent, pleasantly amused, then the third picture, Adam and Eve under the tree of knowledge, God Almighty disappearing in a dudgeon, and the animals skipping. Probably I shall never get them done. If I say, I’ll do a thing, I never do it. But I’ll try. And you too have a shot, if the subject tickles you. The triptych! Tell Mabel I’ll see about the books and let her know.

I found the first violet yesterday—and the slope opposite is all bubbled over with little pale-gold bubbles of winter aconites. La Primavera! Wonder how the horses are! Did you get the money for their feed? Tell me how much more.

D H. L.

Villa Miranda, Scandicci, {Florence).

To Miss Pearn,

9 Jan., 1927.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

The Insel Verlag asked me for a more or less personal article to put in their Almanack, in German. So I did them one—I am sending you a duplicate, and I want you to read it. and decide whether we shall send it out into the world or not, If you think I should regret sending it out to editors, will you preserve it for me, as yours will be the one copy? They’re sure to cut the other one up, for translation, in Germany.

And how did you like the poems? I’m going to do some more. But I’m slowly pegging at a novel, and painting my 678 fourth picture, very smart this last. Painting is more fun and less soul-work than writing. I may end as an R.A.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci,

Florence,

To Miss Pearn.

28 Feb,, 1927.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

I am sending a “Scrutiny” on John Galsworthy, for a book of “scrutinies” by the younger writers on the elder, which is being published by that Calendar young man Edgell Rick word. Will you please have it typed for me? I am ashamed of the scribbled MS. and will you please send me the typescript again, so I can go over it?

I'm afraid it is not very nice to Galsworthy—but really, reading one novel after another just nauseated me up to the nose. Probably you like him, though—But I can’t help it— either I must say what I say, or I put the whole thing in the fire.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci,

Florence,

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.              8 March, 1927.

Dear Brett,—

Your letter from the De Vargas and the one from Taos when you had got back, leaving Mabel and Tony in Santa Fe, have both come. Bad luck they got ’flu. I got my first slap of it ten days ago—bronchi the same—it went off in three days, but comes back—doesn’t quite go yet. I have to-day dabbed on the last mustard plasters we bought in Amalfi—at the very moment I feel it nipping—so to-morrow I hope to be up and smiling. Too bad it’s got me just at the end of Feb. February is the bad month. I hope Tony and Mabel are better.

It is already spring here—wild crocuses and anemones; big purple ones, and primroses and violets. We get some lovely sunny days and some wet ones. But the country is looking lovely, with the almond blossoms out and the corn so green and the beans nearly in flower. Aldous and Maria and Mary Hutchinson came a week ago. Aldous still absolutely gone in the grouches—is writing a political novel, heaven save him. I feel myself in another world altogether. They seem to me like people from a dead planet, like the moon, where never will the grass grow or the clouds turn red. It’s no good, for me the human world becomes more and more unreal, more and more wearisome. I am really happiest when I don’t see people and never go to town. Town just lays me out. I won’t go to London for David. I simply won’t go, to have my life spoilt by those people. They can maul and muck the play about as much as they like. They’d do it, anyhow. Why should they suck my life into the bargain² I won’t go.

Frieda wants to go to Baden-Baden next week—and stay a fortnight and bring her two girls back here a month. The Brewsters, did you know, have moved to Ravello, and are in Cimbrone, Lord Grimthorpe’s place, you remember. They invite me for a little while. I might go—but I don’t know. It depends if I shake off this 'flu. What I’ve promised to do is to walk with Earl in the first weeks in April. I want to go to the Etruscan places near Rome—Veii and Cervetri—then on the Maremma coast, north of Civita Vecchia and south of Pisa— Corneto, Grosseto, etc.—and Volterra. The Etruscans interest me very much—and there are lovely places, with tombs—a dangerous malaria region in summer.

I doubt if we shall come to America this year. It’s not a case of settling. But long journeys just don’t appeal to me. I’d love the ranch if I could stride there. But America puts me off. Whatever else I am, I'm European. And at the moment, my desire to go far has left me. Probably it’ll come back later. But for the moment Italy will do for me. It seems awful to say it, but I feel I'd sell the ranch if it were mine. It’s so far, and I’m not American. You say you’d buy it—but, my dear Brett, what with?

I've done my novel—I like it—but it’s so improper, accord-680 ing to the poor conventional fools, that it’ll never be printed. And I will not cut it. Even my pictures, which seem to me absolutely innocent, I feel people can’t even look at them. They glance, and look quickly away. I wish I could paint a picture that would just kill every cowardly and ill-minded person that looked at it. My word, what a slaughter! How are your radishes? Since my "Eve Regaining Paradise" I've not done anything. I began a resurrection, but haven’t worked at it. In the spring one slackens off. Then this cursed ’flu.

You’ve really got the automobile touch. Why not—Round the world in the Flying Hart? If there are any dollars over, use them for yourself. I did a review of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven—poor stuff—and slapped him.

We don't see a tenth part as many people as you do. So the Florence society is no menace. I can see you bouncing on the little zegua!

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Miss Pearm

nth March, 1927.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

I am sending to-day the MSS. of The Lovely Lady, murder story (sic) for Cynthia Asquith. Hope you get it. Did you get that very untidy MS. of the Scrutiny of John Galsworthy which I sent without registering, a week ago last Monday?

I’ve had digs of ’flu—not bad but beastly—this last fortnight. Hope it’s about over.

I think if I’m well enough I’m going down to Ravello for a change next week—let you know.

When might you come here? Be sure to let us know in time, and we’ll meet you.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Palazzo Cimbrone, Ravello (Salerno).

To Miss Pearn.

22 March, 1927.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

Tell Seeker not to do anything about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I must go over it again and am really not sure if I shall publish it—at least this year. And I think it is utterly unfit for serialising —they would call it indecent—though really, it's most decent. But one day I’ll send it you to have typed.

Glad you have The Lovely Lady—tell me what you think of her.

I shall probably start on a little walking tour next week—on the 28th—walking north. So my address had better be Villa Mirenda again.

Will you tell these people they can have Snake?

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Miss Pearn.                           12 April, 1927.

Dear Miss Pearn,'—

I got back here last night, so have an address once more. I had a very interesting time looking at Etruscan tombs in Tarquinia and in Maremma—-and I want to do a few sketches of Etruscan places.

It was nice to hear of you and Mr. Pollinger hauling on the ropes of my old barge—though why you should have so much trouble 1 don’t know.

I enclose Cynthia Asquith’s letter. I wish you would tell me your own opinion candidly, about the story, too.

I am in a quandary about my novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It's what the world would call very improper. But you know it’s not really improper—I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful.

And this novel is the furthest I've gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is, and I shrink very much even from having it typed. Probably the typist would want to interfere----Anyhow, Seeker wants me to send it him at once.

And Barmby writes that Knopf can’t possibly publish till next spring, so I must send the MS. to New York *d la bonne heure . I am inclined to do just nothing. What would you say? You and Mr. Pollinger—whom I’ve never met, have I? I think perhaps it’s a waste to write any more novels. I could probably live by little things. I mean in magazines.

Anyhow, I hope soon to send you some small things.

What about your holiday? My wife’s youngest daughter arrives to-day from London—so if you come out here you will see her.

Saluti!

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci:, Firenze.

To Martin Seeker.                         29 April, 1927*

Dear Secker,—

Many thanks for the Women in Love and Sea and Sardinia and Plumed Serpent. I do like the little red books. Perhaps now the little dull people will manage to read them, in that cosy and familiar form.

I’ve been thinking about Lady Chatterley’s Lover and think I’ll get him typed in London before long, and let you have a copy, so that you can see how possible or impossible he is. But there is much more latitude these days, and a man dare possib y possess a penis.

It’s sunny weather, full summer, and very lovely weather, not a cloudy day these last twenty days. We have come to the lying in the garden stage, and I go off into the woods to work, where the nightingales have a very gay time singing at me. 1 hey ire very inquisitive and come nearer to watch me turn a page. They seem to love to see the pages turned.

Yrs.,

D H. Lawrence.

Deaf Gardiner,—

Thanks for the camp report. It’s amusing-—to a novelist, the thing interesting. I don t believe you'll ever get modern Germans free from an acute sense of their nationality—and in contact with foreigners they’ll feel political for years to come. They have no self-possession—and they have that naive feeling that it’s somebody else’s fault. Apart from that, they are lustig, which the English never are. And I think they are capable of mass-movement—which the English aren’t, again, not the intelligent ones.

But don’t forget you yourself want to be too suddenly and completely a leader-spring ready-armed from the head of Jove. The English will never follow—not even a handful—you see if they do. They'll come for fun, and if it’s no fun—bastal

But go ahead—there’s nothing without trying.

Fra noi e il paradiso c'e Vinferno e poi il purgatorio.

1 shall be interested to know what to make of your "centre," when you’ve got it. It seems to me the most important—the world sails on towards a debacle—camps and wanderings won’t help that—but a little ark somewhere in a quiet place will be valuable. So make it if you can.

I don’t think we shall come to England this summer. We want to leave in a fortnight for a place in Carinthia—then Sept, in the Isarthal near Miinchen—then a bit in Baden—then back here. So I can’t come to the Cheviots. But one day I really should like to come to one of your meetings, somewhere, if I can come as an outsider, not too strenuous. My health is very tiresome lately.

Good luck, then—and au revoir.

D. H. Lawrence.

By the way, is Gotzsche a German or a Jew or a Scandinavian or what, by blood?

Your camp sounded just a wee bit like going to prison for two weeks’ "hard."

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Dr. Trigant Burrow*                . July, 1927.

Dear Trigant Burrow,—

You are the most amusing person that writes to me. It is really funny—resistances—that we are all of us all the while existing by resisting—and that the p.-a. doctor and his patient only come to hugs in order to offer a perfect resistance to mother or father or Mrs. Grundy—sublimating one resistance into another resistance-—each man his own nonpareil, and spending his life secretly or openly resisting the nonpareil pretensions of all other men—a very true picture of us all, poor dears. All bullies, all being bullied.

What ails me is the absolute frustration of my primeval societal instinct. The hero illusion starts with the individualist illusion, and all resistances ensue. I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct-—and societal repression much more devastating. There is no repression of the sexual individual comparable to the repression of the societal man in me, by the individual ego, my own and everybody else's. I am weary even of my own individuality, and simply nauseated by other people s. I should very much like to meet somebody who has been through your laboratory, and come societally unrepressed. Is there anybody? If it weren’t for money, the peasants here wouldn’t be bad. But money is the stake through the bowels of the societal suicide. What a beastly word, societal!

This is to say, if you come to Europe, do let me know. I should like to meet you. I love the way you pull the loose legs out of the tripods of the p-a-ytical pythonesses.

Of course, men will never agree—can't—in their *subjective sense perception.” Subjective sense perceptions are individualistic ab ovo. But do tell them to try! What a scrimmage among the mental scientists, and a tearing of mental hair!

Mental science, anyhow, can’t exist—anymore than the goose can lay the golden egg. But keep ’em at it, pretending.

I think we shall be in Austria—near V illach for August and in Bavaria—near Munich—for Sept. Are you coming to Europe?—to the p-a-thing in Innsbruck?

Every Jew is a Jehovah, and every Christian is a Jesus, and every scientist is the Logos, and there's never a man about.

I've got bronchials and am in bed for a bit, and furious.

You can convince a man that he lusts after his grandmother-—he doesn’t mind!—but how are you going to bring him to see that as an individual he’s a blown egg!

I’ll try and find your paper on the “Genesis and Meaning of Homosexuality”—you should have said “Genesis and Exodus.” But I’ve long wanted to know the meaning—and there you told it in 1917!

D. H. Lawrence.

Letters to here will follow on when we move.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze.

To A. and M. Huxley.                 Friday, July 1927.

Dear Aldous and Maria,—

No luck! I’ve been in bed last eight days with bronchial hemorrhage—and Dr. Giglioli! Getting up a bit now—but not terra firma.—We shall go away if we can in about ten days—to Austria, near Villach—-other side of your Dolomites—must go up a bit—am so weary cf myself.

We’ll send the books back. Proust too much water-jelly—I can’t read him. Faux Monnayeurs was interesting as a revelation of the modern state of mind—but it’s done to shock and surprise, pour epater—and fanfarons de vice1—not real.

Did Sullivan come? I’m sorry we shan’t see him. But in the autumn, when we come back, we’ll have a meeting, and plan for a forgathering in the snows of the New Year.

Meanwhile many belle cose to you all.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirmda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Dr. Trigant Burrow.               . z Aug., 1927.

Dear Trigant Burrow,—

Your book came three days ago, and I have now read it. I find it extremely good. Your findings about sex and sexuality seem to me exactly it: that’s how it is: and your criticism of psychoanalysis as practised is to the quick. I believe as you do—-one must use words like believe—that it is our being cut off that is our ailment, and out of this ailment everything bad arises. I wish I saw a little clearer how you get over the cut-offness. I must come and be present at your group-analysis work one day, if I may. Myself, I suffer badly from being so cut off. But what is one to do? One can’t link up with the social unconscious. At times, one is forced to be essentially a hermit. I don’t want to be. But anything else is either a personal tussle, or a money tussle: sickening: except, of course, just for ordinary acquaintance, which remains acquaintance. One has no real human relations—that is so devastating.

I didn’t like your last chapter. One should never bow to one’s audience. As for “forgiving,” I never know what it means. To forgive all is to understand all. Whatever do you mean? There is no such animal. Can one “forgive” the social unconscious?—in oneself or outside? What’s the point? But you have some special meaning for forgive. Only that last chapter has a bit of a humble Christian apology sound—and the rest was so brave.

And then there will never be a millennium. There will never be a “true societal flow”—all things are relative. Men were never, in the past, fully societal—and they never will be in the future. But more so, more than now. Now is the time between Good Friday and Easter. We're absolutely in the tomb. If only one saw a chink of light in the tomb door. But your book too is a chink.

But do you know, I think you are really more a philosopher, or artist, than a scientist—and that you have a deep natural resistance to this scientific jargonising—which makes your style sometimes so excruciating—whereas, the moment you let 687

go, it is perfect to your matter.

And I do think that man is related to the universe in some "religious" way, even prior to his relation to his fellow man. And I do think that the only way of true relationship between men is to meet in some common "belief"—if the belief is but physical and not merely mental. I hate religion in its religiosity as much as you do. But you, who like etymologies, look at religion. Monism is the religion of the cut-off, father-worshipis the cult of the cut-off: but it's the cut-offness that’s to fault. There is a principle in the universe, towards which man turns religiously—a life of the universe itself. And the hero is he who touches and transmits the life of the universe. The hero is good-—your own effort is heroic—how else understand it? It’s only this image business which is so hateful. Napoleon was all right; it was the Emperor that was out of gear.

Do you know somebody who said: On connait les femmes, on on les aime; il n’y a pas de milieu? It’s Frenchy, but I’m not sure it isn’t true. I’m not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn’t make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow—neither strictly has a mind—it is the honest state before the apple. Bite the apple, and the love is killed. Between man and woman it’s a question of understanding or love, I am almost convinced.

"Where the apple reddens never pry

__

Lest we lose our Edens, you and I---"

The Edens are so badly lost, anyhow. But it was the apple, not the Lord, did it. There is a fundamental antagonism between the mental cognitive mode and the naive or physical or sexual mode of consciousness. As long as time lasts, it will be a battle or a truce between the two. How to prevent suburbia spreading over Eden (too late! it's done)—how to prevent Eden running to a great wild wilderness—there you are. But you’re wrong, I think, about marriage. Are you married?

How to regain the naive or innocent soul—how to make it the man within man—your "societal"; and at the same time keep the cognitive mode for defences and adjustments and "work”— voila!

As for myself, I'm in despair. I've been in bed this last week with bronchial hemorrhages—due, radically, to chagrin— though I was born bronchial—born in chagrin, too. But I'm better—shaky—shaky—and we’re going to Austria to-morrow, D. V—whoever D. may be—to the mountains.

I shall write a review of your book if I can. Probably even then nobody will print it. But it is most in sympathy with me of any book I’ve read for a long time. Pardon the egoism—what is one to say! I hope we may meet, really.

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Fischer, Villach, Kdrnten, Austria.

To A. and M. Huxley.                    8 Aug., 1927.

Deaf Aldous and Maria,—

Well here we are—got through on Thursday night in the wagon-lit—not too tired and no bad consequences. I feel already much better. What with cool air, a cool bed, cool mountain water—it’s like a new life. I never would have got well, down there in that heat in Tuscany. I hope to heaven you are feeling all right. But if one is well to start with, one doesn’t mind.

It is such a mercy to be able to breathe and move. I take little walks to the country—and we sit by the river—the Drave—in the little town, under the clipped trees, very 18th-century German—Werther period. The river comes from the ice, and is very full and swift and pale and silent. It rather fascinates me.—And the people are so queer—those big bare Germanic legs, in Tyroler Lederhosen—the big bare bodies lying in the sun along the lakeside—a queer impression as if the clock was going rapidly backwards—the reversal of time— everything quiet, sort of vague—yet not dead—and everything going like the river, by itself—no apparent government, no apparent control at all. There is something restful about it— makes one wonder. I think it really is a Schbpferische Pause. But one has to get into the backwater of the pause, to realise it a bit.

I hope you are all gay. Is Sullivan still there? Is Rose mahogany by now?—Two kisses to the boy, to thank him for his nice letter.

Send us a line.

Love,

D. H. Lawrence.

I think so often of the lotus flowers—I must paint them one day.

Villa Mir end a, Scandicci, Firenze.

To A. and M. Huxley.            Sunday, Autumn, 1927.

Dear Aldous and Maria,—

Awfully nice of you to ask us so warmly to Forte: and we'd like to come, but for the weary fact of another removal at once. I feel dead sick at the moment of shifting about. But that won’t last very long. Whatever flesh I’ve got on my bones isn’t Sitzfleisch, though it mayn’t be much of anything else.— To-day—Sunday morning—it’s quite a thickish fog—it is with you?—gets my chest a bit and makes me bark. Is it so by the sea? Almost every day the morning starts a bit foggy, and Florence is always deeply buried. Then the sun comes out so hot.-—Under cover of the mist, the Cacciatori are banging away—it’s a wonder they don’t blow one another to bits—-but I suppose sparrow-shot is small dust. And it’s Sunday, sacra festa.

I don’t find myself settling down very well here: feel, if I move, I’d like to clear out of Italy for good. I think I shall do so next year—and either try Devonshire or somewhere nearer home, l ime to go home, I feel.—But if I’d any money I’d take a long sea-voyage first. But I haven’t got any money—or a minimum.

Poor Kot, he’ll be depressed about his "scheme." I haven’t heard from Douglas yet—he’s in Prato. But he's an erratic bird, I’ve not much hope of him. Poor Kot—I do what I can 690

for him—but why should anybody want to be a publisher?

I’m glad Maria has met Mrs. Beeton: she’s one of the few women worth knowing and cultivating. Right-o! Maria! You wait a bit, and I’ll be eating your puddings for you God gives us a good meeting, as the Methodists 'd say.—Though I'm sorry Rose has gone. The boy must miss her terribly, lessons or not!—-Maria, have you greased the car?—I feel I don't want to do a thing, except curse almost everybody. Never mind! Hasta la vista!

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze.

To Miss Ream.                          28th Oct., 1927.

Dear Miss Pearn,—

Ages since I wrote you—but I thought something would be needing to be written. We were awfully pleased to hear from you and Mrs. Angell, when we were in Bavaria, that you had two pleasant days here. But didn’t you find the place a terrible bare barn, and the beds like the great desert of Gobi and the little deserts of Gobi? Afraid you did. But we are such campaigners—Giulia had all to tell about you, how you didn’t understand what she said, and she didn’t capire ana parola of what you said—they never get over it—and how you only ate a frittata di uova—and were always in the colombaia, come due piccioni, but that you were very cheerful, ridevano, ridevano erano cosi allegre. So there you are, you see, leaving footprints in the sands of the native mind. Tell Mrs. Angell it’s a pity she can’t be on the tiles at this moment—such a good hot sun, and such stillness!

We’ve been back a week, and it’s very lovely really—but since I was ill I’m out of patience with Italy—seems so stupid. But then nowhere else is any better. We had an invitation to Egypt—friends have a house there. But I’m afraid it would cost so much.—But I’m much better—that s the chief thing to me.

Would you answer this man as you think best. He had some other bits for another geog. book. But I’m not sure if I like these anthology-compiling sort of people who get everything for nothing.

Pity you didn’t come when we’re here. Never mind—there arc other times. I ante cose from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandtcci, Florence, Italy.

To Mrs. Hamilton Eames.               8 Novem., 1927.

My dear Marian,—

Your wedding card just come: imagine this sudden hop into matrimony! Anyhow, I believe it’s better than the theatre: I mean the matrimonial stage is a nicer one for you to shine on, than the theatrical. I hope you are feeling chirpy and all serene. You seemed to me a very nice and patient and long-suffering child, so you should make a real good wife, if the man doesn’t spoil you. Anyhow, here’s luck! in a drop <Sf Kirsch-wasser which happens to stand at my elbow.

Write and tell me who or what Hamilton Eames is, besides your husband. Is he connected with the theatre? And my congratulations to him.

And how is your mother? I’m thankful she hasn’t married that prize-fighter, I forget his name (Len!!)—I was wondering about her only two days ago, whatever she is up to now! But I’m thankful to see that she is still Mrs. Witt. And is it still Behaviourism and white rabbits and babies and reactions? Or is there a new ism? Anyhow, better a new "ism" than a new husband.

We came back here a fortnight ago—I was ill here in the summer, afraid I’d leave my bones in the Campo Santo. Am still a bit groggy and not very well pleased with myself: but painting pictures of large and ruddy nymphs and fauns, to keep me in countenance.

We may come to America in the spring. If so, I hope we shall see you and your husband—also Nina. Meanwhile all my unbishoply blessings on you, and remember your mother’s 692 dictum: ⁴ Nothing matters, so long as one keeps one's heart warm.” She said that to me last time we were there. It's frightfully true—but I suppose every different body means something different by it.

I’ll send you one of my books, having nothing else to send. My wife adds her good wishes, and I hope we'll all meet soon.

D. H. Lawrence.

Mirenda.

To A. Huxley.                              Monday.

Dear Aldous,—

Many thanks for Proper Studies. I have read 70 pages, with a little astonishment that you are so serious and professorial. You are not your grandfather’s Enkel for nothing—that funny dry-mindedness and underneath social morality. But you’ll say I’m an introvert, and no fit judge. Though I think to make people introverts and extraverts is bunk—the words apply, obviously, to the direction of the consciousness or the attention, and not to anything in the individual essence. You are an extravert by inheritance far more than in esse. You’d have made a much better introvert, had you been allowed. "Did she fall or was she pushed”—Not that I care very much whether people are intro or extra or anything else, so long as they're a bit simpatico. But, my dear, don’t be dry and formal and exposition all that—What’s the odds! I just read Darwin’s Beagle again—he dried himself—and tant de bruit pour des insectesl—But I like the book.

We sit here rather vaguely, and I still haven’t been to Florence. It’s colder, and we warm up in the evening. Frieda, inspired by Maria, has launched into puddings: boiled batter and jam. I do bits of things—darn my underclothes and try to type out poems—old ones. Reggie and Orioli and Scott-Moncrieff and a young Acton came en quatre— I poured tea, they poured the rest.

We shall have to be seeing you soon and making plans for Xmas and Cortina: or rather New Year and Cortina. I think we shall go to Florence for Xmas—somewhere where we can eat 693                       ² turkey and be silly—not sit solitary here. Will you be in Florence, too?

I’m reading Beethoven’s letters—always in love with somebody when he wasn’t really, and wanting contacts when he didn't really—part of the crucifixion into isolate individuality— poveri noi.

Love—whatever that is—to all !

D. H. L.

I don’t mean I didn’t find the 70 pages good—they're very sane and sound and good—only I myself am in a state of despair about the Word either written or spoken seriously. That’s why, I suppose, I wrote this, when I wasn't asked— instead of holding my tongue.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze.

To Donald Carswell.                        5 Dec., 1927.

Dear Don,—

Many thanks for the book. We’ve both read it, and both really interested. It’s awfully good sidelights on recent history, and seems to me psychologically very sound. Only you don’t allow enough for the emotional side of our reactions—poor Keir Hardie—and if your Lord Overtoun is sarcastic, which surely it is, then most people will take it for praise.

And you do admire a little overmuch English detachment. It often is mere indifference and lack of life. And you are a bit contemptuous of your Scotch: one feels they are miserable specimens, all told, by the time one winds up with Robertson Nicoll. It’s because you under-estimate the vital quality, and over-estimate the English detached efficiency, which is not very vital.

I got Cath’s letter and wrote ------, whom I’ve utterly

forgot. Tiresome, he is, fussing his little affairs round.

Cath’s idea of a Burns book I like very much: I always wanted to do one myself, but am not Scotchy enough. I read just now Lockhart's bit of a life of Burns. Made me spit! Those damned middle-class Lockharts grew lilies of the valley 694

up their ———. to hear them talk. If Cath is condescending to Burns, I disown her. He was quite right, a man’s a man for a' that, and it’s not a bad poem. He means what he says. My word, you can’t know Burns unless you can hate the Lockharts and all the estimable bourgeois and upper classes as he really did— the narrow-gutted pigeons. Don’t, for God’s sake, be mealy-mouthed like them. I'd like to write a Burns life. Oh, why doesn’t Burns come to life again, and really salt them! I'm all for Keir Hardie, my boy. Did you ever know Sir G. Trevelyan, for example? Pfui! "I'm it, mealy-mouthed it!" No, my boy, don’t be on the side of the angels, it’s too lowering.

. Germany sounds rather fun—but too far, too far. I'm supposed to go up to the snow in January, but am shirking it. See when January comes. The changing is such a bore.—I think we shall go back to the ranch in spring—March or April— I’d like to be away from Europe for a bit.

We too have no news. Nothing goes very well—money dwindles—the govt, takes 20 per cent off what I do get—and Curtis Brown 10 per cent. Pax! What does one exist for, but to be made use of, by people with money?

Frieda sends her love with mine—do hope the boy is better— wish something nice would happen all round.

D H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Rolf Gardiner.                          18 Dec., 1927.

Dear Rolf Gardiner,—

You never answered my last—did it annoy you? Never mind-take it as it comes. But write to me from time to time and tell me what you are doing and how you are getting on, because I’m always interested, even if I’m a Job’s comforter now and then. My own tiresome bronchials exasperate me, that’s the worst of it. But they're rather better.

Anyhow, I think if you could revive the old round dances and singing among the men of the mines and ironworks, you would be doing a very valuable thing, an invaluable thing. But I do 695 think you’d do better to work from a centre, and send out shoots and branches. I wish it could be done—really, health or not, I'd come and lend a hand. It’s not talk that’ll help nowadays—or only a minimum.

I have decided to give up this place in March or April: and if I can’t face England, then I shall go back to the ranch in New Mexico. Anyhow, there’s space out there, and a desert to ride over.

I thought when I was in Germany, I thought there was a new sort of stirring there: a horrible disillusion, a grinning awful materialism, but under it, a stir of life. It’s too soon to look for results. If I were talking to the young, I should say only one thing to them: don’t you live just to make money, either for yourself or for anybody else. Don’t look on yourself as a wageslave. Try to find out what life itself is, and live. Repudiate the money idea.

And then I'd teach ’em, if I could, to dance and sing together. The togetherness is important.

But they must first overthrow in themselves the money-fear and money-lust.

But, anyhow, send a line to say how your things are going.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci,

Florence.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.                6 Jan., 1928.

Dear Brett,—

So you are definitely down at Mabeltown, and the ranch is really shut up! I think it’s good for you to have the change. You can’t really turn into a hermit up there. And I guess you've got snow now. It even snowed here this week, but only lasted a day. So probably you are fairly deep in.

There's not much change here. Christmas came and went without much disturbance. We had a good big Christmas tree, ten feet or more, that Pietro stole in the wood; and on Christmas Eve we had seventeen peasants in. They sang, and were very nice. On Christmas Day, Maria and Aldous motored us into Florence to a friend's villa. They have gone now to Switzerland 696 to the snow, and they want us to join them. I'm waiting to hear from them, what it’s really like and how dear it is. We may try it for a month.

Anyhow, it is fully decided to leave this place for good in March or April. I don’t want to keep it on. If my broncs will stand it, I really want to come to the ranch in April. But Frieda doesn’t want to come. Still, we'll see! My cough is still a nuisance, and the weather is the devil: icy wind, then snow, then slush, then warmish fog, then feeble rain, then damp warmish days with weak wet sun, a bore. I just stay in bed a good deal. I feel that somewhere I'm really better and stronger. But my cough goes raking on. It is, as Mabel says, probably a change of life one has to undergo.

I’ve been re-writmg my novel, for the third time. It’s done, all but the last chapter. I think I shall re-christen it Tenderness. And I really think I shall try to publish it privately here, at ten dollars a copy. I might make a thousand pounds with luck, and that would bring us to the ranch nicely. If only the fates and the gods will be with us this year, instead of all the time against, as they were last year. If only one were tough, as some people are tough!

I can see you make your life a good deal with the horses. I don't wonder. They’re better than people.

Well, I do hope you'll have a good year, and that we shall come to the ranch and have good times. One pines for a bit of a real good time; if only things will fit.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Rolf Gardiner.                           7 Jan., 1928.

Dear Role Gardiner,—

Your long letter to-day—I’ll answer it at once, while it’s in my mind.

I had the Northumbrian report and was interested. The German Biinde has the sound of a real thing—but the English side seems not to amount to much. It’s very difficult to do anything with the English: they have so little "togetherness,” 697 or power of togetherness: like grains of sand that will only fuse if lightning hits it. They will fool about and be bossed about for a time with a man like Hargrave—but there’s nothing in it. Think of all the other mountebanking cliques that exist—the Fontainebleau group and all the rest. The Germans take their shirts off and work in the hay: they are still physical: the English are so woefully disembodied. God knows what’s to do with them. I sometimes think they are too sophisticatedly civilised to have any future at all. And you too, if you'll let me say it, are just a bit disembodied too: reaching for earth rather than on it. You strive too much. I agree with you entirely: one must be conscious. And also one must have a centre of gravity, on which one comes to rest. That is what you want, you never quite come to rest within yourself. Patience, you are young. But perhaps you should spend part of your time forgetting other people and not caring about them. Don’t forget, you are striving with yourself so hard, you hit other people in the eye fighting your own phantasm. And they resent it. Your time is too mapped out. You need to find a centre, a focal point within yourself of real at-one-ness. At present you strive and strain and force things a bit, and don’t find it. Paztenza.' Give yourself time. Anything worth having is growth: and to have growth, one must be able to let be.

It seems to me a pity you couldn't have made your farm a sort of little shrine or hearth where you kept the central fire of your effort alive: not all this hard work business: not this effort. You ought to have a few, very few, who are conscious and willing to be conscious, and who would add together their little flames of consciousness to make a permanent core. That would make a holy centre: whole, heal, hale. Even the German Biinde, I am afraid, will drift into nationalistic, and ultimately, fighting bodies: a new, and necessary form of militarism. It may be the right way for them. But not for the English. The English are over-tender. They must have kindled again their religious sense of at-one-ness. And for that you must have a silent, central flame, a flame of consciousness and of warmth which radiates out bit by bit. Keep the core sound, and the rest will look after itself. What we need is reconciliation and atoning. I utterly agree with your song, dance and labour: but the core of atoning 698

in the few must be there, if your song, dance and labour are to have a real source. If it is possible. The German youth is almost ready to fuse into a new sort of fighting unity, it seems to me: us against the world. But the English are older, and weary even of victory.

Well, enough of this! I’ll let you know what I think of the Kibbo Kift book when it comes.

And do come and see us. I should like very much to talk to you: seriously, if you wish it, unseriously if you don’t. I'm sorry there’s nowhere really in this flat to put you up: it’s not very comfortable: but I’m giving it up finally in April: done with it. But you can come out by tram from Florence. And if you call at Pino Orioli’s little bookshop, 6, Lungarno Corsim, he'll always give you any information—in English—about getting here or anything else. He’s a friend of ours, and will be of yours.

If I don't go to the ranch, I shall try to go to Frankfurt this summer. I believe my bronchials are beginning to behave better. I should very much like to meet Becker and Gotzsche, and to be at the camp. But we can talk about it. I have a sister-in-law and husband—bank-manager, but nice—in Schoneberg— Berlin. My wife would like to see the real German youth too. We always go to Baden and Heidelberg: and there’s a bit too much of the old stink there.

Let me know if you really think of coming here. The Huxleys—Aldous and wife—want us to join them in the snow in Switzerland. We might—just possible: but probably not. I want to keep my limited resources—financially this time—for the summer, to be able to move about then.

Well, don’t be too affaire: and don’t expect too much of the world.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandiedt Firenze.

To Rolf Gardiner.                      Monday, 17.1.28.

Dear Rolf Gardiner,—

I read the Kibbo Kift book with a good deal of interest. Of

course it won’t work: not quite flesh and blood. The ideas are sound, but flesh and blood won’t take ’em, till a great deal of flesh and blood have been destroyed. Of course the birthright credit too is sound enough—but to nationalise capital is a good deal harder than to nationalise industries. 3 he man alternates between idealism pure and simple, and a sort of mummery, and then a compromise with practicality. What he wants is all right. I agree with him on the whole, and respect him as a straightforward fighter. But he knows there’s no hope, his way —en masse. And therefore, underneath, he's full of hate. He’s ambitious: and his ambition isn’t practical: so he’s full of hate, underneath. He’s overweening, and he’s cold. But for all that, on the whole he’s right, and I respect him for it. I respect his courage and aloneness. If it weren’t for his ambition and his lack of warmth, I’d go and kibbo kift along with him. But he’ll get no further than holiday camping and mummery. Though even that will have some effect. All luck to him. But by wanting to rope in all mankind it shows he wants to have his cake and eat it. Mankind is largely bad, just now especially—and one must hate the bad, and try to keep what bit of warmth alive one can, among the few decent. But even that’s a forlorn hope.

But I wouldn’t write a criticism in a paper against him. Rather praise him. Because his reaction is on the whole sound. Only it is too egoistic, like all modern things—even you are the same—and Gotzsche, too, probably. The lack of the spark of warmth that alone can kindle a little fire to-day. Hargrave would do all right for a fight.

I wonder how much following he has—Hargrave? I should say small, and insignificant. There is a note of failure and rancour underneath. He doesn't forgive you for leaving him. Still, he's a man. But not a leader for to-day. The leader to-day needs tenderness as well as toughness: I mean a constructive leader: otherwise fight!

Of course I got a cold which prevents our leaving for Switzerland to-day. But I hope we shall get off on Wed. or Thursday—be in Diablerets anyhow on Saturday.

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

Chalet Beau Site,

To Witter Bynner.

Les Diablerets, (Vaud), Suisse.

zr Jany., 1928.

Dear Bynner,—

Your letter, and the poems, came to-day—and I haven’t read the “Pamphlet” ones yet, only the little Chapalan slip, which I think have poignancy, and I like them. It’s a fact, it doesn’t matter what year it is. Time is where one is and with whom. And I do think it’s about now when one should be back in New Mexico under the turquoise.

But I’ve had a paltry time, being ill—since last June I never got right—cough, bronchials very bad. So we came up here to see if it would do me good—the altitude—only about 3,500, but fairly high for Europe—and the snow and sun. We’ve been here about ten days, and I'm no worse, anyhow. But I do wish I could get really better. I’m only half myself. That’s why I never sent you David: I felt so limp and dragged. But I'm getting a copy now and will write in it and send it.

I feel about as you do about Europe—it isn’t really there. I’d rather be at the ranch. But I’ve got to be well enough to take that journey. And Frieda doesn’t much want to come: it's a weariness, and I wish I could get a sort of lift out, else I’m stuck. But I’ll really see if we can't come, end of April: and yours was the first New Mexican hospitality, so I should like to come to you for a day or two. After all, as men we get on right enough. I don’t care a bit what you say of me—no doubt it's all true. But it's not really saying that matters, it’s some kind of lingering feeling, as one likes the blue of turquoise. For the rest, I don’t give a damn. Even if someone gave me a knock on the head with a lump of turquoise, I’d still like the blueness of the stone.

When will you really get your Chinese book out? Probably I shall like the Chapalesque better—but we’ll see. I’ve been collecting my poems together—Seeker wants to do a Collected Poems of me. But what a job! I feel like an autumn morning, a perfect maze of gossamer of rhythms and rhymes and loose lines floating in the air. I did a novel, too, which perhaps I'll publish privately in Florence—and then castrate for the public.

I don’t know how long we’ll stay here—perhaps till March— then go back to the Villa Mirenda, and clear up there. I’m giving it up, definitely. Enough of Italy this spell. Hope we'll get out to New Mex. So au revoir.

D. H. L.

Chalet Beau Site,

Les Diablerets (Vaud).

To Rolf Gardiner.                         3 Feby1928.

Dear Rolf Gardiner,—

Your letter just come—no doubt you had mine to Lansdown Rd., to say we shall be expecting you. Do stay here the three days—10-11-12—we’ll get you a room in a quiet chalet— there’s deep snow—and the Huxleys are here—and probably there'll be Max Mohr, dramatist—German—quite nice. Anyhow, we’ll have a talk.

And don’t letGotzsche or anybody make you do anything you don't want to do. Damn their discipline. If you’ve got to make mistakes—and who hasn't?—make your own, not theirs.

And when you are in Heidelberg do go and see my sister-in-law, Frau Dr. Else Jaffe-Richthofen,Bismarckstr. 17, Heidelberg. She is very nice—has a son about your age at the university— knows everybody. Jaffe was a Jew and professor—rich—and went and became Finan^minister to the Bolshevik Bavarian Republic or whatever it was, in 1920—and died of funk, poor chap. But Else is worth knowing. I shall tell her to look out for you.

Let me know then just when you’ll come, and we’ll meet you at the station—and arrange a warm room for you.

D. H. Lawrence.

Chalet Beau Site,

Les Diablerets (Vaud).

To H. Crosby.                        26 February, 1928.

Dear Mr. Crosby,—

Many thanks for your Chariot of the Sun. I am glad somebody reaches a finger towards the real Ra, and dip your hand in Osins too, since you’re there. It makes real poetry. I'm so glad when somebody waves a sunny hand towards me for once. And so thankful to catch a glimpse of a real poet in the real world: not a strummer on a suburban piano.

What is The Enormous Room—and by whom and when? I never heard of it.

As for a manuscript of mine—I burnt most of the earlier ones. The Plumed Serpent lies in the cabin of the ranch in New Mexico: good sun there. I suppose I could get it. And I think the MS. of the story Sun is m Italy or London. I’ll see. But I never sold an MS. and I hate selling anything. How lucky you are to be able to print just 48 exemplaires hors commerce. But if you like I’ll sell you an MS. When I go back to Italy in a fortnight’s time—Villa Mirenda, Scandicci (Florence)—I'll see what there is there and let you know and you can give me just as much "gold" as you can easily spare, and I'll turn it into sun some way or other.

But let us meet somewhere, shall we?

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Chalet Beau Site,

Les Diablerets (Vaud.')

To Rolf Gardiner.           Monday. (Postmark, 4.3.28.)

Dear Rolf xiie Ganger,—

I’m sure you had a beastly journey—expect the Italian route would have been more bearable. But now you're evidently all right.

Max Mohr stayed till Thursday, and it was vile weather till he left, when it became most brilliant—and has stayed so. It’s really rather lovely—still away outside the world, in a nowhere which I like. We think of staying two more weeks: or I do: my wife wants to go to Baden-Baden for the last week.

I, too, was glad you came; I prefer to know my friends in the flesh. I think there's some sort of destiny in Gore farm. We’ll have to abide by it, whatever it is. Anyhow, this summer I want to go down to look at it and smell it and taste it. Perhaps I due to go back to the Old England: and perhaps you are the whale that will spit forth my Jonahship on to the destined coast. We’ll see! We've all got a long way to go, yet—and I expect you will embellish the inside of a few thousand railwaycompartments still, before you come to earth. Max Mohr says we must all have roots. But at a certain point the business of the thistle is to roll and roll on the wind. Pazienza/

Frieda went and burnt the last sheet of your letter, so I lost the address to Ralph Coward: therefore I can’t send him his letter—unless you send me his address again. Otherwise I’ll forward it to Holland Park.

To-night the Downland Man book came: and it looks the kind of book I shall enjoy. Awfully nice of you to send it; but, caro mio, why do you spend your money? Don’t do it any more. Let me buy the things. I’m going to order the Iron Age in Italy. I believe it’ll have something in it for me.

Well, we'll meet somewhere or other, some time—and meanwhile we’ll go on rolling, like thistle-down—that we used to call Angels when we were children. Non Angli sed Angell!

So an revoirI

D. H. Lawrence.

Chalet Beau Site,

Les Diablerets.

To Rolf Gardiner.                 Sunday, 4 Mars, 1928.

Dear Rolf,—

The demon-drive must have been interesting—but as you say, sad: all the old things have to die, and be born again, if they ever manage it. We’re only in the dying stage as yet.

So the Biinde patriots are trying to shove you out? I suppose you’ll leave them in the end, but being shoved out is another matter. I’m afraid the whole business of leaders and followers is somehow wrong, now. Like the demon-drive, even Leadership must die, and be born different, later on. I’m afraid part of what ails you is that you are struggling to enforce an obsolete form of leadership. It is White Fox's calamity. When leadership has died—it is very nearly dead, save for Mussolini and you and White Fox and Annie Besant and Gandhi—then it will be born again, perhaps, new and changed, and based on reciprocity of tenderness. The reciprocity of power is obsolete. When you get down to the basis of life, to the depth of the warm creative stir, there is no power. It is never: There shall be light!-—only: Let there be light! The same way, not: Thou shalt dance to the mother earth!—only: Let it be danced to the mother earth! It’s no good being pregnant with the inert Austrians. They are en route to their death; and, let us hope, resurrection.

We leave here—at least, I do, for Frieda is already in Baden-Baden—on Tuesday. We meet in Milan, and ought to be in the Villa Mirenda on Wednesday evening. So tell your sister just to send us a line when she is coming. Yes, one can ignore Fascism in Italy for a time. But after a while, the sense of false power forced against life is very depressing. And one can’t escape—except by the trick of abstraction, which is no good.

I will send Ralph Coward his letter.

Don’t kick too hard against the pricks.

D. H. Lawrence.

Diablerets.

To Martin Seeker.               Monday, 5 March, 1928.

Dear Secker.—

I posted off the MS. of the novel to Bollinger to-day-changed the title to: John Thomas and Lady Jane: which I hope you like, as it’s much more suitable than the other. I don’t at all know how much you’ll react to the book, probably you’ll hate it. Aldous Huxley and Maria liked it very much so they said. ---went into a fearful rage over it—a moral rage. T hey’re the only people who have read it so far.

Then the expurgations—I did a fair amount of blanking out and changing, then I sort of got colour-blind, and didn't know any more what was supposed to be proper and what not. So yot must consider it. Don’t all in a rush be scared and want to pull whole sections out. Just consider a bit patiently, in detail, what is possible and what isn’t. I know it’s not easy to judge. And then if there are little bits you can leave out without making obvious gaps, then I'm willing you should leave them out. But if you want any substantial alteration made, then consider the thing carefully, in detail, and mark it carefully in blue pencil, and send me the pages you want changed, and I’ll do my best. I think we ought to manage to make it feasible.

I leave in the morning for Milan, where I meet Frieda. I do hope I shan’t get any cold or anything going down, for I'm a good bit better now. This evening it's trying to rain—warm spring rain on sudden snow. Just as well to descend for a bit.

Well, I hope you won’t hate the novel—though you easily may. It's a bit of a revolution in itself—a bit of a bomb.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Juliette Huxley.              Thursday, 8 March, 1928.

Dear Juliette,—

I had a very pleasant journey—so peaceful in Switzerland—■ but in Domodossola a lot of nervy Italians got in. Frieda's train arrived in Milan just as mine did, and we met on the platform. Got home all right last night—all the peasants out to meet us, with primroses and violets and scarlet and purple anemones. Something touching about them. But I don't really like Italy: It's all in a wrong mood, nervous and depressed. And to-day it rains, rather dree, and is colder than Diablerets. Impossible really to warm these great stone barns. So I've been painting a water-colour: torch-dance by daylight! How are Adam and Eve?—perfect now in a perfect paradise? I quite miss them: had them in my eye so long, that I feel they must be waiting for me somewhere.

Frieda sends her regards (oh, she says love!!!—same thing) and says she’ll write and answer your letter. I'll try and keep her up to it. But perhaps you’d better begin another paradise in the meanwhile. And she says—Frieda—that I left a picture in the bottom drawer of the washstand—the bottom drawer was her drawer, declared empty when she left: so if you’ve time, do pick it up from old Ansermoz. It’s only a small canvas of a

jaguar jumping on a man—not good, not finished, and I don’t like it. So there’s no hurry about sending it, you can post it from London, if you’d be so kind—or even leave it till we come, no matter at all. Miserable thing!

I’m taking my novel to the printer to-morrow in Florence—if it doesn’t rain!

John Thomas and Lady Jane Were caught larking in the rain Penalty! they’re torn in twain.

Tanti saluti e tante belle cose! to your mother. Not a sound from the Aldousells. Wish I was having tea on the Aroles terrace with you all. Post is three miles away here, so must mail to-morrow. Did you get anything done in Aigle?—those lovely hepaticas! Aurevoir!

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze.

To A. and M. Huxley,                       9 March.

Dear Aldous and Maria,—

To-day I lunched with Orioli, and we took the MS. of the novel to the printer: great moment. Juliette, who read the MS. and was very cross, morally so, suggested rather savagely I should call it: John Thomas and Lady Jane. Many a true word spoken in spite, so I promptly called it tnat. Remains to De seen if Seeker and Knopf will stand it.—Afterwards, Juliette was almost reconciled to the novel: but she still thought: what if Anthony were 16, and read it!—07hat indeed; However, to-morrow night I shall have a specimen page from the printer —and by Monday I may hear what Curtis Brown and Seeker think of their expurgated (sic) MS. I m prepared tor anything—but shall go ahead here.—Saw Douglas to-day—but nothing new about him, still thinking or Jerusalem and pre erring Chianti.

We wound up very nicely in Diablerets. Juliette and her mother and Mademoiselle all looked after me like angels, and we made a paradise* with a woollen serpent! Juliette brought

* An embroidery designed by Lawrence.

707

to the station for a last word of advice—me as paradisemanufacturer—and nearly died of shame because Mademoiselle stood like an easel holding it for me to see—on the platform— and I cocked my eye—and all the station peeped and peeped at Juliette's Adam and Eve nude in lisle thread and pink wool!

To-morrow F.’s elder sister due to come.—House full of violets and anemones. Wilks depart at end of month.

Disgustedly!

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence. To Harriet Monroe.               15 March, 1928.

Dear Harriet Monroe,—

Long since I heard from you—or even of you—since that day in Chicago: and the ice on the shores of the lake, which I shall never forget, so wild and American still, with that wild forest of a city behind. Something queer and terrifying about Chicago: one of the strange "centres" of the earth, more so than New York.

I hope we shall go back to New Mexico some time this year, and if so, that we shall again see you in Chicago. I feel it’s time I connected up again with the west.

Meanwhile, I'm busy here printing my new novel in Florence—1000 copies, of which 500 for America. It is a nice and tender phallic novel—not a sex novel in the ordinary sense of the word. I don’t know how much you sympathise with my work—perhaps not much. But, anyhow, you know it is quite sincere, and that I sincerely believe in restoring the other, the phallic consciousness, into our lives: because it is the source of all real beauty, and all real gentleness. And those are the two things, tenderness and beauty, which will save us from horrors. And I think with Poetry you’ve worked for those two things. And in my novel I work for them directly, and direct from the phallic consciousness, which, you understand, is not the cerebral sex-consciousness, but something really deeper, and the root of poetry, lived or sung.

So I shall send you a few order forms, and if you will give them to a few people who may care for the book, do so, please. But if you don’t want to be bothered, throw them away.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Curtis Brown.                15 March, 1928.

Dear C B.,—

Thanks for yours about Gaige. I thought that was gone— forgotten—so when Willard Johnson—the boy who did that Laughing, Horse number of me in Santa Fe—wrote and asked me if he could do that story on his little press in Taos, I said "yes." He hasn’t got a bean—so there's no money there. But I told him if he got ahead to fix up with the New York office. But perhaps he won’t do it. If he doesn’t, I shall write a second half to it—the phallic second half I always intended to add to it—-and send it to you for Gaige to look at. Otherwise later I’ll write a 10,000-word thing and send it. It’s a length I like— and I hate having to fit magazines. Apparently the story appeared in the February number of The Forum, but they never sent me a copy, which is tiresome. I wanted to see it.

My novel, Lady Chatter ley's Lover, or John Thomas and Lady Jane, is at the printer's in Florence: such a nice little printing shop all working away by hand cosy and bit by bit, real Florentine manner—and the printer doesn t know a word of English—nobody on the place knows a word—where ignorance is bliss! Where the serpent is invisible! I hey will print on a nice hand-made Italian paper should be an attractive book. I do hope 111 sell my 1000 copies or most of 'em—or I’ll be broke. I want to post them direct to purchasers. I shall send you a few little order-leaflets, and you will find me a few purchasers, won’t you? I shan t send the book unless the people send the two quid, else m left.

I haven’t heard from----—'. Maybe he s got a belly-ache.

I can’t help it. It’s not my fault if people turn into withered

sticks, with never a kick in them. I believe in the phallic consciousness, as against the irritable cerebral consciousness we're afflicted with: and anybody who calls my novel a dirty sexual novel is a liar. It's not even a sexual novel: it’s phallic. Sex is a thing that exists in the head, its reactions are cerebral, and its processes mental. Whereas the phallic reality is warm and spontaneous and—but basta! you've had enough.

D. H. Lawrence.

Mirenda.

To A. Huxley.                        Sat., 17 March, '28.

Dear Aldous,—

Your letter and Maria’s to-day-—and first sound you’ve made since leaving Diablerets: those 2 post cards were ghosts.—It’s a bitter cold wind here, and in Florence to-day like being in a knife-box. The printer is printing my novel. Seeker won’t do it—meno male—but what about the copyright? Anyhow, I’ve got to sell my thousand, or I'm a lost soul. So you must help me. I’ll send you a little batch of order-forms, and I’m sure you and Maria will make a few folks buy. That novel must be put down their throats. Mind you stand up for it, when the pigs begin to grunt, then to squeal, then to prance their feet in the porridge. It'll need a bit of backing.—Didn’t you find a copy of my Porcupine at the club? It was sent there. It’s for Maria really—-for the later ranch essays.

Let’s go to New Mexico in autumn. Let’s be amused.

I’ve said May fifteenth for my novel.

Damn everybody!

What is Julian’s address?

We must put salt on the hypocritical and snaily tails, the good public.

Dear Maria, don’t be downhearted.

Loeser is dead, in New York: it killed him—Son baie quelle, che dicono, che tanto caeca an bue, quanto mille mosche; perche ci sono piu mosche che buoiJ

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda,

Scandied, Florence.

To Witter Bynner.                     • 13 March, 1928.

Dear Bynner,—

I sniffed the red herring in your last letter a long time: then at last decide it's a live sprat. I mean about The Plumed Serpent and "the hero.” On the whole, I think you’re right. The hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a back number. After all, at the back of the hero is the militant ideal: and the militant ideal, or the ideal militant seems to me also a cold egg. We’re sort of sick of all forms of militarism and mili-tantism, and Miles is a name no more, for a man. On the whole I agree with you, the leader-cum-follower relationship is a bore. And the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and men and men and women, and not the one up one down, lead on I follow, ich dien sort of business. So you see I’m becoming a lamb at last, and you’ll even find it hard to take umbrage at me. Do you think?

But still, in a way, one has to fight, but not in the O Glory! sort of way. I feel one still has to fight for the phallic reality, as against the non-phallic cerebration unrealities. I suppose the phallic consciousness is part of the whole consciousness which is your aim. To me it’s a vital part.

So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane. But that I have to submerge into a subtitle, and call it Lady Chatterley's Lover. But I am printing here in Florence an unexpurgated edition of this tender and phallic novel, far too good for the public. The expurgated will come in the autumn. But this, the full, fine flower with pistil and stamens standing, I hope to have ready by May 15th.—1000 copies, of which 500 for America, at ten dollars a copy. I shall send you a few little order-forms, and do please send a few out for me, to the right people. You can reach a lot of the right sort of people in the Universities. I shall mail direct, from Florence, as soon as the book is ready: a good book. And why should the red flower have its pistil nipped out, before it is allowed to appear? So I shall trust you in this.

W’e are in this house till May 6th, then I don’t know where. I want to come to New Mexico—perhaps even earn a little money this way to come with.

Tante belle cose!

D. II. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Mrs. Hamilton Eames.          15 March, 1928.

Dear Marian,—

I've not yet sent you the promised book: but that was because I didn’t have a nice one. Now I'm correcting proofs of my Collected Poems, and that seems very suitable. So as soon as I get copies, I'll write in one and send it you.

I was glad to hear you are gaily and hopefully embarked with a husband. Imagine Emma Eames being in the family! I do hope your husband will put out a few brave blossoms. The world badly needs a few courageous artists. The present lot have their tails sadly between their legs. When your husband writes, see that, it’s chirpy and defiant.

I’m going to send you a few order-forms for my new novel, which I’m printing here in Florence. It's a tender phallic novel: now you’re married you’ll understand it. I have to publish it here, as it’s too phallic for the gross public. So if you can, give the leaflets to a few people who might like to buy the book. It’s worth it.

And some time this year I do hope we’ll be in New York en route to New Mexico, then we’ll drink a pink and cheerful draught from the soda fountain, for our mutual healths together.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Make your mother buy my novel: good for her, after so much behaviourism.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Rolf Gardiner.                 17 March, 1928.

Dear Rolf,—

I expect you are back in England now—to winter again, for here even there’s a bitter cold wind. I hope you are feeling 712 cheerful. But don't insist on being cheerful: it costs too much from inside. I hope you weren’t put out too by my remarks on leadership. What I said is true to my experience. But you may not have got there yet—or it may not even be in your experience. Every man to his destiny. Only don’t bluff yourself, because that way you let yourself down.

When is your sister Margaret coming out? Here we are— if nothing drives us away—so tell her to come and see us when she will. If she will walk out, then tram No. 16 from the Duomo to Vingone: to the very terminus and dead end (4 hour). Then there’s another 25 minutes’ walk—straight ahead uphill from Vingone till you come to two cypresses, just beyond the bouse marked Podere Nuovo. Turn to the left there, and dip down into the little valley. Our house is the square big box on top of the poggio, near the little church of San Paolo.

Now I want you to help me a bit. I wrote a novel—Lady Chatterley’s Lover or John Thomas and Lady Jane—did I tell you? It is a phallic novel: a delicate and tender phallic novel. Seeker thinks that even expurgated it could not be published publicly. Bah! So I’m publishing it here in Florence: have got a little printer to print it—nobody knows a word of English, on the place, so not a blush!—and I’ve made my favourite phoenix rising from a nest of flames (I rise up) for the cover—and it will be a nice book—1000 copies, half of ’em for America, at £2. I’ve got to sell it too: for I’ve got to live. So you must help me, because I know you will.

It is strictly a novel of the phallic consciousness as against the mental consciousness of to-day. For some things, you will probably dislike it: because you are still squeamish, and scared of the phallic reality. It is perfectly wholesome and normal, and man and a woman. But I protest against its being labelled "sex.” Sex is a mental reaction nowadays, and a hopelessly cerebral affair: and what I believe in is the true phallic consciousness. But you 11 see. So I shall send you a bunch ox the little order-forms, and you must get me what orders you can, because the book must be read—it’s a bomb, but to the living, a flood of urge—and I must sell it. And it’s part of the crusade that we are both out for, and ana mano lava I ultra■ -but I know you’ll help me what you can. his is waere 1 throw 2 straight bomb at the skull of idealistic Mammon. And of course it will in a way set me apart even more definitely than I am already set apart. It's destiny. Tu stai con me, lo so.

D. H. L.

To Martin Seeker.

Villa Mirenda, Scandied, Florence. Friday.

Dear Secker,—

I was not surprised at your decision about the novel—I’m going ahead with my edition. A little printer’s shop in Florence where nobody understands any English, and some of the men, printers, can’t even read. I shall make a nice book, at £2.— And hope I shall sell it, or I’m broke. I enclose you a few slips, and if you can get me one or two orders, benissimo! Write your order on one of the forms, will you?—you may not want three copies.

I sent back proofs of the poems. I'm interested to hear what Robert Bridges says. Barby suddenly turned up this morning from Alassio—and of course it still rains, but is not so cold.

Tell Rina, in case I forget, to take tram 16 from the Duomo to Vingone terminus. The inn is at the terminus.—But we’ll be writing again before she comes—and if weather is decent we’ll meet her in Florence. The inn charges L30 or L35 a day. We shall be all busy packing up to leave—so it won’t be so nice, alas!

Yrs.,

D. H. Lawrence.

To M. Huxley.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze. Friday.

My dear Maria,—

Your letter yesterday. Glad you are happy in London. You wouldn’t be wildly happy in Italy—it only rains—and was bitter cold and sleety—but now, thank heaven, is a bit softer

and srowery, not steady downpour. But I don’t feel so brisk here—and chest more scratchy—don't like it.

Frieda’s daughter Barbara suddenly arrived from Alassio this morning—for a fortnight or so. And F.’s sister Else is in Capri, and staying with us on her way back to Germany. And we are really clearing out of this house end of April. So I feel a bit confused.

No, 1 never said anything to Dorothy Warren about an exhibition—only Barbey talked to her of it. I might do it—but I shan’t sell the pictures—not till I’m strong. I've done three more water-colours: not bad, but I'd rather do oils: one can use one’s elbow, and in water it’s all dib-dab.

The first batch of proofs due to-morrow. Seeker wrote that he didn't see how the novel could possibly be expurgated for public sale—so I’ll just go on with my private one. I m only worried about copyright.—Did you get some of the little orderforms?—and did you notice the 1920 for a date! Pino overlooked it! You must get me a few orders if you can, or I'm broke. I've paid lire 4000 on account of the paper—nice handmade paper, which will cost about 7000, I think! And I've made my design of a phoenix rising from the nest in flames, for the cover. Pino wouldn’t have me let Bramanti wood-cut it: said it would be much truer just cast and printed. Shall send you a specimen.

I think myself it’s rather nice to be busy and practical on the outside—and day-dreams, as you call it, inside. I he things cne cares about are all inside, like seeds in the ground in winter. But one has to attend to the things one only half cares about. And sc life passes away. I expect it is always so, in the winter of our discontent, when the outside is mostly rather horrid and out of connection with the something else that struggles inside. Luckily the inside thing corresponds with the inside thing in just a few people. I think it is so with us. We don’t fit very well outside—but the inside corresponds, which is most important.

June! What shall we do in June? Frieda says we must go back to Switzerland in May, and stay till mid July. Perhaps it would be wisest. But I’m not tying myself down to any plan.

Tell Juliette I expected to hear from her from London. I 715

haven’t got the Highgate address; will you send it me?

The French house sounds awfully nice—should very much like to see it. I think it’s rather a good solution.

The boy will be all right alone at school, after a week or so. Best for him.

Ora fa buio- —buona notte!

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda.

To A, Huxley.                        27th March, 1928.

Dear Aldous,—

Your letter yesterday—glad you liked the pore.—I got yesterday two copies of Scrutinies—the book with my Galsworthy essay in it. Some of ’em hit fairly straight: but Edwin Muir, real Scotchy, is overpowered by Bennett's gold watch-chain. I’d like to write an essay on Bennett—sort of pig in clover.

Your ideas of the grand perverts is excellent. You might begin with a Roman—and go on to St. Francis—Michael Angelo and Leonardo—Goethe or Kant—Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Louis Quatorze. Byron—Baudelaire—Wilde—Proust: they all did the same thing, or tried to: to kick off, or to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness, which is the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense. I think Wilhelm Meister is amazing as a book of peculiar immorality, the perversity of intellectualised sex, and the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being, which is peculiarly bourgeois and Goethian. Goethe began millions of intimacies, and never got beyond the how-do-you-do stage, then fell off into his own boundless ego. He perverted himself into perfection and Godlikeness. But do do a book of the grand orthodox perverts. Back of all of them lies ineffable conceit.

Was in Florence yesterday—saw Douglas—looking very old —off in a week's time to Aleppo—or so he says—by Orient Express—do you remember its time-table in Diablerets? From Aleppo he wants to go to Baalbek—and then, presumably, to rise into heaven. He’s terribly at an end of everything.

716

I haven't got proofs yet of my novel, but they'll begin this week—and say they 'll only take about three weeks. The phoenix is printed, very nice. I shall send Maria one. Orioli is very keen. I’ve got about two thousand liras in orders. Orioli thinks if we got on well with this book, perhaps he can do others, and the author give him a percentage. Not a bad idea. Might be the nucleus of the Authors' Publishing Society of which I spoke, however, to------, so no doubt he’ll bombard

you. I don't like his letters: sort of bullying tone he takes, with an offended Jewish superiority.

Did you get the order-forms? Do get private people to send money if you can—so that I can see if I can sell enough without the booksellers, who take a third commission in America, and a quarter in England—and then hold the book back and sell it for double the price. I hate middle-men, and want to eliminate them as far as possible. If I can carry this thing through, it will be a start for all of us unpopular authors. Never let it be said I was a Bennett.

I was reading Aretino's Ragionamenti—sometimes amusing, but not created enough. I prefer Boccaccio. We had one sunny day, but grey and windy again now—no fun—-F/s daughter here, but leaves to-morrow. The Wilks mere wraiths, having packed up every old rag, pot, pan and whisker with the sanctity of pure idealists cherishing their goods.

Had a cable from Brett asking me to send my pictures to New York for exhibition on May ist. Too short a notice.

Wish the sun would shine.

Even if we had to go to Switzerland, we could get away early in July, and go to Toulouse or wherever it is.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence♦ To Miss Peam.                   i April, 1928.

Dear Nancy Pearn,—

Have you got by any chance the manuscript of Sun in the office? An American asks me for it particularly, and offers $100. So there’s a windfall, if it exists. If it doesn’t, povero me! for I haven’t got it, the MS. Would you tell me what

MSS. there are of mine in the office? I'm afraid I ve burnt most of those left on my hands—you remember Sun is the story the Coterie did and printed too separate copies.

You hear I am burning my boats by publishing my "shocking” novel here all by myself. I expect everybody will disapprove—you certainly will. So I shan't ask you to buy a copy.

It rains here—and rains! If it would leave off, I would go round and collect material for my final Etruscan Sketches. They at least are irreproachable. What it is to be always under reproach!

Sempre,

D. H. Lawrence.

Did the story, The Lovely Lady, ever appear in Lady Cynthia’s "murder” book? If so, no one ever sent me a copy of the book.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To H. Crosby.                      i April, 1928.

Dear Harry Crosby,—

That was very nice of you, to send me that little pseudo-book full of red gold. How beautiful the gold is!—such a pity it ever became currency. One should love it for its yellow life, answering the sun. I shan’t spend it if I can help it.

I have hunted for MSS.—I'm afraid I burn most of 'em. I found The Man Who Loved Islands, which is a good story —came in The Dial and in The London Mercury; also Two Blue Birds■—from Dial and Pall Mall; also Smile, a slight thing of four pages, which I like; then None of That—a story of an American woman and a bull-fighter in Mexico City—coming just now at the end of my vol. of short stories—-a fairly long story; then The Scrutiny of the Works of John Galsworthy, just appearing in a volume published by Wishart. What a pity there is nothing exactly sunny! But I have written to London to see if the MS. of Sun is there. And Man Who Loved Islands is a good story. I should like so much to give you something you would like. Shall I send you Man Who Loved Islands and Two Blue Birds and Smile: and then Sun if it luckily turns up? Or perhaps a poem or two, those I changed for the Collected Poems which will appear this autumn? Tell me, will you? I am having the MSS. which I've got bound in a simple cover, and I'd send you what you like: and certainly Sun, if it exists, as well.

I enclose one or two little forms for my new novel, which I am printing here in Florence. It is a phallic novel, but good and sun-wards, truly sun-wards, not widdershins or auti! You might like it.

In May we shall go to Switzerland again, I think, for my health. But in early July we ought to be in Paris. I shall let you know, of course. And in autumn I want to go back to New Mexico, where we have a little ranch, near Taos. You are American, are you? But do you always live in Paris?

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

To Miss Isaacs,—

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence♦ 2 April, 1928.

Dear Miss Isaacs,—

Many thanks for the book of Theater Essays. The first copy sent must have been stolen in the post.

What a handsome book it is! and really very interesting. I think nothing is better, especially about the stage, than to hear all the different voices saying their say. One feels a bit bewildered at the end. But then, damn it all, one is a bit bewildered by the spectacle of life altogether.

I enclose a couple of leaflets for my new novel. It is frankly a phallic novel. But then I think it’s the death of the phallic consciousness which Is making us go so withered and flat, filmy, in our lives. Somebody says so in one of the essays— about the stage. Essential drama is essentially phallic, and where the phallic consciousness is dead, there’s no essential drama. Of course I don’t mean merely sex, the modern sex. That’s a thing of mental consciousness and cerebral reactions, reflected down on to the physical, and rather repulsive.

But there, you don’t want to hear all this. Again, many thanks for the book.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

P.S.—We are giving up this house for good at the end of this month—but the Florence address—Orioli’s—will always get me.

To L, E. Bollinger.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence. 2nd April, 1928.

Dear Pollinger,—

If you haven't sent over the MS. of Lady C. to Chatto’s office, please don't send it. I don’t want any more publishers trying to cover their nakedness with "large patches of sheer beauty” and sighing, "It’s a great pity.” It is!

Instead, will you either give the MS. to Aldous Huxley, or Mrs. Huxley, should either of them call for it; otherwise post it to Aldous Huxley. And do you mind sending up the enclosed to the Foreign Department.

Very rainy here.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda.

To A. Huxley.                      Monday, 2nd April.

Dear Aldous,—

Awfully good of you to go to Curtis Brown. They are furious in that office that I publish my novel: daren't say much—but their quotation of Johnny Cape, which I enclose, shows. It seems to make ’em all very mad. Why, in God’s name? One would think I advocated sheer perversity: instead of merely saying merely natural things. I'm beat by their psychology—don’t understand ’em. But I can see they’ll get the wind up. I shall ask Curtis Brown to send MS. to you—do

you mind? Perhaps Maria will deposit it somewhere for me— and when I have got all proofs in Florence, we can burn it. Damn them all. Let ——— put a sheer patch of beauty on his -----—: I'll bet he’s got an ugly one.—I'll have to leave out John Thomas, shall I? What a pity! But it's too late to leave it from the leaflets.—You were sent 25 leaflets the very first; wonder who took 'em?—one suspects everything. ------

is forbidden to be sold in Italy, by Big Ben; and it is withdrawn by the publishers in England. So there's a mouse among the vestals once more!—"For my own good,’* they want me not to publish Lady C.—not to destroy my at last respectable reputation. Too late! I am embarked. You must stand by me, when the seas rise. Larboard watch, ahoy! All overboard but John Thomas.-—Oh, captain, my captain, our fearful trip’s begun—John Thomas—Hip—Hip!! for he s a jolly good fe-ellow----!

I've corrected 41 pages of proofs, and it was almost Maria's typing over again. Dear Maria, all those little mistakes you made, and I followed like Wenceslas's page so patiently in your footsteps: now it’s a Florentine printer. He writes dind t did'nt, dnid't, dind’t, din’dt, didn’t like a Bach fugue. The word is his blind spot.

Well, I painted a charming picture of a man pissing—I'm sure it is the one Maria will choose: called "Dandelions, for short. Now I'm doing a small thing in oil, called The Rape of the Sabine Women’’ or A Study in Arses.—-I might send my pictures to Dorothy Warren to exhibit—but I shan't sell em .—unless perhaps the waters. Maria can have any one of the water-colours: they are seven: ‘Adam Throwing the Apple, and "The Mango Tree’’: those you know. Then "The torch Dance," "Yawning," "The Lizard," "Under the Haystack," and "Dandelions": If I sell my novel, I might reproduce them in a portfolio, and sell that—500 copies. I’m a lost soul to the publishers. But Maria can have any one of them, but if she’d rather have an oil she must wait a bit.

It’s the most awful weather—pours and pours with rain. F.’s sister comes back to Florence from Capri to-day—it's rained all the while she was there—now she’ll stay a bit with us, and it'll go on raining. My cough is as ever: but I’m no 721

worse: really rather well, I think. Does me good to feel furious about the novel.

Dear Mana, do tell Lady Colefax to come to tea if she'd care to. I don't know anything about her, but take your word for it. Tell her we shall be delighted, etc.

If we go to Switzerland in May, why shouldn’t we have a little giro in France in early July—those Pyrenees—something nice. And I should so like to see the St. Cloud house and the Seine also.

D. H. L.

Dear Maria—if you’re passing by Curtis Brown's office with the car, will you call and demand the MS. of John Thomas, and carry it away from them. I don't want them to have it any more. And you can do what you like with it.—You ask for Mr. Pollinger. I've told him to hand it over.

I do wish you were coming in to tea—or we to you: for it rains, the country is motionless, there is no sound, the little narcissus in the jar smell wallow (?), and we’ve not seen a soul to talk to happily since we left Diablerets.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.. To Witter Bynner.                 13 April, 1928.

Dear Bynner,—

1 got Cake and read it with a good deal of amusement. It is often very witty, and in parts really funny. It’s not particularly ---—; rather a type than the specific person—so she needn’t "get her hair off” about it. Its fault is perhaps in scattering the scenes over the earth, so destroying some of the unity, maybe. But it remains very amusing—and at last just spiteful, which of course tickles me. But you notice the chief mischief of------in your letter—her effect on the ------s. I don’t

mind her passion for cake—it’s her passion for breaking other people’s eggs and making a mess instead of an omelette, which is really dangerous. She seems to hate anybody to care for anybody—even for herself—and if anybody does care for anybody, she must upset it—even if she falls herself out of the app.e-cart. Do write a play about that—the helpless way a woman must upset any apple-cart that's got two apples in it: just for the fun.

My health's a good bit better—and if I can sell my novel, and have some money, I want to start off sailing round the world with Frieda in the autumn—there’s a grand cheap way, by the Messageries Maritimes—and land in San Francisco—-and come on. And then really, I think—Frieda certainly thinks —it would be better to stay in Santa Fe for some time till we could go to the ranch. It would be fun. And perhaps one could have friends among one, instead of ces femmes. It would be nice to feel something stable. I begin to feel a bit battered, one way and another.

You’ll help me what you can with my novel, won't you? It seems to be rousing already a lot of gratuitous hostility. Povero me!

Weil, pazienza! Don't be irritated by me—I’m really more good-natured than most people.

We leave the Mirenda for good at the end of this month. So write c/o Pino Orioli, will you? And I’m looking forward to a proper reunion, really. ______

I think it's very silly of------ and —--- to be at outs

and made mischief by. People who have lived together had best stick together. You can only change for the worse.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Firenze.

To M. Huxley.               Tuesday, 16 April, 1928.

Dear Maria,—

Quite a while since we heard from you. F. was in Alassio a week with her daughter Barbara—came back last night. Now we’re going to begin to pack. I'm winding up my last picture, too, so I can have them shipped to London. I think I shall send them to Dorothy Warren—they might as well be shown. But I shan’t sell them. I’m in the middle of the proofs—shall finish them this week—still haven’t got a coverpaper—want to find a good red—phoenix in black. I send you one specimen with the bird—paper no good. Have a fair number of orders from England—and the first one from America yesterday. So they’re beginning. After having the London people trying to pull me down and make me feel in the wrong about Lady C.—Curtis Brown’s office en bloc— Seeker-—Cape , I was quite pleased to have Mrs. Knopf’s letter saying she liked it very much and they want to publish it. Really, people are swine, the way they try to make one feel in the wrong.—The Forum sent me letters written by people who read my story, The Escaped Cock, that The Forum published in February. Really, they’re funny—I am an enemy of the human species, have committed the unpardonable sin, etc., etc.—and a story good as gold. And a woman who’s been my friend for years told me on Saturday that my pictures were disgusting and unnecessary, and even old-fashioned. Really, I shall have to buy a weapon of some sort. Wish I had the skunk's.

Did you enjoy the trip north? How well I know Lincoln— used to love it. Did you go to the flat dree coast, and Boston and King’s Lynn? Or did you go to Southwell and Nottingham?

Roses are out—and iris just fluttering out. Are you feeling chirpy, both of you? We lunch with Lady Colefax at the Waterfields—who have inherited Janet Ross’s place—on Monday. Beati noil

D. H. L.

I liked Lady Colefax—she seemed real—but looked as if she feared I might bite!

To H. Crosby.

Villa Mirenda, Scandied, Florence.

17 April, 1928.

Dear Harry Crosby,—

Send your complete book of poems, and I’ll write a little introduction for it—about 2000 words, do you want? I really like the poems. Send it soon, so I do it before we leave here.

And I’ll send you the MSS.—•Man Who Loved Islands— and Sun—and a few poems. But I’m afraid the old MS. of Eagle is burnt—I might write it out for you. I'm taking the stories to be bound, as best they can be, here: will let you have them when the binder is through.

Thanks for the order for the book. We leave this house May i st: but c/o Pino Orioli will find me—6, Lungarno Corsini, Florence.

And we'll meet in the summer—you say “we”—are you also married?

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence. To Juliette Huxley.                   17 April, 1928.

Dear Juliette,—

Why do you say I laugh at you? I may laugh at some things about you. I laugh at you when you say, "What if Anthony were sixteen, and read this novel!" He'd be too bored at 16: but at twenty, of course, he should read it. Was your mind a sexual blank at sixteen? Is anybody’s? And what ails the mind in that respect is that it has nothing to go on, it grinds away in abstraction. So I laugh at you and shall go on laughing when you say: What if Anthony were 16, and read your novel! What, indeed! But of course I don't laugh at you, nor at your mother either. For absurdities I laugh at everybody, including myself: and why not? But at the essential person I don't laugh. And of course, you ought to know it, and not have those silly misgivings.

I’ve been having a tussle with my novel: publishers, agents, etc., in London holding up hands of pious horror (because it may affect their pockets), and trying to make me feel disastrously in the wrong. Now the Knopfs write from New York they like it very much, and hope to be able to get it into shape to offer to the public. I doubt they can’t. But it s nice o them.

I'm in the midst of the proofs—hope to finish them this week. But I still haven’t chosen the cover paper. The orders came in very nicely from England. Are you risking a copy, or not?

It’s been nasty weather—not really nice since we came back. But to-day looks promising. To-morrow Lady Colefax is due to come to tea. I’m busy finishing off my pictures—think I shall send them to Dorothy Warren for her to exhibit in her gallery in Maddox St.—she wants to. But don’t go and see them—you’d only be in a rage as you were that morning in les Aroles.

We want to leave this house on the 30th—so we’ve not much longer. I may stay in Florence to see my book out on the 15th, then to Switzerland, to cure. I think we’ll go to Vermala Montana, above Sierre (or is it Sion?)—because it’s a flat plateau and 1 can walk without gasping. My chest is so-so— but I'm better really.

Anyhow, we’ll see you during the summer—perhaps August. Remember me to Julian, and I hope the book goes gaily, and he’ll feel nice and chirpy doing it: and not try to do too many other things. Frieda has actually written too. How are the children? Is Anthony at school?

D. H. L.

I suppose your mother is back in her Neuchatel. Remember me to her when you write.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence, To Helen W. Bramble                   17 April, 1928.

(of The Forum}.

Dear Miss Bramble,—

Many thanks for your letter and the copies of letters about the Escaped Cock. But what a lovely little anthology! I am delighted to have them. Now I know I’ve committed the unpardonable sin, I feel all right. I always was so afraid I might be saved: like ten dollars in the bank. No more fear of that! But, oh, I do so want to know how many souls were lost through my maleficence: and the editor’s. The more the merrier! Do you think Carrie J. Hill, who has nothing but sympathy in her dear old heart "for us both”—one at a time, my dear—might be able to tell me? No wonder The Forum looks red, fiery and Mephistophelean. Let it be more so. Long live the cloven hoof!

Of course you may have lost a few subscriptions pro tem. But, believe me, those lost souls will either come back or send delegates. You won’t lose in the long run. Deadness is what loses in the long run. Anything that makes ’em wriggle becomes at last indispensable. Vive le gai coq, et le coq galI

I hope Carrie Hill will read my novel—and that it will fall into the hands of the son of nineteen, and that he’ll read it aloud to the gaudy end before a stunned and aghast parent can stop him. Oh, what a lot of hypocrites!

So I enclose a few order forms, and please send one to George Williamson, Litchfield, Mich., and to Carrie dear, and a few others: I might even get them to lose their souls, instead of saving ’em: which would be so much more becoming.

Your sincere "traitor and enemy of the human race,"

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence. To The Hon. Dorothy Brett. 25 April, 1928.

Dear Brett,—

I had your cablegram day before yesterday. But I promised to send my pictures to Dorothy Warren. It won’t matter, though—even if any are sold, they must be reserved till after the New York Show. I expect the Warren show in May or June—so that leaves plenty of time for them to come to New York. You say, show arranged for August. But whatever is the good of showing pictures in New York in August, when every single soul who looks at pictures will be away, mostly abroad? That looks a dud to me. I wish Mrs. Hare would write to me personally, so that I know what she is actually doing. I wrote to her about my novel, and sent her some forms. But she hasn’t answered yet. Perhaps she will, and perhaps she will tell me about the pictures, what she is arranging.

I’m so glad the cellar held up. Be economical and get your debts paid off. They are a great bore. I haven’t heard from Spud about the story, but The Forum sent me the letters they got on the strength of it, and apparently I am the enemy of the human race, have caused innumerable souls to be lost, have committed the unpardonable sin, etc., etc. Sounded like he

Adelphi, Tell Mabel I'll be writing her in a day or two. A rivederci!

D. H. L.

Did Mabel sell the MS. of Sons and Lovers?

Villa Mirenda, Scandied, Firenze.

To A. Huxley.                    25th April, 1928.

Dear Aldous,—

Lady Colefax sent in her cheque for ten pounds the same day as you sent yours for her. So I am sending hers on to you— have asked her—which settles it.

A lovely day—first really spring-summer day. We are staying on at least two more weeks: must see the book out: have only done half the proofs yet. Orders come pretty well—but nothing from the old crowd, E. M. Forster, or Clive Bell—only Hutchinson and Maynard Keynes. The expenses, however, are covered. Wish the printer would hurry up.

We might keep on the Mirenda—but go to Switzerland now, of course.

I painted a little picture, "Finding of Moses’—which is really five negresses—now am doing a "Family in Garden"—rather small—all nude, of course—ma in hammock, pa on his heels squatting—and two bambini. Guess Maria will want this one. Cable from Brett not to exhibit in London, as exhibition fixed for August, in New York. But think I shall ship the things to London.

I wish we knew of some nice well-fed inn in Switzerland— where the peasants drink in the Gastzimmer—it's so much nicer than an hotel with English old maids. Do you know of any such place? Does Julian? With a bit of level ground if possible. I’m pretty well, except on a hill. Tell me if you know of an inn.

It's still a rotten spring—country looks dead.—These two days there’s a high wind ripping the blossom to bits—our front is strewn with broken buds of the ippocastagni. It’s not a bit nice out of doors, so one stays in. But I think we’ll be out of this house by the last day of this month—in two weeks* 728

time—then I hope I can leave my novel, and depart for Switzerland. Otherwise we'll go somewhere near, for a fortnight, till the novel is really out. I have it on my conscience. I expect by the end of the week it will be all set up. fnen next week they'll start printing it on the hand-made paper.—So I’ll leave out John Thomas altogether—pity!—I heard from Curtis Brown they sent the MS. to Chatto’s, so you could collect it. But do collect it for me when you can. 1 don’t want

the swine to have it another minute.

I think we shall go to V ermala Montana, above Sierre because there is a plateau and one can walk on the flat, which is a relief to me. I hope it’ll do me good, for I don t very mucl want to stick myself in Switzerland. I do hope I’ll sell my novel. Then in the autumn I think we’ll sail round the world, you can have a ticket by the Messageries Maritimes for about £i2O—gOOd for a year—stay wherever the ships stop—and go on when you like.—I want so much to get away from the world—books, publishers, agents, critics all that sort of thing '_so get away and forget everything for a bit. It s nothing but old chagrin makes me ill.—And end the giro at the ranch.

Lady Colefax writes, so we ask her to tea Thursday. Is she Lady Colefax or The Lady Sybil Colefax? Frieda wants to write you a long letter when she—Lady C.—has been.

But we’ll really have a meeting nicely in summer. If you want to go straight to Forte—strange desire—I suppose you'o just pop up and see us on the plateau in Switzerland. B> if you want to do a bit of a giro, so am I pining, pining to be amused, to forget and to escape the thousand natural snares.

How is Aldous?—If I can really get through with my novel, believe me, that’s the thing to do: publish for oneself at £2. It’s the solution for us small-selling authors.               .

How are you in London? I feel you’re sick of it. it s wise you abandon the house idea there. But Italy’s no happy land Let’s go to the ranch.                     DHL

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To H. Crosby.                      29 April, 1928.

Dear Harry Crosby,—

I had your note from Lausanne: so awfully sorry you are having things done to your throat. What's wrong? I do hope it is better.

I am sending you to-morrow the MSS., bound by the binder in Florence, nothing grand—but with my phoenix rising from the nest in flames, which I made to be printed on the cover of Lady Chatterley. But I coloured it a bit on your MSS. covers: do hope you’ll like it. Sun is the final MS., and I wish the story had been printed as it stands there, really complete. One day, when the public is more educated, I shall have the story printed whole, as it is in this MS. But I have no typescript copy, so one day, when the day comes, perhaps you’ll have one made for me. Not now, or I shall lose it. And at the end there are very few poems. Guards has a third part which has never been printed—I didn't put it in my Collected Poems, which Seeker is just doing. But I send it you because of the bit of night sun in it. And I send you Gipsy with four verses; the last two verses I left out for the printed version, but they, too, have a bit of your sun. The Man Who Loved Islands had to be bound from the top, as I left no margins when I tore it out to send to London.

And I have done the introduction to Chariot of the Sun, without waiting for the additional poems. I was afraid it might be too late for me to do it here, if I wished. I am sending you the MS. which please keep, as I have got a type copy. But if you’d like it bound like the other two, send it to me c/o Pino Orioli, 6, Lungarno Corsini, Florence, and I’ll have it done. You can cut this introduction, and do what you like with it, for your book. If there is any part you don't like, omit it. I give you the thing along with the other MSS. If the publishers feel like paying a few dollars, all right. But not you.

And let me know if you’d like me to send the introduction to my agent, to try on the magazines, or if you’d rather not. Probably no one would print it—if they did, I'd better have the name of your publisher and date of publication of Chariot: you are keeping the same title? Are you keeping that engraving about the sun? If not, then strike out that sentence about it, in my introduction. But if you'd rather the introduction were not printed except in your book, I am perfectly content. Only as a magazine article it would be a bit of an advertisement for you.

I do hope your throat is better, and not going to give you much more trouble. We shall be here, I suppose, till 20th May, for my novel. Then we must go to Switzerland for my chest. You don't know a nice inn, do you, about 3000 ft. up, or a bit more, in French Switzerland? I hate the thought of an hotel with English spinsters, inevitable and sunless. We had an apartment in Diablerets—quite nice, but perhaps it would be nicer not to keep house for a bit. And Diablerets hasn’t got a yard of level ground to walk on—all up and down —and I pant.

Regards from us both to you both, and I hope we shall meet and that you are better.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Postscript:

May 1 st.

I was just sending off this when the new poems came. No, I never had a sunstroke, so don’t really like the poem. The others I like better—but don’t print them in Chariot. They don’t belong: they are another thing. Put them in another book. Leave Chariot as it is. I send my foreword—the typescript is the complete thing. It’s good—but it won’t fit if you introduce these new, long, unwieldy, not very sensitive poems. Do print Chariot as it stands. The new ones aren’t so good.

D. H. L.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Mark Gertler.

24 May, 1928.

Dear Mark,—

Kot said you’d like to see these photographs of my pictures •"“they're only snaps a neighbour took—there was another snap—“Resurrection"—but I'm afraid I've not got it any more. There are seven big pictures—oils—a Nymphs and Faun," all dark orange, not photographed. Also a ‘ Fight with an Amazon." I think I shall send them to the Warren for her gallery, because when we leave here—-in about ten days—God knows when we’ll come back, and it’s no good just abandoning them. Would you take the big pictures off their stretchers and roll them?—paint is a bit thick in places, it might crack off. But they’d need a big packing case.—I gave the seven watercolours and three small oils, on boards, to a friend to take to London for me: Kot’s old acquaintance, Enid Hopkin, now Mrs. Enid Hilton. She stayed in a little inn near here with her husband. If you felt like it, you could call at her house— flat, that is, top floor—40, Great James St., Bedford Row, W.C. 1, and look at the pictures she took. Perhaps you'll dislike them. I myself prefer the big oils.—The Hiltons won’t be home, though, till 1st June-—a week from now.

And would you tell me where you have your pictures photographed. and how much it costs? I'd like to have photographs of all these—but not if it's too expensive.

What do you do with the shiny places on your pictures, when you want 'em not to shine? Mine do shine—some all over, because there’s so much oil in them. But I don’t mind all over.

You ll be sick of my questions.—I am now doing the last proofs of my novel, so it won’t be long. I expect some people will want to annihilate me for it: but I believe in it, it’s got to be done. One's got to get back to the live, really lovely phallic self, and phallic consciousness. I think I get a certain phallic beauty in my pictures too. I know they're rolling with faults, Sladeily considered. But there’s something there. Wonder how your work goes. I've seen nothing for two years— but that nude you were doing in Sept. 1926 seemed to me to have some phallic glow too. I hope we can send you your copy of the novel within a fortnight. Nice of you to order it.

I was so very sorry to hear of Ottoline so very ill. Poor Ottoline, when I feel she’s down, my heart bleeds for her. After all, she's a queen, among the mass of women.

Of course I had to have a bit of ’flu; have been in bed some days. But am up again. I shall be really better at a higher altitude when we get to Switzerland. Did you ever try the mountains—between z and 4000 ft.? It's really rather marvel -lous, if you stay long enough. I think we shall go to Annecy, just in France, south of Geneva, and look round from there.— I wish I really got well again—it's such a drag, not getting back to oneself. You know yourself how it feels. I do hope you’re better, and feeling fairly chirpy.

We shall come to England, probably in August. Where will you be?—But we shall see you. We’re not dead yet. We’ll still show the world what’s what.

Tell Kot I had his letter—and it’s cold even here!

Frieda sends all sorts of messages.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.           24 May, 1928.

My dear Ottoline,—

I’m most grieved to think you’ve had such a time and so much pain with that mysterious illness: worse even than I thought. It puzzles me terribly why these things should come. But do you know what I think? I think it’s because one isn’t just vulgarly selfish enough, vulgarly physically selfish, selfkeeping and self-preserving. One wastes one's common flesh too much: then these microbes, which are the pure incarnation of invisible selfishness, pounce on one.

You ask me, do I feel things very much?—and I do. And that’s why I too am ill. The hurts, and the bitterness sink in, however much one may reject them with one’s spirit. They sink in, and there they lie, inside one, wasting one. What is the matter with us is primarily chagrin. Then the microbes pounce. One ought to be tough and selfish: and one is never tough enough, and never selfish in the proper self-preserving way. Then one is laid low.

I’ve been in bed again this last week, but not bad, a touch of ’flu. And it's no good going to Switzerland to be bitter cold. It’s even cold here.

Yes, I’m sad about Garsington, very sad that it has gone. While you still had it I always felt in some way I still had it. If only one could have two lives: the first, in which to make one’s mistakes, which seem as if they had to be made; and the second in which to profit by them. If it could only be so, what a lovely Garsington we could all have, and no bitterness at the end of it!

But don't say you feel you're not important in life. You’ve been an important influence in lots of lives, as you have in mine: through being fundamentally generous, and through being Ottoline. After all, there’s only one Ottoline. And she has moved one’s imagination. It doesn’t matter what sort of vision comes out of a man’s imagination, his vision of Ottoline. Any more than a photograph of me is me, or even "like" me. The so-called portraits of Ottoline can’t possibly be Ottoline— no one knows that better than an artist. But Ottoline has moved men’s imagination, deeply, and that’s perhaps the most a woman can do. And in the world to-day, full of women, how rare to find one that can move the imagination! No, I wish, and wish deeply, there could be Ottoline again and Garsington again, and we could start afresh.

But we can start afresh anyhow, in a quieter, gentler way.

I’m doing the last proofs of my novel now, so in about a week I expect we shall leave. I hope the book won't shock you —but I’m sure it won't. You will understand what I'm trying to do: the full natural rapprochement of a man and a woman; and the re-entry into life of a bit of the old phallic awareness and the old phallic insouciance.

I do hope you are feeling a bit better each day. I'm a lot better really; only this bit of ’flu put me back.

Frieda sends her love and her sympathy with mine.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci (Florence),

To H. and C. Crosby.             Friday, 26 May, 1928.

Dear Harry Crosby and Caresse,—

My wife went to Florence yesterday and brought the Queen of Naples' snuff-box and three pieces of gold, from Orioli, to my utter amazement. But cari miei, it won’t do. I am sure you’re not Croesuses to that extent: and anyhow, what right have I to receive these things? For heaven’s sake, you embarrass me! I hope to heaven you’re quite, quite rich, for if you’re not, I shall feel really bad about it. Here I am, quite uneasy in my skin. Gold rolls mir zur Fussen? Gold—I feel almost wicked with it!

The wagon-lit man was a knave, and tried to bully Orioli out of 200 liras, but only got too. I wonder very much that he delivered the goods. Why, oh why, did you send them! I considered myself paid in excess before, so now where am I?

But I shall buy some snuff and put it in the snuff-box and take it as my grandfather did: and offer worthy souls a pinch and a sneeze, with little finger lifted.

But at present I feel rather worried—for the first time I know what embarras de richesse means. Perhaps one day we can square it somehow.

Meanwhile very many thanks—but in future I shall tell you the price of my pen to a centime, and not a button more.

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Mirenda, Scandicci (Florence).

To IL Crosby.

Dear Harry Crosby,—

Your letter to-day. Glad you liked the MSS. Man Who Loved Islands is one of my favourite stories.

Do a little de luxe or di lussissimo edition of Sun if you like. But you'll have to decide how many copies you’re going to print. And you give me 25 per cent or 30 per cent of profits, as the commercial de-luxers do: if there is any profit. If not, we'll consider it wine spilled to Phoebus Apollo.

I don't think the little sun on your letter-paper is good enough. I suggest one of the above. You know the Artec and Zuni "Cloud-tower" motive with the sun? There is the darkness. Your dishevelled marguerite won't do.

Do entirely as you like with the introduction, end it where you like. I'll find “sunwards" on my copy, and end it there. I'll send it to the agent in London.

Which reminds me my agent may think he ought to make a contract and take a percentage all commercial and also if you do a Sun de luxe. But it depends how many copies you print. You could put on it—“Sold only sunwards."

I’m so glad if you don’t put any of those new poems in Chariot. Don't lose your delicacy and your sun-sensitiveness, and become Parisy, or look too much at hotels and Cook-tounsts. What do they matter? You’ve looked too much at the world.

Are your bits of French always as you intend them to be? Il sera mort s'il ouvrait son cceur! I say to myself il serait mart. But it is a very true saying.

We shall be here till end of the month. Then somewhere or other in Switzerland. I hope we shall see you and Caresse Crosby. I don’t mind a chaos—though I’m fairly tidy by nature—if I feel sometimes the wind blows through the chaos. Those inert and dusty limbos of some people depress me.

Tante cose1

D. H. Lawrence.

Kesselmatte,

Gsteig b, Gstand.

To M. Huxley.                          Friday Evening.

.......... The------*s came to tea and ---as near being in a real temper as ever I’ve seen her. She said: I don’t know how it (the place) makes you feel, but I’ve lost all my cosmic consciousness and all my universal love. I feel I don’t care one bit about humanity.—I said: Good for you, — 1—but it was as if another horse-fly had bit her.

So now you know what’s wrong with Switzerland, why you can’t stand it, and why it’s good for health.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad (Bern), Switzerland.

To H. Crosby.                             iz July, 1928.

Dear Harry Crosby,—-

I had yours from Venice. Glad you are sunning yourself. We are up here in a peasant chalet, to get my cough better— and propose to stay till end Sept., if we don't get too bored.

I just heard that a person, Miss Allanah Harper, has accepted your little foreword article—called Chaos in Modern Poetry— for her new magazine which is to start in Paris in October—and be devoted to international literature or something of the sort. I think her mag. appears quarterly—or six-monthly—-and the second number is to be all French—the 3rd all German—the 5th no doubt Latvian or one of the "coming languages—and the 20th probably Hittite. Anyhow, is October all right?—and do you want to communicate with the lady? I've lost her address, but you can get her c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Magazine Dept.,

6, Henrietta St., London, W.C.2.

I think her "version ’ is again a little different from yours— and I think better—and I don’t believe I mentioned the 4 seas; or is it 7 seas? When does your book appear? Write and tell her.

Don't bother with the Sun story unless you feel quite determined about it. If you do, tell me how many copies you propose to print, when, where, and how much, and I'll write to Seeker and Knopf for their respective permissions. They’ll probably want to fleece you if you write. 111 do a Sun graph if J can. What else?

Your copy of Lady Chatterley was sent to Paris end of last week, I hear. Have you got it? I hope so.

I send this to Paris, as you put no address on your letter, and I can’t address you c/o he Sun. It may even be raining ii Venice—as here, with thunder—I wish I was well.

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Secker,—

Many thanks for the books. I have great fun reading Hardy's stories again. What a commonplace genius he has; or a genius for the commonplace, I don't know which. He doesn't rank so terribly high, really. But better than Bernard Shaw, even then. I'm afraid The Intelligent Woman’s Guide I shall have to leave to the intelligent woman: it is too boring for the intelligent man, if I'm any sample. Too much gas-bag. Still, very many thanks and shall I send them back to 5, John St., or to Bridgefoot?

I hope you’ve got your copies of Lady Chatterley. I know all those paid for are sent out—and in England, received all right. I think it’s quite a handsome book.

One goes up and down in health here—it's always like that, the first weeks of altitude. But I can eat well and sleep well: it’s only the walking uphill that's a failure still. Yet I think I manage even that better.

I’ll keep Palling in mind, in case we want to go there one day. It sounds the right sort of place. I do want to come to England end of Sept. Dorothy Warren is supposed to be showing pretty well. I might go back to Italy and finish my Etruscans.

Glad you had a good holiday.

D. H. L.

Kesselmatte,

Gsteig b, Gstaad.

To A. and M. Huxley.                     31 July, 192b,

Dear Aldous and Maria,—

I should have written before, but have been under the altitude—felt perfectly wretched, and made design for my tombstone in Gsteig churchyard, with suitable inscription: 'Departed this life, etc., etc.—He was fed up!" However, last Friday—or Thursday afternoon, I forget which—I decided to 738

live a little longer—and to-day I walked down to the village, and what is much worse, up again. It's> like climbing to the Diablerets glacier. However, here I am, with a crick in my neck I admit, and Achsah et famille will be drippingly arriving to tea just now. The sun is sharply hot, the wind quite cool. But the sun sort of dissolves one's corpuscles. I daren’t try another sunbath, not for a minute. So I rather envy you your red colour all over—or pansy-bronze or calceolaria or burnt-monkey-musk, whatever it is—and I would willingly dangle myself before a shark if I could swim in the deep sea and sit in the southern sun naked and undiminished. In fact, if I don’t actually sit on a muck-heap and scrape myself with a tin lid, it’s because I haven’t the energy.

I suppose all the ordered copies of Lady Jane are in England: so the booksellers have hastily written to say we must take back their copies at once, they couldn’t handle the Lady, and I must cancel their orders, and will we remove the offence at once. That is in all 114 copies we have to fetch back. Of course, these children of God haven’t paid,—Then there are rumours that the police are going to raid the shops: I suppose people hope they will. At the same time, the first batch has arrived safely at its various destinations in America.

I believe I have lost most of my friends in the escapade, but that is a small loss, alas! I never had any. Richard Aldington writes he gets a great kick out of it, and it’s a feather in the cap of the XX century. It’s a fool’s cap anyhow, why should I put a feather in it. An American young man writes: But oh, your friends, Lorenzo! By their reactions shall you know them!—I shan’t, because they’ll keep them severely dark. I have unkindly set my foot down, and won’t either give it or lend it to the----—’s and of course, buying is beyond their idea.

I see the white flutter of our spotless friends away down on the high-road—poor dears, such a climb! Heaven is not reached in a single bound! No indeed, —---, it isn t, and it was an

American who first registered the fact.

Well, I feel there’s not much of me left. What little there is gives you the Easter Kiss and hopes we 11 crow in chorus once more, one day, like risen Easter eggs.

D. H. L.

My dear Enid,—

Yours to-day, to say you have the books safely—Hurrah! I was afraid of that Steele—as I wrote you, in my unnecessary letter this afternoon. Don’t be troubled about being Cordelia. But I do wish you hadn’t given your father’s address. Better a fake one. You are under no obligation to give Jackson’s your name. You may give them any name you please. The only person you are responsible to is to me. But though Jackson has no right to disclose your name to anyone except me, if I demand his receipt, he may kindly inform the police, should there be any trouble. There is no trouble so far—no risk whatsoever—the book might as well be any common book on the market, in that respect. So you are perfectly safe. The only trouble would be if the book were suppressed, if Jackson’s gave the police your address, if they followed it up to your Daddy— then they might descend on you and seize the books. That is all they could do. You are in no way against the law.

But I shall write to Jackson’s and give them my receipt and ask them to post yours to me.

And then I think we'd better try and think of a place where we can deposit the books safely. At the moment I can think of nowhere. I’d send them to Ada, but I’m not telling my sisters about this venture. It would only shock them. Have you any idea of a place—some safe place where the things could lie till we needed them? If you think of a place, just box fifty copies and transfer them to it. You can have someone fetch the box and you needn’t know where it goes. It would be safer.

Then the odd twenty copies you could send out as I ask you. I’ll tell Orioli to send me the orders, and I’ll forward them to you.

And I want you to take a copy—later on Th write in it: to Enid, for her help in time of trouble. And then later it will become more valuable.

Meanwhile I’m most awfully grateful. And tell Laurence not to trouble: nobody is under any obligation whatever to give

their name on request: the only danger would be if you did it to defraud Jackson's—which you don’t in the least—so you can call yourself what you like, and give the moon for your address, and you don’t infringe at all on the law.

D H. L.

Orioli has a bunch of orders in Florence—I asked him to send them to me, and I’ll forward them to you. So keep 20 or 30 copies by you.

To Enid Hilton.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b, Gstaad.

Monday.

Dear Enid,—

Richard Aldington says he’ll house some copies—so if you feel like putting forty copies in a box and sending them—or even taking them down—by passenger train, to him at Malt-house Cottage, Padworth, nr. Reading, Berks, that would relieve you of a lot. You might send him a note.

So sorry to be bothering you. I’ll send you orders to distribute directly they come from Florence, and arrange with you about it.

D. H. L.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b, Gstaad

(.Bern).

To M. and A. Huxley.

15 August, 1928.

Dear Marla and Aldous,—

Nothing particularly new here.—Last week I was better, and sun-bathed—this week I’ve got a cold and feel all hot inside. It’s a beastly climate really, hot and cold at once. I m getting sick of it, hope we can leave in first half of September. But my sister is coming with her daughter for a fortnight end of this month. Then when she goes we can go—presumably to Baden-Baden for a bit—and possibly England. I have it in my mind I want to go back to the ranch—but absolutely—in November. Perhaps we might first go and look at some Etruscan things, for a little giro—Arezzo, Cortona, Chiusi, Orvieto, Norta, Bieda— places just north of Rome. What do you say?—But I begin to feel I want to go back to New Mexico. I shall never be well any more in Europe—so dead! Nothing to re-act to. I am still unaware of the fate of Lady Jane in America—some copies arrived—then we had cables saying "wait." So we are waiting. Not that there is any hurry any more; all the English copies having arrived safely. It has been good fun, really, and worth it. Though the money hasn’t all come in, by any means. But I feel I've had another whack at ’em—a good satisfactory whack-— and it’s for them to feel minchioni, not me. How they love to make one minchione, with their decayed disapproval. But their turn, not mine. How glad I am to have lost certain of my "friends" through John Thomas—like the Israelites who fell dead when the Magic Serpent was erected. May they all fall dead! Pfui!

Aldous, will you please write me out the words of "I’ll give you one—O!” after four? I know as far as "four for the Gospel Writers." But 5,6,7,8,9,10! I don’t know.

I had a copy of Transition, that Paris magazine—the Amer, number. My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! Gertrude Stein is more amusing—and some of the Americans quite good. But for prize jejune pap, take the letters from Frenchmen at the end—the sheer rinsings of baby’s napkins. How feeble the Frenchy mind has become!

I). H. L.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad (Bern), Switzerland,

To A. Stieglitz.                           15 August, 1928.

Dear Stieglitz,—

Many thanks for sending that cable to Florence. I'm glad you liked Lady C, She seems to have exploded like a bomb among most of my English friends, and they’re still suffering from shell-shock. But they’re coming round already: some few already feeling it was good for ’em. Give them time. There are rumours of suppression in England, and rumours of ban in America. But I can’t help it. I ve shot my shot, anyhow: I shot an arrow into the air tee-de-dum!

Don’t be alarmed about the pictures—they’re quite good. Anyhow, they contain something-—which is more than you can say of most moderns, which are all excellent rind of the fruit, but no fruit. And because a picture has subject-matter it is not therefore less a picture. Besides, what’s a deformed guitar and a shred of newspaper but subject-matter? There’s the greatest lot of bunk talked about modern painting ever. If a picture is to hit deep into the senses, which is its business, it must hit down to the soul and up into the mind—that is, it has to mean something to the co-ordinating soul and the co-ordinating spirit which are central in man’s consciousness: and the meaning has to come through direct sense impression. I know what I'm about. As for their space composition and their massreaction and their arabesques, if that isn't all literary and ideaconcept, what is? Such a lot of canary cages, and never a bird in one of 'em! What, I ask you, is Roger Fry?—a literary gentleman, or a painter? My God, look at his pictures! The pen is mightier than the palette in his case.

But I'm not really keen on exhibiting, so don’t go to any trouble. Dorothy Warren is supposed to be showing my things in London in first half of October—that is, if I don’t go and stop her—which leaves the pictures free for November. But as I say, I don't really care whether the canvases come to New York or not. Only if you show me, at least have a look at Hon. Dorothy Brett's things and see if you don't like them.

I want to come to America in late autumn anyhow, to go to the ranch. So I hope we shall meet. How did O’Keefe take the book?

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad.

To A. Huxley.                         Sunday, after Tea.

Deap Aldous,—

Many thanks for the One-O words. It is a great success with the Brewsters, and a Hindu called Boshi, who tells us at great length the Sanscrit meaning of it all.—But they’ve gone— all gone last Wednesday—the Brewsters to Geneva—because Achsah hates Switzerland. So they sit in an hotel and look as if they were keeping the league leagued up: and I believe they hate it.

For a change, we have —- and her daughter—and it is really rather suffering—and , poor —, she can’t help feeling that ninepence is exactly half as good again as sixpence. If I wearily protest that ninepence is nothing to me unless it’s ninepence worth of life, she just looks at me as if I’d said nothing. How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price-list. It makes my blood boil.

However, they leave next Friday, back safely to England, dear England, with its eternal "expensive" and "not at all dear, you know." The English are actually the most materialistic people in the world. They’re deader and pennywiser than any Americans: and I can stand them less.

However, to horse! we think to stay here till the 17th of this month—then to Baden for about a fortnight—and then, but that I’m fed up to the nose with Englishness just now, I'd go to England. Dorothy Warren is showing my pictures from Oct. 5th to 26th—she says they are framed and look lovely. I’m pining to see them framed and hung. But whether I shall have the strength to put my nose into that stink-pot of an island, I don’t know. I very much doubt it.

Richard Aldington says he is offered by Paulhan, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Franqaise, his house, an ancient fortress, a vigie, on the isle of Port-Oros, about ten miles off Hyeres on the Riviera—and Richard wants us to go there. Frieda is pining for sea in winter. We may go then about Oct. 1st and look at the place. There is a little hotel.—Having looked, we’d come on to the Mirenda. And if it would suit you I'd like to do those Etruscans in the last half of October. But don’t, of course, disturb yourself a hair s breadth for us. If one did the Etruscan places, I suppose it would take io to 14 days. And will you go on to Sicily? You don’t want to be there till November—it’s really best in January when the almond blossoms. Now it will be pretty dried up. But I love Sicily.—But if we like the Port-Cros island I think we'll go there for the three winter months— very warm and fine pine-forest on the island (which is about 5x2 miles, I think) no gendarmes—13 families fishermen— and—chi lo sal—Not many miles from Monte, glittering Monte!!

But one might be happy there. I like Richard Aldington and Arabella—they are in Vallombrosa at the moment. We’ll see, anyhow. I don’t feel quite at the point when I can go to the ranch. I’m pretty well in myself, but cursed with the same cough. I wish we could all have houses on the island for the winter. But you are so difficult with people—the poor------'s!

I thought on the island I might paint nice out-door nudes. I ought to have been at Forte, oughtn’t I?—I’ve only painted one or two little things here—one nice board, of contadini—And now figures on the sand at the sea. There’s something very dramatic about paint. Really, why don’t you begin?—I never forget that I owe Maria a picture. If only she were there and seized one that she liked! But for myself, I feel I’ve not yet painted the picture for her—something a mixture of Watteau and Boucher, with lotus flowers and decorative nudes that nobody will blush at. I’ll do it one day.

Do stay at the Mirenda if ever you want to—but write to Giulia first—Signorina Giulia Pini, Z candied, per San Paolo (Firenze). Because the padroni may have taken the key to Florence.—Only the beds, Maria, the hard beds!—And think of it quite bare of pictures!

Orioli said he might come to Forte for a week-end—then you’d hear all about Lady C.—That beastly ------, why

doesn’t a shark eat him—not fit for anything else. How I hate ordinary people.

Here it's turning to autumn. We had three awful deluge days—then a brilliant morning, brilliant new snow, brilliant new world—and slopes all bubbled over with pink autumn crocuses—very lovely. This evening it’s sulking and trying to thunder: cow-bells ting-ting-ting—very still in all the world, and somehow far. Even our visitors have subsided in comparative stillness.

Am reading again Chartreuse de Parme—so good historically, socially and all that—but emotionally rather empty and trashy. Had of course to rescue F.—who is painting autumn crocuses in water, and naturally rubbed her paper with milk roll instead of stale bread, to thin off her pencil marks. Of course milk roll is so much better class! nice and greasy.

Night falling-—mist on the mountains—stewed rabbit and onions in the kitchen—wish you were here for a party!— D. H. L.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad (Bern).

To David Garnett.                        24 Aug., 1928.

Dear David,—

I'm so glad you like Lady C.—and glad you tell me, so many people are beastly about it. I'm ordering you a copy.

I should like to give your father a copy, if he'd care for it. Let me know, will you, and if to send to the Cearne. In my early days your father said to me, "I should welcome a description of the whole act"—which has stayed in my mind till I wrote this book. But your mother would disapprove.

Do you live there at St. Ives? and in a Hall? Grand Dieu! I wondered if you still were at your bookshop—must be a bore— they haven't paid yet for their copies of Lady C.

We may be in England end of Sept.—and should both like to see you very much. I always look on the Cearne as my jumping-off point into the world—and your father as my first backer. Do you remember swimming in the Isar?

Tante cose!

D. H. Lawrence.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad

To H. Crosby-

(Bern). •

Monday.

Dear Harry Crosby,—•

Y ours this evening. Many thanks for the books. I’m very much interested in modern painting, but I doubt that’s not a good book you sent. I expect to have an exhibition of my paintings in London in October and probably in New York in November, in Alfred Stieglita’s gallery. When we come to Paris in Oct. I’ll give you a little painting I did of men catching sun-horses—quite tiny—but I always half meant it for you. Perhaps we shall go to New York in late autumn. But I hope we’ll see you before then.

I enclose a drawing of the Sun, from a Maya design. You can blank out the lettering if you like. But you may not like the design. I do though. Anyhow, keep it if you like it.

I only get depressed about my health—-if only I am well I’m quite a happy soul. But I do get tired of not being well: it’s three years now I'm shaky, since we came back from America last time.

Imagine a race-horse! But what a tricky thing to ride! I’ve never ridden except in New Mexico, where we’ve got four or five horses—value 50 to 70 dollars apiece. But I love them, and wish to God I was there unsaddling at the little saddle-house now evening is falling. Will you ride your Sunstroke in the Bois-—or will you race him at Newmarket? Bella bestial

What luck to find a sun-maid! not a raisin but a real lass! Americana Anchel propria d'oro. O soltanto dorata? beato ta!

I’ll tell Knopf and Seeker and my agents that you’re doing 100 de luxe Suns late autumn at 125 francs French. Do write the Miss Allanah Harper—and compare the MSS., yours and hers. Make her give you proofs. And take any bits out of hers that you like, especially at the end. I believe it’s better.

Savage rumours that Lady Chatterley is to be suppressed in London: and that it is stopped from entering America. Lieber Ding! Better read it—it's a direct phallic book, i.e. the direct nocturnal connection of a man with the sun—the path of the dark sun.

D. H Lawrence.

I've got a nice canvas of sun-fauns and sun-nymphs laughing at the Crucifixion—but I had to paint out the Crucifixion. If the sun is too complicated, I'll try a simpler one. T his is meant to be done in three colours, but it would probably look all right in black and white half-tone.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad, (Bern), Switzerland.

To L. E. Pollinger.                       Aug. 27th, 1928.

Dear Pollinger.—

I received the enclosed from the Vanguard Press this morning. I think Rich should have forwarded their communications.

I want them to go ahead with Lady C., so have cabled them as they suggest: Withhold Knopf two sent. It seems the U.S. mail is holding up some, at least, of the copies I sent—so I can send no more and those held up will be lost. I am determined to stand by Lady C. and to send her out into the world as far as possible. I perfectly understand that C. B. and Rich are against her, thinking she will do me harm, and probably disliking her anyhow. But I stand by her: and am perfectly content she should do me harm with such people as take offence at her. I am out against such people. Fly little boat! Therefore if the Vanguard will distribute her in U.S.A., well and good. It suits my aims.

I finished the second half of The Escaped Cock, about 10,000 words—rather lovely—but I feel tender about giving it out for publication—as I felt tender about Lady C. This story is only a tiny bit fierce, as C. B. puts it. I can’t make up ray mind about having it typed and sent out. Possibly Crosby-Gaige wouldn’t like it—not that I'd care a bit. Only why expose any sensitive 748 things gratuitously? And this story is one of my thin-skinned ones.

Yours,

D. H. Lawrence.

I think the Vanguard are right about piracy danger—and their $10 edition won’t hurt mine.—Please send me the Baker letter back.—D. H. L.

c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd.,

6, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, London, W.C.2.

To A. Stieglitz.                             1st Sept., 7928.

Dear Alfred Stieglitz,—

Would you please let me know by return whether you think of making a show of me and Hon. Dorothy Brett this autumn or winter.

Because Dorothy Warren wants to open her show of me alone on Oct. 5th or on Oct. 9th—the latter for preference, if you are in no hurry—and to keep it till Oct. 26th or till Oct. 30th—just three weeks. She would then ship the pictures to you, if you want them. So please let me know by return. And if there were any hurry, please send a line direct to—

Miss Dorothy Warren,

The Warren Gallery,

39a, Maddox Street,

London, W.i.

But as I wrote you to Lake George, I don’t mind a bit if you don’t make a show. I’m not very keen on sending anything to U.S.A., if the truth must be told. So please let me know by return, whether to send the pictures to New York or not.

It appears the U.S. mail is holding up Lady Chatterley. Poor weak-minded fools! There was a fuss and a threat in London—but nothing done so far—so I shall be able to sell out my edition over here, without bothering about America. So your copy will no doubt rise considerably in value, and you’ll have lost nothing by me.

But I’m glad you liked it—it's a test of people.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

I've lost your New York address.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad, (Bern).

To Enid Hilton.                            2 Sept., 1928.

Dear Enid,—

I am sending you to-day the MS. of The Escaped Cock: the two parts. I wrote the first part a year and a half ago, and it came out in the American Forum, and brought down most fearful abuse on my head. So I had to do a second part.

I wish, if you can trust your friend, you would ask her to type it for me: typing is a fearful bore really. I would like one true copy, one carbon copy. There is no desperate hurry. And when it is done—if it is done in time—send me the typescript here. We shall be here till the 15th at least. And send me a proper bill. I want the whole thing typed.

I may give Emily a couple of small oils to bring to England— Panels like the Finding of Moses. If you like you might meet her at Victoria on Sunday next—9th—at 18.43, by the boat train from Newhaven, and take the pictures for Dorothy Warren. But if you are doing anything that day, don’t bother in the least. Emily can post the things from Nottingham. Margaret, her daughter, is a reddish-haired girl of 19. They will leave St. Pancras about 9.0 o’clock, for Nottingham, that night.

You’ll think there’s no end of me!

D. H. L.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b, Gstaad, Switzerland.

To H. Crosby.                             6 Sept., 1928.

Dear Harry Crosby,—

Seeker wrote he was willing for you to publish Sun, but he wants you to present him with a copy when it comes out. He’s a sly dog at getting his picking. But please yourself whether you do send him a copy or not. I haven’t heard from Knopf yet.

The Modern french Painting book turned out better when I really read it. I was prejudiced by the amazingly feeble and inadequate choice of illustrations—but preposterous. Yet the man Jan Gordon is on the whole sound and sane and quite good—even if he talks down to his reader as if to an eternal Slade student.

Some of the things in Transition I found really good and amusing. But James Joyce bores me stiff—too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life. Gertrude Stein amuses me for a while, but soon palls. Some of the other things, not the most ambitious, made me laugh. But the feeblest of all feebles were the sayings of the French wise men at the end, about America. Really the French are crumbling to sheer puerile inanity. They have the minds of domestic cats.

My sister is going through Paris, and will post you there your little picture—Sun-men catching horses. It is nothing—so just put it in the fire if you don’t care for it. I think it’s quite a nice trifle, that’s all.

We stay here till the 17th, then to Baden-Baden for a fortnight or so—then probably to France, maybe to England. When do you sail for America?

I hope Sunstroke is looking shiny and stroked.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Kesselmatte, Gsteig b. Gstaad.

To A. Stieglitz-                              12 Sept., 1928.

Dear Stieglitz,—

Your long 14 pages to-day. I’m afraid my friends have been bothering you about those pictures. Too bad! I didn’t want it at all. I am not hard up—-have plenty of money to go on with— don’t want to sell my pictures at all, really, because I rather love them and want to keep them. I’d miss them much more than a few thousand dollars would make up. Don’t gasp at my "thousands." I am showing them in London because friends wanted me to—and we are giving up the Italian Villa—and— vanity, I suppose. Or mischief. More arrows in the air, and let’s hope one won’t fall in my own eye, like Harold at Hastings. But it would be useless to send them to America now—too much stupid fuss over Lady C. Why so much fuss over simple natural things? They ought to censor eggs, as revealing the intimate relations of cock and hen. Though they don’t necessarily—so there!

However, don’t bother, it would only be foolish of me to ship pictures to New York this year. Some other year, maybe. But why think of other years!

Thank O’Keefe for her letter—I should like to see you both— and to see some of your work. But that too will have to be another year. Too much fuss. I hate foolish fuss.

Sincerely,

D. H- Lawrence.

To M. Huxley.

Hotel Lowen, Lichtenthal, Baden-Baden.

22 Sept., 1928.

Dear Maria,—

No news from either of you for a long while—and I wrote Aldous. We are here since Tuesday—and good weather. F.’s mother here in hotel with us, and the Brewsters! We all drove in two grand 2-horse landaus yesterday to the altes Schloss and through the forest for three hours—everybody in bliss. It’s rather cold—and Germany is queer—prosperous and alive— different from other people—makes me feel a bit queer inside. We go to the Kurhaus and drink hot waters and listen to music and—eat, of course.

I never know quite where I am. in Germany. We leave 1st October—Frieda for England, I for South of France, where I shall stay a bit with F.’s sister Else, and join the Aldingtons to look at the island—Port-Cros. What are you doing, now autumn is here, fat red apples on the trees by the road, and yellow leaves dripping? Hope you got le Dieu des Corps— the French improvement on Lady C. Very cold potato, I thought.

D. H. L.

Hotel Lowen,

Lichtenthal bei Baden-Baden.

To Enid Hilton.

22 Sept., 1928.

Deas Enid,—

Thanks for your letter and the typescripts, which arrived safely this afternoon. They are quite all right, and I enclose cheque. Don’t send me the MS. itself while we are on the move—it’s only another thing to carry round.

Quite pleasant here; rather chilly to-day, but sunny. We eat too much and talk too much—and listen to music in the Kurgarten and so on. I don't mind Baden for a bit, but it soon palls.

The picture Contadini is of two Italian peasants—as the word itself says. They can call it Italian Peasants instead of Contadini—which, as you know, means the same thing.

I expect Frieda will come to England on the 2nd or 3rd—and I shall go to S. of France. Meanwhile don’t you take too much notice of the horridness of England—shut your eyes and ears all you can, and keep an inside quiet.

And thanks so much for looking after these things for me.

D. H. L.

Let me know if there is any change in the date of the show.

Hotel Lowen,

Lichtenthal bei Baden-Baden, Germania.

To Giulia Pini.*                       22 Settembre, 1928.

Cara Giulia,—

Siamo qui a Baden-Baden con la rnadre della Signora. Sono belle giornate di autunno, un po’ fresche, le foglie degli alberi gik gialle e rosse. Ogm giorno ci sono concetti di musica, belli, nel grande giardino, e ci andiamo bevere il te al fresco. Alla signora Baronessa, la suocera, ci piace molto quando noi siamo qui, e facciamo, come ieri, lungx giri in carozza a due cavalli, come le hanno ancora in questa citt.i, lungi giri fuori, fra i bos chi. Allora la vecchia signora e contenta.

Ci dispiaceva molto sentire che i padroni vi mandono via. Ma io 1’aspettavo. Quando il fattore voleva far’ seminare I’erba, era chiaro che volevano mandate via una famiglia. Ma pure voi restate ancora un poco, e ci rivedremo. Poi andiamo via finalmente anche noi. Spero veramente che troverate un’ altro podere, ed una casa buona, e buoni padroni. E una cosa un poco difficile—ma pure, cercando si trova un buon’ posto.

Scrivemi una parola per dire cid che succede. Siamo qui fino al i- Ottobre—poi la signora va in Inghilterra per quindici giorni, io I'aspetto nella Francia. Non voglio fare il lungo viaggio. E poi ritorniamo in Italia, nel mezzo di Ottobre.

Spero veramente che tutti vanno bene, e che abbiano sentito di un buon posto per 1 anno venture.

Molti saluti,

D. H. Lawrence.

♦One of the peasant family at Villa Mirenda.

Hotel Lowen,

Lichtenthal b. Baden-Baden.

1 o M. Huxley.                      25th September, 1928.

Dear Maria,—

Had your letter—so sorry it rain?—guess it’s left off. Here it was bitter cold—but is warmer now. Our plans too are a bit changed. 1 he Mirenda people are sending away our peasants, Giulia, Pietro and family—and there’s sure to be a great emotional stew. And I really feel the Mirenda is bad for my health. So Frieda intends to come direct to Florence, leave here next Tuesday, 2nd, arrive Florence 3rd, and finish the bit of packing—it’s nearly all done—and give up the house for good. It ought only to take a few days. If you are in Florence, go and give her a bit of moral support—she’ll probably be in a bit of a stew too. I, coward, am staying out of it.—I shall go on Tuesday to S. of France. That Island Port-Cros is 19 kms. off Hyeres, and may be a nice place to winter, no people, no villas, one small hotel, 13 families fishermen and the Vigie—fortress. It may be nice. Also F.’s sister Else is down just there till 8th Oct. So I’ll try it—and Frieda can join me somewhere there. The exhibition of pictures is put off. till Nov.—and F. will go to London to see it, I shan’t. She may see you in Paris en passant. Meanwhile do stay a day or two en passant on that bit of Riviera near Hyeres, and see me—and F. if she’s already back. I wonder when you’ll start. It was so cold here, but not much rain—now is a bit warmer. Only six more days here—so much food! We are now going to the Fischkultur for tea. Hope they won’t give us ants’ eggs.—I may be able to send you my pictures to your Paris house after all—am not sending them to U.S.A. I guess you’ll like Suresnes once you settle in. We are staving home. Love to both.

D. H. L.

Hotel Lowen, Lichtenthal, Baden-Baden.

To Caresse Crosby.                           Thursday.

Dear Caresse,—

The proofs came at lunch-time—I have already done headpiece and a little tail-piece for Fart i. Shall have a go at the others to-morrow and forward to you as quickly as possible. I wish you would send me two more sets of proofs, for my use— at your leisure. And tell me what terms you have arranged with Marks because he must not sell this too cheap—I should say I io since Random House charges $4 for that foreword to the Paris Lady C. And on the cover will you please print my phcemx, quite small—nest and flames might be red and bird black-—I think under my name.

No sign or sound of any gramophone.

I like the look of the book very much—send me the fifty sheets to sign.

Love from both.

D. H. L.

La Vigie.

To M. Huxley.                    Monday, 22 October.

My dear Maria.—

We’ve been here a week to-day. Frieda brought a vile cold from Florence, so I got it and have felt a rag of rags—but it’s going. This isn’t a castle or fortezza at all—but a thick defence-wall enclosing a cleared two acres or so of the crown of the hill—and all the enclosure just gone wild, wild lavender and little arbutus trees. The rooms are just built up against the defence-wall one storey—brick floors—quite nice. There are fireplaces and we burn lots of pine-wood—a great blessing. Outside all is pine forest and rosemary—we look down on green pine-tops and blue sea. A long hour up from the hotel— bathing place f hour up. I’ve not been—Frieda has. It’s quite nice for a time, especially the fires—and the Aldingtons are old friends. So is Bridget Patmore. We get on very well, and I’m the only disagreeable one. Mail comes Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. All food, all supplies must be brought from the mainland—when the boat comes. We’ll probably stay till December—then where?—How’s the house getting on? When do you move in?—We’ve had all weathers, from violent mistral to creeping hot fog. I’ll be all right when my cold goes—those 756

Italian germs!-—I've begun Aldous's book, what a fat book!

No news. Have had practically no mail yet. Oh, Maria, if too frs. is enough, send a little stodgy cake and a few sweets— tea is a blank. Let the shop do the sending, don’t you bother. Orioli wanted to ask Aldous if he had a little book to let him publish.

Let us know how it all goes.

D. H. L.

La Vigie,

Port-Cros (Far).

To A. Huxley.                                Sunday,

Dear Aldous,—

I have read Point Counter Point with a heart sinking through my boot-soles and a rising admiration. I do think you’ve shown the truth, perhaps the last truth, about you and your generation, with really fine courage. It seems to me it would take ten times the courage to write P. Counter P. that it took to write Lady C.: and if the public knew what it was reading, it would throw a hundred stones at you, to one at me. I do think that art has to reveal the palpitating moment or the state of man as it is. And I think you do that, terribly. But what a moment! and what a state! if you can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape, in their various degrees—and you state plainly that it is so-—caro, however are we going to live through the days? Preparing still another murder, suicide, and rape? But it becomes of a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia, inertia, inertia and final atrophy of the feelings. Till, I suppose, comes a final super-war, and murder, suicide, rape sweeps away the vast bulk of mankind. It is as you say—intellectual appreciation does not amount to so much, it's what you thrill to. And if murder, suicide, rape is what you thrill to, and nothing else, then it’s your destiny—you can’t change it mentally. You live by what you thrill to, and there's the end of it. Still for all that it’s a perverse courage which makes the man accept the slow suicide o inertia and sterility: the perverseness of a perverse child.—It’s

amazing how men arc like that. --------—--- is exactly

the same inside, murder, suicide, rape—with a desire to be raped very strong—same thing really—just like you—only he doesn’t face it, and gilds his perverseness. It makes me feel ill, I’ve had more hemorrhage here and been in bed this week. Sporca miseria. If I don’t find some solid spot to climb out of, in this bog, I'm done. I can’t stand murder, suicide, rape— especially rape: and especially being raped. Why do men only thrill to a woman who’ll rape them? All I want to do to your Lucy is smack her across the mouth, your Rampion is the most boring character in the book—a gas-bag. Your attempt at intellectual sympathy!—It's all rather disgusting, and I feel like a badger that has its hole on Wimbledon Common and trying not to be caught. Well, caro, I feel like saying good-bye to you—but one will have to go on saying good-bye for years.

D. H. L.

Port-Cros.

To M. Huxley.                               8 Nov.

Dear Maria,—

No, the island isn’t good enough—storms, torrents, no boat, no bread, uncomfortable Vigie. No, no good. We are leaving Tuesday, D.V.—boat, that is, just going over to Bandol, beyond Toulon, for a bit. Will send address.—But where then? where shall we go for a little house to keep? Where? Do you think we’d like somewhere near Paris?—Forest of Fontainebleau perhaps—a bit higher up than you are? Do you think? Or must it be Italy—perhaps Lago di Garda, where we first started. If you have a bright idea send a line poste restante, Bandol, Var. I do hope you’re not so busy. Do hope the book makes real money! Do hope all well. Skies look sort of lowering.

Love,

D. H. L.

La Vigie, lie de Port-Cros, Var, France.

To H. J. Seligmann.                     8 Novem., 1928.

Dear Mb Seligmann,—

Hon. Dorothy Brett sent me your review of Lady Chatterley from 1 he Sun. Sporting of you to do it! Stieglitz said you were going to. But I'm sorry you got put out into the cold because of it. I'm afraid it doesn’t pay to stand up for me and my iniquities. But I am properly grateful—and every little helps. I shall send you a copy of my Collected Poems.

Do you ever see Thomas Seltzer? I think of him always with affection and a sad heart. I wish to God he had been able to prosper on me. But I'm afraid I'm not the stuff prosperity is made out of. I expect little myself, and trim my sails accord-ingly, and get along well enough on what comes my way. By the way, if you see Seltzer ask him if he’d let me buy the copyright of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. I want to do my Collected Poems in America as in England: they are in such a scattered mess. My poems in America, I mean. Curtis Brown don’t seem to be any help to me in the matter. Knopf won’t take it up. So I must do it myself. And I don't even know who has the books. Seltzer has Birds, Beasts. The Viking Press have Look! We have Come Through! and Amores (I think it is Amoves). I believe Mitchell Kennerley once bought sheets of Love Poems and Others, my first volume—but who has the rights now, I don’t know. Then about New Poems, I don't know if they ever appeared in America at all. So you see it’s a mess. But I have written to the Viking Press—and I must approach Seltzer—I always feel so unhappy about him—not because I left him, for his affairs would have gone just the same, if not worse, had I stayed with him—but because of the great disappointment to him. Myself I don’t expect money success, so it doesn’t matter. But a publisher has to have it.

Somebody sent me a letter from--, who is a

bookseller in New York, in which he said he had seen pirated copies of Lady C. in Philadelphia. I wonder if it’s true. I’ve heard nothing. There was talk of a private edition in New York, but I’ve heard nothing of that either. But I don’t trust

------. He wanted me to send him fifty copies, at my risk— and he doesn't even pay for the six copies I did send, and that I know he received. So it goes—they take advantage of the Customs suppression not to pay for what they get. No wonder poor Seltzer was worried out of his skin.

Though it's no reason why I should worry you. But write me a line c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd., 6, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, London, W.C.2.

And many thanks for your backing.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

La Vigie, He de Port-Cros, Var, France.

To Morris L. Ernst.                     10 Novem., 1928.

I have finished reading To the Pure. I find it a curious, interesting, pertinent book, curiously moving. As the work of lawyers rather than literary men, it conveys an impression that no truly literary work would achieve. I look out with those unemotional lawyer’s eyes, and have a queer experience. I am left feeling puzzled, uneasy and a little frightened, as if I had been watching a great unchained ape fumbling through his hairs for something—he doesn’t quite know what—which he will squash if he gets it. I see that weird and horrible animal, Social Man, devoid of real individuality or personality, fumbling gropingly and menacingly for something he is afraid of, but he doesn’t know what it is. It is a lawyer's vision, not an artist’s—but it is the result of experience in dealing with the Social Man. The book, in its queer muddle—for legal precision is artistic muddle—creates the weird reactionary of the ageless censor-animal curiously and vividly. It leaves one feeling breathless, and makes one realise the necessity of keeping a chain on the beast. For censorship is one of the lower and debasing activities of social man—that is obvious.

Myself, I believe censorship helps nobody; and hurts many. But the book has brought it home to me much more grimly than 760 before. Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose, rhe censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness. It is our developing and extending consciousness that he threatens—and our consciousness in its newest, most sensitive activity, its vital growth. To arrest 01 circumscribe the vital consciousness is to produce morons, and nothing but a moron would wish to do it.

No, the book is a good book—and the very effect of muddle which it has on me conveys most vividly the feeling of the groping atavistic working of the ageless censor, furtive, underhand, mean.

Print this letter if you like—or any bit of it. I believe in the living extending consciousness of man. I believe the consciousness of man has now to embrace the emotions and passions of sex, and the deep effects of human physical contact. This is the glimmering edge of our awareness and our field of understanding, in the endless business of knowing ourselves. And no censor must or shall or even can really interfere.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

lie de Port-Cros,

Var, France.

To J. D. Chambers.                    14 Novem., 1928.

Dear David,—

I hardly recognised you as J.D.—and you must be a man now, instead of a thin little lad with very fair hair. Ugh, what a gap in time! it makes me feel scared.

Whatever I forget, I shall never forget the Haggs—I loved it so. I loved to come to you all, it really was a new life began in me there. The water-pippin by the door—those maiden-blush roses that Flower would lean over and eat and trip floundering round.—And stewed figs for tea in winter, and in August green stewed apples. Do you still have them? Tell your mother I never forget, no matter where life carries us.—And does she still blush if somebody comes and finds her in a dirty white apron? Or doesn’t she wear work-aprons any more? Oh, I’d love to be nineteen again, and coming up through the Warren and catching the first glimpse of the buildings. Then I d sit on the sofa under the window, and we'd crowd round the little table to tea, in that tiny little kitchen I was so at home in.

Son’ tempi passati, cari miei! quanto cari, non saprete mail—I could never tell you in English how much it all meant to me, how I still feel about it.

If there is anything I can ever do for you, do tell me.— Because whatever else I am, I am somewhere still the same Bert who rushed with such joy to the Haggs.

Ever,

D. H. Lawrence.

The best address is: c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd., 6, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, W.C.2.

Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To M. Huxley.                                 Wed.

Dear Maria,—

It is incredibly lovely weather, and the place very lovely, swimming with milky gold light at sunset, and white boats half melted on the white twilight sea, and palm trees frizzing their tops in the rosy west, and their thick dark columns down in the dark where we are, with shadowy boys running and calling, and tiny orange lamps under foliage, in the under dusk. Then we come in and have tea in my room looking south where the moon is, and get sticky with the jammy cake.

I think we shall go to Italy end of other month, to finish my Etruscans, which they pester me about all the time. And if I get them done, perhaps Xmas on Capri. And then see what next. Onoli writes he is not well—liver. He wants to publish a series of Italian Renaissance stories, and wants to know if Aldous would do him 12,000 or 15,000 words of Sachetti or Bandello or anybody he likes. I am doing Lasca—quite amusing.

I do hope your house is getting shipshape, and a cook. You must have a cook. Food quite good and imaginative, here, especially nice fishes which I like so much. It’s so hot, we can’t believe it.

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, V'ar, France.

Io The Hon. Dorothy Brett.            Nov. 24th, 1928.

Dear Brett,—

I wrote you a couple of days ago and posted it to Taos, all the news, which is none. o-day comes your letter from New York. Glad you got there safely and easily. I can tell you are pining tor I aos, but I suppose that will wear off, I wish I were there too—but feel the Americans hostile to me: and I don't feel I love them, at the moment.

We are here on the coast near Toulon—very pleasant and warm and quiet. But I think I shall have to go back to Italy in December to finish those Etruscan essays—they nag at me for them publishers always want a book.” They want a novel, but I m not going to give them one. What’s the good of writing books? In England the government now takes 20 per cent of all royalties of persons living abroad—and Curtis Brown 10 per cent, so they take £30 on every £100. And their royalties damn little. What’s the good! It pays me far, far better to write little newspaper articles, and the papers want them now. Imagine me appearing regularly—irregularly, as a matter of fact-—in the Evening News, Sunday Dispatch, Daily Express! But the Sunday Dispatch gives me £25 for a 2,000 article, written in an hour and a half—and nobody would even publish a story like None of that.

If we come over after Christmas, what is the best way of doing it, as regards passports, permits, etc.? That business is a great bore. I don’t want to take a house, because after Christmas I'd really like to sail away. America is so irritating. I feel I’d like to go to Zululand, and paint Zulus. Climate supposed to be perfect,

D. H. L.

Beau Bwage, Bandol, Var.

To M. Huxley.                            5 Dec., 1928.

Deaf Maria,—

Well, of all the duds, to gc and poison yourselves with alum, if you don’t take the biscuit! What your insides must have felt like! Do for goodness’ sake sit quite calm and get your wits about you, and keep them there. Dear Maria, the only thing to do in life is to gather oneself together and keep oneself together in spite of everything and everybody. You do get far too much tangled up in other people’s presences: though it's damned hard not to: but it is disastrous. It causes the modern hysteria, which affects men even worse than women, and which I find nauseating: worse than your alum.

I'm glad you’ll get money out of your Counterpane—sounds quite a lot—you’ll be able to squirt around. Here there's no news. When it comes to the point of going to Florence, I find I don't want to go. I expect one of these days we shall move on to Spain. But it’s sunny here all the time, and quiet and very pleasant: the people are all very nice: why should one hurry away to something worse! Only Frieda gets fidgety, wanting a house to keep. Why can’t women be peaceful? Hanno il diavolo nel corpo♦

Paul Morand and the Greek wife sound quite attractive—but I don’t think I want their house, marble or otherwise: though it’s nice of them to say we could have it.

I suppose Aldous is back with you? you don't say.—As for plans, they'll have to make themselves, when the time comes.

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To Enid Hilton.                             7 Dec., 1928.

Dear Enid,—

Your letter to-night. I ought to have written you before, but somehow I felt we might be moving on. It is really blank indecision keeps us here—though really Bandol is quite nice 764

there are no people. Anyhow the hotel is really pleasant and the food really good—40 frs.—so it's not worth while changing. Frieda gets fidgety wanting a place of her own to spread out in. But where? Where does one really want to live? Can you tell me? Even Frieda doesn’t really know—she oscillates between Lago di Garda and Taormina, and isn't sure of either. I say the best thing would be to go to Spain and try it, anyhow before settling anything. But she has left the trunks in Florence—and Orioli has gone very vague. I ought to go there. And one of us ought to come to London to see Dorothy Warren. And m this state of complex indecision we just sit still here and do nothing. But anyhow it has been sunny all the time, till to-day, which is grey—really lovely weather. I feel I am pretty well off—as you say, the sun is worth a lot, so why fret.

I'm sorry about your nose—what was it? Damn London, it seems to depress everybody.

By the way, since the fuss over Lady C. has died down, do you feel you could keep twenty or twenty-five copies in your flat? If you do, I’ll ask Orioli to send them along, a few at a time. And you can keep them till we get orders again—you know the price is now £4, as there aren’t many copies left. But I did a small edition of 200 on common paper, to be sold at a guinea. I am going to send a number to Lahr to sell, because the Americans have got out two pirated editions, robbing me completely, and I want to undersell them.

Well, I do hope you’ll keep pretty fit. One of us might possibly be in England soon. Remember me to Laurence.

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol,

To A. and M. Huxley.                     15 Dec., 1928.

Deas Aldous and Maria,—

It has been quite cold, but the sun rose brilliant, all bright and crystal, and is shining on me as I sit in bed writing. It makes me not want to come north—ever. My feeling now is, I would like to go real south, to get a house: either Sicily again or 765

south Spain: and I'd like to look at the South of Spain first. But my instinct is to go south, not to come north. Of course it would mean going away in summer-—but one does that even in Florence. I should think Suresnes would be a summer place rather than winter. It is quite nice here—but what a mess the French make of their places—perfect slums of villadom, appallingly without order, or form, or place. A ghastly slummy nowhereness—but France seems all like that. And the people, though nice and tidy in themselves, as a whole make a slummy impression, no bigger life at all—a bit thin and boring, too house-keeperishly individual. I don’t think I'd want to live in France.

I have been doing a book of Pensees, which I call pansies, a sort of loose little poem form; Frieda says with joy: real doggerel. —But meant for Pensees, not poetry, especially not lyrical poetry. I think they’d amuse you, Maria. There’s a little one to you, half catty—

Thank you, dear Maria, for helping with Lady C., etc. but probably I shan’t put it in.

If you saw Sylvia Beach, and she seemed a bit warm, you might say I’d mentioned her—but I feel very doubtful of her.

Glad the house is coming right. Of course as soon as it’s quite right you’ll want to go away. But you can always go back to it. I suppose we’ll see it one day—perhaps soon. But if we have to be in Paris, perhaps best stay in town. What little hotel would you suggest?

Love,

D. H. L.

Of course I could put up the expenses of a Paris edition myself.

Pino would be no use in Paris—I have to hold his hand—or his head—all the time even in Florence. One wants somebody on the spot.

I am enclosing a letter to the Beach, read it, leave it to your discretion; is her address right?

My dear Maria and Aldous,—

V ould you or Aldous do a little thing for me when you are in Paris s T iere have come out two pirated editions of Lady C. in America: they are being sold in London at £3 and one I heard at 30/- but usually £3. I believe they are being sold in Paris too, in Galignani’s and other shops—is there one Castiglione? I do wish when you are in town you would ask at these shops if they have copies of the book, at how much, and ask to see one— then examine it and tell me if it’s the pirated editions—and tell them, the brutes. The pirated editions were photographed from my edition, so they may look superficially the same. But paper and binding are different.

I’ve got a little paper-bound edition of 200 which I’m selling privately now—just going to—at 21/-, and the booksellers in London are going to ask 30/- for it. If only I had 2,000 I could kill the pirates—but I've only 200. Pino has them.

The first edition has about a hundred left, and they are now £4, London booksellers charge £5. But of course this pirated lot stops those too. I’m done in the eye! And such a lot of mine have been confiscated in America.

But if you are in town do find out for me. I must do something if I can.

Frieda had an inflamed eye, and was sad. She’s asked her daughter Barby here. We might possibly go by ship to Capri (Naples) for Christmas.

D. H. L.

Beau Rivage, Bandol'»

To A. Huxley.                            Sunday.

Dear Aldous,—

That man Stephenson was here, of the Fanfrolico press. I liked him. They think of starting a new press—with no Lindsay stuff in it—and of splashing out with my pictures 767

reproduced in a book at io guineas each! Holy Lord! They want to do most of them in black-and-white collotype, but I don’t want it. I want colour at any price—I hate collotype reproduction. What do you think? If you hear any interesting news about colour-printing, tell me, because I feel I must keep close after these young men, they don’t quite know what’s what.

So many thanks to Maria for the blue Guide, and you for Rasputin. Frieda got wildly thrilled over the latter. I study Spain, and feel like popping off. But now Barbara ------

says she'll come for the fortnight after Christmas—arrive apparently on Thursday—27th—so that'll keep us here till second week in January. Frieda isn’t keen on Spain, but I am, rather. One will have to stay on the Medit. Coast, the inland too bitter cold. But Barcelona, Mallorca, Valencia, Ronda, Malaga are warm.

Stephenson gave me, against my will, about seven massive Fanfrolico books. On the whole, what a waste of good printing! Could I perhaps leave some of them in your Suresnes house? And perhaps a couple of African wooden cups or goblets from Upper Congo, which I found here, and like: Maria might like to have them for a time.

I am telling Pino to send you a copy of the 200 edit. Lady C. to Suresnes. Then you’ll both have a copy.

I wonder if the address is right, St. Trond.

A cold wind, gets my broncs. a bit, I must say—and hotel suddenly full of French people! Merry Xmas to you both!

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage,

Bandol, Var, France,

To Rolf Gardiner.                          23 Dec., 1928.

Dear Rolf,—

I did get your long letter to Port-Cros: but only the other day, as it went back to London. We left that island—it wasn’t good enough in bad weather. Anyhow, I hate poky little islands.

I was glad to hear you had such a good time with the singing —and that Gore is getting on its legs. It’ll be good for you to have a place of your own, I should think. It’s what I ought to find: somewhere really to live. We’ve given up the Villa Mirenda, and are once more wanderers in the wide, wide world, which, alas, is all too narrow. Frieda, of course, wants a house—but even she doesn’t know quite where. I believe she secretly hankers after Tuscany, but I set my foot down and say no!—at least for the present. It really was bad for my chest—which has been so much better this winter, so far, thank God. And so I haven't felt gloomy at all, quite chirpy and more like myself. This is merely a dull little place on the sea, but it has its own small life, is friendly, and I’ve felt pretty well here. Still, I don’t want very much to take a house here-— nor does F. I think probably we shall go to Spain—perhaps even at the end of next week. I don't think we shall go up to the snow this spring, if I keep all right. But it would have been nice to see you en passant, like at Diablerets last year. I suppose you’ll have another busy year. Myself, I'm afraid I take more and more pleasure in being alone, with just an occasional friend. I think perhaps the nicest thing in the world is to be most of the time alone, then to see a few people with whom one feels a bit of natural sympathy. I'm afraid I’m really not made for groups and gatherings.

How is your sister Margaret? I have not seen her after that fleeting visit to Florence—but often think of her. Is she still dabbling with school-teaching? What a horrible thing to dabble in!

No, I don’t agree with you about Lady C. It’s a good book —and if one doesn’t smash as one goes, it’s no good. I his silly White Fox blarney about pure constructive activity is all poppycock—nine-tenths at least must be smash-smash! or else all your constructivity turns out feebly destructive. What about him, by the way—the Kibbo-Kifter?

AmitiesI

D. H. Lawrence.

To Rhys Davies.

Christmas Day, 1928.

Dear Davies,—

The dressing-gown came this morning as I sat in bed at coffee—very resplendent and I look as if I was just going to utter the unutterable name of God in it. But I’m likely to utter something much more profane to you for spending your money. There do I try to keep you within decent bounds of economy, knowing your finances and having lived for years with similar ones, and then you break out into silk dressing-gown Christmas gifts! It’s worse than an expensive tart. I do wish you hadn’t gone such lengths, I always say I forbid any present dearer than 2/6. But thank you very much and I shall swank my little swank in it; but not cease to be troubled.

I told you Frieda’s daughter was coming. If we don’t come to Nice you must come again and see us, before we flit.

Tell your man Tchekhov is a second-rate writer and a willy wet-leg.

Lindsay sent me this morning another copy of his Dionysos book!

Amities!

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To Charles Wilson.                         28 Dec., 1928.

Dear Charles Wilson.—

Many thanks for the calendar and the greeting. Here are three scraps of a sort of poetry, which will perhaps do as a "message." I've done a book of such poems—really they are pensees—which I shall publish later—but you may as well start in with these three bits.

I hope you got your copy of Lady Chatterley. It was finally sent from Florence, so if it doesn’t arrive it is lost.

I wonder when we shall come to England. I read with shame of the miners "Hampers’’ and the "Fund.’’ It’s a nice thing to make them live on charity and crumbs of cake, when what they want is manly independence. The whole scheme of things is unjust and rotten, and money is just a disease upon humanity. It’s time there was an enormous revolution-—not to instal soviets, but to give life itself a chance. What’s the good of an industrial system piling up rubbish, while nobody lives. We want a revolution not in the name of money or work or any of that, but of life—and let money and work be as casual in human life as they are in a bird’s life, damn it all. Oh, it's time the whole thing was changed, absolutely. And the men will have to do it—you’ve got to smash money and this beastly possessive spirit. I get more revolutionary every minute, but for life’s sake. The dead materialism of Marx socialism and soviets seems to me no better than what we’ve got. What we want is life and trust; men trusting men, and making living a free thing, not a thing to be earned. But if men trusted men, we could soon have a new world, and send this one to the devil.

There's more message—perhaps too strong for you. But the beastliness of the show, the injustice—just see the rich English down here on the Riviera, thousands of them—nauseates me. Men can't stand injustice.

Happy New Year.

D. H. Lawrence.

To Charles Wilson.

New Year’s Greeting to the Willington Men, for 1929.

For God's Sake---

For God’s sake, let us be men,

Not monkeys minding machines,

Or sitting with our tails curled

While the machine amuses us, radio or film or gramophone— Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

O! Start a Revolution!

O! start a revolution, somebody!

Not to get the money,

But to lose it all for ever!

O! start a revolution, somebody!

Not to instal the working classes,

But to abolish the working classes for ever And have a world of men.

It’s Either You Fight or You Die.

It’s either you fight or you die.

Young Gents, you’ve got no option.

No good asking the reason why,

It’s either you fight or you die,

Die, die, lily-liveredly die,

Or fight and make the splinters fiy, Bust up the holy apple pie.

You've got no option.

Don’t say you can't, start in and try,

Give nice hypocrisy the lie, And tackle the blousy, big blow-fly Of money; do it or die.

You’ve got no option.

Hotel Beau Rivage,

Bandol, Var, France.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                  28 Dec., 1928.

My dear Ottoline,—

I was glad to hear from you again, and very glad to know you are better. Aldous also wrote that you were really wonderfully well, after that bad time. As for me, it’s poco a poco, but I’m really getting better all the time.

We have been down on this coast since October, and I must say it has suited me well, it’s a good winter climate. I didn’t know Katherine had been here—wonder where she stayed. But I think in a fortnight we shall move on to Spain. From here it’s not so very far. We've got to find somewhere to live, now we’ve given up the Florence house. Frieda gets fidgety, being without a house. But she doesn't really know where, she wants one. Where does one want to live, finally?

About Lady C.—you mustn’t think I advocate perpetual sex. Far from it. Nothing nauseates me more than promiscuous sex in and out of season. But I want, with Lady C., to make an adjustment in consciousness to the basic physical realities. I realise that one of the reasons why the common people often keep—or kept—the good natural glow of life, just warm life, longer than educated people, was because it was still possible for them to say----1* or ——* without either a shudder or a

sensation. If a man had been able to say to you when you were young and in love: an’ if tha ——,* an if tha----,* I*

glad, I shouldna want a woman who could na----* nor--

—surely it would have been a liberation to you, and it would have helped to keep your heart warm. Think of poor Swift's insane But of horror at the end of every verse of that poem to Celia. But Celia---!*—you see the very fact that it should

horrify him, and simply devastate his consciousness, is all wrong, and a bitter shame to poor Celia. It’s just the awful and truly unnecessary recoil from these things that I would like to break. It's a question of conscious acceptance and adjustment—only that. God forbid that I should be t aken as urging loose sex activity. 1 here is a brief time or sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quie. space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort o. sex, like apples, leaving tl young quite free for their sort.

It's such a pity preachers have always dinned in: Go thou and do likewise! That's not the point. The point is: It is so, let it be so, with a generous heart.

*The law being what it is, I have been compelled, reluctantly, to excise some words,—(Editor's Note.)

Well, forgive all this, but I don’t want you to misunderstand me, because I always count on your sympathy somewhere.

Frieda sends her love, and one day I hope we ll have a few quiet chats and laughs together—there’s still time for that.

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol. To A. Huxley.                         Sat,, 30 Dec.

Dear Aldous,—

Many thanks for your information about offset. I had a telegram from the Pegasus Press man—apparently called Holroyd Reece—saying he would be in Paris in 10 days’ time and would answer my letter fully, and would we meantime send a copy of Lady C. to him to Paris. So much for him. Sylvia Beach wrote very friendly about the other books— edits., I mean—and sent cheque for £8 for 2 copies of the first. That’s one on her: because at the beginning she ordered three copies, and then, when she heard that discount was only 15% demanded back the money for two copies and bought only one: she might have had all the three for £5. Now she's paid £9 14: nearly double. But she acted up so friendly now I did ask her if she would take charge of a Paris edition if I paid for it. But she hasn’t answered yet. I suppose she’s smoking a pipe on it. Orioli says he has only 25 of the second edit., left, alas!—and they are ordered, but I tell him to hold some.—I’ll have to wait, I suppose, till I hear from Beach and Pegasus—I don’t incline very warmly to either, yet must have someone.

About plans—Frieda’s daughter Barby arrives on 2nd to stay a week or so: then we can go. You wouldn’t arrive till 20th, would you? Juliette said she and Julian would come, before then, on their way to Grasse to H. G. Wells. Now what are we going to do? I don’t really want to go back to Italy. I am so much better this winter than I was last, I can feel that this place is so much better for me than Italy—something bleeds me a bit. emotionally, in Italy. I really want to 774 go to Spain—I feel I should be well there, too. I think it’s a man’s country. But Frieda hangs back. She terribly wants a house—doesn’t know where—feels Spain is far. But it isn’t. It’s no further than Florence. I would like to see you both. But these little en passant glimpses like Lavendou or Chexbres don’t amount to much, do they? If we were going to meet it ought to be after you’ve done your business in Florence. Wouldn’t you like to come to Spain?—to a warm place, Tarragon or Valencia or Malaga—not Malaga, though? But with a car it is a long way, I do agree. Unless a ship brought you from Livorno, which isn’t so very dear, I think.

Anyhow, that’s how it ail stands at present. It’s been a lovely warm day, like spring. I lie in bed and look at the dawn, and the sort of mountains opposite across the gulf go quite translucent red like hot iron—very lovely dawns—almost like Taormina, where we had it the same. Now it is tea-time and just a bit pinky and primrosy and touches of frail grey cloud. This place is nothing much in itself—but I seem to be happy here, sitting on the tiny port and watching the "life"—chiefly dogs—or wandering out on the jetty. I find I can be very happy quite by myself just wandering or sitting on a stone—if the sun shines. Yes, one needs the sun. If anything, one need to go farther south than here, rather than further north. But it is wonderful how sunny it is here—really one can thank heaven for so shining. And of course we’re quite as far south as Florence.

Ottoline wrote very sweetly—very sweetly—but still coughing a little over Lady C.

I have done my Pansies, nice and peppery. I altered Maria’s a bit-—she must say if she doesn’t want it in. I don’t know if she had it even. But I changed it to Dear Clarinda. 1 nere, Maria! get a new nickname, be a new maid. Now you're Clarinda, my dear!

What’s the French for Belgium, I wonder.

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Pio age, Bandol, Var.

To H. Crosby.                             2 Jan t 1929.

Dear Harry Crosby,—

I was glad to hear from you again and to know you had a good time in America, but you didn’t stay very long.

We have been sitting here the last two months, and I must say it has been amazingly sunny. I have watched him rise nearly every morning from the surprised sea, as I lay in bed luxuriously, and I must say I was grateful to him every day for coming up so triumphant. This is a dull little place, apart from the sun, but I have liked it. Now before long I think we shall go to Spain. My wife's daughter is with us for a week or so still—after then we shall think of departure. I don’t suppose I shall come north unless I have to come to Paris to arrange about an edition of Lady C. I want to do a stock edition at about 100 francs—something like Joyce’s Ulysses or The Well of Loneliness—but the difficulty is to get somebody to see to it for me. I asked Sylvia Beach if she'd look after it if I paid for the production, but she hasn’t answered. The man of the Pegasus Press will answer this week—at least, so he promised by telegraph. I suppose you don’t know of any reliable bookseller in Paris—or publisher—who would take charge of the thing for me? I should like to do it quickly, to hit back at those pirated editions which have appeared in U.S.A. But I'm sure I don’t know why I bother you.

Many thanks for the book which arrived from Brentano's this morning. It looks rather massive, but I've no doubt it has good things in it. Your poems are slow coming out. (No, I've seen nothing of yours.)

How long will you stay in Paris now? Till the summer?

I did a book of sort of poems-—really little pensees—but you won’t care for them except perhaps one or two.

How did Caresse Crosby like her native country, too? If it is her native country—it may not be.

I have been much better in health this winter, and so felt quite chirpy. I should like to paint, but in an hotel bedroom, how can one! We must take a house somewhere.

Well, welcome back to Europe, to both of you, and all good wishes for the New Year.

D H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To A. Huxley.                       Sunday, 6 Jan,, 1929.

Dear Aldous,—

F.'s daughter, Barbara, is here, probably till next Saturday— 12th—so if you are coming soon we shall wait for you, as it would be good to talk things over, and if it's fine you may like to stay a few days peacefully. Let me know, will you, and about reserving rooms—if you like two little ones or one big, etc., etc. It actually snowed, and is beastly cold, but I think it’s calming down. Julian and Juliette called just for the day, and we had s quite jolly few hours

Bar by got herself into a very depressed state in London. Really, the young make me feel really low in spirits. I sort of want to go away to the farthest corner of the earth and never say another word. A young man appeared from California— to admire me—and you know what a depressing effect admirers have on me—I want to die. But yet he is really nice and is staying at the other hotel—and is leaving in a day or two.

I haven't heard a sound from Sylvia Beach nor the Pegasus about Lady C.—though Pino sent the Pegasus a copy of the book. So the Paris edition is still at a standstill—or rather, nothing done. But at the moment I feel limp, feel I only want to fly away and disappear from it all.

But come soon and let us at least have a few practical days here, before we start dashing off.

The cold here is so nasty—what must the north be like? No, Maria dear, one must live in the South.

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To Curtis Brown.

7 January, 1929.

Dear C. B.,—

All right, let the Gaige people do the first part of Escaped Cock if they want to, but the second half of the story is the best. So please put in a clause that I can reprint their half in six months’ time, because I shall put out the whole story, because I know it is good and I believe in it. If I let the first half go now alone, it is because it has already appeared, and it will make way for the second. So send me along the contract when you are ready—or if Mr. Wells feels he would rather not have this story, I don't mind a bit.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Var.

To L. E. Pollinger.

yth Jan., 1929.

Dear Pollinger,—

To-day I am sending you a couple of MSS. of the poems: Pansies. They may displease you, so be prepared. If you offer them to Seeker, and he doesn’t care for them, I don’t mind a bit if he doesn’t publish them. I shall write him about it.

Did you get the six copies of the paper-bound Lady C.? If you did, and Seeker sends round for two of them, please let him have them. Orioli wouldn’t send them.

Heaven knows how I can write a "story" of a thousand words cr so, for that Legion book. My stories won’t come so small— and I have nothing to hand. Won’t a couple of the "Pansies" do? Let me know, will you?

Do get the MS. of the Escaped Cock anyhow. It’s one of my best stories. And Church doctrine teaches the resurrection of the body; and if that doesn’t mean the whole man, what does it mean? And if man is whole without a woman then I'm damned* No, you are wrong.

I m not particularly anxious to publish a book of small prose pieces just now. Surely it’s not necessary?

We had snow here—and it’s been bitter cold—now blowing black and horrid. VC hat a way to start a year! Perhaps London is basking in sun and radiance. Let’s hope so.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To Mrs. Crosby.                   Monday, 7 Jan,, 1929.

Dear Caresse Crosby,—

I only got your letter and the cheque for Sun—4000 frs.— this morning—seems to me quite a large sum, and I do hope you didn’t swindle yourselves, which I feel is what happens. I do think it made a thrilling little book to look at: and if one gets a bit of fun out of a thing, that's what matters most.

I wrote to Harry Crosby when I got his letter from the ship— hope he had it—though there was nothing in it to interest you, except here we all are again in France!

I’m still waiting to see if I can find some decent bookseller or publisher to take charge of a Paris edition of my Lady Chatterley. I think I should like it done by the photography process—offset-—as it saves all the bother of type. But I don’t care. Tell me if you think of anybody, will you? I would pay for the production myself.

We had snow, and bitter cold, horrid—now it blows and is rather cold and rather horrid. I think we shall go to Spain in about a fortnight’s time. What, is your Black Sun going to bring forth now?

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Bivage, Baudot, Var.

To Miss Pearn.                   Friday, nth Jan., 1929.

Dear Nancy Pearn,—

Herewith I return the article on myself. It seems all right— clever girl! I sent Pollinger two MSS, of the Pansies. When you read them you will see how they are the same as this article, Pazienza!

Haven’t you received the MS. of the article on New Mexico, sent two weeks ago? Alas, if it's lost!

I’ve been so busy doing a long introduc. to my vol. of pictures, I’ve had no time to think of articles—but hope to be clear in a day or two. Meanwhile, don't take fright at the Pansies—they’re all right.

Ever,

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Bivage, Baudot, Var.

To Rhys Davies.                           11 Jan,, 1929.

Dear Davies,—

Barbara wouldn’t come to Nice after all-—just wouldn't— said it was too far. She leaves to-morrow for Paris. Some time next week I expect the Huxleys will appear—Aldous and wife. Stephenson came, and stirred us all up as usual. But I thought he seemed a bit more downhearted than the first time. He is rushing back to London to work. I think they’ll do my pictures all right—and he liked the Pansies, was pining to take a pamphlet or broadside from them, for the working classes. He told me you were doing a Swan story. You must show it me—and I can tell Curtis Brown’s people if I think it’s a good one for limited edition publication. And how’s the novel going?

We were in Toulon yesterday—drank coffee and rum on the port the same, and went to the same tea-place after— thought of you.

1*11 let you know if plans mature at all. We’ve a young Californian friend staying here now—all a bit of a whirl; not the peaceful Bandol of before Christmas at all. We went away out on the sea on a motor-boat this afternoon—warm sun, cold wind—such snowy mountains at the back.

Regards from us both.

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage,

Bandol, Var.

To Enid Hilton.            -              21 Jan,, 1929.

Dear Enid,—

Glad to hear you are better and enjoying life. Good thing we sent you none of the books—just heard from Pollinger that six copies sent him were confiscated, and two Scotland Yard officials called to enquire. So the brutes are putting their ridiculous foot down.

The news about the pictures is that they are going to be reproduced in a book, in colour—expensive—ten guineas a copy—book to appear in March, and exhibition to take place at the same time. I suppose this will really come off.

We are still here. To-day the Huxleys—Aldous and Maria— are due to arrive—suppose they’ll stay about a week. Then I really think we’ll really leave for Spain. It’s been very cold, but bright—at last it’s grey and warmer—rather nice for a change. Frieda's daughter was here for a while—and another friend. Frieda was thrilled about vegetable dyes—I suppose she’ll be trying them, when we get a house. How do you make them fast? Or don’t you?

You might call at Lahr’s and see if he has any news.

Just a hurried note—affection from both of us, also to Laurence.

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage,

Baudot, Var, France.

To Curtis Brown.                     24k/: January, 1929.

Dear C. B.,—

I'm sorry about the bother about those six copies of Lady C. —but no good succumbing under it, after all.

What I am concerned about is my manuscript. There are the two copies of the poems, Pansies, sent to Bollinger on January 7th from Bandol, registered, as papiers d’affaires, No. 587. There is also the manuscript of my essay on painting, for the introduction to the book of reproductions of my paintings. This was sent to Bollinger as registered letter on January 14th, No. 718.—Now these two MSS. we must recover, whoever is interfering in their delivery. The essay on painting is my original manuscript. I have no copy. I sent it to Bollinger to be typed. It is about 10,000 words—is perfectly proper—and I can't have it lost. Will you please make the proper enquiries at that end, and I will do so at this: in that way at least we shall find out where the MSS. are. Then if Scotland Yard or anyone else continues to detain them, I can take the proper steps, make the proper publicity, and bring an action if necessary. After all, Scotland Yard does not rule the country, and mustn’t be allowed to. I’m very sorry to bring trouble on your unoffending head—all my fault, I know. But then in this life somebody has got to put up a fight.

P. R. Stephenson said he would be coming along to your office to make a contract for the book of pictures. I asked Bollinger to arrange for a sum down, for the rights to reproduce the pictures—and a small percentage as royalty—Stephenson having suggested £250 down on a 10% royalty basis, I would suggest £250 payment for rights to reproduce pictures, and then a 5% royalty, something like that. But we must recover the MS. of the essay. v

Ever,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Rivage,

Bandol, Var.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.                  5 Feby., 1929.

My deah Ottoline,—

Aldous and Mana were here for ten days or so—neither of them very well, run down. Aldous with liver, and Maria going very thin and not eating enough. I think the Counter-Point book sort of got between them—she found it hard to forgive the death of the child—which one can well understand. But, as I say, there's more than one self to everybody, and the Aldous that writes those novels is only one little Aldous amongst others—probably much nicer—that don’t write novels—I mean it's only one of his little selves that writes the book and makes the child die, it’s not all himself. No, I don’t like his books: even if I admire a sort of desperate courage of repulsion and repudiation in them. But again, I feel only half a man writes the books—a sort of precocious adolescent. There is surely much more of a man in the actual Aldous. They went on in the car to Italy, and yesterday came a desperate post card saying they had broken down at Albenga, near Savona, and having to stay in a very bad hotel, very cold, and the wind bitter. I hope they’re out of it by now. To-day was a beautiful, beautiful day—all bright royal sunshine, and no wind, so one just sat out and felt the brightness. But mostly there has been L very cold wind. It’s a cold winter here too, but nearly always dear.

I’m so sad you have such bad health. Aldous thought you so much better. But if you have those blinding headaches, my word, I sympathise. I never really had headaches until I was ill eighteen months ago—but now I have a holy terror of them. Thank goodness mine are better now. What do you think yours come from? I believe they often arise from a condition of weakness, that one doesn't take sufficient account of. Are you sure you eat enough? Do you drink a little burgundy- thnce I am here, and can eat, and drink wine again, I am surprised how the headaches don't come. One just has to build up resistance-—that seems to me the only way.

And I agree with you, people are most exhausting. I like them all right at a little distance, if they will leave me alone— but I don't want to talk to them any more. I find I can still sit on a bench and be quite happy, just seeing the sea twinkle and the fisher people potter with their lobster pots. What is there to say any more, to ordinary people at least? It is lovely to be alone, especially when the sun shines. I think you should winter abroad, in some quiet place like this where you see the sun rise behind the sea at dawn, and every day different, and every day, somehow, the spangle and glitter of the sea is a different spangle and glitter. I watch the dawn every day as I lie in bed. And now the sun has moved such a long way, and rises behind the queer, tressy, shaking eucalyptus tree.

But I want to go soon, now. Frieda has not been contented here in an hotel—she wanted a house. But I liked the hotelwarm and no effort. Then lately they have been making a great fuss over Lady C. Scotland Yard holding it up—visiting my agents—sort of threatening criminal proceedings—and holding up my mail—and actually confiscating two copies, MS. copies of my poems, Pansies, which I sent to my agent Curtis Brown —saying the poems were indecent and obscene—which they're not—and putting me to a lot of trouble. I don’t mind when I’m well, but one gets run down. And those dirty canaille to be calling me obscene! Really, why does one write! Or why does one write the things I write! I suppose it's destiny, but on the whole, an unkind one. Those precious young people who are supposed to admire one so much never stand up and give one a bit of backing. I believe they’d see me thrown into prison for life, and never lift a finger. What a spunkless world!

I was glad to hear of Bertie Russell. Perhaps he and his Dora will do something, after all—better than his donning away in Cambridge.

I had such a silly, funny little letter from E. M. Forster, telling me a propos of nothing that he admires me but doesn’t read me. Do you ever see him?

Did I tell you my pictures are going to be reproduced and put in a book—in colour—at io guineas a copy? I wrote a long foreword on painting in relation to life—good, I think, really.

Don’t you think it’s nonsense when Murry says that my 784

world is not the ordinary man’s world and that I am a sort of animal with a sixth sense. Seems to me more likely he’s a sort of animal with only four senses—the real sense of touch missing. I hey all seem determined to make a freak of me— to save their own short-failings, and make them "normal."

I wanted to go to Spain, but now it’s upset—and Frieda doesn’t want me to go. So I don’t know what we shall do. I can even be arrested if I come to England—under the Post Office laws—oh, la la! I feel like wandering away somewhere—• south—south—perhaps to Africa. But I shall let you know.

I do most sincerely hope you’ll be better, for I know so well what it is to fight with pain and struggle on from day to day. What I feel is that you are physically too weak, you need building up, you need to build up resistance. I’m sure you are in some way exhausted, and can’t recuperate. Tell the doctors to find a way of nourishing you and fortifying you.

Remember me to Philip—-Aldous says he is busy editing memoirs for a book, which I’m sure he'll like doing.

We have got a copy of Sergeant Grishka—good in its way, but so depressing and—sort of Jewish: not quite true.

I do hope you’ll be better and feel stronger.

Love from us both,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To Rhys Davies.               Saturday (Postmark 9.2.29).

Dear Davies,—

Well, I was sorry about the story, especially as Lahr says you look like being hard up. But if only your novel is done, you can soon do the story up a bit, and we can place it.

When will your novel be done? And when will you be coming along? Let me know, so we can have a room for you. The hotel gets very full nowadays. And it is possible my sister will be coming for a fortnight. I am waiting to hear from her. So if she comes you will see her.

785

The Huxleys say Italy is icy cold, colder than it's ever been. On the whole, we seem to be pretty well off here.

Don’t for goodness' sake wear yourself out over that book. I’ve nearly re-typed all the Pansies, which has been a fair sweat, as I do so hate typing, and am bad at it. Then we both had a bit of 'flu—but not bad.

Send a line then to say when you’ll come, and au revoir from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, Var.

To M. Huxley.                   Monday, 18 Feb., 1929.

Dear Maria,—

Your letter this evening. I’m a bit worried about your health, so please be a good child and really take care for a while —don’t bother about anything else. Now do as you’re bidden, and don’t go squiffing about any more, but keep still and warm and well fed: and don’t buy a car just yet. Just be without one for six weeks, really. You need a rest from driving.

I wrote you to Haskard's, but perhaps you didn’t get it. Alas, my blue coat is an illusion!—My sister is here, arrived a week ago: and I am fond of her, but she fills me with tortures of angry depression. I feel all those Midlands behind her, with their sort of despair. I want to put my pansies in the fire, and myself with them—oh, dear! But this afternoon Frieda and she have gone to Toulon—and it was a lovely warm day, the loveliest—so you should have had a good journey—O the blue sea! But all the palm trees and eucalyptus trees of Bandol are dead.—frozen dead. They look funny and dry and whitish, desiccated—but I can’t believe they’ll not put forth. But Madame says the gardeners say no, they are killed. I feel as if half the town had died. Then these wonderful blue tinkling days so still and fair!

We had a bit of ’flu—I had—but not bad. Every single body in the hotel had it—but mostly mildish.

I have no news from London. I sent Jack Hutchinson a copy 786

of the Pansies a week ago—want very much to know if he’s got them.

We now think of Corsica. Frieda has read it up in Baedeker, and is thrilled! So I expect we’ll go—perhaps even end of next week. It sounds rather nice—and wonderful for motoring in— and all sorts of climate—Ajaccio warm like here, then the mountains for summer. Anyhow, it’s only a night from Nice or Marseilles, and only six hours from Livorno. So one easily gets out. If we don’t like it, we’ll just cross to Florence—where it’s warmer—and get our things and perhaps go to the ranch for the summer. No good trying to take Frieda even to Mallorca.

I wonder if Aldous would put Paulhan’s address on this letter—look at it—Joseph Barezzi is the famous Sicilian manservant of Port-Cros—and the letter finds me instead of Paulhan—who as you know is editor of the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise.

Well, let us know you are safely arrived, and safely in bed, and warm and well fed. I shall fidget till I know.

D. H. L.

Could you get me Nancy Cunard's address? I’ll ask her if she will do Lady C.

The Pegasus makes no more show.

BandoL

To A. Huxley.

Monday, Feb., 1929.

Dear Aldous,—

Well, here is your Dickensian Gentleman—suggestions, but not much help. I have written to Mr. Groves and told him to let me know at once, as if there is anything doing I will come to Paris to see to it: which I will. I would do a good bit to get this thing going. And it would be fun to see you in your house. But if it is once more “unfortunately we can’t!” then we’ll leave here for Marseilles on Thursday, and go to Spain. Am feeling fed-uppish.

The weather has been widish and now it’s raining a bit. I’m afraid this winter is going to be one of the long-drawn-out miseries of linked vileness.—Yes, Jix won’t have a long run for 787 his money—the English won’t stand for that rant—fools if they did.—Rhys Davies comes this afternoon—and I've got to go to Toulon to get my new suit—grey—750 frs.—I believe it will look nice—shall buy some nutty shirts and new shoes and see if I can’t come out a butterfly for once-—I want a metamorphosis or metempsychosis or both—a reincarnation into a dashing body that doesn’t cough.—A few daffodils in the shops, little wild ones, and I think of those in the woods near you, that were out when you came from Diablerets. Damn all American women with insistent voices! The sound of the hammer in those voices of theirs almost kills me.—The printers, terrified of Jix, are refusing to reproduce some of my pictures, so Stephenson writes: the “Mango Tree,’’ for one—that water-colour of which Mana said she couldn’t hang it up in her bedroom when the boy was about—so I shall give it her, to hang in the servant’s room.—Am doing a lovely one—water—of fighting men and singing swans.

Do you think “Groves” sounds better or worse than “Moulder”?

D. H. L.

Dear Maria—The governess is engaged to the negro waiter and they walk arm in arm on Sundays like two birds of Paradise, but she looks none the less diminished—and I disapprove.

Did you see the cartoon of us all in the Evening Standard?— got you by the hair!—D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage,

Bandol, Var,

To J. M. Murry.

1 March, 1929.

Dear Jack,—

I didn’t know your handwriting any more, it seems to have gone so small and sort of invisible. How are you? I'm pretty well, but a scratchy chest and cough as ever-—sickening-—but pretty well in spite of all. I believe Katherine once stayed here, so perhaps you know the place. We gave up the Florence house, and are houseless. We think to leave here next Wednesday, and go to Majorca, perhaps take a villa there. I haven’t 788

any great hunch as to where I want to live—only, for the moment, not Italy,

I haven t got a copy of the Rainbow, to save my life. My copy was stolen from me long ago—as every single first-edit, copy of my own books has been—just "lifted" by one kindly visitor or another. But the man can get the American edition from Galignani, for a dollar. I’ll write and tell him.

And how are you ? And how is your wife? I heard she was ill, but do nope she s better. Do you live in Hants now, and not Dorset?

Frieda is about the same—but not quite so energetic as she used to be. I begin to realise that we do get older, and that it does make a great difference—in some ways, it’s pleasanter— I like being older—if only my chest didn’t scratch so much.

111 send you a line when we get an address—otherwise you must write me c/o Curtis Brown.

Tanti ricordi!

D. H. L.

Bandol, Van To A. and M. Huxley.

Dear Aldous and Maria,—

Well, though I’ve not heard from Mr. Groves, I’ve decided to come to Paris to see about an edit, of Lady C—else I’ll feel minchione, with all those other pirates. So expect to arrive Paris at 10.0 on Tuesday night. Frieda says she wants to go straight to Baden-Baden—by Lyon, Besan^on, Strasburg—and join me in ten days or so. If you have a nice handy hotel to suggest, send me a line, I expect I'd get it—otherwise I shall probably go to the little Hotel de Versailles, Bvd. Montparnasse —near the gare. But I’d send you a line.

Rhys Davies will probably be coming up at the same time, so I'd have company.

So see you soon—and hope it’ll be nice weather and can have some lovely meetings.

D.H.L.

60, Boulevard Montparnasse,

To A. and M. Huxley.                    Wed. Evening,

Dear Maria and Aldous,—

We won’t come to lunch to-morrow, it’s so far, and an effort—and crowning glory, that man —— will turn up at your house directly after lunch—and I don’t want to see him twice. He called here—was most honoured by having had an interview with Jix—so I told him he’d be----------

before ten years are out—don’t think he wants to see me twice—hope not—says you are "a bright fellow”—I said "Quite!” (Aldous, that’s you.)

I think we’ll get off Saturday, for more quiet travelling. I don’t want to go north, don’t want to be North, shan’t have any peace till I see the Mediterranean again, all the rest hell! Think we’ll go in little stages to Mallorca. The North has all gone evil—I can’t help feeling it morally or ethically. I mean anti-life.

We’ll see you though—ring-up.

D. H. L.

3, rue du Bac,

Suresnes, Seine.

To Rhys Davies.

Wed. (Postmark 20.3.29).

Dear Davies,—

I arrived here with a bit of ’flu or something—felt very cheap—but they are really very nice and kind to me, and look after me so nicely.

I am coming back to the hotel on Monday, after lunch—will you tell the man? And I expect my wife on the Wed. following —perhaps with her nephew. You might tell him that, without fixing it, because I’m not quite sure.

Would you come to tea to-morrow, come a bit early, and we can walk in the Lois by the river. I won’t say lunch, because there are always people here, and you'd only be bored—the people bore me a bit.

Could you bring me, out of my trunk, the wooden African vase, with its lid I shall leave it here. It is at the bottom of the trunk, which I think I did not lock. You can lift out the tray of the trunk—it’s under that.

Do come, I shall be glad to see you and hear your news.

D. H. L.

Hotel de Versailles,

60, Bod. Montparnasse, Paris, XV.

To L. E. Pollsnger.                          3 April, 1929.

Dear Pollinger,—

Albert Boni called last evening, and we talked things over— and though he is not the publisher I should exactly choose, I think it would be a good thing if he could have all my books and publish them in a uniform edition, as he seems quite keen to do. In that case, he wants the poems, so we shall have to decide quickly in order to ask Cape to release his claim to these, before he goes any further. And then there is Alfred Knopf: Boni suggests I write him saying I was hurt by his refusal to print the poems, and now should be glad if he would release me from my contract with him. Shall I do that?—We talked about money, but very indefinite. Boni said I ought to get more than 20 per cent of Seltzer’s debt, and that whether I went over to him, Boni, or not, he would give me £200 on the debt—that being, as far as I remember, just about 20 per cent. He asked me if I was in need of money, as he had a cheque in his pocket and would be glad to write it out for me. I said, thank God I was not in need of money, and would prefer he settled with you. Very distasteful, having people hand one a cheque across the table, and expecting you to receive it as if it were the body of God. Rather repulsive.

There came also the man -—— of the former

—— concern, with something of the same story, offering me money if I was "in need, and asking about the Escaped ock» I said I would, not let him print the first half of that story as a complete thing, without indicating that it was only a part. He

kept repeating over 900 dollars till I almost told him nine hundred---- I said I might, prepare for him a little novel—

about 25,000 words—which I did two years ago but which wants doing over. I might—when I settle somewhere. The MS. is in Florence.

D. H. Lawrence.

clo Signor G Orioli,

6, Limgarno Corsini, Florence, Italy,

To D« V. Lederhandler.                    5 April, 1929.

Dear Mr Lederhandler,—

Many thanks for sending me that leaflet. As you surmise, Sun is included in The Woman Who Rode Away, so I shall be able to prosecute those pirates, which I must do, as it is becoming intolerable. But I presume they have pirated the little unexpurgated edition of 150 copies of the unexpurgated form of the story—only slightly different from the Knopf version— which was printed over here in Paris by the Black Sun Press, and sold in New York by Harry F. Marks, 31, W. 47th St.—I wish you’d ask him about it.

And still another—the fifth—pirated edition of Lady Chatter-leyI! Makes one ill! I was very upset when I heard that——— ----— of the---— Bookshop in Phila. was back of the first pirated edition of Lady Chatterley. He is a personal friend—so I hated to hear such a thing, and am loath to believe it. Do you think there is anything in it? Do tell me. A certain circumstance makes me suspicious.

No, alas, all my early first editions have been stolen from me. But G. Orioli has one or two of my MSS. of stories—how much do you want to pay?

In any case, many thanks for sending me that leaflet.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence,

Paris.

To H. Crosby.

6 April.

Dear Harry,—

rhe packet of sweets just come—awfully nice of you and Caresse. We've thought of you a lot, these two pregnant days. But keep a little sun spot of insouciance somewhere inside you. I’m sure one of the great secrets of the sun is a strong insouciance, in the middle of him, where no one breaks in on him.

We leave in the morning—via Orleans and Toulouse. I do hope we shall like Spain, and perhaps find a place a bit like your Mill, with sun in the courtyard, and very still.

I shall write you as soon as we really arrive anywhere— meanwhile, Thomas Cook and Son,

Calle Fontanella,

Barcelona,

will find us.

Pax, then! the sunny sort.

D. H. L.

Hotel Principe Alfonso, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

To Rhys Davies.

25 April, 1929.

Dear Davies,—

How fortunate I needn’t ecstasise to you!—everybody seems to think I ought to be in ecstasies over this place, even including Frieda—Majorca is one of her oldest dreams—and I don’t really care for it. True, the sea is usually a most heavenly blue, and the old town lies round the bay, pale, phantom in the strong light, all a funny heapy-heap of buff and white and the flowers are nice—and I like this hotel. But there is a co d little wind, and some days it is all funny and grey and clammy, scirocco, and they give one far too much food to eat, quite good food here, but too much—and my bill last week was over eleven pounds, merely the hotel—and the Spanish wme, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse—and a bottle of Julien, the cheapest claret, costs 9 pesetas—over six shillings—and worst of all, the place gets on my nerves all the time, the people are dead and staring, I can’t'bear their Spanishy faces, dead unpleasant masks, a bit like city English—and my malaria came back, and my teeth chattered like castanets—and that’s the only truly Spanish thing I've done. We nearly took a house—and I must say, in some ways it was very nice, but thank God my malaria came on in time to save us from deciding on it. And that's about all the news—except that we ran into Robert Nichols in the street the second day we came here, and saw quite a lot of him and his wife, and we liked them very much. They had been here three months, and just got fed-up, and had booked their berths, so they sailed off to Marseilles on Tuesday morning, and at that moment I wished I was sailing too. But in the morning when it is lovely and sunny and blue and fresh, I am reconciled again, for a time. We may stay another twelve days-—we might stop a month—but I think, by June surely, we shall be sailing also to Marseilles, and going either to Lago di Garda or somewhere like that. I don’t want to take a house here, to stay. I think, all in ail, Italy is best when it comes to living, and France next. Triumphal Frieda! I don’t feel as if I should work here—Nichols couldn't—I feel somehow peeved, a state I do dislike, in myself even worse than others. Yet I do like the sea and the sunshine, and the pink convolvulus flowers all on the rocks. And we know some rather nice people, residents, who invite us to lunch and dinner, quite social.

No news of the world. I’m sorry Stephenson is getting vaguer and vaguer. Will he pop like a bubble—even before he’s through with my book of pictures?

So very glad you’ve got clear of Brentano’s—and am sure Chatto’s will look after you well. That’s good news, and all luck? I am still having wibble-wobbles with Seeker over Pansies—and damn all publishers, and all the trade.

Many regards from us both—and I hope you hate the thought of Spain and Majorca sufficiently.

D. H. L.

Hotel Principe Alfonso,

Palma de. Mallorca, Spain. To Hon. Dorothy Brett.                  27 April, 1929.

Dear Breit,—

So you are safely back in Taos, but not yet been up to the ranch. I had your letter to-day. And Mabel has dropped the Dude Ranch idea, but the Dude Rancheress isn’t so easy to drop. I can imagine the horror of it, the crass paint and the dyed curtains and the built-in sleeping porches. Mabel should never have entertained the idea at all. And perhaps it will be better if you have a separate studio, off the estate, so to speak.

We have been here ten days. It’s quite nice, southern, and Mediterranean and a bit like Capri—only much more island and much fewer people. One could live quite lonely if one wanted. We nearly took a house, but then an attack of malaria came on, and my teeth chattered and I thought I’d better beware. There isn’t malaria on the island, so they swear, but it’s evident I’m in the malarial tremble zone. Still we’ll stay a while, and see. It’s a very pleasant hotel, and practically no people at all.

I wish, somehow, the mysterious bars would lift that keep us from coming back to the ranch—a sort of fear, a sort of instinct. Now I am in a Spanish-speaking country, I have New Mexico before my eyes every moment. After all, it’s so much bigger and lovelier than this is. Europe remains a bit poky, wherever you go. Yet I feel the stars are against my crossing the Atlantic just now. But we shan’t make any move about selling the ranch. Only, when you get back up there, I do wish you would carefully collect all my MSS. and make me a list and have Mabel check it and send it to me, and put the MSS. in safe deposit in Taos bank. I’ll send a cheque for the costs. Also let me know what the horses have cost, feeding—and the taxes. Somebody said you were trying to sell some of the MSS., but I expect you were only dangling bait, to see what sort of fish would rise. My pictures are busily being reproduced. I’ve seen proofs of two of them—very disappointing and smudgy. The exhibition should be ready in May, when the book comes. I can’t

paint in these hotels, and I am a bit at a loose end. Perhaps the Gods will move. Anyhow, I hope you’ll have a nice summer

and get good things done. Wonder if the cellar did fall in

D. H. L.

Hotel Principe Alfonso, Palma de Mallorca.

To M. and A. Huxley. Ascension Day (May gth, 1929).

Deaf Maria and Aldous,—

I had your letter, Maria, but no post card from Cook’s, Barcelona—and not a sound from Aldous—which made me wonder where he was. However, I suppose you are both in London now, though I don’t know where, so will send this to Suresnes.

We are still on the island—but changed the hotel. This is very nice, on the edge of the sea, good food but too much of it— ten shillings a day. We are only four people in the place, so have it to ourselves. The weather continues dry, the island parched, the sun hot, the wind often rather chill. The air itself is cold rather than hot—anyhow, cool. The exchange went down to thirty-seven.

Yesterday we motored to Valdemosa, where Chopin was so happy and George Sand hated it.—It was lovely looking out from the monastery, into the dimness of the plain below, and the great loose roses of the monastery gardens so brilliant and spreading themselves out—then inside, the cloisters so white and silent. We picnicked on the north coast high above the sea, mountainous, and the bluest, bluest sea I ever saw—not hard like peacocks and jewels, but soft like blue feathers of the tit—really very lovely—and no people—olives and a few goats—and the big blueness shimmering to far off, north-lovely. Then we went on to Seller, and the smell of orange-blossom so strong and sweet in all the air, one felt like a bee.— Coming back over the mountains we stopped in an old Moorish garden, with round shadowy pools under palm trees, and big bright roses in the sun, and the yellow jasmine had shed so many flowers the ground was brilliant yellow—and nightingales singing powerfully, ringing in the curious stillness. There is a queer stillness where the Moors have been, like ghosts—a bit morne, yet lovely for the time—like a pause in life.—It’s queer, there is a certain loveliness about the island, yet a certain underneath ugliness, unalive. The people seem to me rather dead, and they are ugly, and they have those non-existent bodies that English people often have, which I thought was impossible on the Mediterranean. But they say there is a large Jewish admixture. Dead-bodied people with rather ugly faces and a certain staleness. Curious! But it makes one have no desire to live here. The Spaniards, I believe, have refused life so long that life now refuses them, and they are rancid.

I think we shall stay till towards the end of the month— about a fortnight more—then I want if possible to take a steamer to Alicante or Valencia, and do a trip in Spain—Burgos, Granada, Cordoba, Seville, Madrid. I don’t expect to like it immensely—that is, sympathetically. Yet it interests me.

Then perhaps we’ll go to the Lago di Garda or perhaps for a week to Forte, to see if there is a house there. Since I don’t think I want at all to stay permanently in Spam, we’d better cast round for a house before the real hot weather sets in.

And I wonder how you are getting on in England, how it all seems to you. Somehow, I don’t want to come. The cistus flowers are out among the rocks, pink and white, and yellow sea-poppies by the sea. The world is lovely if one avoids man-— so why not avoid him! Why not! Why not! I am tired of humanity.

But I hope you are having a good time, and remember me to everybody and send a line.

D. H. L.

Hotel Principe Alfonso, Palma de Mallorca, Spagna.

To Giulia Pini.

16 Maggio, 1929.

Cara Giulia,—

leri il Signore Orioli mi ha mandate 1’indirizzo tuo, posso dunque scrivere una lettera per dire che non vi abbiamo dimenticato, parliamo tan to di te e di tutti gli al tn di San Paolo, vogliamo anche sapere come andate voi. Come vi place il posto nuovo? la terra, come e? 11 lavoro, e duro, o plu leggero che a San Paolo? e 11 grano e gli ulivi, promessono bene per quest’ anno?

Qui siamo proprio al mare, Mallorca e una Isola che ap-partiene alia Spagna, la gente parla spagnuolo: ma tutto rissembra molto L TItalia: la campagna ha gli ulivi, 11 vino, grano, iguali alia Toscana. Pero fa un poco plu caldo, e plu asciutto qui. Non ha piovuto quasi niente, quest’ anno, il grano va male, ma gli ulivi fioriscono belli. OIL mangiamo ciliege e nespole, le mandorle sono gia grosse.

Restiamo ancora un poco qui, perche ci place. La signora fa 1 bagni di mare, e abbiamo amici qui, come dappertutto. Ma non vogliamo vivere qui per sempre. Ritorniamo in Italia, forse nel iuglio, o in settembre, per cercare una casa per vivere. Questa volta vogliamo una casa intera, e non un appartamento di sopra, come alia Mirenda, con una Zaira ed un Tito di basso. Vorremo una casa non troppo grande, no troppo piccola, e con un giardino: dove possiamo stare in santa pace, senna queste fastidie della Villa Mirenda. C’e qualche cosa nella tua vicinanza?

Pero, quando veniamo a Firenze, o quest’ estate o nell’ autunno, verremo alia Villa Sguanci per vedervi tutti, e per salutarvi. Intanto tu ci scriverai e ci dual tutto che c’ e di nuovo: come state tutti voi; la Teresina, come va lei?—se va sposarsi? e il Pietro, pensa lui anche a sposarsi, e porta la sposa a vivere con voi? il Pierino, va sempre alia scuola? e come gli place poi la scuola nuova? e il babbo, e la zia, e lo zio, stanno tutti content! e bene? e la Stellina?

Io vado sempre megliorando, poco a poco. La tosse me da sempre noia, pero di salute sono piu forte. La signora sta bene. Sua figlia, la pit! vecchia, Elsa, che tu non hai vista, si e sposata un mese fa, ed ha passato un tempo col marito in Italia. Ora sono tornati a Londra. I rniei quadri, quell! che ho fatto a San Paolo, e che stavanc nalla Villa Mirenda, ora sono esposti a Londra in un’ esposizione, tutta la gente va a verderli: sono anche riprodotti in un libro, tutti quelli quadri, e alcuni al tri, e quando veniamo a Firenze ti fard vedere il libro, e riconoscerai i quadri.

Mi pare che non c’e altro a dirti—dird dunque a rivederci, e molti saiuti di me e della signora a tutta la famiglia.

D. H. Lawrence.

To A. Huxley.

Dear Aldous,—

Hotel Principe Alfonso, Palma de Mallorca.

17th May, 1929.

Your p.c. on the 7th reached me to-day—don't know why it took ten days. You should put Spain. I have sent you a letter and p.c. lately—hope you have them—we came to this address three weeks ago.—We didn’t go into that house as I had a shot of malaria and didn’t want to risk the climate—but it hasn't come back. It's rather lovely here—so fresh and calm and sunny—but there is a certain something about the atmosphere, a human deadness and a foolish ineffectual sort of resistance, to life, which bores me and makes me not want to stay. With all their tiresomeness I like the Italians much better, and the French too. They are more alive, more frank, more life-generous. The Spaniards seem like boxes of something shut up and gone stale. We want to leave at end of the month, and hesitate very much whether to take the steamer straight to Marseilles, or whether to get the boat to Alicante, and go to Burgos, Granada, Seville, Cordoba, Toledo and Madrid, then on to Italy. Frieda is again moaning for a house, so I think we’ll look in Italy—either Massa or Lago di Garda—we may as well try to get something quite soon, so as not to remain in space. Maria, what do you really think about Massa?

When do you leave for Italy? I must say the Mediterranean is a great comfort—and there are stretches of wild coast, and little uninhabited bays on this island, really lovely, like the first day of time—only, queerly enough, a bit haunted. I feel old and sullen ghosts on the air, and am rather frightened.

I have seen proofs of most of my pictures—-some rather good, some lamentable. But I think it’ll be a nice book—and they've already got orders for about £2,500 worth—orders for all the vellum copies—ten—at £50 each. Figurati. I doubt Stephenson can't give you a copy, so shall give Maria one of mine.

D. H. L.

Hotel Principe Alfonso,

Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

To R. and N. Nichols.                    18 May, 1929.

Deap Nichols and Mrs. Nichols,—

I was very sorry to hear from Nell that you, Robert, had rather crocked up in Paris and gone on being crocked up in England. That’s really too bad. Take it from me, you ought to live in the south, in the sun—not here, I think, but some place like Rapallo, where it’s rather lovely and not too far. I agree this isn’t a good place for work. I have tried to paint two pictures—and each time it’s been a failure and made me all on edge. So I accept the decree of destiny, and shall make no further attempt to work at all while I am in Spain.

I think we shall leave this day fortnight on the boat for Alicante, and make a little tour of Spain, and then sail Barcelona to Genoa and look for a house in Italy. If we find one, I hope you’ll come next winter within reach, that would be fun if we could see one another.

It is brilliant and sunny here, but the wind is still cold if you sit in it. We went to Gala Rajada for a long week-end, with Mrs. Murray and Mrs. Leopold. It is on the N.E. coast, and in some ways rather lovely, lonely clean little bays with pine trees down to the shore. But the queer raw wind caught my chest—yet the sun was amazing, so bright, the sea so pure. Mrs. Murray and Mrs. L. are leaving on Tuesday—we have been just four in the hotel—the tall waiter has gone to Paris. Now we shall be alone with an elderly American man who giggles and is a fool. But not for long.

Send us a line and I do hope you are better. I still duly eat the Bemax for breakfast—"Begin Breakfast, etc.----” and I

think of you each time.

Many good wishes from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Dear Jack,—

Y our letter came on here—I had your other one, too, with photographs of the children—felt so distressed about your wife.

But you see, my dear chap, leaving aside all my impatience and “don’t care," I know well that we “missed it," as you put it. I don't understand you, your workings are beyond me. And you don’t get me. You said in your review of my poems: “this is not life, life is not like that." And you have the same attitude to the real me. Life is not like that—ergo, there is no such animal. Hence my “don’t care.” I am tired of being told there is no such animal, by animals who are merely different. If I am a giraffe, and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me and say they know me are nice well-behaved dogs, there it is, the animals are different. And the me that you say you love is not me, but an idol of your own imagination. Believe me, you don’t love me. The animal that I am you instinctively dislike—just as all the Lynds and Squires and Eliots and Goulds instinctively dislike it—and you all say there's no such animal, or if there is there ought not to be—so why not stick to your position? If I am the only man in your life, it is not because I am I, but merely because I provided the speck of dust on which you formed your crystal of an imaginary man. We don't know one another—if you knew how little we know one another! And let’s not pretend. By pretending a bit, we had some jolly times, in the past, ut we all had to pretend a bit—and we could none of us keep it up. Believe me, we belong to different worlds, different ways of consciousness, you and I, and the best we can do is to let one another alone, for ever and ever. We are a dissonance.

My health is a great nuisance, but by no means as bad as all that, and I have no idea of passing out. We want to leave next week for a short tour in Spain—then go north. So don't think of coming to Mallorca. It is no good our meeting—even when we are immortal spirits, we shall dwell in different Hades.

801

Why not accept it. But I do hope your wife is getting better and the children are well and gay.

D. H. L.

Hotel Principe Alfonso, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

To Enid Hilton.                          20 May, 1929.

Dear Enid,—

I wonder if you are still there—send me a line if you get this. It was very nice of you to send all the information—I’ve written it down in my book. But it doesn’t look as if it would easily get hot. It’s lovely and sunny here, but not a bit too hot—very nice, in fact.

We think of staying another fortnight, then doing a little tour in Spain, if it won’t be too strenuous, and then taking a boat to Genoa. Frieda of course pines for the Mirenda, or something like it—so I think the best we can do is to go to Italy and find ourselves a proper house—not a half, like the Mirenda and fit it up for good and for keeps. I think, all in all, that's the best—and Italy most suitable. We may sell the ranch.

When you go back to London will you please post for me the complete MSS. of The Escaped Cock—both parts—to

Mrs. Harry Crosby,

19, rue de Lille,

Paris, 7%

They are rather important, so please register them safely.

And I expect you’ll find the exhibition about ready to open. I’ve had 21 of the proofs of my pictures—some of the reproductions quite good—I think it will make a stunning book— wish I could give you one, but my poor six copies are all demanded, what with family and obligations.

I do hope you’ve had a jolly holiday—later on you must come where we are.

Regards to both.

Hotel Principe Alfonso,

Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

1 o L. E. Pollinger.                      22nd May, 1929.

Dear Pollinger.—

No, I am not going to die just yet, I hope. My bronchials have been acting up and making me swear, these last ten days— but I eat my dinner as usual, and go out to tea and luncheon here and there. How anxious they must be to have me dead, my fellow scribes and countrymen! I won’t oblige them if I can help.

1 hear Stephenson’s book of my pictures is nearly ready—and apparently he has orders for half of them—perhaps more by now—this was two weeks ago and all the ten vellum copies at 50 guineas ordered. Be sure and see the book is properly copyrighted,

Well, I hope we’ll smooth out all these little businesses for the moment—but this country makes one feel extra pugnacious and disinclined for compliance.

Regards,

D. H. Lawrence,

You will see I altered the 250 back to 150, for the nonce!

Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

To D. V. Lederhandler.                   25 May, 1929.

Dear Mr, Lederhandler,—

I think in Florence I have got some nice little essay or story in MS. that I can send you for your $60—since that is what you want. But it must wait awhile till I go to Italy, as the MSS. are locked in my private trunks, and I never sell any I only sola one in my life, really—to a personal friend. Write to me again, c/o Orioli to remind me, and I’ll tell you what I ve got, so you can choose.

And I will give you these two pages of the rough draft of one or two of the Pansies poems—due to come out in oook form jus now. I shall burn the rest of the rough drafts—I hate such stuff about—but as I have nothing else, you can have these two pp. if you want them. I'm sorry I crossed them out, but I did that to all the poems as I got them into shape.

Don't tell anybody 1 gave you these, or I shall have no peace.

Thanks for the news about the pirates. Perhaps we shall succeed in coming at something more definite, later on.

My book of pictures is ten guineas in English. It is nearly ready—and will be very nice, I think.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

To Speiser and Speiser.                    26 May, 1929.

My dear Mr. Speiser,—

That is very kind of you, to say you will try to hunt out the pirates of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and of Sun. Perhaps you disapprove of my novel—if you have read it—myself, naturally, I stand by it, through all time. But it would be a service to literature if this unabashed piracy were stopped, or even checked. There have appeared at least three pirated editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in U.S.A.—I have seen copies of two. But I have not seen a copy of the first, the Philadelphia bootleg edition, though I have a description of it—and I hear —----

—-------sells it steadily. It ought to be more easy to lay hold

of the pirates of Sun, a short story included in my volume, The Woman Who Rode Away, published and copyrighted by Alfred A. Knopf last year. Later a little unexpurgated edition of the story was privately printed in Paris—only very slightly different from the Knopf version—and sold in New York by a bookseller called, I think, Harry Marks: I don’t know him. I asked Edwin Rich to see if he could find out who pirated Sun (Rich is manager of Curtis Brown, Ltd., my literary agents in New York)—but I don’t know what success he had. Also Harry Marks—or Harry B. Marks—said he would try to prosecute the same pirates. But I hear nothing further.

Myself, I write in all honesty and in the sincere belief that the human consciousness needs badly now to have the doors

freely opened into the dark chamber of horrors of "sex'—it is no chamber of horrors really, of course—and I feel the language needs to be freed of various artificial taboos on words and expressions. All these taboos and shut doors only make for social insanity. ¹ do my work, and take the reward of insult, since it is to be expected. But surely all sincere work is worth some bit of protection.

If there is any information I can give you, will you please address me c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd.,

6, Henrietta St.,

Covent Garden,

London, W.C.2.

I his is quickest. And anyhow many thanks for your sympathy.

And if you can assure me that the----— Bookshop is not

concerned in any way in pirating my books, I shall be very glad. But tell me if you find it is otherwise. It’s hard to know.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel Principe Alfonso, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

To Rhys Davies.

26 May, 1929.

Dear Davies,—

Well, I'm very sorry about your not getting your novel published just now. But don’t you think of altering it a lot. They’ll swallow it in a while, when they’ve got over their Jixing constipation. My word, I’d give ’em jalap—and I hope the election will. Never you mind. For the time being, write short stories, and see about getting one done in a limited edition. And damn all their frightened little eyes.

If you find out when Dorothy Warren's show is coming off, then my sister will come down for it, and if you wrote to her you could meet her then. But go to the Midlands one day. And don’t go to Julian Huxley’s if you don’t want to. Aldous has been suffering acutely from a stiff-neck—stiff-necked, and 805 uncircumcised generation. They are leaving for Italy next week, having come to hate that house mortally.

It is really rather lovely here, warm and sunny and blue, and so remote, if one goes a bit away. Of course we know a number of residents—come-to-lunch kind of thing—but nice. 1 o-day we motored along the coast to a lonely bay with pine-trees down to the sea, and the Mallorquin servants cooked Spanish rice over a fire in a huge pot, and the others bathed, and I sat under a tree like the ancient of days and drank small beer— microscopic bock—and it was really very lovely, no one in the world but us. This is a wonderful place for doing nothing—the time passes rapidly in a long stretch of nothingness—broken by someone fetching us out in a motor, or somebody else in a donkey-cart. It is very good for my health, I believe. This letter is my most serious contribution to literature these six weeks. There's something I like about the Island—but the people are dullish. There is a great fume again about a house. "I must have a house of my own now.” Meanwhile we have this rather large, striped hotel almost to ourselves—and have the run of the establishment. It's very free. The food is very good, but so abundant—5 courses for lunch, and then a lot of fruit—that I get frightened. The servants eat themselves tight, you never saw such a full-fed lot. That’s Mallorca. I never want to see roast chicken or fried chicken again. The hotel bill comes to about ten quid a week—exactly—and they say I’m fatter. I'm certainly fuller. I still haven’t got used to the wine, but I have a hollow suspicion that you’d even like it—sugary.— I drink this canary be-pissed beer.

Yes, go to the Zoo. The animals don’t care for gin! I didn’t see Henderson’s stammerings on me, and don’t send them unless I shall feel like buttered asparagus (it’s all wild here) when I read it.

Remember us very nicely to your mother and sister; tell them to be good and sporting, and trip out to Italy or Spain next year. C’est le premier pas qui coute—and they took it this spring. Keep up your fine enthusiasm for scrubbing the bedroom floor, and tell me when you’re going broke.

Belle cose!

Forte dei Marmi, Italy.

do Curtis Brown, Ltd., 6, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, London, W.C.z.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.               23 June, 1929.

Dear Brett,—

I want to write to you about my manuscripts. You know I keep them as a sort of nest-egg. One day I shall need them. So I depend on them for my reserve. For this reason I don't sell them. I’ve only sold one manuscript in all my life and that is the complete version of Sun which Harry Crosby printed unexpurgated in Paris, and he gave me a hundred gold dollars. Beyond that, nothing. Yet I am always hearing of MSS. of mine for sale in dealers’ catalogues—things that have been sneaked from me by various people—friends and otherwise. And it's very unpleasant.

So now I want you to get straight for me the MSS. I left behind at the ranch. Will you please make me a list of them and let Mabel and Mr. Read, of the Taos Bank check the list; then take a safe-deposit in my name in the Taos Bank, put the manuscripts in it, and give the key to Mr. Read to hold for me. At the same time will you give the deeds of the ranch, all the papers connected with the property which we left in the iron trunk, to Mr. Frayne, the lawyer—I suppose he is still there— for him to see if the holding is properly recorded in Court; and then give these papers to Mr. Read to put in the safe-deposit with the rest.

I trust you to do this faithfully, and as soon as possible after you receive this letter.

Then I want you to tell me exactly what manuscripts I gave you: and which exactly you sold to Mrs. Hare: and how much she paid. Also if you have sold any others elsewhere. You will see that I need to keep track of all my manuscripts, sold or unsold, and I need to know the price they went at, in fairness to any future purchaser. So please answer me quite plainly and definitely, or I shan't know what to think.

We left Majorca last Tuesday—it was too hot. Frieda has gone to England to see her children, and to see about the pictures. The show began on June 14th, and I've heard no definite news •—a long incomprehensible telegram here—saying show great success—press critique bored or scurrilous and apparently some pictures sold, but I can’t make out quite what. I he book is out—a very handsome volume—it has sold over zoo at ten guineas, and all the zoguinea ones (ten). I am keeping you a copy, it is very swanky—but not sending it until I know how to get it through. Anyhow, there has been no interference, so far, in England: so perhaps U.S.A, will not kick.

I am staying here in a pensions for a fortnight or so—Aldous and Maria have a little house—then I shall probably go to Switzerland to meet Frieda. I hear Maria Christina is in Europe, but where, I don’t know. I wonder what is happening about the sale of the ranch. I think almost certainly we shall come over this autumn to settle up—or if I don’t come, then Frieda will come alone. We must get it wound up now, it’s no use dragging on.

I shall trust your loyalty to do the things I ask you to do, in this letter.

D. H. L.

Florence,

To Maria Huxley.

Wed,, io. vii. 29.

You have heard of the catastrophe, of course—iz pictures seized and in gaol—yours among them—and threatened to be burnt—auto-da-fe—you have no luck in that picture. Frieda is staying on in London, don’t know how long—had a telegram, nothing else. Arrived with a nasty cold, in bed two days— miser la—guess I got it sitting too late on the beach on Friday, as it was all in my legs and lower man—better now—out this evening for the first time. Shall leave Sunday or Monday, I think for Bavaria—not at all hot here, by good luck—more anon.

D.H. L.

Hotel Goldner Lowen,

~ T _ _                    Lichtenthal, Baden -Baden.

Io L. E. Pollinger.                               T ,

b                            20 July, 1929.

Dear Pollinger,—

Well, here we are, all right—it was so hot yesterday, we just did nothing, but last night a long and lurid thunderstorm poured out endless white electricity and set us free-—now it’s delicious and cool and fresh.

I hear there is another edition (pirated) of Lady C. about to appear in Philadelphia, illustrated this time. My hat! what will it be like. . . .

Phis is a nice old Gasthaus, quiet rooms on the garden, 9 marks a day pension. Lichtenthal is about i| miles from Baden, but it joins on now and is incorporated—and there is the tram. Even I can remember when it was a separate village. The tram only takes a few minutes—or you can walk along the Lichtenthaler-Allee, under the trees by the Oos, all the way. Baden itself is incurably 1850, with the romance and the pathos and the bathos of Turgenev rather than Dostoievsky. Just now the trees are very green, the roses very pink and very numerous, the fountains very white, the visitors not many, and the music also a little pathetic. It would amuse you for a little while. But my wife and her mother want us to go on Wednesday up to the Plattig—about 3,000 feet up—only an hour or so drive from here. Everybody is crazy for altitude—except me, and I don’t like it very much. But I think every hill-top in Germany over 2,000 feet must be crowded with Germans, stepping heavenwards. That’s why Baden is comparatively empty. I don’t know if you’d like to come to the Plattig—have never been there myself—and I don't know how long we shall stay. I’ll tell you, and perhaps if it’s nice you’ll come. Or come here when we descend again. I’m sure you’d like the Lowen, and Baden-Baden, for a bit. Germany seems to me, here, very quiet, prosperous, cheaper, and not so shoving or assertive any more. You must come for a week or so, either to the ’lattig, or to here. Better write to the Ludwig-W ilhelmstift.

Ever,

Kurhaus Pldttig,

Bet Buhl (Baden).

To L. E. Pol linger.                        25 th July, 1929.

Deaf Poliinger,—

....... I had the bright idea that perhaps we might print the first version of Lady C. as it stands. In my usual way, I wrote the whole novel, complete, three times. The first time is almost quite proper—but very much tamer than the second and third time—and a good deal different—quite a different gamekeeper, for example—a little man of the people, merely of the people—I glanced at the MS. when I was in Florence—it is there, bound up complete. I could have it sent here and go over it—and could, I believe, easily make it passable; but shall I? Shall I print a crude first version? I cannot expurgate the real one— physical impossibility.

Quite cool up here—had a huge storm—it’s the usual Kurhaus with 150 people—and I am rather unhappy, and wish I was back in the south, and could see the olive trees and the Mediterranean. J hate these great black pine forests—and this heavy, though good food. I should pine away quite soon if I had to stay—fortunately I haven’t.

If you were coming to Baden I should descend willingly to the Lowen again. Else we shall soon go to Bavaria and then over the Brenner to the Garda. I hate the north.

D H. I .

Write tot Hotel Pldttig, Badischer Schwarzwald, Germania.

To G, Orioli.                          Monday (no date).

Dear Pino,—

Suddenly I have the bright idea that the first version of Lady C. may be the right one for Knopf and Seeker. I believe it has hardly any ------ or —-----» and no address to the

—----; in fact hardly any of the root of the matter at all. You

remember the first version is the one you had bound for Frieda, and it is in your flat. I wish you would just glance through the so-called hot parts, and tell me how hot they are. I'm sure they are hardly warm. And I'm sure I could expurgate the few flies out of that Virgin ointment—whereas our Lady C. I cannot, absolutely cannot, even begin to expurgate.

If you think we can go ahead with the first version for the public edition, then perhaps you had better send me the MS. along. I suppose I shall have to have it typed out, since the whole thing will be different from our Lady. Perhaps I can find a typist here in Germany. I shall not risk sending the MS. to England.

It is pretty hot here—especially in the afternoon. But the evening and night and morning are cool. The hotel is very pleasant—an old Gasthaus with a garden and trees, where we sit out all day and drink beer and do nothing. But the women want to go up to a higher altitude, either the Plattig—about an hour from here—or Herrenalp, a bit further. Frieda is going to look at the Plattig this morning.

She is very well, and as usual pretends to love it here, and as usual secretly rather hates it. The Germans are most curious. They love things just because they think they have a sentimental reason for loving them—das Heimatland, der Tannenbaum, das Brunnele, das Bachlein—the very words send a German into swoon of love, which is as often as not entirely false. They make up their feelings in their heads, while their real feelings all go wrong. That’s why Germans come out with such startling and really silly bursts of hatred. It’s the result of never living from their real feelings, always from the feelings they invent in their heads. And that’s why, as a bourgeois crowd, they are so monstrously ugly. My God, how ugly they can be! And it’s because they never live direct from their spontaneous feeling; except in the matter of eating and drinking, God help us!

I wish you were here to laugh at them with me. 1 daren t say much to Frieda—She really hates them worse than I do, and flies into a state. My God, why are people never straightforward?

But the garden is so pleasant and still and green, the food is good, my mother-in-law is 78; and quiet now. I go by myself to the Kurhaus, and sit under the trees listening to the orchestra and looking at the amazing grotesques of people. But I should go much oftener if you were here to go with me.—The world is fantastic.

I do hope you are not killing yourself in that hot hole of a Montecatini. Don’t die of heart failure to cure your liver.—I do so wonder if Aldous is with you.—Don’t forget the Impruneta.

D. H. L.

How is Douglas?

Kurhaus Plattig.

To Miss Pearn.                           2 August, 1929.

Dear Nancy Pearn,—

I am sending you the article which Everyman asked me to write for their series—A Religion for the Young. This is my idea of a religion for the young—don’t know if they’ll print it— and don’t care very much, for I have a rather poor opinion of Everyman—and I’m sure they can pay nothing. But it’s a nice article, much too good for them, so take care of it for me, and please read the beginning and correctmy quotations wherewrong.

And no good asking me to do stories of anything else just now—I'm quite out of mood. I hate it here—it’s bitter cold, rainy, pine woods black as hell, and 150 Kurgdste in this hotel, somehow weighs on my spirits horribly. I don’t feel "good" in Germany this time. However, we are going down from this beastly mountain to-morrow-—we are here for my mother-in-law's sake, she is 78, and insanely only thinks of clutching at life to live till she’s 100. It’s too awful. But to-morrow we go down to more normal life.

Hotel Lowen, Lichtenthal bei Baden-Baden. Be so good as to tell the other depts, will you—though I think we shall stay only about a week—then go south probably to Lake Como, for I feel no good at all here: don’t feel well: icy wind has cut my chest, after we had stewed in heat down in the valley. Ye gods!

I was thinking of those articles—essays—of mine which Murry printed in the Adelphi—four or five, a few years ago. I 812 wonder if you have copies of them. .1 hey would come in handy for a book. I have no copies of them, but Murry would have. And I expect he'd tell you exactly what articles of mine he ever printed. here must be lots that are not on your list. There must be quite enough for a book, really.

I ve got a little novel—but I want to re-write it—if ever I get into the mood. It’s about 30,000 words I suppose.

D H. L.

Hotel Lowen,

Lichtenthal bei Baden-Baden, Allemagne.

To H. and C. Crosby.                    2 August, 1929.

Dear Harry and Caresse,—

It is a long time since I heard from you, you have answered none of my letters. I have been thinking perhaps you got cold feet about the Escaped Cock, since the ridiculous fuss over my pictures again, and since your Harry Marks came to Paris—if he came. And I want to tell you not to bother for a moment about the thing, if you don’t want to. If circumstances have so worked that it makes it inconvenient for you to publish the story, will you only please let me have back the MSS.—you have all my copies—so that I can make other arrangements. Believe me, I shall understand perfectly, if you tell me your plans are changed.

We are here for another week or so, then I think we shall go down to Lake Como. It is rather cold and rather rainy, and I don’t like Germany this year. I want to go away. And as soon as it gets cool enough, we shall go to Italy and look for a house to live in.

Meanwhile I hope you are having a nice time and not too many complications. You are due to be in Cannes, but I suppose you're elsewhere.

You, Caresse, please answer my letter if Harry is otherwise involved, and tell me how you are and how things are, and let me know about the story.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Hotel LGwen,

Lichtenthal,

Baden-Baden.

To A. and M. Huxley.                    6 Aug., 1929.

Dear Aldous and Maria.—

We had both your letters—up on that beastly Plattig that I loathed so much, and where I nearly perished of cold if I put my nose out of doors—the hotel being heated up. Horrible! Save me from Hoheluftkurorte. It is quite nice here—an old inn, we sit in the garden and eat fat red plums—and the weather is just right, sunny and just pleasant for meals out of doors.

Aldous, I didn’t know Frieda had been turning her heavy artillery on you. She only confessed very proud of herself, after I had your letter. Anyhow, let’s hope it’ll be another shot in the bows of the old buffers, your article.

I haven’t any news—the case is supposed to be on Thursday —I expect, anyhow, they’ll burn the four books just to show that they can burn something—their own fingers also, I hope. Am exceedingly bored by it all, and wish I had never had a show. Never again. But one does forget what they are like, the swine people.

The Pansies unexpurgated are ready and will be sent to you this week, I expect. I must say they’ve made rather an awful book of it, filled up the pages like a cheap printed report, and paper absolutely scarce. I pity the poor devils who pay £2 a copy—but I can't help it. Stephenson lent his name as printer, but he’ll look down his nose when he sees how badly the book is planned and executed. I’m disappointed—but I can’t help it.

I wonder how you are feeling up in your mountains. I felt rotten here—I hope you won’t also get cold and rain. I am seeing a doctor, so we shall probably be two more weeks here at least. After that, I don’t know. I felt incapable of a plan. Only this autumn I want to find a house, either in Italy or Marseilles. I think Italy for preference.—I hear the Crosbys sent Frieda a gramophone to Italy—I hope not c/o you, or you’ll have all the fuss. I so carefully asked him, please to send 814 nothing till we had a house—but there you are! People! They are still in Paris.

I feel very piano here in Germany and incapable of much. A Gesangverein is just arriving with oak-wreaths round their heads and red ribbons—so we shall have music wherever we go, like the Lady of Banbury Cross. People do make efforts to keep it up.

D. H. L.

Hotel Lowen,

Lichtenthal, Baden-Baden.

To M. Huxley.                          12 Aug., 1929.

Deas Maria,—

Sorry your mountain is no better than ours—though it certainly is not worse. We are much better down here—ar old inn, with old garden with such nice trees, and I have a room with a balcony among the leaves, might be a sparrow. The weather has been very nice again, sunny and warm with a touch of autumn. I like it, really—but the atmosphere of Germany itself somehow makes one irritable. Frieda is really very irritable—but then she always is, in her native land. She never feels free, yet seems to hug the thing she isn’t free of, and altogether I just leave her alone. She has massage for her foot, and all sorts of baths at the Kuranstalt, and takes it out that way. Yesterday, evening, we celebrated her 50th birthday —we were nine people, five of whom were over seventy, and we drank Pfirsich Bowie with 2 Flaschen Sekt in it, and ate trout and ducks—very nice. It was quite nice—but the Germans themselves are very depressed, and they leave me hollow. There are lovely roses on the table, and I dread the effect on Frieda of four large boxes of chocolates.

I have been going to the old Medizinabrat who examined me two years ago. He says the place on the lung very much healed, the bronchial condition better but not very much better, and the asthma no better. I needn’t bother about the lung but must look after the broncs and asthma—must not go to high altitudes, not even 3,000 feet—and am best living near the sea— 815 and otherwise there’s not much to be done, except avoid damp, sudden changes, and dust: keep as even temperature as possible, and not try to walk or climb much, as I should never exert the asthma to make me pant.—I knew it all. Meanwhile another Medizinabrat gives me a little treatment for my ear, and life is a jest and all things show it, and my name’s Mr. Gay.

Don’t ask me what we shall do in Sept. While we stay in Germany I am sort of paralysed—can’t come to any conclusion—and Frieda is worse. But we shall look for a house. I suppose you have seen about the pictures. I merely had two telegrams, they both say: "Writing," but not a word has appeared yet. At the moment I despise and detest the very name Englishman. They are minchioni, the best of them, and foully "pure,” white as lepers. Pah!

Well, that's about all. We shall be here ten more days, anyhow, I suppose. Remember me to Costanza and Ekkie, if they are still there.

D. H. L.

I’m sorry Aldous isn’t well—hope he’s not in for one of those long psychological-organical changes that men get, like the change of life in women.

Hotel Lowen,

Lichtenthal, Baden-Baden.

To Catherine Carswell.                     12 Aug., 1929.

Dear Catherine,—

I was glad to have your letter to-day and to know you really do like the pictures. It pleases me very much when people genuinely respond to them: and you know, the peasants loved them, at the Mirenda: and the proprietress of the hotel at Bandol loved the four I did there—and the postman, an intelligent young Swiss, used to stand and stare at those I painted in Gsteig. It never occurred to any of them to be shocked. Yet people who called themselves my dear friends were not only shocked but mortally offended by them. But they were just bourgeois. I could see my sister Ada genuinely loved them. There seems to be no middle line.

The police-case business bores and disgusts me and makes me feel I never want to send another inch of work to England, either paint or pen. Why are those morons and canaille allowed to insult one ad lib., while one is defenceless? England is a lily-livered country, when it comes to purity.

Your Whitman joke is amusing, but, alas! it would only be played once more at my expense. These people are nastier than you imagine, and it only needs a little more to start them putting pressure on the French or Italian Govts, to prosecute me for producing and issuing obscenity. I do not want to find myself in gaol, as a final insult—with a little vague sympathy in the far distance. No, for God's sake, leave my unfortunate name alone just now.

I am glad you are out of the studio and having a rest from housework, and getting along with Burns. What a thrill when the book is finally done.

We shall stay here a little longer, then begin to move south. We want to go to Italy to find a house—it's becoming imperative to have some sort of a place of our own. Meanwhile, it’s really very nice here—an old inn with garden quiet and shady, where one can sit all day if one likes.

No, the trouble is, once the police attack you, you are entirely at their mercy—so there it is.

Ever,

D. H. L.

The poem* is delightful—but I don’t understand all the words.

Lowen, Lichtenthal, Baden-Baden♦

To M and A. Huxley.                   20 Aug., 1929.

Dear Maria and Aldous,—

Glad you are down again in the proper warm—it's rather cold here, and we have arranged to leave on Saturday and go to Bavaria, where I’m afraid it will be colder. Seems a unny summer, started so hot and then left off. Everything here so intensely green, it quite hurts. Yet there is a chill autumn feeling in the

* A love dialogue by Dunbar.

air. I feel more and more one should never go far from the Mediterranean!

I suppose that you know by now that the pictures are safe— Dorothy has them back, and she will give Hutchinson the North Sea for you. I'm sure you will like it. But they burnt four of the picture books, including one of the vellum copies, and somehow it makes me very mad. Why can’t they burn some of their own idiocy, and leave things alone they don’t understand.

A bore that gramophone! Could you somehow deposit it with Pino? Perhaps you will be going to Florence? Or even Costanza might kindly take it. I’m so sorry you are troubled with it, but really it’s not my fault.

I hear most of the new Pansies are sold, but they haven’t sent out the gift copies yet—some delay or other getting them from the printers.

Titus has sold the first 3,000 Lady C. and is printing again.

I don’t think we shall come to Forte. If we go to Bavaria we shall stay till mid September, then come south by way of Garda. Frieda still limps, but her foot is much better. I'm not in a good mood at all-—can’t do anything and am altogether disagreeable. I want to move from here—have had enough of Germany and relatives for the moment. Another axiom is that relatives and family relations are always bad for one, and should be taken in the smallest doses possible. These five weeks here were two too many.

The photographs were very jolly, I'm sure the boy has a good time. Poor Jehanne, I often think of her. Her shawl is so much admired—and she’s so down on her luck. And once one goes down it’s so hard to come up—my health has taught me that.—I shall send a post card with new address.

D. H. L.

Hotel Ldwen, Lichtenthal, Baden-Baden.

To Phys Davies.                          24 Aug., 1939.

Dear Davies,—

Your letter this morning—and what a dismal picture of the Welsh countryside! Do you think people are going to die 818 away into a sort of mushroom state, or, when they get low enough, will a new sort of life come in and make them tackle their conditions? Only God knows. But I loathe this mushroomy, fishy apathy. What’s the good of despair unless it’s lurid!

I’m worried about your novels. The problem is, would the big, bloated public swallow you anyhow, at this state of affairs? If Gollancz doesn’t come across, then come to terms pretty quick with the Mandrake for one of your books: ask for at least £150 down, on receipt of manuscript. They ought to give it you at once. And urge that they publish before Christmas. It seems to me, that if you catch them on the rise of the wave, the Mandrake ought to serve your purpose very well. They have aroused a certain interest—and there is a big public waiting to get anything which they think is not orthodox, does not come via the "good" publishers. There is the enormous "proper" public, of Heinemann or Gollancz. But I believe the "improper" public is almost as big, if not bigger, so long as they are fairly safe. For men like you and me the "proper" public is-already a dead horse—certainly so, in my case. But then I am amazed to realise how huge, and how much more potent the improper public is. And it is on this the Mandrake will draw. And they may have a run of real success—I would risk them, if I were you. But I don’t think they’ll have a long run. Stephenson is another sort of mushroom—he grows too fast. And the big publishers, after a while, will quash them. But for the moment they may just be your ticket. That’s how it looks to me. I’d gladly write any sort of foreword for you—but better not. In the first place because of the police, in the second, it’s not really good for your reputation. But if you or Stephenson think of any way in which I could be of use, let me know. I could certainly do a review.

I want Charlie Lahr to start a little fortnightly rag called The Squib, or something like that—just to rag them all, to get at them and lampoon them, make fun of them, jeer at them and altogether have a good time. We would have a little thing of about ten pages, not much bigger than this note-paper in size, and we’d all have noms de plume—T’d be David Dolittle and sell it at anything up to sixpence—do a few numbers just for 819 fun, and if it got really started, put it on a money basis—a business basis. For the beginning we’d find the money between us—costs ought to be very slight—I'd stand a few quid. he trouble is a good editor. Would you like to try it?—perhaps with Mrs. Lahr to help. We want short little peppery things, pansies, tiny articles. I'm sure you'd be good at squibs. Your idea of the lily-white policemen of London fainting with shock at the sight of one of my nudes would make an Ai squib. The thing to do would be to seize on the ridiculous points in politics-literature and newspapers—and people-—and just ridicule them—watch the press and the books and just get a laugh out of them.

We leave here to-morrow for Bavaria, and I'm glad. Baden is quite lovely in its way, and everybody quite nice, in their way, yet one feels that the Germans, underneath, aren’t nice. And these huge German women sitting round one like mountains that would never even know if they sat on one—I'm sure their bottoms would be too tough for my poor pinching—they simply give me the horrors. I want to go somewhere where the women are a bit smaller: and where their hats don't sit so menacingly on their heads. You can get me in Bavaria c/o Dr. Max Mohr,

“Wolfsgrube,”

Rottach-am-Tegemsee, Oberbayern.

But I shall send an address.

In Sept, we want to go down to Italy to look for a house—and let's hope the gods will guide us.

Tell your mother and sister I'm very glad they stick up for me. They are quite right, I'm quite a nice person, really. God knows why I should have so much mud poured over me.

The poor young man of the faggots and peas (what a good pansy there is there!); have you seen any of his stories or poems? And what are they like?

If you get much more boost in the Welsh papers you’ll soon be able to pose as the national bard, and wear a crown of leaks—or is it written leeks? porri,

D.H L.

Kaffee Angermaier,

Pot tach-cun- Tegernsee, Oberbayern.

To W. E. Hopkin.                  zo Aug., 1929.

Dear Willie,—

We are here among the mountains—rather a lovely place— and very peaceful, a little inn smelling terrifically of cows— but we eat out of doors under the trees, and live in a little house to ourselves. It is much more the old Germany here. I simply can’t stand the new Germany—it’s awful, so empty and depressing and in a hurry to get nowhere.

I think in about a fortnight’s time we shall go down to Italy again. Give me the south, the Mediterranean.

1 m sure Eastwood is a dreary place now—and it will go on getting drearier, unless something happens—if anything can happen, in happy England.

Hope you had a good time with Stephenson—you two are sure to get on together. But you have to face the fact that the socialists dislike the Pansies much more than the aristocrats or even the cultured bourgeois do: ergo,, the socialists are merely little bourgeois over again,

All good wishes from us both, also to your wife.

D. H. Lawrence.

Kaffee Angermaier, Rottach-am-Tegernsee, Oberbayern.

To A. Huxley.                       5 Sept.

Dear Aldous,—

Had your letter—also Maria’s—glad all goes gaily. Here we’ve been so-so. On Sunday Frieda had a bone-setter from a neighbouring village—a farmer. He felt her foot, said: Na!

ist ’raus!—shoved with his thumbs, a little click. Fertig! he said, and so it was. It was really funny. The bone was off the centre, resting on the side of the socket. He just pushed it back, the whole thing took a minute. But he said if it had

821                        DD

gone a few more months it would have been too late, as the socket fills in to fit itself up to the displaced bone.—And I had paid 12 guineas to the Park Lane specialist, —: and four guineas to the masseuse in Baden: and there is still the bill of the long-bearded Herr Medizinabrat ------ to pay—

also a sort of specialist. Voila les medecins! I call it monstrous. If she hadn't come here she’d have limped all her life, and now already she goes quite normal, only a little bit of stiffness. "Ach! wear it off like a rusty key!” said the man.

The next is, I’ve been in bed all week feeling a wreck—and two doctors, freundlich, descended on me. One is a new, very modern one, who was a Pfarrer—a priest—and has a Klinik in Munchen and does wonders, chiefly with diet and breathing. He wasn’t the ordinary Artz at all—says that in a few weeks, with diet and a bit of breathing, I ought to be well. He says that we are all undergoing a great change in our animal man— that includes woman, of course. But especially men between 42 and 49 are in a state of change. The new animal man will be different from the old—and already demands different food and different rhythms—but he is given only old food and old rhythms, and so gets poisoned. He says mine is partly poison from unwanted food—and I know that’s true. Especially heavy German food is poison to me. He says, go back to simple food. The Roman legions conquered the world on millet porridge— he says he gets amazing results by substituting millet porridge for bread and potatoes, etc. Then as much raw food as possible —fruit, salads, etc.—no coffee, but tea if you like it—no vinegar or strong acid—otherwise pretty well anything plain—roast beef and so on—beer—a little wine—but no cake and pastry— and no rich sauces. The great thing is, if you can, to live mainly on the good, rather solid porridges—millet, oatmeal, barley— then raw fruits and vegetables—then yaourt and sour milk and light cheese—and nuts. He says my asthma comes from the vagus nerve, which controls the expansion of the bloodvessels—and the vagus nerve is in a constant state of reaction, from the stomach’s recoil from constant food which it doesn't really want, and consequent constant poisoning. He says this causes my cough, in a large measure, and I believe him. He says much more important than climate is not to be poisoned 822 by wrong food. And any food you feel you don’t really want is wrong.

Now I feel that this, on the whole, is true. I feel I don't want most of the food I eat, merely because it is the kind of food it is: even the bread.—So now for a new diet and a new man—I write it out in detail because I think it applies a good deal to Maria, and also to you, as well as to me.

We wanted to leave about 15th. Motor to Innsbruck—then to Verona—then perhaps to Venice for a few days to meet Dorothy Warren and settle about the pictures—then finally Florence, to cast round for a house. But this doctor threatens not to let me go till I am better—so we may be detained here a bit. Anyhow, I feel this is the right track, doctor or no doctor.

So heaven knows when we shall see you—we’ll have to leave it on the knees of the gods.

Griisse!

D. H. L.

Kaffee Anger maier, Rottach-am-Tegernsee, Oberbayern.

To Enid Hilton.                 Friday (Sept., 1929).

Dear Enid,—

I wonder if you’ve gone—and if not, if you could ask Stephenson to give you the two extra copies of the Paintings book which he says he has got for me—and bring them to Paris, and from Paris send them to G. Orioli, 6, Lungarno Corsini, Florence. It’s rather an awful bother to put you to, but perhaps you’d do it.

I've been so seedy this week—and in bed most of the time— but now a new doctor has descended on me—in fact, three doctors—and they say I can soon be well, with proper regime and diet: that the animal man is in a state of change, and needs a whole corresponding change of food and rhythm. I ieel this is true, and shall start in. They also say eliminate sa/t as much as possible, as there is excess of chlorine in the body—and 823

substitute some other salt in place of NaCl: the common salt. I feel that may be true. They say I can get well in quite a short time. I hope it’s true—it may be, really.

It’s very nice here, and if ever you want a fairly cheap place in the mountains—we have practically a house to ourselves for 3/6 a day, and take our meals in the little Gasthaus to which this house belongs. If the doctors don’t make me stay longer for a cure, we want to leave about the 15th for Italy. But they may hold on to me a bit longer. We must go soon and see about a house.

I told you, didn’t I, that Frieda had the village bone-setter for her foot—last Sunday. He set it in a minute, and now already she walks almost normal: just a bit of stiffness, no more.

D. H. L.

(6, Lungarno Corsini, Florence.) Rottach-am-Tegernsee, Oberbayern.

To D. V. Feder handler.             12 Sept., 1929.

Dear Mr. Lederhandler,—

Thanks for your letter and the $15. There is no hurry about that, anyhow,

I will remember you when I want to do something really privately in U.S.A.—which might be fairly soon.

Yes, the paralysis of Sir Clifford is symbolic—all art is au fond symbolic, conscious or unconscious. When I began Lady C., of course I did not know what I was doing—I did not deliberately work symbolically. But by the time the book was finished I realised what the unconscious symbolism was. And I wrote the book three times—I have three complete MSS.—pretty different, yet the same. The wood is of course unconscious symbolism—perhaps even the mines—even Mrs. Bolton.

Sincerely,

D. H. Lawrence.

Kaffee Angermaier,

Rottach-am-Tegernsee, Oherbayern. To Miss Moller.                  13 Sept., 1929.

Dear Miss Moller,—

Sc after lying low and economising, you are going to fly off into the wildest extravagances! Anyhow, it sounds a most wonderful trip, and I hope you’ll enjoy it tip-top.

Here we are still in the mountains, lovely weather—but as soon as it turns cold we shall descend. As usual, I don't like altitude, and Frieda does. Her foot is better—the bone was on the side of the socket. A bone-setter, a farmer, came on Sunday morning from a neighbouring village, put his thumb on the place, and said: It’s out! He gave it a shove, and it was in. The bone was resting on the side of the socket, the socket was filling in, and in a couple of months she would have been lame for life. Which is pretty awful, considering I had a bill for 12 guineas—and paid it, alas—from a Park Lane specialist for her—and there is another "famous" doctor unpaid still in Baden-Baden. They all said it was strained ligaments, and ordered massage. The farmer knew in the first touch. Why didn’t they? She now goes all right-—limps a bit out of habit and scare.

I, too, had a doctor—and they prescribed me arsenic and raw carrots. The arsenic made me feel worse, so I left it off, but I gnaw a carrot now and then. They say with diet I ought soon to be well. Contentissimo! if only it were so.

We are again uncertain in our movements. We are due to meet Dorothy Warren and her husband—of my picture show— perhaps in Venice. But they don’t give any date, so we are hung up. I should like to see them, to settle about the pictures. But they are the hardest birds to lay hold of.

When we have seen them we shall come on to Florence, and I hope you won’t have flown. We are most anxious to find a house to settle down in—but where, oh, where? I wish heaven would point me a finger. A place like that of your friend's near Lucca sounds awfully good—but how is one to find such a place?—I wonder if Nelly Morrison knows of anywhere. I would like a villa, not too big, but all to ourselves this time. I have lost your letter, so haven’t Nelly’s address. Do ask her if there is anything in the region where she now is. And I’ll send her a line, Via de’ Bardi. I wish there was something possible—I am really tired of hotels.

Now I hope you have had ram, and it is cooler. Frieda will be able to mount up to your terrace this time, if you are still there-—and I, poor broken-winded wretch, shall try. So meanwhile don’t get too excited over your trip—and many greetings.

D. H. Lawrence.

Rottach, Bavaria.

To Willard Johnson.                       14 Sept., 1929.

Dear Spud,—

Thanks for your letter and the countersigned list of MSS.— and thanks for sending the parcel. I enclose a little cheque to pay postage and my contribution to The Horse. I’m sad about those MSS. because many are missing, the complete handwritten manuscript of The Plumed Serpent has gone—that part that remains is merely duplicate—and many other things. It seems strange they should all have been stolen—and very depressing.

You ought to pay no customs on the poems at all, as it is the American edition pub. in New York by Cape at $5. So what do the fools want charging customs? There is no duty on books produced in U.S.A. I ordered you also a copy of Pansies—from Knopf.

I knew Idella had a baby, but never knew it died. That’s triste.

How does The Horse go?

My health is still pretty bad—and I don't know when we’ll get back to U.S.A, and New Mexico. I think we shall winter in S. of France. We'll be going down to Marseilles next week.

Write to me and tell me all the news. I read about Manby— very horrible. What was the final decision?—was he murdered?

If you send Idella’s address I will send her the collected poems.

Best from us both.

D. H. Lawrence.

Rottach.

To M. Huxley.             Sunday, 15th September, 1929.

Dear Maria.—

To-day you are supposed to be starting off for Paris—hope you'll have a nice trip—wonder if it's hot? Poured with rain in the night, but still quite warm, for here: they say, not been so warm for 105 years—why 105? We want to leave on Tuesday. I have come to the conclusion that I loathe all mountains, and never want to be among them again. Also I feel as if wild horses would never again drag me over the German frontier. Never come—at least, not now. Yet everybody here is extraordinarily nice, and the place quite beautiful —a few years ago I should have loved it. And now, unfortunately, I hate it—for no apparent reason.

We intend to go straight to the South of France—Cassis or Bandol. When I compare how cheerful and well I was there in Bandol, to what I am here, then I decide to go straight back and look for a house, there near Marseilles. I shall send you an address.

I began the cure, with rhythmic doses of arsenic and phosphorus. At the end of a week I was nearly dead (the new man! the animal basis!). So I dropped the drug side of the cure absolutely, and feel much better. But I go on fairly with the porridge and Rohkost—raw fruit and vegetables—and I'm sure that’s good for me. I feel in better tone already. But_ in Germany I feel so feeble, and as if I hardly want to live. How J hate it!

I feel I don’t want to go to Spain this winter—don’t want to make the effort. And at present I'm a bit fed up with travelling: should like a quiet winter, and if I have the energy at d initiative, paint.

Dorothy Warren and her husband were due tv meet us, and settle up about the pictures, etc. . . . But yesterday I had a wire from Wurzburg saying they couldn’t possibly come, must go on to Hungary to buy that jade stuff they sell in their Gallery-—ugly stuff.. ..

That was a horrible affair of Rose’s pretendant, poor devil! I must say, your family is unlucky in its men—your sisters. What a mercy the poor wretch is dead! One can’t really stand these horrors!

I suppose you’ve still not got your Pansies! More muddle. But I’ve had £300 for it, anyhow—and another £200 due. You’ll get a copy in Paris, in time.

Oh, how many liras did you pay for that gramophone? I’d no idea you paid that bill—-but if you paid that, I’m sure there were other bits as well. Don’t forget to tell me.

I do hope you’ll get your North Sea. The Warren has it at her house in Maida Vale.

Remember me to Jehanne, and I do hope she’s all right.

I wish I was south of the Alps.

Love,

D. H. L.

Hotel Beau Rivage,

Bandol, Var, France.

To L. E, Pollinger.                         29 Sept., 1929.

Dear Pollinger,—

I am a bit surprised that Faber & Faber risk the obscenity article—-don’t mind if they leave out Galsworthy and Barrie, why so much as mention them? No, if the thing appears publicly, I don’t want it to come as a private edition at all. But I want it to appear in U.S.A.—very important to me there —let me know about this.

The Black Sun Press in Paris have got their 500 edn. of The Escaped Cock just about ready. They will ship it over to U.S.A, en bloc—and I suppose it will be sold there in November. I didn't ask you to do anything about this because I know you do not want any more complications with authorities. The other thing is Orioli’s new little venture—a bit unexpected. I 828

did the translation for him a year ago, to launch him on a series of translations. I believe they’ll be nice. Aldous Huxley is at work on a Machiavelli play for the next volume, and Richard Aldington is doing another. As concerns Orioli's edition, that is just between him and me, like Lady C. But I have asked him if he will let you arrange, if possible, for public sales. Doctor Manente is absolutely "proper"—and very suitable for college reading. The other vols. will be the same. So that I think some firm like the Oxford Press might profitably take up the whole series. However, we must wait a day or two to see if Orioli is willing for you to handle the matter. Properly handled, though, the series could be sold very well, especially to American colleges and universities.

We have taken a little house here for six months—the Villa Beau Soleil—and expect to move in on Tuesday. I feel much better in the strong light of this sea. But still the thought of the Great British Public puts me off work entirely—either painting or writing. I cannot work for that G.B.P., I feel sick at the thought.

Very still and sunny here—olvidar—vergessen—oublier— dimenticare—forget—so difficult to forget.

D. H. L.

Villa Beau Soleil, Bandol, Var, France.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.              29 Sept., 1929.

Dear Brett,—

You will have had my letters—and the one where I suddenly got a slump, feeling there was a great loss of MSS. Fortunately came that list from Curtis Brown, showing most of those that I remembered at the ranch are now in New York. I was very relieved. It’s not so much the loss, as the sense of being robbed, which one minds. That little cupboard was utterly unsafe. And even while I was at the ranch myself, my books were stolen from the shelves. Of course, I knew quite well that you would not sell my MSS. in spite of what anybody said. But your 829

visitors are another matter; same as anybody’s visitors. And rhe MSS. I gave you, of course you do as you like with—only I wish you’d tell me. By the way, is my copy of The Rainbow still there?—bound in blue, the ist edition (Methuen).

Glad you are painting. I’ve had a blank summer—felt perfectly miserable in Germany, and ill, and couldn’t do a thing. Now, thank God, we are back at the sea, have taken this little house till end of March, and I feel better. I hope my elan or whatever it is will come back. I felt very down and out this summer. Not money, I’ve got plenty of money. Nowadays I can easily earn with my writing. But health and spirits. That disgusting affair in London over the pictures got me sick, real sick.

I hear an American dealer got 120 of the Paintings books, and apparently got them in all right. Wonder what he sells them at. Yours is in London. Worth 12 guineas now.

An awful bore about your copy of Collected Poems. But it’s the customs fault. A book produced in U.S.A, should not be held up for customs. Bynner got his copy straight through. I hope you had the Pansies from New York.

Shall be interested to see photographs of your paintings. When you do see mine, you won’t like them. They take a different line. But Vanity Fair will produce four in November; though you can’t judge from black and white.

I expect you’ll be in Taos by now. Here it’s still quite warm, bright sun, very still and soothing. Feel I need it. People are queer everywhere, and the world is going quite insane. But there are still a few quiet places that are liveable.

Glad you had the rights of the ditch fixed. One day, when you can get a chance, do try to get someone to fix the real boundaries of the ranch—locate them, I mean. If some old-timer can remember the corner tree, then you can take the sights. Old Willie Vandiver might know. You know the ranch property is really a square and is quite a bit bigger than the present enclosure. And the piece above the house, up towards the raspberry canyon, is really inside the bounds, and I should like that secured especially, as it keeps us private. If we could find out the corner marks, we could fence, bit by bit.

Hope your hand is better, that you cut cleaning the ditch. Hope all goes well!

D. H. L.

Beau Rivage.

To M Huxley.                    Sunday (? Oct, 1929).

Dear Maria,—

We’ve taken a little house, on the west shore—a sort of bungalow something like yours at Forte, only bigger—six rooms, bath, little central heating plant, hot and cold water— town supply of water, quite good and apparently abundant— bare garden, good garage—1000 frs. a month—and really rather lovely position. We expect to move in on Tuesday— Villa Beau SoleiL I think it will be nice and easy. There is a femme de menage, Camille, said to be very good. We have it till end of March—can keep it on if we wish.—You think you might come?—But there are no big old stone villas in great gardens, like Italy. One would have to hunt hard in the country to find a bit of a chateau place—it might be possible. These villas—modern, are much easier. And does one, after all, want a great stone house? Aren’t they a weariness? Here, where one is so much out of doors, a small house is so much more convenient—one opens the door on to a terrasse or balcony —we've got a big one—and there one has room. It is sunny and still. Already the visitors are nearly every one gone—the village is nearly as last year. But somehow a bit stunned by the mob of town people that have been here—it was a full season. They will come to life in another fortnight or so. The palm trees are recovered, nearly all, and have new green leaves. But the eucalyptus trees, that were so lovely and tressy, are dead, sawn off, they are now monuments of wood. So the place seems paler, and a bit bare, but Frieda says she likes it better. It is a very still afternoon, the sea very still, blue, but autumn slatey blue, and nothing moving at all—men sitting motionless near the dark nets. I’m fond of the place.

Madame, in the hotel, loves us and is almost bitter that we are leaving her.—Max Mohr is here, but not in this hotel, in 831

Les Goelands. He is rather like a bewildered seal rolling round. The Brewsters, he and she, may come. The girl is at school in England.—I am already feeling better, I felt very low in Germany. Frieda’s foot almost well, but a bit stiff. She bathes now every day, and says It is lovely. I think I shall bathe from the house.

Do they have, in Paris, that new food Bemax, English— the Vitamin B food? Nichols gave me a tin in Mallorca—it’s just like bran, but I’ve an idea it did me good. It costs only 2/6 or so in England—but would be more in Paris. If you happen to be in the sort of shop that would have it, ask them to send me a tin by post, to Villa Beau Soleil, will you? And if you happen to put your nose in a likely book-shop, ask if they have a little brochure on The Olive Tree and The Vine, I want to write essays on various trees, olive, vine, evergreen oak, stone-pine, of the Mediterranean, and should like a bit of technical Encyclopaedia Britannica sort of information. But in both cases, don't go out of your way, it doesn’t really matter a bit.

I wish Aldous had gone to see Charlie Lahr in London, and got his copy of Pansies, Also we talk of making a little magazine, 12 pp., called The Squib—which is merely to put crackers under people’s chairs. Little sarcastic or lampooning poems, tiny mocking articles, 50 or too words, a series of “mock” reviews—one man wanted to do a tiny “shorter notice” on the life of M. M., by -—   —that sort of thing—all anonymous, all noms de plume. All short, some caricature, drawings— once a month, 12 pp.—6d. Just squibs to have little darts of revenge and send little shots of ridicule on a few solemn asses: but good-tempered. Rhys Davies and Charles Lahr would edit it, and I think it would be rather fun. It’s badly needed. A squib or two at the old women in government. I’m sure, Aldous, you would be Ai at it.

If you decide seriously you would like a house here, we will tell the agent and look. And we might then take a permanency too. It is an easy place. One can sail from Marseilles to anywhere. And one is in the sun. But I daren't for my life persuade you. Only I think the north is death, I really do.

How long do you think to stay in Spain? I am so thankful 832

for the thought of sitting still, quite still, for a winter, I don't even want to go to Toulon, Nowhere. .

Enclose £i for the gramophone—you didn't tell me how much. Regards to Rose and to Jehanne, she will take things too seriously—what does a little religion matter nowadays!

D. H. L.

Villa Beau Solei!, Bandol.

To M. Huxley.                    Thursday (? Oct., 1929).

My dear Maria,—

Your letter this morning—awfully good of you to do the notes—they’ll do nicely. Was writing a few poems: then the essays. They have so neglected the olives here, that the oil is bad and bitter.

So you are off to Spain! Spain is hard, so don't let it tire you. I shrink from it at the moment. But you’ll be thrilled to your marrow, I'm sure. How long will you be gone?

Here we shall sit, thank God, pray God!—still. And if you seriously think you want a house, say just what and how, and we can tell the agent, nice man, to scout around and have something ready for you to look at.

Sitting on terrace, the sun goes so early in the west—but lovely and warm, wind a bit cold, but I don't get it—sea blue and troubled, splashing white foam up on the islands. We are not on Bandol harbour, but to the west, more open.

Think of us in the Ramblas at Barcelona.

Such dark paw-marks of the wind on the sea! Here, to me, it is something like Sicily, Greek, or pre-Roman. Yet think how bored you might get with it!

Allora, buon’ viaggio e buort divertimento, and always be content to miss something rather than get really tired.

Frieda has got a piano.

Foam on the islands, and a far-off sail of a ship. I feel like John on Patmos, and am just as frightened of the Beast-mystic number 666-—was it?

D. H. L.

Villa Beau Soleil,

Bandol, Var, France.

To Miss Pearn.

4 Oct., 1929.

Dear Nancy Pearn,—

Herewith the proofs of article for the Star Review.

About a contract for a year with Vanity Fair: I am quite willing to write articles for them, but it's not much good my promising one a month—I’d be sure to have a perverse period when I couldn’t turn one out. And my health, alas, went down rather with a slump in Germany: am feeling feeble. But I like it here, I feel more myself, and if the gods are with me I’ll pick up soon, and do you articles and stories. I wish I felt better.

Ever,

D. H. L.

Villa Beau Soleil, Bandol, Var.

To A. & M. Huxley.

23 Oct., 1929, Wed.

Dear Aldous and Maria,—

Yours from Barcelona. Glad you like it, but sorry about the cold—which, however, is prevalent here just the same, and I've been in bed with it. I expect your weather has changed— we've had wind and rain since Friday—but calmer and warmer to-day. The Brewsters arrived suddenly from Naples, and are also looking round for a house. She is very nervosa, poor dear.

Aldous’s book of essays came—and many thanks. I haven’t read them all, but Baudelaire seemed to me very good. All needs saying, badly: Wonder what sort of a press it will get.

No news here—Max Mohr has gone back to Germany, but says he’ll return here with wife and child in January. The little house—this—which Achsah finds truly terrible because it is so lacking in “Beauty," is quite pleasant, for the time being, and I believe will be cosy enough. It was the "love-nest" (Frieda’s word) of a femme-tenue, hence the sunk-in marble bath and rather expensive plumbing, including the central heating. But 834 it is, none the less, a rather hard square box. I mind the hardness most—it's not flimsy. Maria, you may have the stoniest house in the world, if you can find it. When I’m up and about we’re going scouting along the coast-plain a bit, with the Brewsters, who love nothing better. Achsah buys every "beautiful" house that is not for sale. But we’d get a bit of an idea of what’s available.

We’ve got a cat—a young yellow "marmalade" cat with a white breast, who simply forced himself on us. He is very nice, but I never knew a French cat before—sang-froid, will of his own, aimable, but wasting no emotion. I like him very much, but I don’t love him—which is perhaps as it should be. He simply abandoned his French home, and howled like a lion on the terrace till I let him live here—he’s about eight months, I suppose.

I hope you’ll get this—if so, it’ll be at Granada, which everybody says is so lovely. Do hope you are cured of the cold and able to enjoy it all, both of you.

Love,

D. H. L.

Brewsters having a bad time with their vegetables in the Beau Rivage.

Villa Beau Soleil,

Bandol, Var.

To Mme. Jehanne Moulaert.             26 October, 1929*

Deaf Jehanne,—

The typescript has just come, and thank you very much. But the bill for typing is not enclosed. Do send it me, please.

Yes, I have often thought of you, and of our talks. I like you because you seem to me quite honest, you say what you mean, and nearly all people equivocate when a subject really touches them, so I think that in the end you will come out all right, after this horrible period of frustration. You must remember that all your life you have been revolting against your special bourgeois milieu in which you were brought up, because it was so moral, so loveless; and so materialist, while it pretended to be ideal and loving. I do think that morality combined with lovelessness is hateful, so you have rebelled, because you are by nature affectionate, yet you have never been able to trust your own affection. You almost deliberately chose a man you could not trust, because you didn’t want to trust. You felt it was all a swindle, trust, affection, morality, ideals, all a bourgeois swindle, and perhaps in the bourgeoisie; so it is. And yet affection and trust and even morality are not in themselves a swindle. One can’t live without them. One must be honest about money and those things, or one loses one’s self-respect. It is a pity that the bourgeoisie, with their greedy dead materialism, have made morality and family and affection and trust all suspicious and repulsive.

I think, if you would only remember, when you feel so hostile and bewildered: “Now I am only tangled up in my hatred of my bourgeois self, which comes from my bourgeois, bad upbringing. But in my own individual self, I don’t care. I am honest because I am naturally honest, I am affectionate because I am naturally affectionate, and I must be careful, when I’m fighting my nasty bourgeois nature.’* Then you’ll have more peace. Maria, too, has a real nature, and a bad, bourgeois nature and perhaps one's own family bring out the bad side of one’s nature more than anybody. So perhaps it is well if you are not too much together.

Well, there’s a sermon. But I have thought of you so often, and the torments I could see in you. But now I'm sure you are beginning to accept the real individual side of your nature, which is the nice side, and to get free of the nasty bourgeois side, which comes from upbringing. And if one can only be real and at peace with oneself, that is about all that matters. Other people don't matter very much. The chief thing is to be one’s own real self, and to be at peace with oneself. Then life comes easily again. While one is in conflict with oneself, life holds back and is difficult all the time.

Well, never mind if I preach at you, I suppose it is my nature, too. A card from Maria this morning from Valencia— she says they are happy. We are installed in this commonplace little bourgeois house, that was made by a femme entre-tenue, and is her ideal: awful. But it is right on the edge of the

sea; I can lie and look out through the open doors at the sun on the water, and the foam against the islands, so I like it all right—why bother about this house. Perhaps you will come to Bandol some time and we can have more talks. My wife kept your shawl, she loves it. Have you done any more nice ones? If only we were nearer to see them, I should buy one for my sister-in-law.

Belle cose,

D. H. Lawrence.

Villa Beau Soleil,

Bandol, Var.

To Caresse Crosby.                        i Nov,, 1929

Dear Caresse,—

I have got the four vellum copies, and the ten others, and very many thanks, indeed. I am so glad to have them— I haven’t received any imperfect copies. Did you send any?

Thanks also for sending that copy to Berlin. It was enthusiastically received.

Have you heard anything of the copies sent to New York? I do wonder how they will fare. Tell me as soon as you hear. If they are stopped, we must make a plan for getting them to England.

So you are going to New York for a fortnight! Is that for a rest, or for a change?

We are quiet here—have some American friends in the hotel—and expect the Huxleys shortly. The weather varies between very lovely and rather fidgety.

Greetings from us both,

D. H. Lawrence.

Beau Soleil, Bandol.

To A. <L M. Huxley.          Saturday, 9 November, 1929.

Dear Aldous and Maria,—

I didn’t write to Seville, thought it was too late. Hope you’re

837

not dead tired. Rather changesome weather here—yesterday lovely, to-day raining. We’ve motored a bit with Brewsters, looking at houses. The country is lovely—yesterday, the lovely wide valley full of brilliant vines, beautiful, beautifull I think they will take a little stone house, just like a smaller Mirenda on a hill-top, Chateau Brun—about 5 miles from here—quite lovely situation, lovely—but lonely, and no light nor bath nor water-closet—and water from wells—but very nice—and unfurnished, only two thousand five hundred francs a year—a pleasant old place. But hunting, one could find all sorts of things—and fascinating country. But I don’t want to be so isolated. We shall get a bit bigger house in the spring—perhaps here—perhaps at St. Cyr-s.-mer or Les Lecques—about 7 miles nearer Marseilles from here. But it’s easy and pleasant living here, suits me.

Our trunks—4—at the station, and a charge of 1148 frs. Monstrous!

I'm feeling a good bit better—Frieda pretty well. From the outside world, little or no news. I’m so anxious when I think of that enormous way from S. of Spain by Biarritz to Paris. Too much, too much. Hope you won’t go to Gibraltar. When we’ve motored for one morning, I'm so thankful to have done.

Pino may come for Xmas—seems very hopeful about the passport. The Doctor Manente story looks awfully well.

Very Novemberish to-day—wish you were safe at home! Must send this to Suresnes.

Love from both to both.

D. H. L.

Beau Soleil. To Madame Doublet.

O Madame Douillet,—■

Merci bien pour les poissons—Us sont si jolis, comme an. petit soleil couchant et une petite lune levante dans leur del courbe. Je les regarde pendant des heures, s’agrandir et se diminuer comme par magique, et toujours en mouvement, toujours.

Aussi Madame Douillet, la mere, ctait-elle tres gentille de nous les apporter.

Veuillez payer la note de Monsieur Carter avec ce billet de mille francs—et aussi le pain, et les deux jolis poissons. Je pref ere beaucoup ce pain de seigle au pain du village, qui est quelquefois un peu aigre.

Salutations!

D. H. L.

Villa Beau Soldi,

Bandol, Var, France.

To Miss Moller.

i Dec., 1929.

Dear Miss Moller,—

Many thanks for your letter and for sending on those addresses. But here we are, and have taken a house for six months. The doctors said, as I found this place, and the sea, suited me so excellently last winter, it would be folly not to come back again this winter. So I obeyed. We'd both rather have come to Italy—but if only I can get my infernal chest better, then we’ll be free to come and to take a house where we like.

It is very quiet here, a tiny port, village, amiable and careless people. It somehow is more cheerful than Italy, more free of care! It does not put weights on one, as Italy does sometimes. The house is just an ugly six-room bungalow, but it has bath and water and central heating, a big terrace, a wilderness garden, and stands in a rather lovely position on the sea, so let’s hope the gods will be good to us and I shall get strong and Frieda will be happy having a new place to play with.

And you will soon be gone! It will be most thrilling. But don’t get too tired. Somehow, I think travelling becomes more tiring.—And we will meet in spring in Florence, when your terrace is full of flowers, and it will be lovely.—And if by any chance you come this way, come and see us.

Affectionately from both,

D. H. Lawrence.

Beau Soleil, Bandol.

To A. & M, Huxley.                         Dec., 1929.

Dear Aldous and Mafia,—

So you are safely back—that’s one mercy, anyhow, and we needn’t think of you on rainy, windy days and imagine the little red car ploughing on, ploughing on. Ugh!—I feel i don't want to feel any bad weather or see one single ugly or frightening thing just now—and Spain seems full of frightfulness. As for weather, we get mixed—blue and windy just now, turning colder, I think.

No news here. I sent you a copy of Pansies, which —---—

------ brought from London. He does etchings and drawings, and writes on the Apocalypse—I knew him in the past—he is staying at the Beau Rivage for the moment. But he fills me with the same savage despair with the young Englishman—so without fire, without spark, without spunk—so ineffectual. What’s the good of such people, though they are clever. They think the whole end of living is achieved if they talk, with a drink, rather amusingly and cleverly for an evening. Bores me—somehow so fatuous.

Yesterday Frieda went to Toulon with ------, and she

bought six snowy-white cups and saucers, and six snowy-white plates—very inexpensive—after having demanded des tasses de Limoges. Then she went to the carpet dept.—Dames de France—floated down on the salesman and demanded des tapis de Bokhara, s’il vous plait!—and bought, of course, a straw mat for 70 frs. But said to Frieda: "Frieda, isn’t it rather lovely, quite oriental design—and won’t •—---- appreciate it—

a touch of the East ”—It was Jap, of course.—They want us to look for a house very near them—but for the moment, the sight of their flurries is enough for me. I am thankful for this unredeemedly modern and small Beau Soleil, taken for 6 months and no more, and am thankful to God to escape anything like a permanency. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Well, I ve had nearly fifty years of Europe, so I should rather try the cycle of Cathay.—Douglas sent me his What About Europe?—a bit rancid, perhaps, and sometimes 840

fatuous, but on the whole he's right—Europe is as reesty as he says.

D. H. L.

Beau Soleil, Bandol.

To M. Huxley.                           io Dec., 1929.

Deaf Maria,—

We've got two goldfish or one gold and one silver—sent to me by Madame Douillet, of the hotel—and they are the bane of the cat's life, for he thinks they are demons or phantasmagoria as they go round and gleam and become unnaturally huge in the glass.

How are your little kittens? Is the grey colour of earth descending on them? They must be fun. Our yellow Beau Soleil gets huge.

Do you still think of coming in January? You know I expect every letter to give a different plan.

We have got my sister Ada coming after Xmas, Frieda's sister Else, and Barby —----shall have to fit them in in turn,

the house is impossible for two visitors. Really, it’s too small for one—everybody hears everybody brushing their teeth, and I hate it. But you’ll be all right in the Beau Rivage, won’t you? —-kino will probably be there—and the Brewsters will be gone. It’s quite near.

I believe by dint of looking you might find the sort of house you want—and the countryside is lovely. But I’m in a sort of despair—my health is very tiresome, and I’m sick of it altogether. I sort of wish I could go to the moon. Meanwhile, this little place is quite comfortable and all right; we’ve had some marvellous sunny days, rather too warm—the peasants are picking the narcissus—all in bloom.

I’d be all right if I felt better. It's beginning to irritate me. Not that I’m thinner or weaker—only the asthma is so maddening.

Well, I’m glad the rue du Bac sounds cheerful, and that

841

Jehanne is well. She is nice, really, and soon she'll get a real chance, I feel.

Did you get the flowers Frieda sent?

D. H. L.

Beau Soleil, Var, Bandol«

To M. Huxley.                     Thursday, Dec., 1929.

Deap Maria,—

Well, here's Xmas in a day or two!—I rather hate it. Why make merry when one doesn’t feel merry. However, my sisters have sent plum pudding and cake, so I suppose we’ll invite the friends and eat it appropriately.—Don’t send anything, by the way—don’t bother. Because I don’t know what I should send you and Aldous; I've got nothing—and there is nothing. So don't send anything except amove, amore! And before I forget do tell me what Jehanne paid for the typing of that almond-tree article—so nice it is—but tell me.

It was very warm, lovely, and sunny here till Tuesday! When it went cold. To-day is sunny and clear, but cold, the sun has no strength. I keep mostly indoors. It’s a bit too sharp for me.

No news—except, I suppose, you saw about Harry Crosby— that upset me very much.

I’he cat made an attack on the goldfish to-day, and a few small brilliant gold scales are floating loose. I spanked him, and he looked like a Chinese demon. Now he’s trying to make up to me, but I’m cold.

The sun is just going down: coldly, from a milk-blue sea.

There come the friends.

D. H. L.

You really ought to get your picture from Dorothy Warren now. She’s distributed all the sold ones.

Beau Soleil, Bandol, Var.

To Mark Gertler.                          23 Dec., 1929.

Dfar Gertler,—

Sorry you are feeling low in spirits. Don't worry, it is very common with men when they pass forty—or when they draw near :forty. Men seem to undergo a sort of spiritual change of life, with really painful depression and loss of energy. Even men whose physical health is quite good. So don’t fret. Often an entire change of scene helps quite a lot. But it’s a condition which often drags over several years. Then, in the end, you come out of it with a new sort of rhythm, a new psychic rhythm: a sort of re-birth. Meanwhile, it is what the mystics call the little death, and you have to put up with it. I have had it too, though not so acutely as some men. But then my health is enough to depress the Archangel Michael himself. My bronchials are really awful. It’s not the lungs.

I shall be pleased to see Dr. Morland, if he really wants to take the trouble to stop off here. But I don’t like the thought of troubling him.

And we shall be pleased to see you later. The Hotel Beau Rivage is really very nice. Bandol is a quiet little place, but usually sunny and pleasant. Yesterday there was a great storm, the first, so to-day is grey and a bit stunned, but quiet. I hope it will soon clear again—we get so used to the sun, we miss it worse than ever.

All good wishes from us both—and au revoir!

D. H. L.

Beau Soleil, Bandol.

To A. Huxley,

23 Dec., 1929.

Dear Aldous,—

Many thanks for Maillol, which has just come. He has a certain tender charm.

I haven’t sent a thing to anybody, as I am in bed with a bout of bronchitis, and feel I can’t make any efforts. Wonder how 843

Maria got on in San Remo—futile sort of journey—futile business! Expect she had the storm yesterday same as here. The world very grey and stunned to-day. I'm rather the same, as I had to put a linseed poultice on my drones. Hope your rheumatism is better. It is indeed a curse, being ill.

I hope you’ve got good news of Julian. Somehow, I feel he’ll dodge through, and the tsetse flies won’t bite him. But let me know, as I shall go on wondering.

I think you’re lucky to escape the Christmassing. Why do we do it! But I suppose the children like it.—I’m keeping ours down to a mere tea-party, so not much harm done. But the friends in the hotel are now seven!

No news in our world. I am doing practically nothing— haven’t touched a paint-brush. Sad!

Did you get the painting from Dorothy Warren? You could claim it any time now.

Gertler talks of coming down here in Januarv.

D. H. L.

The cat has killed the silver goldfish—nothing less than a tragedy.

Beau Soleil, Bandol, Var.

To Rhys Davies.                           23 Dec., 1929.

Dear Davies,—

I have been wanting all this time to write—but my bronchials have been giving me such a bad time. Now I’m in bed with linseed poultices, so can’t go much lower. There was a great storm yesterday—huge seas—to-day is quiet, but grey and chill and forlorn: imagine me the same.

We were so sorry to hear of that motor-car accident and those two ribs. I believe ribs aren’t terribly important—witness Eve—so I hope you’re about better now. But it was too bad. And I always thought Charlie Lahr was a lucky man—now one must doubt it. Anyhow, there’s no luck in the wide world at present.

I read your story in This Quarter—quite amusing. What does your mother say to it? La jeunessel And you are coming 844 cut in the London Mercury! Oh, beware, they'll be putting a little blue ribbon round your neck, tied in a blue bow at the side.

Did you read that Harry Crosby, the rich young American in Paris who printed Escaped Cock for me, shot himself and his mistress in New York? Very horrible! Too much money—and Transition surrealisms----

We've got altogether seven friends in the Beau Rivage, and they all come to tea. I tell you it’s a jorum.

Frieda says she is writing to you.

Tell me if there is anything I could order you for Christmas— any book or books you'd specially like—or a pen or something. So tell me.

Remember us warmly to your mother, and to your sister. I wish we could come in and have a mince-pie with you—do you have mince-pie in Wales?

I’m disappointed about the chips and faggots young man.

I thought of calling my book of collected sketches, Chips and Faggots.

Well I won't say merry Christmas, but I do hope you are feeling chirpy, all the same. And do let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

D. H. L.

Beau Soleil, Bandol.

To M. & A. Huxley.                       6 Jan., 1930.

Dear Maria and Aldous,—

I'm rather better but don’t get on much. Still, I think I'm better—warily. Frieda’s got a cold for a change.

Already the year is changing round. Ida Rauh being here, we talk, of course, of I aos and the ranch, and plan to go back in the spring. It might pick me up again: who knows?

Pino and Douglas were very sweet, but rather on the holiday raszle, so rather depressing. I find that people who are on the razzle, enjoying themselves, are so inwardly miserable and agace, they are a real trial.

How are you both after the festivities?—I don't suppose you 845

railed much, anyhow. What about your plans? Are you coming down as you said about the 20th? That is only a fortnight ahead. When one does nothing, how time seems to vanish away!

Weather has been so warm, unnaturally so, and sunny. These last two days it is stormy from the sea, but still not at all cold. Perhaps we are not going to have any real cold this winter.

What is the latest news of Julian and Juliette? I wondered so often, but Aldous did not tell me. And Yvonne, is she still errant?

Margaret Gordon wants us to go and stay with her in her house near Grasse, but I think not. I hear--— and ------

and Co. were rolling their incomes round Nice for Xmas, rich as pigs, ------- ------- sunning himself in the glow of their

lucre, Pino Orioli the obscure satellite, being the guest of the obscure —----. So we climb down the steps of the hierarchy,

from a pinnacle of —----to the lowest rung of a Pino! Scala

degli angiolil

---—----— says his income is an "easy" four thousand a year. So he has got a "hall" in the lake district in England, a Georgian hall in which he can become a little more damp than he already is, to be a last lake poet, instead of a mere puddle poet.

I feel very spiteful against them all, for being mere incomes on two legs.

Well, I can’t write letters any more, but am not depressed. Tell us the news, and about your coming.

D. H. L.

Beau Soleil, Baridol, Var.

To Martin Seeker.                           9 Jan,t 1930.

Dear Secker,—

Count Keyserling asked my sister-in-law to give him a copy of Plumed Serpent because he wants to write an article on it. Mean swine won’t buy a copy! I leave it to you whether you send one—you have my sister-in-law’s address.

Hope the MSS. of Assorted Articles was all right, and title. I haven’t heard anything. You’ll send me galley proofs, won’t you?

All quiet here, had a number of visitors, including the ---—t on £4,000 a year, so they say. How are the puny risen! (Bit of spite—cross it out.)

Hope all goes well.

D. H. L.

Beau Soleil, Batidol, Var.

To Mrs. H. Crosby.                         20 Jan., ’30.

Dear Caresse,—

Thank you for the dream book. Harry had a real poetic gift—if only he hadn’t tried to disintegrate himself so! This disintegrating spirit, and the tangled sound of it, makes my soul weary to death.

I shall be interested to read the diary, later, if you wish me to—or what of it you wish me to. And if I could write a suitable foreword, I’d be glad to. But for the next two months, I’m not allowed to do anything. The doctor came from England and said I must lie in bed for two months, and do nothing and see no people—absolute rest. Oh, dear! and Harry was really so well, physically. And my nerves are so healthy, but my chest lets me down. So there we are. Life and death in all of us!

Did Chariot of the Sun ever appear? I have never seen a copy. I should like very much to have one, if the book exists.

And is it possible for you to send me a couple of imperfect copies of Escaped Cock, as you once suggested? I should be glad.

Oh, yes—don’t you try to recover yourself too soon—it is much better to be a little blind and stunned or a time r, and not make efforts to see or to feel. Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness. It was too dreac a blow—and it was wrong.

D. H. L.

Villa Beau Soleil, Bandol, Var.

To Lady Ottoline Morrell.           21 Jan., 1930.

My dear Ottoline,—

Many thanks for sending me Philip's book—I have begun to read it, and shall enjoy it—nice and fat and human, one can keep on with it pleasantly for many a day, Quite a job worth doing, to make such a book accessible. I must say 1 like the Englishmen of a hundred years ago. They were still men.

AU very quite here-—my health been bad this winter-—doctor says perhaps I must go into a sanatorium for a couple of months. Perhaps I will, I am tired of being always defeated by bad health. It has been rather bitter to me, this not being able to get better, for such a long time. But the body has a strange will of its own, and nurses its own chagrin.

Frieda's sister is staying with us—and her daughter Barbara comes next week—so we are not lonely. The weather has been quite lovely—a grey day to-day, but I don't mind it. It is nice here, but there is something curiously flat and uninteresting about the French—though they are very nice to us here.

What a pity we didn't know, when you were at Aix, so near. It would have been so good to see you again. I don’t know when I shall come to England with my wretched health, but perhaps you will come south. With love from us both.

D. H. L.

To M. Huxley.

Beau Soleil, Bandol.

2Z Jan., 1930.

My dear Maria,—

Your letter came yesterday, and we deciphered it. Glad you had a good time in London—thrilled about the play—hope it’ll make you lots of money, then the rest doesn't much matter. It's bound to be horrible to look at, all plays are—so utterly false. But if it settles the money worries, good for it.

We had that doctor—he says I'm to rest absolutely, lie out on the balcony, do nothing, say nothing and above all, see no people. He says it's the people use up the life. Then in two months there should be a decided improvement. So I am obeying—doing nothing, saying nothing, seeing nobody, lying either in bed or on the balcony—and we’ll see the result. He said he’d look at a sanatorium above Nice—his chief desire seems to be to remove me from the reach of "people." He says the bronchitis is very bad, and the lung is a bit active, and they aggravate one another, but the thing to do is to try to get the bronchitis down, as it is doing most mischief.

Well, if you come here, I shall be—in bed or on the balcony— Santa Madonna! possessing my soul in false patience.

Meanwhile I hope the play will be a great success, and let me know.

D. H. L.

Villa Beau Soleil,

Bandol, Var, France.

To The Hon. Dorothy Brett.              Jan. 24, 19Z0.

Dear Brett,—

I saw your father died—apparently it was easy for him—and 78. I hope he has left you better off—if not, never mind. And I wonder if it will take you to England.

I am lying in bed, quite ill, cut off from work and everything, trying to get my bronchitis healed a bit—very bad this winter. I want so much to get well enough to be able to start for New Mexico. I feel I’d get better there, and I get worse here. There is the Consul to see—I can’t do it—perhaps Earl will. Ida went away, when I depended on her a bit. I was wondering if it would be best to sail on your Dollar Line from Marseilles right to San Francisco, and land there. Landing might be easier, and the long sea voyage would do me good. But 1 shall see what Mabel says. And of course I must get better than I am, before I can think of travel. But by the end of March, surely, I shall be well enough again—I pray the gods. But I'm baa this winter; much worse than last.

I wonder where you are—you have not written- you should have had two letters—or three—of mine by now.

Frieda must write to you herself. I don’t know how she is going to act, but I feel I mustn’t stay here to get any worst, or I’m done for. I don’t know why I’ve gone down so this winter—there’s no reason. But here I am, almost helpless and minding it bitterly.

Well, hasta la vista! as you say.

D. H. L.

The doctors say the lung trouble is active, but the bronchitis is the worst, and I must try and get that down first.

Beau Soleil, Bandol, Var.

To L. E. Pollinger,                          zo Jan., 1930.

Dear Pollinger,—

Not a sound from you—-I do hope you got home safely and are well.

I duly lie in bed—or out on the terrace—and I think I am really better. I don’t do any work, and I see no people, for there is no one to see—only my wife’s daughter, Barbara, is with us.

I wanted to say, I don’t want to publish that “Jolly Roger” extended essay with the Mandrake—I just feel I don’t want to publish it as it stands—so do suppress the agreement, which I signed.

Weather sunny—they say all the almond blossom is out, lovely up at the Brewsters'. I watch the sea and the white foam.

D. H. L.

To Maria Huxley.

Ad Astra, Vence, A M.

Friday.

I have submitted and come here to a sanatorium—sort of sanatorium—and Frieda is in the hotel—I came yesterday. It doesn’t seem very different from an ordinary hotel—but the doctors are there to look after one.—I'll tell you the results.—I heard the play wasn't a success with the public, but perhaps 850

they 11 come round to it. Pity if it doesn’t make you richer, if not rich.—Maria, do send me a bit of that liver medicine which Aldous found so good. It’s quite a nice place here—the air is good, and one is aloft. Shall write properly.

D. H. L.

Ad Astra, Vence.

To M< Huxley.                                 Wed.

Dear Maria,—

Your letter came on—a good letter, made me understand about the play very well. I'm afraid the public wants to be made to feel it is all on the side of the angels. But I hope the run will be longer than you think, and make a bit of money anyhow.

Here I came at last, as I was getting so feeble and so thin. It isn’t a sanatorium, really—an hotel where a nurse takes your temperature and two doctors look at you once a week—for the rest, just an hotel. They examined me with X-rays and all that. It is as I say—the lung has moved very little since Mexico, in five years. But the broncs are awful, and they have inflamed my lower man, the ventre and the liver. I suppose that's why I’ve gone so thin—I daren't tell you my weight—but I’ve lost a lot this winter, can’t understand why. Of course they can do nothing for me—food, the food is good, but it’s hotel food— they say milk is bad for my liver, and it's true. They don't say rest all the time—I go down to lunch, down two flights of steep stairs, alas—and I'm going to practise walking again. I think they are right and the English doctor wrong. A certain amount of movement is better. I’ve got a good balcony and lovely view—and the air is much better than Bandol. If ever you want to live in these parts, try a place like Vence.—Frieda is in the Nouvel Hotel in Vence—she goes back to the Beau Soleil Saturday—her daughter Barbara is there. They will pack up and go to a little house in Cagnes, which the di Chiaras are giving up. Then they’ll come on the bus, about 20 minutes, to see me.—It's dull here—only French people convalescing and nothing in my line. But I’m feeling more chirpy, and shall 851

try to get on my legs. It would be fun to see you, end of this month. When I hope I can walk a bit. I wish we could have been somewhere to have a good time like Diablerets. Or I wish I could sail away to somewhere really thrilling—perhaps we shall go to the ranch. What I want is to be thoroughly cheered up somehow—not this rest-cure business.

Well, it all sounds very egoistic—that’s the worst of being sick. The mimosa is all out, in clouds—like Australia, and the almond blossom very lovely, especially around Bandol. Today was a marvellous day—I sat in the garden. Perhaps we might have a few jolly days, if you came down—just jolly, like Diablerets.

D. H. L.

Ad Astra, Vence A.M, France,

To L. E. Pollingsr.                        20th Feb., 1930.

Dear Pollinger,—

I don’t believe Stern is going to get far with Boni.

About Charles Lahr—don’t insist on money down—I don’t want it. Say accounts made a month after publication. Thank you so much for looking after it.

Oh, that Mandrake—vegetable of ill omen!

When will Nettles appear?

Thank you for the books. I read Mamba and the Chinese book: the other two, the girl at sea is a feeble fake, and the other man, I'm sick of self-conscious young Americans posing before their own cameras.

I’ve been rather worse here—think I have a bit of ’flu—pain too. There's nothing in this place—I was better in Beau Soleil -—have been here fifteen days.

Commando hasn’t come, from F. V. Morley.

My wife has her daughter Barbara with her, and another friend—not so bad. I’m rather miserable here.

Ever,

D. H. L.

To M. Huxley.

Ad Astra, Vence, Friday.

Dear Maria,—

The two parcels came now—very luxurious. Frieda trying them all—very extravagant of you to send so much. And Coreine and the Browning book. It's interesting, the Browning, yet somehow humiliating—bourgeois. The bourgeois at its highest level makes one squirm a bit.

I am rather worse here—such bad nights, and cough, and heart, and pain decidedly worse here—and miserable. Seems to me like grippe, but they say not. It's not a good place— shan't stay long—I’m better in a house—I’m miserable.

Frieda has Barbey with her—and Ida Rauh. When do you think of coming?

D. H. L.

This place no good.

NOTE

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Victoria Street, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on September nth, 1885. His father, John Arthur Lawrence, a miner, married Lydia Beardsail at Sneinton Church, Nottingham on December 27th, 1875. His father had been employed at Brinsley Colliery since he was seven years of age. D. H. Lawrence was the fourth child of a family of five consisting of three boys and two girls. At the age of thirteen he won a scholarship from the local Council School, and went to Nottingham High School. At sixteen, he left the High School and got a job with a Nottingham firm of surgical goods manufacturers at a wage of thirteen shillings a week. This place is described in his novel, Sons and Lovers. He soon abandoned this for a position at the British School at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, as a pupil teacher (described in The Rainbow). At eighteen he went to Nottingham University College to take, a teaching certificate, and it was during this time that he had begun to write his first novel, 1 he White Peacock. His mother developed cancer and died in 1910, but before her death, a special copy of The White Peacock was printed so that she might read it. He was at Nottingham University College for two years and took his teacher's certificate, and was then appointed to the Davidson Road School at Croydon. During this period he wrote a good many articles and short stories, and some poetry. He met Ford II addox Hueffer, who was responsible for sending the manuscript of The White Peacock to William Heinemann, who afterwards published it. He also met Edward Garnett, who became his friend and adviser in his subsequent dealings with publishers at that time. 7 he White Peacock was published by Heinemann in January, 1911. During this period he also contributed several articles and short stories to the English Review. After spending nearly two years at Croydon, Lawrence resigned from the school, and from that 855

time on lived entirely by his writing. Shortly after leaving the school, he was offered a Lectureship in Germany, which he refused. Almost immediately after this he went to Germany, where he stayed for six months in Bavaria, and afterwards went to Italy to Lake Garda. It was during this period that The Trespasser was published (May, 1912: Duckworth).

In February, 1913, Love Poems and Others appeared (Duckworth), and in May, 1913, Sons and Lovers, his third novel, was published by Duckworth. At this time he was at Munich, but in June of that year he came back to England and stayed for a short time at Broadstairs. In August, 1913, he returned to Munich, and in September of that year he went to Lerici on the Gulf of Spezia, in Italy, where he stayed until June, 1914.

He then came to England and was married in July, 1914, to Frieda, Baroness von Richthofen. In December, 1914, the book of short stories called The Prussian Officer was published by Duckworth. For some time they lived at Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and in January, 1915, moved to Pulborough, Sussex.

August, 1915, found the Lawrences at Hampstead, and The Rainbow was published in September, 1915. The publishers were afterwards ordered to destroy their stock, and the book was withdrawn from circulation.

In December, 1915, they moved to Cornwall, where they stayed until October, 1917. During this period Lawrence’s book of essays, Twilight in Italy, was published (June, 1916: Duckworth), and Amores (poems) (July, 1916: Duckworth). From October, 1917, until January, 1918, they stayed in London, and afterwards moved to Newbury, Berks, where they were until April, 1918. In May of that year they went to Middleton-by Wirksworth, Derbyshire. A year later they moved back to Newbury, Berks, where they stayed until November, 1919. The war being ended, they went abroad to Italy, staying for a short time in Florence. December, 1919, found them in Capri, where they stayed until March, 1920, moving on then to Taormina, Sicily. They stayed at Taormina until April, 1921, when they travelled through Italy into Germany, and eventually reached Baden-Baden. Meanwhile, Lawrence’s fourth novel, Women in Love, was published by Seeker, in May, 1921. It was first of all published privately in a limited edition, printed for 856

subscribers only (New York: November, 1920). From Baden-Baden they went to Zell-am-See, Bei Salzburg, and afterwards oack to Sicily. During that winter Lawrence visited Sardinia and the material he collected there was afterwards published in Sea and Sardinia (New York: Thomas Seltzer, December, 1921; London: Martin Seeker, April, 1923).

In March, 1922, the Lawrences decided to go to Ceylon, where they stayed until the end of April. They then sailed for Australia, and stayed there until June of that year. In April, 1922, Lawrence’s fifth novel, Aaron's Rod, was published by Seltzer in New York, and afterwards, in June, 1922, by Martin Seeker, London. In August, 1922, they left Australia, and went via New York, Tahiti and Raratonga to San Francisco, where they landed on September 4th.

Lawrence began to write Aaron's Rod in London, continued it in Florence, and finished it in Sicily.

From San Francisco, they went to Taos, New Mexico, and afterwards to Mexico itself.

Lawrence travelled a good deal in America in the autumn of

1923, visiting New York, Los Angeles, and back again to Mexico. Mrs. Lawrence returned to England in August, 1923, and in November of that year, Lawrence sailed from Vera Cruz, also for England. From December, 1923, to the end of January,

1924, they were in England. Afterwards they paid a visit to Baden-Baden and Paris and came back to London, and in March, 1924, sailed again for America, and went straight to New Mexico, once more. They stayed there until October, 1924, when they moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, where Lawrence wrote most of the material which appears in Mornings in Mexico (Seeker, 1927) and finished The Plumed Serpent (Seeker, 1926). At this time he was also writing short stories which appeared afterwards in The Woman Who Rode Away (Seeker, 1928).

In October, 1925, he was back again in England, but only stayed a very short time, going almost immediately to pay a visit to Mrs. Lawrence’s family at Baden-Baden, and afterwards to Spotorno, where they stayed until March, 1926. During this period, The Plumed Serpent (Seeker) was published.

From Spotorno they moved to Florence, where they took the Villa Mirenda⁻, Scandicci, a little village just outside Florence, 857 where Lawrence began to write Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence wrote three separate and complete drafts of this novel, which was first published in a private edition in Florence by G. Orioli. Except for brief visits to Germany and England and Switzerland, Lawrence stayed at the Villa Mirenda until May, 1928.

From May, 1928, until November of that year they were travelling in Switzerland, Germany, and the South of France, and after a brief visit to lie de Port-Cros, they settled at Bandol, Var, where they stayed until March, 1929.

They then travelled, going to Paris and to Florence, and in April, 1929, went to Palma de Mallorca, Balearic Islands, where they were until May, 1929. It was during this period that an exhibition of Lawrence's pictures was arranged for at the Warren Galleries in London. Following action by the Home Office, the exhibition was closed. The pictures were afterwards released, and the majority of them were transferred to Vence in the South of France, where they are now. In the summer of 1929, the Lawrences travelled in Germany and during this time, his book of poems Pansies was published, first in a limited edition for private circulation only, and afterwards by Seeker. In September, 1929, he returned to Bandol. While there he became very ill, and in February, 1930, moved into the hills at Vence. He died at the Villa Robermond, Vence, Alpes Maritimes, on March 2nd, 1930, and was buried in the local cemetery. No headstone was over his grave, save a phoenix (which was his own design), done in local stones by a peasant who loved him.

INDEX

Aaron ("my black horse"), 6i8, SZ2, 659, '665

Aaron’s Rod, 518, 520, 521, 531 ("everybody hated"), 533, 535, 549. 575. 856

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 146, 164, 165, 174, 182, 194, 195, 205

Abercrombie, Mrs., 166

Abercrombies, The, 151

Abruzzi, The, 191

Academy, The Royal ("simply bored ’), 129

Achsah, 739, 744, 837 (and see under Brewster)

Acton (“a young”), 693

Ada (D. H. L.’s sister, see under Lawrence)

Adam and Eve (Juliette Huxley’s embroidery), 707, 708

Adderley, Rev., The Hon. James, 24

Adelphi, The (J. M. M.’s magazine), 572-4 578/582, 594, 596, 607, 623, 640, 641, 645-8, 668, 728, 812

Adolf (the Rabbit Sketch), 530, 532

Adriatic (?to America, by the), 274

JEschylus, 232

Africa, 439, 472, 499

Afterdamp (suggested title for The

Widowing, etc.), 139

Aigle, 707

Aix, 848

Ajaccio, 787

Aj anta frescoes, 297, 299, 300

Alamos, 581

Alassio, 643, 714, 715, 723

Alastair, 182

Albenga, 783

Alderswasley, 675

Aldington, Arabella, 745

Aldington, Hilda, 393, 399. 4OI> 418, 420

Aldington. Richard, 21 r, 439, 739.

74i. 741. 745 ("I      R-A"),

829

Aldingtons, The, 207, 753, 756 ("old friends")

Aldousells, The (A, and M Huxley), 707

Aleppo, 716

Alessandro (Elide s brother), 176

Ahcante, 797, 799, 800

Alfreton, 674

“Almond Blossom” (poem), 535

Alongshore, 84

Along the Road, 647

Alyosha, 326

Amalfi, 500, 510, 679

Ambergate, 464

America, 269 (passports obtained), 375 ("the new unknown"), 380 ("my untilled field"), 479 (?a lecture tour), 512, 533 (“I shrink from the States”), 551 ("if A will accept me, and England won't"), 556 ("shove or be shoved”), 579 ("foolish and empty”: "exhausts the springs of one's soul")

American artists (at Taos), 555

American Commercial Commission, 565

American essays, 444, 449, 450, 455, 476 (in English Review)

American Review ("reincarnation of Smart Set"), 126

Americans, 375 ("rather dreadful as a rule”), 763 ("hostile to me")

American women ("with insistent voices”), 788

Amletto (i.e Hamlet), 92

A mores, 350, 354, 399 (notice in Poetry), 759, 855

Amphiteatroff (Russian novelist), 180

Amy (New Poems inscribed to her), 457 (and see under Lowell)

Anacapri, 490

"Anacoreti nolle Tebaidi” (Loren-zetti. D. H. L copies), 510

Andes, 420 (east slope of the), 421 ("our island in the”), 450 ("won’t be any A.’’)

Andrews, Miss Esther, 382, 389, Z9I. 393. 4OI» 408. 4¹⁰

Andreyev (D. H. L. on), 21

Angell, Mrs. 691

Ann Veronica, 15, 149

Anna Karenin, 69

Anna of the Five Towns, 64

Annecy, 733

Annesley, 633, 674, 675

Ansermoz (“old A”), 706

Anthony, Mrs., no, in, 114-116 Apaches, 550, 552, 554, 555, 566

(Particle in Dial)

Apennines, 166, 168

Apostolic Beasts (PEvangelic, ?

Apocalyptic), 530

Apres-midi d'un Faune (Collings), 183

Aquitania (D. H. L. to N. York), 596, Z97

Arabella (American girl at Mecklen-burgh Sq.), 446, 447 449

Aretino {Ragionarnenti), 717

Arezzo (Etruscan), 742

Argegno (Como), 538 Arizona, 560

Arno valley, 659, 661

Arnold, Matthew (quoted), xii Aroles, 707, 726

Arrozo Hondo, 638

A rt and Ritual, 149, 164

Arundel, 215

Arzopalo, 566

Ashurbampai, 318, 459

Asolo, 538

Asquith, Lady Cynthia, 195 (“Mrs. Asquith’’), 321, 418, 471 ("going to have another baby and feels doomed”), 650 {Glad Ghosts written for), 682; Letters to, 133, 147, 161, 171, 217, 227, 243, 245, 246, 250, 257, 258, 259, 261, 263,

264, 265, 270, 274, 278, 283, 298, 301. 315. 339. Z40. 34b. 349. 365. 37b- 378, 380, 385. 386, 39L 397. 4°5. 415. 417. 4²4- 426, 427, 429, 430. 433. 44L 443. 445. 453 455. 462, 478, 482, 484, 497, 502, 504, 545

Asquith, Herbert, 217, 258, 259,

265, 271, 285, 316, 341, Z47, 377, 379 ("I think H. A. is a poet”), 397. 415. 429. 546 ("likes reading other people’s books”)

Asquith, Mr. (Lord Asquith and Oxford), 149, 172, 385

Asquiths, The, 130

Ass, The, 513

Assisi, 656 (“dtdn t like”), 657 ("wouldn’t live in”)

Assorted Articles, 847

Athenceum, The (J. M. Murry,

editor of), 470, 471

Atina, 486, 489

Atkinson (of Heinemann’s), 15, 16, 50

Atlantis, 439

At the Gates, 414

Aulla, 166, 170

Austen, Jane, 200

Australia, 540, 541, 544 ("going to"), 546 ("heaven knows why”), 549 ("a weird place . . . socially nil”), 852 (Italy like A.). 856

Australia, West, 542, 547

Australian bush, 605

Australians (every A. ' a little Pope all on his own, God’s Vicar”), 548

Austria (D. H L. in), 564

Authors’ Publishing Society (suggested), 717

Authors’ Society, 276, 287, 427, 496

Aztec, 735

Azul (Peat, dog), 659, 661, 662, 665

Baalbek, 716

Babylon, 318

Bacchae. The, 4, 7

Baden-Baden, 135, 139, 147, 195, 197. 199. 462. 474. 479. 492, 514. 640, 680, 699, 703, 705. 741, 751, 789, 809, 855. 856

Baedeker (on Corsica), 787

Baillot, Mie. ("that Egyptian book”) Zi4

Baker. Ida, 457

Balaam's ass, 535, 536

Balfour ("hopeless"), 4Z3

Baltic, 672

Bandello, 762

Bandol, xxx, 758, 764, 827. 834-850, 837

Barbadoes, 284, 288

Barbara, Barbey, Barby (Frieda’s daughter), 643, 648, 652, 714, 715. 767. 774. 777. 780, 781, 848, 852, 853

Barcelona, 768, 793, 800, 834

Barezzi, Joseph (Port-Cros), 787

Barker, Granville, 103

Barlow, Robert Pratt, Letter to, 542

Barmby (N. Y. manager for Curtis Brown), 600, 614, 625, 637, 656, 683

Barnes, Jim, 151 ("a rum chap"), 153 156. 165, 174, 177, 182

Barrie, Sir James, 166, 606 ("suburbanite”), 828

Barrow-in-Furness, 217

Basle, 139

"Bat”(poem), 524

Baudelaire 7x6, 834

Bavaria, 122 (“too humid”), 463 (Minister of Finance), 466, 474, 808, 855

Bax, Arnold, 330

Bay (poems), 438, 442, 455, 500, 503

Beach, Sylvia, 766, 774, 776, 777

Beagle (reads Darwin’s B. again), 693

Beardsley, 164, 182 ("I hate the B. illustrations”)

Beau Soleil villa (Bandol), 829-850 Beaumont (agent), 427, 429, 433 ('that man B."), 438, 442 (and Pinker), 449 (New Paths), 455 ("that miserable little B.”), 457, 474. 483. 499

Beaverbrook, Lord. 648

Becker, 499

Beethoven (reading B.’s letters), 694

Beeton, Mrs. ("one of the few women,” etc ), 691

"Bei Hennef” (poem), 68

Bell, Clive, 728

Bellinzone, 142

Belloc, Hilaire, 32, 178 ("I think

H. B. is conceited")

Beloved Stranger, 575

Bemax (vitamin B food), 3oo, 832

Benerberg, 40, 42

Bennett, Arnold, 64 ("hate B.’s resignation”), 170 (and Stage Society), 174, 277, 295 ("an old imitator”), 423 (? to sponsor novel), 716 ("sort of pig in clover”), 717 (‘never let it be said,” etc.)

Benvenuto, 57, 58

Beowulf, 303

Beresford, Mr. and Mrs. J. D. 289, 297 (lends cottage), 299 (near Padstow), 302, 325, 334; Letters to, 302, 311, 314 , 328, 333

Bergson ("bores me”), 119

Berliner Tageblatt, 351

Bernardo, Villa 642

Berners, Lord (Tyrwhitt), 664

Besan^on, 789

Besant, Annie, 705

Beveridge, Millicent (portrait of D.H.L.), 514

Biarritz, 837

Bibesco, Prince, 283

Bieda (Etruscan), 742

Birds, Beasts and Flowers (poems), 513, 515 ("very free poems'), 524, 563 (Seltzer), 567 (printing),

572 (doing proofs), 573 (Seeker), 578 (Murry), 588 (Monroe), 795 (copyright)

Birrell, Francis, 223

Bjorkman, Mr., 142-4

"Black Bread” (suggested title for Verga story), 544

Black Forest, 517, 593, 641

Black Sun Press (Paris), 792, 828

Blackwell, 56g (?to publish), 162 (agreement)

Blake, William, xi, xiv, xviii

Blavatsky, Mme, 476

Bledworth, 675

Blind Man, The, 459, 532 (English Review), 551 (Seeker)

“Blue Jay” (Mexican poem), 563

Blue John (i.e, fluor spar), 461

Blue Monthly ("doing reviews for”), 118

Blue Review ("that scoundrel”), 123

Boccaccio, 717

Bocklin, 93

Bodmin (exempted at), 355, 365, 411

Bogliaco, 65

Bognor, 222

Boli Hill, 436, 675

Bolzano (see under Bozen)

Bone, Gertrude, 21

Bonesetter (F.’s foot), 821, 822, 824

Boni, Albert, 791 (?uniform edition), 852

Bonn, 37

Books (glum silence ... of shut books), 35

Booksellers (their commission), 717

Bookman, The, 171, 174

Boot, Jesse, 214

Booth, Mrs., 652

Borg, Michael (and Magnus), 599, 600, 603

Boshi ("a Hindu called”), 744

Bosigran, 428, 429, 434, 450

Boston (Lincs), 724

Boston (U.S.A.), 561, 656

Boucher (designs), 137 745

Botticelli (compared with Ajanta), 299

Bottomley, Horatio, 248, 543

Boy in the Bush, The, 584 (D. H. L. suggests title), 585 (D. H. L. “finished”), 600, 603, 6x8

Bozen, 56, 58, 62, 523, 537 ("lovely inn at”)

Brace, Harcourt, 576

Bracknels, The, 69

Brailsford (on Shelley and Godwin), 237

Bramanti (wood-cut), 715

Bramble, Helen W. (of The Forum),

Letter to, 726

Brangwyn, Frank, 86

Brazil. 421

Breach, The, 674

Breaking Point, The, iz

Brenner, The, 810

Brentano’s, 776, 794

Brett, Hon. Dorothy, 285, 594, 595-8 (deaf and a painter), 599 (at Taos), 600 (J. M. M.), 602, 612, 615, 617, 619, 622, 624, 638, 642 (at Capri), 650, 717 (D. H. L.’s pictures for N. Y.), 743 (her pictures), 749 (D. H. L.’s pictures for N. Y.), 759; Letters to, 616, 626, 631, 643, 647, 648, 651-3, 655—7, k>59, 66 r, 664, 667, 668, 677, 679, 696, 727, 763, 795, 807, 829, 849

Brewster, Mr. and Mrs. E. H., 534 (D. H. L.’s friend in Ceylon), 536, 537, 644, 651, 660, 680 (Ravello), 744. 753. 832, 835, 8z8, 841, 849, 850

Bridgefoot:, 640, 738

Brinsley (near Eastwood), 675

Bridges, Robert, 714

Bridget, 538

Broadstairs, 127, 855

Bronte, Duca di (Nelson-Hood), 505, 527

Brooke, Rupert 174, 182, 226 (death of), 379, 380, 477 {£20 from)

Brooks, J. Ellingham, 490 ("a nice young man”), 501 (New Poems)

Brothers Karamazov, The, 237

Brown, Curtis, 189, 514, 515, 546, 550 {Kangaroo). 552, 564 {Kangaroo), 566 {Fantasia), 568, 604 ("my permanent address c/o"), 614 {St Mawr), 621 (Blackwell and Cape), 643 (in Italy with D H. L ), 644, 695 (’ takes 10 p c. off what I get"), 707 (Lady Chatterley), 720 (Lady C), 722 (John Thomas), 724 (“office against Lady C.”), 729 (Lady C.), 748. 749, 759, 778 {"Gaige people and Escaped Cock"); Letters to, ZlZ. 515. 516-8. 520, 521, 524, 5Z2. 535. 536. 539. 54L 547. 567. 585. 595. 596, 599. 603, 616, 621, 625, 629, 630, 631, 634, 636, 637, 641, 654, 709, 782

Browning book, The, 853

Brun CMteau, 838

Brussels, 667

Buddha and Buddhism, 350 ( 'decadent and foul”), 534, 552 ("didn’t care at all for”), 541 ("absolutely dead off"), 542 ("they can have”), 546 ("I don’t believe in B., hate him, in fact”), 605

Buenos Ayres, 166

Bull-fight (scene of novel), 568

Bumpus, 304, z09, 310

Btinde, 704 {see also under “Germany”)

"Bunny” (David Garnett, qv.), 67, 70, 77, 525, 526; Letter to, 106 Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress, 327 Burgos, 797, 799

Burning bush. The, 375

Bums, Robert, 84, 92, 694, 695, 817 Burrow, Dr. Trigant, Letters to, xxiv, 634. 675, 685, 687

Burslem, 248

Butterley reservoir, 459

Buxton, 223

Buzzi, Paolo, 195

Bynner, Witter, 565 (with D. H. L. in Mexico), 578, 587, 588, 6ri, 649 ("little sketch of, in Plumed Serpent"), 828; Letters to, 562, 566, 575, 581, 586, 589, 596, 611, 612. 618, 620, 624, 649, 701, 711, 722

Byrne, James, 70

Byron, 134,673 (Hucknall Torkard), 716

Bystander, The, 603

Cadogan Square, 441

Cagnes, 851

Cake ("read with amusement”), 722 Calabria, 501, 529, 531 Cala Rajada, 800

California, 392, 573 (? "going to"), 576. 577 ll). H. L in), 579 ("a queer place . . . selfish . . . empty”)

Calles, President, 587, 624 (inauguration)

Cambridge. 232, 344

Camomile, 526, 528, 531, 533 ("hope it's bitter”), 549, 576 (Harcourt Brace and)

Campagna, 527

Campbell, Gordon H., 195, 197, 239, 262 (Nancy), 263, 386, 419, 4²3>431-3. 471

Campfollower ("common things like the C.”), 211

Campione, 106, 107

Candelmass, 413

Cannan, Gilbert, 238, 239, 250, 251, 289, 368, 383 (Mendelj, 488

Cannan, Mary, 238, 293, 491, 494 (“who was Barrie's wife’’), 507 (studio at Taormina), 524 (Mrs. Gilbert Cannan), 573, 576 (flat)

Carmans, The, 235, 238, 319 Cannes, 812

Canovaia, 512

Cape, Jonathan, 525 ("don’t want the guinea"), 536 (Studies in American Literature), 621, 720 ("Johnny” and Lady Chatterley), 724 (against Lady C.), 791 (“to release claim on poems"), 826 (American edition of poems)

Capelleros, The, 643

Capital and Labour, 244, 407

Capri, 486, 488, 489, 493, 494, 498, 500 ("sick of C.”), 501, 527, 600 (Seeker), 612 (Brett), 643, 651 (? going there), 654 (D. H. L. in), 715, 762 (?going there), 767, 795. 855

Captain’s Doll, The, 532, 550, 564

Caravan, 649

Carinthia (going to), 684

Carlyle, 95 ("wrote 50 vols. on value of silence”)

Carmen, Bliss, 117

Carmichael, 304 (books by), 539 (Mrs. C, and Verga MS).

Carnegie Institute (excavations at Yucatan), 619

Carrara, 169, 181

Carrington, 426

Carson, 382

Carswell, Catherine (Mrs. Jackson), Letters to, 200, 2or, 204, 210, 307, 345. 352, 355. 360, 363. 370. 375-382, 387, 389, 390, 393, 398, 4OI> 402, 408, 410, 416, 420, 437, 440, 442, 445, 447, 451. 465. 470. 471. 483, 485, 489, 499. 505, 314, 517, 522, 524, 526, 533, 54¹. 549. 554-560, 565, 569, 571, 576, 583, 601, 617, 635, 654, 816

Carswell, 358

Carswell, Donald, 210, 283, 639;

Letters to, 452, 530, 694

Carter, Vivian, 480

Carthage, 439

Caruso, 92

Casanova ("tried C., but he smells ), xiii, 523

Caserta (going to), 484

Cassandra, 552

Cassino, 489

Cassis, 827

Castiglione (?selling Lady C. in Paris), 767

Catholicism ("Free" and "Reactionary"), 344

Cauca Valley (Colombia), 421

Cavalleria Rusticana (Verga), 529, 537. 569

Cearae, The (Near Edenbridge, Kent), 12-4, l6. *9. ZZ, 34. 57. 7°. 104, no, 112, 114, n6, 124-6, 129, 133, 171, 200, 529, 746

Celestial Omnibus, 224

Celia (Swift’s poem to), 773

Censorship, 760

Century Magazine, The, io, 19, 126

Cervetri (Etruscan), 680

Cervo inn (Gargnano), 67, 538

Ceylon 534 ("must go to"), 538, 543 ("too hot and enervating"), 545 ("the east is not for me”), 605, 856

Chambers, J. D., Letter to, 76r

Chaos in Modern Poetry, 737

Chapaia (lake), 567, 568, 571, 576, see also 701

Chardin, 518

Chariot of the Sun, 702, 730, 736, 847

Chartreuse de Par me ( reading again”), 746

Chatterton ("no sympathy with starvers"), 91

Chatto and Windus, 414, 415, 422, 536, 720 (Lady C.), 729 (MS. of Lady C.), 794

Chelsea, 663, 666

Chesham, 208-214, 855

Chesterfield, 670

Cheviots, The, 684

Chexbres, xxx, 775

Chiaras, The di, 850

Chicago, 263 413, 457, 468, 474, 559, 561, 588 (D. H. L. there for a day), 708

Chichester, 244

Chicken, Ita, 619

Children ("barometers”), 443

Chimopova (Hopi village), 607

Chinese (at Sonora: "run about like vermin”), 581

Chips and Faggots (suggested title), 845            , r

Chiusi (Etruscan), 659, 742

Chopin, 545 (priest on Orsova), 796 (Valdemosa and George Sand)

Chorus of Women (suggested title for poems), 438

Christ (foreword to Sons and

Lovers), 95-101

Christening, The, 2-01

Christian, Bertram, 210

Christianity, 357 ("based on love of > self, love of property”), 360 ("based on reaction" . . . "greatest thing world has seen”)

Churchill, Winston, 351

C. I. D. (enquires about D. H. L.), 424. 425

Cimabue, 231

Cinema “crowd" (picked up at

Papeete), 551

Cirolo, 142

Civilisation (collapsing). 271

Civita Vecchia, 680

Clarence Thompson, 611

"Clarinda” (i.e, Maria Huxley), 775

Clarke, Eddie (brother-in-law), 48

Clarke, Mrs. (sister), 289, 297, 298, 463

Classic American Literature (see

Studies in etc.), 521

Clayhanger, 62

Clayton, Douglas 136

Coalition Government, The, 223

Cochranes, The, 359

Cimbrone (Lord Grimthorpe), 680

Colefax, Lady, 722, 724, 726, 728, 729

Collard, 4 50

Collected Poems, 701 (Seeker suggests), 712, 719, 730, 759, 83c

Collier's Wife, The (rejected by Daily News), 30

Collings, Ernest H. R., 115, 117;

Letters to, 71, 72, 86, 93, 107, 113, 122,129,137,182, 259, 400

Collins, Vere, 451, 455, 476, 600

Colombia, 420, 421

Colombo (going to), 536

Colonna, Vittoria, 343, 344

Colonies (Flinders Petrie quoted), 547

Commando, 852

Community (a new C. to be founded), 215, 220

Como, Lake, 538, 812, 813

Coney Grey (farm), 675

Conrad, Joseph, 66, 70, 84, 175

Conservative and Liberal, 247

Constable, 333

Constance, Lake of, 140 (D. H. L. at), 519 (going to)

Constant Nymph, The, 640

Constantine Bay, 314, 328 ("we don't like")

Constanza Davidovna, 141 (see under Garnett, David)

Construction of Novels (to Arnold

Bennett), 295

Contemporary Magazine, The, (Cobden Sanderson’s Quarterly), 625

Cook, Miss, 28

Corbin, Alice, 553

Cordoba, 797, 799

Coriine, 853

Corn Dance (essay), 613

Corneto, 680

Cornishmen, 312 (D. H. L. on), 329 ("I don't like," etc.), 425 ("just like the C ”, i.e. C. 1. D. in London)

Cornwall, xxix, 297 (D. H. L. in),299 (while waiting for Florida), 301-418 (D. H. I, in), 303 (“I do like C ”), 308 ("I like C very much It is not England"), 309 (“I still like C ”), 310 ("I love C.”), 450, 475< 554. 855

Cornwallis-West affair, The, 392 Corot, 216

Carriere della Sera, 173

Corsica 787 (we now think of C.)

Cortona (Etruscan), 655, 742

Cortina, 672, 693

Costanza, 816, 818 ("and Ekkie”)

Coterie (N. York: printed copies of Sun), 718

Counterpane (M. Huxley), 764

Country of the Blind (H. G. Wells), 194

Court Theatre, 24, 481

Coward, Ralph, 704, 705

Coyoacan, 620

Cozoucan, 621

Craig, Mary. A. (translator of Verga), 537, 539

Cranford (D. H. L. begins a novel “as blameless as C."), 427

Crich, 131,674, 675

Crippen, 92

Cromford, 438, 446, 463, 475, 633

Crosby, Caresse, 735, 736, 776, 793, 802; Letters to, 755, 779, 835, 845

Crosby, Harry, 814, 842, 845, Letters to, 702, 718, 724, 730, 734, 735. 737. 747. 75L 77&. 793. 813

Crosland (Sonnets: "he is a nasty person"), 178

Crown de Leon (tramp steamer), 283-5, 288

Croydon, xxv, 1-8, 10-18, 121, 854 Cuernavaca, 619, 620

Cunard, Nancy, 542, 787

Curtis, Miss, 554

Daily Express, The, 763

Daily Mirror, The, 367

Daily News, The, 30, 31, 44

Dance, Herbert, 58

D’Annunzio, 92, 345

Dante, 322

Darlington (Western Australia), 547- 57i

Darwin, 101, 693

Dassburg, 624

Daughters of the Vicar, 11, 136 (previously Two Marriages), 210, 202

David, 634 (a play, not for publication), 637 (for the theatre), 642 (Seeker’s agreement for), 651 (in German), 655 (Seeker, Knopf), 660 (private performance), 660 (Knopf), 662 (in German), 667 ("very few hopes”), 669 (rehearsals to begin), 675, 676 (to London for), 701

Davidson (the school), 34

Davies, Rhys, 788 789, 832 (to edit The Squib with C. Lahr); Letters to, 770, 780, 785, 790, 793, 805, 818, 844

Davies, W. H., 127, 130, 135, 146, 151, 152, 164, 174

Davison, Lawrence H. (worn de plume of D. H. L. for Movements, etc ), 517

Day of Wrath (suggested title for Women in Love), 507

Dax, Mrs., 254

Dead Rose, The, 202

Dean Forest of, 451

Decameron, The, 239

de Grey, 518, 519

Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire (D. H. L reading), 440

De la Huerta, 587

de la Mare, Walter, 27, 32, 48, 50, 51, 55, 60, no, in

Deledda ("very interesting”) , 472

Delius, 330

Del Monte (ranch at Questa), 560-

4, 570, 580, 620

Delphos (oracle at), 673

Demerara, 284

De Quincey, 484 ("I like him, because he dislikes Plato," etc.)

Derby, Lord, 385

Derbyshire, 670

Derwent, The (at Matlock), 460

Desenzano, in, 538

Deutsche Verlagsanstalt (agreements with), 616

Devonshire, 289, 291, 630, 690

("shall try”)

De Vargas. 679

de Wint, Peter, 86

Diablerets, xxx, 700. 710, 716, 722, .73r. 739 (glacier), 769, 788, 852

Dial, The (N. Y.), 520, 530, 532, 566 (Indians and an Englishman), 657 (Glad Ghosts), 668 (ib.), 718 (The Man Who Loved Islands and Two Blue Birds)

Diarmid’s Lay, 419

Diary of a Trip to Sardinia (provisional title), 513, 515

Dickensian Gentleman, 787 Dickenson, Lowes, 386 Dieu des Corps, Le, 753 Dionysos ("Lindsay’s D. book”), 770

Dobson, 83

Doctor Manente (Orioli book), 829, 838

Domodossola, 706

Don (i.e. Carswell, q.v.), 383, 388, 39°, 39i, 40I> 4o8> 4i°. 43⁸, 44L 448, 471, 499 (his "case”), 549 ("not John, Juan, nor Giovanni”)

Don Juan (poem), 206

Doran (agreement with), 350

Dorset, 789

Dostoievsky, 30, 118 (E. Garnett and), 125 (Garnett s Life of), 198, 238 (Idiot), 313 ("taken great dislike to the Possessed”), 314, 322, 325-7 ("I find I've gone off D.”), 364 (Murry’s book on), 383, 525, 809

Douglas, Norman, 143,631 (D. II. L. and Magnus), 537, 634 (Magnus episode), 690, 839 (What About Europe?)

Douglas, James, 496(S/ar),7O7, 716, 812, 845

Douillet, Mme. (of Bandol), 841;

Letter to, 838 (in French)

Dove's Nest, 583

Downland, 16

Downland Man, The, 704

Dowson, Ernest, 150, 163

Doxey, Mrs., 457

Drachenfels, 37, 38

Drave (river), 689

Dregs (suggested title for Magnus MS.), 634

Drexel Institute (Philadelphia), 642 Drinkwater, John, 174, 182, 277

Dublin (?publish novel in), 423    "

Duckworth’s, II, 13, 16, 26-8, 30, 32, 35, 37, 42 ("don’t want any money from”), 46, 48, 50, 51, 55, 57, 60, 62 (Z50 from), 64, 68, 82 (^100 o/a), 105 (Sons and Lovers), no (money), in ("shady pp. in

Sons and Lovers"), 112 (money), 114, 115 (Collings and), 117 ("printers very slow”), 123 (Collings’ drawing), 126 (/50 from), 136 (MS. of pj y to), 139, 172, 190 (loss on Sons and Lovers), 191-3, 199, 202, 207, 209, 212, 302 (?Italian Days), 350 (Twilight in Italy), 354 (The Sisters), 380 ("the faithful D"), 437, 495 (resale of copyrights?), 496 (relationship with), 500 ("a bit timid” . . . The Rainbow), 501 ("going on with”), 536 (and Curtis Brown), 539 (Curtis Brown and), 604, 855 Dufferin, Lord (Letters from High

Latitudes), 648

Dunbar (love dialogue by), 816 and note

Dunlop, 193

Dunn, Willie, 170

Durer, 518

Duse, Eleanora, 345, 576

"Eagle,” 563 (Mexican poem), 724 (MS. burnt)

Eames, Mrs. Hamilton, Letters to, 692, 712

Earl (see E. H. Brewster) Easterbrook, Miss, 535, 536 Eastwood (Notts.), 444, 457, 460,

493, 633, 674 ("where I was born”), 675, 821, 854

Eder, Dr. and Mrs , 420, 421, 470 ("?to Palestine with”), 471, 639

Edinburgh, 347 (printers* strike), 353

“Education of the People,” 459 (“three little essays”), 465 (returned by Freeman, accepted by Stanley Unwin)

Educational Supplement (The Times), 459

Edward VII, King, 641

Egoist, The (American), 181 (poems in), 187 (“what a beast of a paper”)

Egypt, 439 (Frobenius), 472, 691 (invitation to)

Elegies (sketches for), 137

Elide (maid in Italy), 148, 165, 169 (daughter of Felice), 175-7, 184, 188, 294, 374

Eliots, The (instinctively dislike me), 801

El Paso, 562, 619

Ellisina, 485, 492

Elsa (Frieda’s daughter), 648, 651 Emily, 444 (E is still here, with her child and Jackie) (see Mrs Emily King)

Fmma (housekeeper at Pads tow), 302, 311, 314, 320, 329, 334, 336 Emergency Committee, 477, 480 Encyclopedia Britannica, 832

End of the World (Abercrombie), 194 Engine Lane, 674

England (D. H. L. and), 106 ("the tightness of”), 120 ("gloom of dark moral judgment”), 121 (“don’t want to live there any more”), 124 ("that Sunday feeling”), 126 (“dimness in the air gives me the blues”), 129 ("don't like E. . . . but the English are lovable people”), 131 (“dim and woolly": cf. German climate "bright and sharply defined"), 132, 270 ("end of my writing for

E. i.e. Rainbow), 271 (“collapsing”), 273 (“a last vision of its beauty" when going to America), 302 (hatred of), 375 (“want to go away for ever"), 464-6 (must leave), 470 (“no use for me here any more"), 471, 512 (thought of E. “entirely repugnant”), 542 ("made mistake forsaking E. . . . running away like Jonah"), 546 (“I break my heart over E. when I am out here”--Ceylon), 669 (“seems to suit my health”), 857 England my England, 532, 533, 535, 55i. 560, 856

Englishmen (D. H. L. on), 291 (most young cultivated E. “rotten”), 694 (detachment . . . often mere indifference and lack of life), 698 (over-tend er), 699 (older than the Germans, and “weary even of victory")

English Review, The, 8, 19, 20 (Harrison), 28, 31, 37, 72, 104, 125 ("so piffling”) 126, 132, 136, 143, 147, 150, 151 (Solway Firth), 153, 174, 179, 201, 255, 373, 400-2, 404, 413,416,442,468,473,476, 532 (Samson and Delilah), 535 (“Almond Blossom” and England my England), 854

Enid (see under Hop kin), 170, 446, 447

Enormous Room, The, 703 (“never heard of it”)

Epstein, 370

Ernst, Morris, L., Letter to, 760

Escaped Cock, The, 724, 726, 750 (MS, to Enid Hilton), 778 (MS. of), 79i, 8o2 (MS.), 8rz (Crosby: ‘"cold feet about?"), 847

Essays (Arthur Ransome’s), 122

Estrada, Genaro (P.E.N. club), 619, 621

Etna, 502, 505, 512, 526, 529

Etruscans, xvii, 527 ( 'puzzled by secret of"), 680 (near Rome), 682 (tombs), 655 (Umbria), 718 (Collecting material), 742 (ib.), 745, 762, 763 (essays: but "publishers always want 'a book' ")

European History (for Oxford Press), 461, 462, 465

Evans, Mrs. (“the murdered”), 619 Eve's Mass, 413

Evening Land, 553

Evening News, The, 763

Evening Standard, The (cartoon), 788

Everyman (A Religion for the Young), 812

Ewart, Wilfred (and Old Mexico), 562

Eyewitness, The, 30

Eztatlan. 583

Faber and Faber ("the obscenity article”), 828

Fabianism, xxv, 247, 386 Face I shall never see, 211 Fagan, 481

Fanfrolico Press, 767 (Stephenson, of the), 768 {“what a waste of good printing”)

Fantasia of the Unconscious, 551, 563. 566, 568, 575, 635

Fanny and Annie, 518 (short story), 532 (Hutchinsons)

Faraglioni, The, 498 barbman, 338 bar)eon, Eleanor, 260, 477, 479, 5io, 511

Fascism (in Italy), xix, 705

Faux Monnayeurs, 686

Felice (Fiori, mother of Elide), 142-5, 168, 169, 176, 177, 188, 294> 359, 374

belley Mill (the White Peacock farm), 674

Feltrelline, Signora, 79 ("who

• teaches us Italian")

Feroze, Dr., 464 ("a Parsee”)

Fiascherino, 141, 142, 144, 145, 304, 332, 373

Fight for Barbara, 70, 77, 78, 103

Fighting Line, The (suggested title), 209

Finanzminister (Bolshevik Bavarian

Republic), 702 (Frieda's relative)

Finney Farm, 656

"Fish” (poem), 524

Fisher, 456 (“that man Fisher")

Fisher, Mrs., 428

Fisher Street, 254, 257

Flaubert, 65

Flecker, 133 ("F-rhythm"), 135

Flint (?a poet), 449

Flood, "before the,” 543, 545 (i.e. the tropics)

Florence, 114, 485 (going to), 492, 521-3 ("want to write story about”), 600 (Seeker), 643, 650 (with sister), 656, 661, 716 (D. H. L. in), 787, 823 (going to), LZZ,857

Florida, xxix, 269, 270, 289 {“may get oft to"), 294, 297, 298 (“Huxley will come to"), 299 (“not going immediately”), 376, 392

Fontana Vecchia, 575

Fontainebleau, 561, 698, 758

Foreign Legion, The, 634 (see Memoir of, etc )

Forest Row, 115

Forster, E. M., 615, 728; Letters to, 224, 552, 613

Fort Myers (Florida), 278, 284, 287, 288

Forte dei Marnri (Italy), xxix, xxx, 690, 729, 745, 797, 807, 818, 831 Forum, The, 28, 30, 84, 104, no, 118, 126, 143, 709, 724 {Escaped Cock), 726 (Helen Bramble, of the), 727, 750 {Escaped Cock)

Fox, The (story), 459, 461, 481, 532 {Nash's Magazine), 569 (' belongs to the old world”)

Fra Angelico, 216, 233, 445

‘ Fragment of Stained Glass, A,” 72, 20T

Frangois le Champi, 468

Francis of Assisi, xiii, 656 ("I can’t stand F. of A ")

Frankfurt, 099 (?going to)

Frayne, Mr. (lawyer at Taos), 807

Frederick of Germany, The Empress, 173

Freeman (on The Times), 459, 465 (returns essays)

Freemasonry (D. H. L. "can't belong”)

Freer, Mrs., 598

French people, 766 ("a slummy impression" of)

Freud, 142 ("never did read ), 475 Frieda, 855 and passim—her daughters, 683, 715, 717, 723, 776, 777;

and sec tinder Barbara, 708, 715, 721, 753. 755. 841

Friedel, 664

Friendship, 627 (D. H L. to I).

Brett on)

Frobenius (German author), 439 (on Africa)

Frost Flowers, 421

Fry, Roger, 743

F. T., 93 (“tell F. T. I'll write soon")

Futurism, 195 (D, H. L. "interested in”), 197 (wants "to write an essay about")

Gadfly, 119

Gaige, 709, 748, 778 (Escaped Cock), 790

Galignani, 767 (Lady Chatterley), 789 (Rainbow)

Gallina Canyon, 636

Galsworthy, John, 103, 104, 423 (?to sponsor novel), 679 ("scrutiny”on), 681 fib.), 716 (ib.), 718 (ib,), 828

Galuzzo, 676

Galveston, 530, 597

Gamba, 188

Gambrosier, Ettore, 141,142

Game of Forfeits, A, 37

Gandhi, 705

Garda, Lago di, 48, 49, 538, 758, 7⁶5- 794 797. 799. 8lo, 818 853

Gardiner, Rolf, 667; Letters to, 604, 606, 666, 669, 670, 672, 684, 695, 697, 699, 702-4, 712, 768

Gardola di Tignale, 107

Gardone, 63

Gargnano, 62, 63, 538

Garnett, Arthur, 116

Garnett David ("Bunny”), 46, 55, 62, 117, 126, 140, 173, 199, 214, 223, 235; Letters to, 58, 78, 89, 114. 746

Garnett, Edward, 18 (Lords and Masters), 55, 72, 117, 854; Letters to, ix, xxi, 9-16, 18-32, 41-7, 56, 62, 66, 68, 74, 76, 81, 84, 90, 95-103, 109-111, 116, 117, 124, 126. 132, 136, 139, 141, 170, 172, 177, 189, 193, 197, 199, SOI, 209, 214, , 525.528

Garnett, Mrs. Edward, 126, 127, 140, 144, 173, 179, 190 ("says I have no true nobility”), 199, 2x4

Garnett, Robert, 112, 124, 126

Garmo, 619

Garsington, 235, 236, 239, 240, 241, 243, 253, 268. 270, 273, 278. 283,

313 (MSS "lie there"), 448 (Gentler at), 734 ( "sad about” i.e. given up)

Garvice, Charles, 9

Gaul (books on), 472

Gavril, 327

Gawler, Mrs., 548

"Genesis and Meaning of Homosexuality" (Burrow), 686

Genoa, 800

George, Lake, 750

George, Lloyd, 381, 382, 385, 387, 455 (“hopeless" . . . wish I were in his position ... do something . . . have my own way"), 473- 546

George, W. L., 126 (Sons and Lovers), 276 (Rainbow)

Georgian Anthology, 313 ("Snapdragon")

Georgian Poetry, 175, 270, 411, 413, 414

Gerhardi, William, 640

Germany, 33 (going to), 118 (domesticity), 510 (going to), 515, 517 (friendly, but depressing), 655 (going to), 697 (Biinde), 698, 855, 857

Gentler, Mark, 285, 383, 419, 433, 639, 842; Letters to, 319, 348, 367, Z68, 384. 396 403, 425, 43X, 434, 439. 448. 474. 73L 843

Gesangverein, 815

Ghosts, 92

Gibbon 439 (reading), 440, 449 (near end of)

Gibraltar, 838

Gibson, W. W., 146, 151, 164, 165, 174, 182, 194

Giglioli, Dr., 686

Gillett, F, W., 603

Gingerbread (D. II. L.’s suggested title for Camomile), 526

Giotto, 231

Gipsy, 730

Gissing, 22 (D. H. L. on), 91 ("no sympathy with starvers")

Glad Ghosts, 644 ("much too long"), 646-8, 650 (written for Lady Cynthia Asquith), 657 (Dial), 668 (ib.)

Glasgow, 284, 288, 307 ("a godforsaken place"), 515 (Art School)

Gobi, deserts of, 691

Godwin, 237 (Brailsford on)

Goelands, Les (Beau Rivage), 832

Goethe, xvi, 76 (D II. L. on), 310, 484 (“I laughed over G yesterday”), 525, 716

Golden Age, The, 58

Golden Bough, The, 344. 359

Golden Journey to Samarcand, The, 133, 134, 155

Goldring, Douglas, 477, 481, 508, 636; Letter to, 514

Gollancz (Rhys Davies and), 817

Goodyear (“whom 1 like”), 289

Goose Fair, 201

Goossens, 330

Gordon, Jan (Modern French Painting). 75i

Gordon, Margaret, 846

Gore Farm, 703, 769

Gorky, Maxim, 180

Gotthard, The, 140, 142

Gotzsche 570, 572-4, 580, 581, 587,

684, 699, 700, 702

Goulds, The, 801 (“instinctively dislike me”)

Gourdjieff, 656

Government people, 421 ("are the devil, with their importance, and their 'expediency,* and their 'tyranny’ *')

Goya, 216

Graham, Stephen, 562

Granada, 797, 799, 835

Grant, Duncan, 215, 216

Grasse, 774

Gray, Cecil, 420 (can find /1000 for "new colony”), 421, 425; Letters to, 418, 422, 428, 429, 434, 438, 449, 450

Greasley, 674

Great Expectations, 411

Greatham, 215

Greece, 361 ("death agony of”), 362

Greenland, 560

Gregory, Lady, 528 (plays)

Greiff enhagen, 358 (“slipping back”)

Grenzen der Seele, 525, 529

Grief, 167 (poem for Edward

Marsh), 206

Grimthorpe, Lord, 680

Grosseto. 680

Groves, Mr., 787-9

Gsteig, 815

Guadalajara, 567, 581, 586, 587

Guards, 730 (a third part not printed)

Guaymar, 580

Guide (the blue), 768

Guild-Socialism (D. H. L. on), zoo

Gull, Ranger (i.e. Guy Thorne), 336

Gurnard’s Head, 328, 334

Hadrian, 532 (originally: You Touched Me), 535 ("can’t alter,

not got copy”)

Hagedorn, Hermann, 262

Haggard, Rider, 672

“Halliday,” 527 (?libel action- John

Bull article)

Hamburg, 587

Hamilton, Mrs. Enid, xxxiv

Hamlet, 117 ("wouldn’t sell more

than 100 copies unless pushed”) Hampstead, 293, 435 (H. Norns), 669, 855, 85b

Hanley, 64, 248

Hants, 789

Harbottle, 604, 606 ("poor stuff”) Hare, Mrs., 727, 807 (?bought MSS.

from Hon. Dorothy Brett) Hardie, Keir, 694, 695 Hardy, Thomas, 120, 205 (Abercrombie on), 206, 208, 270, 435, 437. (the H. country), 738 ("a genius for the commonplace; but better than G. B. S. even then”)

Hargrave, 698, 700

Harold (i.e, Hobson, q.v.), 107, nr, 117

Harper, Miss Allanah. 737, 747 Harrison, Austin, 79, 20, 25, 28, 30, 31 ("likes to think he’s a personal benefactor”), 32, 126 (asks for stories), 136 (Italian sketches), 143, 150 . (wants prose not poetry), 17r, 401, 402, 404, 416, 452, 468, 476; Leiter to, 543

Harvard, 414

Harvest Moon, 399

Haskard's, 524, 786

Hatchard’s, 294 (Rainbow)

Havlyn, 328

Hawk, Mr A. D_, 560, 619, 620, 624

Hawke, Mrs., 334

Haystacks, 19

Headley, 477

Hearsts', 550 (Captain’s Doll) Hebrides, 358, 417 (songs), 423 (ib.) H. C„ Letters to, 2, 3, 4, 7, 121 Heidelberg, 117, 600, 702 Heinemann. William, 2, 12, iz, 18-

20, 24, 27, 43, 45, 50 (“his Jew-ship"), 60, 72 (White Peacock), 190 ("a rich commercial man"), 586 (Letters of a V.A.D.), 819 (for "proper” public), 854, Letter to, 1 Henderson, 806 Henley, 92

Henry, Mrs. Nancy, Letters to, 450, 454. 466, 476

Hepburn, Mrs. (Anna Wickham), 58. 262

Herefordshire, 325

Hermes Ithyphallos, 558

Hermitage (near Newbury), 424-6 (Dollie Radford’s cottage), 471, 473, 474

Hcrrenalp, 811

Hesel tine, Philip, 283, 288 (a musician . . will come to Florida), 290 ("backboneless”), 306 ("seems empty”), 310, 312, 314, 319, 320 (publishing scheme), 324. 325, 328, Z29, 331, 336, 338

Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers (poem), 5i3

Hiddigeigei’s roof, 498

High Park (woods), 674

Hill, Carrie, J., 726, 727

Hilton, Mrs, Enid (previously Enid Hopkin), 732; Letters to, 140, 740, 741, 750, 7ZZ 764, 781, 802, 823

Hindus, 350 ("decadent and barbarous”)

History of Egypt, 322

History of Europe (D. H E. for Oxford Press), 409, 507

History of Italian Painting for Children, 518 (suggested title)

History of the East, 318 ("a very bad little book”)

Hobson, Harold, 56, 82, 84, 88, 91, 93, 95, 129

Hobson, J. A., 86, 88

Hockings, The, 389

Hodgson, Ralph, 152

Hoheluftkurorte, 814 ("save me from H.”)

Holland Park, 704

"Holroyd, Mrs.," 675 ("was an aunt of mine")

Homer, 232, 237 (Chapman’s), 528 ("won’t read, my Greek too infinitesimal")

Hone, Joseph Maunsell, Letter to, 423

Honour and Arms, 202, 209

Hopi, 607 (country), 608 (women), 610 (reservation)

"Hopi Snake Dance" (article), 610, 613,615 (Murry likesj, 625 (ui The Theatre Arts}, 626, 642, 682

Hopkin, Enid (now Mrs. Enid Hilton), 732 ("Kot’s old acquaintance”)

Hopkin, W. E. (Willie), 446, 447, 469; Letters to, 4, 5, 130, 168, 214, 254, zio, 436, 492, 821

Hopkin, Mrs. W. E. (Sallie), 169, 170; Letters to, 6, 7, 39, 48, 85, 87, . 205, 404, 406, 444, 446

Howard’s Fnd, 552

Horse, The (i.e. The Laughing

Horse, q.v.}, 826

Horsedealer’s Daughter, The, 532, 543

Horton, Dr , 294 (Rainbow)

Hotel Webster, 649

Hotevilla, 607

House in Demetrius Road. 304

House of Ellis, The, 577 (D. H. L. reads MS. of), 586 (M. L Skinner's title for The Boy in the Bush}

House of Mirth, 80

House of the Dead, 180

Hubrecht, 502

Hiibsch, 269 (to publish Rainbow in

U.S.A.)

Hudson, Miss, 240

Hueffer, Ford Madox, 1 (and White Peacock}, n, 14 (plays "lost”), 15, 2i, 72 ("discovered E. was a genius”), 172, 2ii, 854

Hughes, Mrs., 621

Humanitarianism (D. H. L. and), 95

Humes, Elizabeth, 565

Hungary, 826 (jade from)

Hunt, Miss (i.e. Mrs. Hueffer), 13

Huntingdons, The, 166,173, 202, 359

Hutchinson’s, 68,   419,   518

("friendly"), 603,618(The Woman Who Rode A way), 728

Hutchinson, Jack, 786 (Pansies), 818 ("North Sea")

Hutchinson, Mary, 689

Huxley, Aldous, 285, 298, 647 (Along the Road}, 677, 680, 827 (a Machiavelli play); Letters to, 693, 710, 716, 720, 728. 744, 757, 767, 774- 777. 787. 799. 821, 843

Huxley, A and M., 696, 699, 702, 705, 720, 783, 808; Letters to, 672, 686, 689, 690, 707, 738, 741, 765, 767, 781, 789, 790, 796, 814, 817, 834- 837, 840, 845

Huxley, J uhan, 710, 726, 728, 774, 777. 805, 844, 846

Huxley, Juliette, 707, 708, 715, 774, 777, 846; Letters to, 706, 725

Huxley, Maria, 680; Letters to, 676, 7T4» 723, 736. 752. 755. 758, 762, 764, 786, 808, 815. 827, 8zr, 833, 841, 842, 848, 851, 853

Hydres, 744

Hysteria (the modern, D. H. L. on), 764 (affects men even worse than women)

Ibsen, 66, 104 ("don’t want to write like”)

Ida, 848 (went away from ranch)

Idella, 588, 619, 624, 826, 827

Idiot (Dostoievsky), 238

Ig€a, Villa, 61, 62, 63, 538

Imagist Anthology, 228

I Malavoglia (Verga), 528, 529, 538, 639

India, 582 (?D. H. L. going to), Indian Civil Servants, 549 (“are the limit”), Indians (i.e. Red Indians), 555 ("much more remote than negroes”)

Indian Studies, 316

Indians and an Englishman, 566 (Particle in Dial)

Innsbruck, 48, 519, 537, 686, 823

Insurrection of Miss Houghton, The (provisional title), 118

Insel Verlag (Almanack), 678 (asks for article)

Intelligent Woman’s Guide, The, 738 (“tooboring for anyintelligent man”) International, 550 (Captain’s Doll) Intimacy, 10

Ionian Sea, 526

I Promessi Sposi, 468

"Irishy people” (except Synge), 103 ("time for a reaction against”)

Iron Age in Italy, 704

Irschenausen, 144

Isaacs, Miss, Letters to, 613. 626, 719

Isaacs, Rufus, 546

Isar and Isarthal, 39, 40, 44, 46, 684, 746

Ischia, 490, 493

Isis Unveiled, 476

Isle of Man, 112

Italian Days (Por Hours), 302 (suggested title)

Italian Sketches, 294, 321, 347

Italian Studies, 311

Italian unification, 5 to (extra chapter for Oxford Press History) Italy, 120 ("does not judge”), 122 ("still sighing for”), 432, 661 ("is always lovely), 706 ("I don’t really like"), 855

Ivy, 363 (Ivy Low now Mme.

Litvinoff)

Ixtaccilmatl, 587

Ixtlan, 583

Jackie, 444 (Jack Clarke, D. H. L.’s nephew)

Jackson, Mrs. (see Catherine Carswell)

Jackson’s, 740 (Enid Hilton)

Jade, 828 (Warrens get from Hungary)

Jaffe, Professor Friedel, 117, 125, 636 '(Frieda’s nephew), 702 (Minister of Finance, etc.)

Jaffe-Richthofen, Frau Dr. Else, 702

Jalisco, 583, 586

James, Henry, 277, 278 (Pand

Rainbow)

Jane Eyre, 2

Jeanne D’Arc, 74, 75, 77

Jefferies, 15, 21 (Story of my Heart) Jehanne, 818 (shawl), 828, 833, 842, and see under Moulaert

Jenkins, Mrs. A. L. (Perth, West Australia), 544; Letters to, 541, 547. 55i. 554

Jennings, Blanche, 255

Jewish, 250 (Encyclopedia), 676 (psychology)

Jix, 787, 788, 790, 8oz

Johanna, 522 (Frieda’s younger sister; see under Schreibershofen) John Bull, 527, 529

John Chilcote, 12

John Patrick (i.e. Carswell), 583, 654 (to school)

John Thomas and Lady Jane (Juliette Huxley’s suggestion as title for Lady Chatterley), 705, 707 Johnson, Willard, 596,611,621,643, 709 (Laughing Horse)', Letters to, 556, 578, 587, 590, 607, 619, 826 "Jolly Roger” (essay), 850 Jonah, 543 (“running away like”) Joyce, James, 742 ("a clumsy olla putrida"), 751 ("bores me stiff”), 776 (Ulysses)

Jung, 458, 460, 462, 475

Juta, Jan 516 (pictures of Sardinia), 518 (royalty), 519 (5 drawings), 524 (coming to Florence), 530

Kama (or Karma), 542

Kandy, 534 (Brewster), 541, 542 Kangaroo, xxv, 550 (finished), 561, 564 ("not The K”), 567 (£125 from Seeker), 572 (doing proofs), 578 (Murry), 583 (Catherine Car swell), 584

Kant, 716

Karamazov, 326 (Dmitri), 327 (Ivan) Katie, 428 (Mrs. Kate Berryman) Kents xiv

Kennerley, Mitchell, 126, 136, 144, 170, 179, 190. 191, 219, 759; Letters to, 138, 14°. T4²

Keynes, Maynard, 728

Keyserling, Count, 652 (D. H. L. on), 845 (Plumed Serpent)

Kibbo Kiff 699, 769 ("what about the Kibbo-Kifter? ”)

Kierkegaard (quoted), xii Kmgsclere, 477

King’s Lynn, 724

King, Mrs Emily, 444 (D. H. L.’s elder sister)

Kiowa, 664 (ranch)

Kisses in the Train (poem), 132

Knopf, Alfred A., 625, 629 (Seltzer and), 635 ("left Seltzer and gone to K.”), 637 (’"exclusively"), 642 (K. doesn't like limited editions), 644 (Plumed Serpent), 655 {David), 658, 660 (ib.), 683 (Lady C.), 707 (John Thomas etc), 75 (likes Lady C. and wants to publish), 737 (Sun), 747 (ib de luxe), 751 (ib.), 759,791 (Bom and) 804 (Woman Who Rode Away), 810 (Lady C.)

Knopf, Mrs. Blanche, 660, 724 (likes Lady C.)

Koteliansky, S , 217, 286, 296, 319 342 (Kuprin), 368. 369, 396, 419, 420, 423, 425, 426, 431-3, 440, 451, 458, 484, 487, 562 (Murry), 564. 573. 574- 588, 595 (publishing scheme), 639,690 (depressed about his scheme), 731—3

Kouyoumdjian, 290 ("blatant and pushing”), 306 (in Cornwall)

Krenkow, Frau Karl, 34, 35

Kuprin, 342 ("don't think much of these lesser Russians”)

Labour, 453 ("hopeless”)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, xii, xvii, xxvii, xxxiv, 682, 683, 709 (or John Thomas and Lady Jane, at the printer’s in Florence),

710 (“not sexual: it's phallic"),

711 (prefers Lady Jane, etc. as title), 713, 720 (Bollinger and Chatto), 730 (phoenix for), 737—9 (booksellers reject), 742, 743, 745 (Orioli and), 746 (David Garnett likes), 747 (to be suppressed in London, banned in America), 748 (Vanguard Press), 750 (held up in U.S. mail), 752 ("too much stupid fuss over”), 759 (review in The Sun . . . ? pirated in America), 765 (‘ fuss has died down ” £4 the present price, paper-covered edition, American piracies), 767 (ib.), 770, 778 (paper-bound), 779 (’Paris Edition), 781 (and Scotland Yard), 784 (ib.), 792 (5thpirated edition), 804 (Speiser and pirates) 809 (pirated edition illustrated', 816 (Titus sold ist 3,000, and printing again), 824 (wrote three times: i.e 3 complete MSS ), 857

Lady into Fox, 578 ("just playboy stuff”)

Lady Jane (i.e. Lady C hatter ley q.v.), 742 (fate of, in America)

Ladybird, The 532 (30,000 words or so), 533 ("novelette"), 550 (in America), 569 (D. H. L. on). 650

Lahr, Charles, 765 (Lady Chatter ley), 781 (Enid Hilton), 785 (on Rhys Davies), 819 (The Squib), 832 (A Huxley and), ib. (to edit Squib with Rhys Davies), 844 (motor accident), 852

La Lupa, 569

Lamartine, 135

Lancret, 518

Land and Water, 532 (Hadrian and

You Touched Me)

Land’s End, 332

Lane, John,510 (book on Venice for)

Lang, Andrew, 92

Langley Mill, 633, 675

Lansdown Road, 702

Laocobn, 676

Lamy,554

Lasca, 762 ("I am doing L.— quite amusing”)

La Serra, 165

Last Judgment (Fra Angelico), 216 Laughing Horse, The, (Santa FL) 590, 660 ("a little western magazine"), 709 (Willard Johnson)

Laurence (Hilton), 781

Lausanne, 730

Lawrence, David Herbert, (bom at Eastwood, Nottingham, n Sept. 1885 died at Nice, 2 March, 1930)

— America, 262, 274, 388, 390, 391,

479. 564, 574. 680, 692

— Aunt, 675 (original of "Mrs.

Holroyd”)

— Autobiography, 20, 26 ("Snap

dragon”)

— Beard, his, 374

— Bibliography, 642 (MacDonald)

— Birth, 674, 854

— Brother, eldest, 300 (“a radical

nonconformist”)

— Business, 331 ("no business genius"), 444 (hatred of), 552 ("business is no good”: apropos Howard's End)

— Censorship, on, 760

— Childhood, 674

— Christianity, on, 357 (“love of

self”)

— "Creative stuff”, 89 ^can only

write "when it comes"), 90 ("when I want to do it"), 118

— Criticism, 41 (fretted by), 75 ("I

am no critic")

— Cruelty, on, 74

— Dogmatism, his, 2

— Doom, sense of, 575

— England , 564-8, 574

— Europe, 560 ("I belong to E.,

though not to England”)

— Exemption, 365

— Father, 616 (death of), 673

(choirboy), 675 (birth of), 854

— Friendship, on, 626 (to Hon.

Dorothy Brett)

— Gipsy, the, 434, 435

— Hatreds, 344 (the public, the

people, society, democracy, aristocracy)

— Health, 470, 474, 533, 668,

673, 697, 700, 701, 726, 732, 733. 737, 738. 747, 801, 815, 843, 848-850

— Horses, 697 ("better than

people”)

— Impressionism, 2

— Irresolution, 678 ("If I say, I’ll

do a thing, I never do it”)

— Italy, love for, 94, 680

— Journalists on, 677 ("all can

aille”)

— London, on, 228 ("I don t like

L "), 273, 282, 288, 289, 393 ("I have no belief in L"), 405 ("evil influence of”), 591 ("awful ... so dark, so damp”), 605, 765, 855, 856

— Love, on, 432 ("subsidiary”)

— MSS., 703 (burnt most of the

earlier ones, none sold), 795, 803 (in Florence), 807 ("a sort of nest-egg”), 826 (list of), 830 (D. Brett;

— Malaria, 629, 630, 632, 635, 794,

795

— Marriage, on, 49, 677 688

— Martyrs, on, 455

— Materialism, xx, 94 (his creed),

392 (rejected)

— Megalomania (?), no ("I admire

my own work a good deal"), 117 ("I know I can write bigger stuff than any man in England")

— Methods of waiting, no (plays

"come so quick and exciting from the pen”), and see above under "Creative"

— ■ Militarism, hatred of, 365

— Money affairs, 194 (never believe

in money "unless in my pocket ’), 236, 270 (appeal to Marsh), 272 (lb.), 274 ‘"horribly poor"), 277, 287, 304, 311 ("we are very badly off"), 316 ("we have very little money”), 332 ("very badly off soon”), 344 (refused money from Lady O Morrell), 354 (Duckworth proposition), 359, 374, 378, 384, 430, 431, 434 (money "a conundrum ”), 695, 696 (on the "money-idea . . . moneyfear money-lust"), 759 ("don't expect money success"), 771 ("a disease upon humanity"), 791 (Boni's "cheque across the table")

— Monogamy, on, 323-4

— Monotheism, on, 604

— Mother, 854

— Mother-in-law, 474 and see under

Richthofen

— Mountains, 147, 825 ("I loathe

all mountains”)

— Music, on, 673; and see 428

("learning songs”)

—- Nationality, on, 356

— North, the, 618 ("I hate all

that comes from the North”), see also under South

— Novels, typography of the Notts-

Derby, 633

— Optimism, mood of, 543 (hope

for England)

— Paganism, on, 604

— Pain, horror of, 345

— Painting, 216, 668 ("I’d paint if

I’d got. paints, and could do it"), 672 (the "Unholy Family’), 676 (Boccaccio, picture of nuns and gardener," and "Fight with an Amazon"), 678 ("Eve regaining Paradise’ ), 679 ("more fun and less soulwork than writing . . may end as an R.A.”), 681 ("Eve” began a "Resurrection” ... "my pictures seem to me absolutely innocent '') ,69 2,706, 707 ("Jaguar and man 1, 715 three more water-colours, "but I’d rather do oils”), 721

(seven water-colours) id. (“Dandelions", “Rape of Sabine Women"), 728 ("Finding of Moses", “Family in Garden"), 732 ("Resurrection” and seven big oils "Nymphs and Faun”, “Fight with an Amazon") 748 ("Crucifixion”: painted out), 753 . ("Contadini", "Italian Peasants”), 788 ("Mango Tree”), 818 ("North Sea"), 828 (ib.)

— Parvenu, 484 (D. H. L. and the)

— Passion, on, 300

— Patriotism, 546 ("English in the

teeth of all the world, etc")

— Peerage, the, 677 (Mrs. Holroyd)

— People, 677 ("don’t mean much

to me”)

—- Personal element, on the, 289

— Philosophy, his, 237-9, 240

("broken down in middle cf”), 255, 304 (writing little book “of philosophy or religion”), 3-²> Z2Z, 404, 409 411 432 ("doing some philosophical essays”), 435, 453 (“don t know the terms of real philosophy”)

— Poetry, 154 (scansion of), 308

(essence of)

— Political views, 243

— Portrait, 514 (by Mrllicent Bever

idge)

— Pot-boilers, 115

— Poverty , 118 ("so out of place”)

— Prayer, 108

— Prudery, on, 557

— Publicity, 241 ("I hate pub

licity”)

— Rebel, the, 572 ("certainly with

this world I am at war")

— Religion, on, xix, r< u (“I am a

passionately religious man”), 688

— Restlessness, 234, 294 ("my

proverbial restlessness”), 315 (“six months my usual limit”), 500 ("I hate Capri"), -41 (at Kandy: “Don’t think 1 care for the east) 544 (Ceylon, Australia. San Francisco), 547 (at Thirroul, N.S.W.: “I believe I wish I’d stayed in Darlington", W.A.), 548 (in Australia: "a bitter burning nostalgia for Europe"), 548 (in Sydney; "I do wish I had stayed in W.A."), 551 (the

restless 'questing beast part of me"), 551 (in New Mexico; "I came to love Australia"), 560 ("I know now I don't want to live anywhere very long"), 565 ("never sure what I shall do in a month’s time"), 571 (back in U.S.A.: regrets Mexico), 572 (ib., "I think what I would like best would be to go back to Mexico"), 573 ("now I've reached the Atlantic, I only want to go west, to the mountains and desert again”), 577 (“in California, but don’t suppose I shall stay long”), 583 (Pacific coast: "I kept thinking, ‘Best go back to England' "), 586 (going to England: “God knows how long I shall stay there”), 6^0 (Florence: "don’t find my_- settling down here . . . not a sitzfleisch"), 764 (“going to Florence": and find I don’t really want to go’ ’), 763 ("where does one really want to live?”), 810 (in Baden: "wish I was back in the South"), 841 (“I sort of wish I could go to the moon”)

Riding, 747

Russia, on, 383 (authors), 561 ("it appeals to me”)

Sex, on, 357, 558, 676 (“a lurid sexuality specialist”) 682 (on the "sex relation”) Sisters (Ada and Emily), 48, 274, 289, 297, 298, 425, 436, 444. 457. 460. 4b3. 469. 473, 494- 503. 533 ("loftily disapproving”), 629, 639, 648, 650, 666, 668, 674, 673, 740 (not telling them about Lady C.), 741, 750, 785, 786 ("I am fond of her, but she fills me with tortures of angry depression"), 816 (Ada: genuinely loved the pictures”), 841

Sixth sense, 785 (Murry’s theory: "my world not the ordinary man's world, and that I am a sort of animal with a sixth sense”)

Solitude, on, 410 ("wealth uncountable—to be alone”), 446 ("giad to be alone”)

South, the, 617 (my spirit

"always wants to go South’’); see also under N orth

Style, his, zi ("form not my strong point")

Supernatural, belief in, zo6

Teaching, 91 (return to), 105 (as last resource), 112 (ib.), 125 (if Sons and Lovers "does not go”), 352 ("rather soldier than schoolmaster, anyhow"), 769 ("what a horrible thing to dabble in")

Travel, 526, 548 ("God, how I hate a new country ” i.e. Sydney), 556 (perhaps "my destiny to know the world”) (ib ) (a "form of running away from oneself”), 604, 605, 673 ("I begin to hate journeys— I’ve journeyed enough”), 680 (no desire to travel), 839 ("becomes more tiring")

Typing, 212 (use of a typewriter), 357 (no money)

Unsocial, 325 ("out of the camp"), 344 (one must "live apart”), 426 (heart “shuts up against people"), '428, 436 (cooped up with other people: purgatory!, 667 (can’t belong clubs, etc.), 680 (happiest "when I don’t see people"), 769 ("take more and more pleasure in being alone’), 784 ("lovely to be -alone, especially when the sun shines’ ’), 797 (The world is lovely if one avoids man, etc.)

War, the, 265 (on war: "downing tools”), 291 (Battersea recruiting station), 282 (on the War), 295 (ib: "stinks worse and worse"), 317, 321, 365 (exemption), 378, 379, 402 (Military Service Act), 403 (ib.), 424 (C.T D. enquiries), 425' (ib.), 455 (Grade 3:

Writing, 90 ("most of my stuff wants weeding out"), 178 (I am a slow writer, really—only have great outbursts of work), 618 ("I loathe writing”), 674 (first incen tive to), 763 ("what’s the good of”: Government and Curtis Brown take 30 p.c. of earnings)

Women, on, 37 {‘‘some woman who’ll give me, etc.’’), 38 ("why fall in love with me?”), 93 ("must have a woman at the back of me"), 118 (relations between men and women), 143 (in Italy, women and men "natural enemies”), 300 (relation between men and women: A junta frescoes), 688 (il n'y a pas de milieu)

— Work, 431 (not everything, i.e. subsidiary)

— Young, the, 777 ("make me feel really low in spirits”)

Lavendou, 775

Lea vis, Mr, F R (quoted), xi Lederhandler, D.V., Letters to, 792, 803, 824

Lee, Agnes, 262

Lee, Vernon (quoted), xxx

Leghorn, 359

Legion book, 778

Legion MS., 631 (see Memoir, etc.) Leithdale, 577

le Maistre, Violet, 600 (J M. M. to marry)

Leonard!, Villa, 60

Leonardo, 716

Leopold, Mrs. 800

Lerici (near Pisa), 130-2, 134, 141, 144, 147, 294, 484, 855

Les Lecques, 838

Letters of a V. A D. (Skinner), 586

Levanto, 180

Lewis, 199 (of Vickers Maxim) Liberalism, 247 Libraries, 129, 140, 242 Lichtenthal, 809

Life of Jesus (Murry), 648 "Lightning” (poem), 51 Ligure, Albergo, 642, 651, 652 Lily, 444

Lincolnshire, 666 (going to), 724 ("how well I know”)

Lindsay, 767 (Fanfrolico), 770 (Dionysos book)

Literary Fund, Royal, 210 (gift of £50), 427. 445*8 ’

"Little Lord Fauntleroy, 104 Littlehampton, 215, 242, 244, 245 Livanters, The (i.e. The Trespasser), 5> 16

Liverpool, 255

Livorno, 775, 787

Lobo, 591

Lockhart,92, 694 (life of Bums), 695

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 277 {Rainbow), 478 (spiritualism)

Loeser, 710

Lohningshof, 522

Loisach, 40

Landon Mercury, 603 ("highbrow”), 718 (The Man Who Loved Islands), 843

Look! We have Come Through! 478, 759

Lords and Masters, 18, 74

Lorenzetti, 510 (D. H. L. copies picture)

Los Angeles, 573-5, 57⁸ (“silly”), 856

Lost Girl, The, 504, 506, 508, 509, 510, 513, 633

Louis Quatorze, 716

Love Among the Haystacks, 30, 31

Love Poems and Others, 60, 63, 109, 137 ("not a success"), 759 ("my first volume”), 855

Lovely Lady, The, 68r, 682, 718 Low, Barbara, 311, 353, 357, 364, 437. 465> 513. 514. 516

Lowell, Amy, 207, 212, 414, 457 (New Poems inscribed to her)

Lowen, 809

Lucas, E. V., 212

Lucca, 825

Lucerne, 140, 142

Lucka, 525 (study of the Grenz leute)

Lugano, 142

Luhan, Mrs. (Mabel), 586, 594, 596, 601, 613

Lusitania, 229

Luther, 343

Lydbrook, forest of, 452

Lynds, The, 80 x Lyon, 789

Mabel, see under Sterne, Mrs. Mabel Dodge

Mabinogion, 303

Macaulay, Rose, 640

MacDonald, Dr. (of Philadelphia), 642

Mackenzie, Compton, 212 (Sinister Street), 488, 494 (at Capri), 495 (Seeker’s offer), 496, 498, 500, 508 (MS, of Lost Girl), 551

McLeod, A. W., Letters to, 9, 36. 37, 55, 60, 64, 80, 81, 92, 103, 119, 121, 146, 149, 163, 173, 178, 180, 187, 195, 255

MacQueen, 223 Maderno, 65 Madrid, 797, 799 Maeterlinck, 196 Maggiore, Lake, 48 Magra, 165, 181 Magnus, Maurice, 599 (suicide), 603 (contract signed for book), 631 (Douglas and D ILL. on), 633 (with D. H L. at Montecassino), 6

Maida Vale, 828

Maillol, 843 ("has a certain tender charm")

Maitres Sonneurs, 468

Majorca, 788 (going to), 793, 794.

807

Malaga, 768, 775

Malaria, 680

Mallorca, 768, 787, 790 (? going to), 801, 806 (over-feeding), 857

Malory, 303 ("the ridiculous M , with his grails and his chival ries")

Malta, 507

Malwa (P. & O ), 547 (to Sydney), 5 48 ("empty and quite pleasant ")

Mamba, 852 (read)

"Man and Bat " (poem), 524

Man Who Died, The, xxxiii

Man Who Loved Islands, The, 718 (MS.), 724 (ib.), 730 (id.), 735 ("one of my favourite stories”)

Manby, 826 ("was he murdered?”) Manchester Guardian, 209 Mandrake, The, 819, 852

Mann, Mary, 468 ("quite good, I think”)

Mansfield Katherine, 103, 194, 157-9, 160, 185-7, 192, 239 (Mrs. J. M. Murry), 250, 251, 357 ("very dissatisfied with J. M. M."), 562 (death), 563, 788; Letters to, 286, 288, 296, 305, 309, 341, 366. 456, 458, 460, 461, 463, 468, 472, 475

Manu (Spanish ship), 409

Manned, 350 ("read him all”)

Marama, 548 (leaving Sydney in the)

Marcus, 433 ("a terrible young egoist") (see Mark Gertler)

Maremma, 680, 682

Margaret, 750 (sister Emily’s daughter)

Margaret, 713, 769 (sister of Rolf Gardiner)

Maria Christina, 808 (in Europe)

Marinetti, 195-8 ("How good he is”), 82

Mark Rutherford, 81, 82, 179 ("I do think he is jolly good”)

Marks, Harry, F (N. Y. bookseller), 756, 792, 804, 813

Married Man, 103

Marsden, Mr. and Miss, 436

Marseilles, 287, 787, 794, 799, 814 827, 832

Marsh Edward, 68 145, 140, 167 (poem for: "Grief”), 174 ("the Georgian poetry man”); Letters to, 64, 127, 130, 135, 151, 153, 165, 781, 193. 205, 206, 258, 260, 270 272, 276, 321, 4H, 477, 479

Martin Chuzzlewit, 571 Martyrdom of Man, 472 Maruca, 627

Marx socialism, 771 ("dead materialism of")

Mary and the Bramble (Abercrombie), 194

Masefield, in ("a horrible sentimentalist —the cheap Byron of the day”), 174, 194

Mason, Miss, 33 Massa, 799 Masses, 658

Mastro-don Gesualdo (Verga), 529, 536,. 537 (D. H. L, translating), 538 (id.), 539 (trs. Mary A. Craig, published Osgood, 1893), 540 (translating: "to pass the time”), Z46- 567 (Seltzer), 568, 569, 572 (doing proofs), 573 (J. M, Murry), 621 (Cape)

Mathew, 563

Mathews, H. W., Letter to, 633

Matlock, 446, 460, 461, 670, 675

Maunsel, 449 (M. and his philosophy) Maunsell, 423 (publisher in Dublin) Mauzizio, Porto 663

Max Havelaar, 553, 554 (W. Siebenhaar translating first part), 559, 577- 658

Maya, 616, 747

Mayrhofen, 48, 55, 56, 537

Mecklenburgh Square, 494 (Italian shop behind)

Medici Society, 518 (agreement),520 Mediterranean poem 660

Meeting Among the Mountains, 413, 414

Melrose, 491, 499, 507

Memoir of the Foreign Legion, 618, 621, 633

Memories (poem). 206

Mendel, 383 ("a bad book”) Meran, 58, 522, 523, 537, 538 Mercure de France, 250

Mercury, The, 520 Meredith, 179, 195 Merrild, Knud, Letters to, 569, 571, 573, 580

Merry-Go Round, The, 77, 103 Messina, Straits of, 501, 526 Metal Checks (poem), 211

Methuen, 199 (offer per Pinker),

207, 208, 212, 219, 222, 225, 242, 270 (Rainbow suppressed), 271, 276 (Rainbow), 380 (glad there is no more M ), 830, 855 (Rainbow) Metz, 33, 35, 36 (arrest as spy) Mexicans, 555 Mexico, 566 ("I like”), 605, 856 Mexico City, 561—4 , 569, 616-7, 626, 629

Mexico, New, 547, 696, 701, 708 (?go back to), 710 (let’s go to), 712 (ib.), 719, 742 (ib ), 780 (MS. of article), 795 ("before my eyes every moment”), 849 ("I want to . . . start for N.M.” 24 Jan., 1930), 856

Mexico, Old, 564 (going to) Meynell, Alice, 215, 413

Meynell, Viola, 215, 218-9, 222, 225, 243. 346

Michael Angelo, 716

Michael Angelo, Life of (Rolland), 343 ("just finished reading”)

Middleton ((Derby), 439, 855 Milan, 147, 359, 373, 374, 705, 706 Milford, Humphrey, 517, 640 Milton, 166 (‘ inferior to Shelley"), 253

Minas Nuevas, 580

Miracle, The (story), 380

Mirenda, Villa, 669, 702, 705, 723, 745, 769, 802 857

Miriam, 674 (her home, farm, "where I got my first incentive to write”)

Misprints, 187 (in The Egoist); see also 626, 640, 658, 666, 721

Mississippi, 571

Mixed Marriage, A (novel), 488, 496 Mixtec (Indians), 626

Moby Dick, 318 (D.H L. reading) Modern French Painting, 751 Mohr, Max (German dramatist), 702-4, 820, 831, 834

Moller, Miss, Letters to, 825, 839 Monet, 216

Monkey Nuts (unpublished), 532 Monmouth, 452

Monro, Harold, 315 ("I don’t like”) Monro’s Magazine, 137

Monroe, Harriet, 256, 553 (Turkey Cock, Evening Land); Letters to, 206, 208, 211, 262, 399, 457, 467, 473. 553. 559. 563. 588, 598, 7°⁸

Monrow Bridge, 452

Monte Carlo, 745

Montecassino, 632, 633 (I). H. L.

and Magnus at)

Montecatini, 812

Moorgreen, 633, 674-5

Moose, The, 513

Morand, Paul, 764

Mordkin (dances), 47

Morgano's cafd, 488, 490 ("centre of Capn”)

Morgenrot. 237 (name for "my new philosophy”)

Morland, Or., 843

Morley, F. V., 853 (Commando)

Morning Post, The, 41, 173 (“I love the M.P., it is so fat ’), 179 ("a frightfully decent paper”), 187 (Greek architecture)

Mornings in Mexico (4 articles), 625, 632, 856

Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 225, 277 (^30 from), 311,448. Z62, 732 (ill: "a queen"), 775 ("still coughing a little over Lady C.”); Letters to, 213, 215, 219, 222, 223, 225, 228, 231-242, 251, 253, 268, 273, 282, 285, 290, 297, 299. 305, 3i3. 317. 322, 328, 342, 350, 733, 772, 783, 848

Morrell, Philip, 216, 277, 278 (Parliament and The Rainbow), 287 (id.), 295 (ib.), 785, 848

Morrison, Nelly, 824; Letter to, 523 Mortal Coil, The, 372, 373, 378

Mortimer, Mr., 578 (J.M.M.’s "little attack on”)

Moulaert, Mme Jehanne, Letter to,

8ZZ

Mounts Bay, 335

Mount Kemmel, 439

"Mountain Lion" (Mexican poem) , 563

Mountsier, Robert, 389, 393, 513, 516, 518 (Aaron’s Rod), 519, 521, 532 (Hadrian), 534-5, 540 (and Curtis Brown), 544 (Novells Rusti-cane), 550 (Ladybird), 559 (Max Hardelaar), 560 (?to Mexico)

Movements in European History, 467 (suggested title), 517 (pub lished), 600 (illustrations for)

Mr. Noon (Part I), 513 (Seeker)

Mrs. Holroyd, 191-2; see also under

Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, The Mudie’s, 504 (and The Lost Girl) Muir, Edwin, 716 (and Bennett, in

Scrutinies)

Munich (Miinchen), 33, 38, 40, 116 (going to), 120 (can buy pictures in), 123 (love and hate it), 137 (D. H. L. in), 470, 474, 480, 605, 684-5, 822, 855

Murray, Gilbert, 173 ("very interesting, just a bit conceited”), 328, 344

Murray, Mrs., 800

Murray, Scot, 655 (the ranch)

Murry, John Middleton, x, 239, 247, 249, 250-3, 257, 269, 288, 290 ("irritates me . . . falsifies me"), 291 ("rather out of sympathy with”), 296 (O. H. L. on), 305 ("one of the few people f count upon”), 313, 320 ("my only real friends"), 323 ("despairing letter from”), 341, 353 ("M. and I are not really associates”), 426 ("can ’t believe any more in”), 471 (Editor of Athenceum:), 473, 509, 566 (O. H. L. on his second marriage), 567 (starting new magazine), 589, 606 ("suburban ite”), 613, 643 (at Hampstead),

647  (' an incorrigible worm”),

648 (Life of Jesus), 667 ( ’too

much or too little for me"), 668 ("a pantheist without a Pan—a frying-pantheist”), 785 (on D. H. L.’s "sixth sense”), 811 (D. H. L.’s essays in Adelphi); Letters to, 128, 157, 185, 192, 286-7, 364   371,

409, 470, 561-2, 564, 566, 568, 572, 574- 578-9, 582, 590, 593, 595, 597, 600, 610, 614, 622-3, 628, 639, 641-2, 644, 646, 648, 788, 801; Letters to J. M. M. and Katherine Mansfield, 309, 320, 325, 330, 334. 337

Mussolini, 704, 721 ("Big Ben”)

Mylor, 409

Nairobi Herald, 499

Naples, 484, 486 488, 489, 490, 493, 500 511, 643, 735 (Queen's snuff box)

Napoleon, 525 (a Mittelmensch)

Nash's Magazine, 532 (The Fox) Nastasya, 327

Nation, The, 13 (poems in), 26, 55, 460, 520 (Whitman essay), 668 (sketch in)

Nation, The (N.Y), 578

National Purity League, The, 294 (and The Rainbow)

Nations, 358 (raison d'etre of) Nature in Downland, 18

Nature Poems (Davies), 174

Navajo (Indians), 554, 555, 593, 008-10

Navojoa, 580

Nelson-Hood, Mr Alec (Duca di

Bronte), 505, 527

Nethermere, 2 (early tit of The

White Peacock)

Nettles, xxxiii, 852

Newark, 675

Newbury’, 424, 477, 855

New England, 576

Newhaven, 750

Newlyn, 352

New Machiavelli, 62, 119, 120

Newmarket, 747

New Mexico (see under Mexico)

New Numbers, 174, 182, 194

New Orleans, 530, 572

New Paths (anthology), 449 (I). H. L. included)

New Poems, 455 (Seeker), 457 (id.), 468, 473 (to H. Monroe), 478, 501 (Seeker), 759 (Pin America)

Newquay, 332, 334

New Statesman, 121, 132, 141, 144, 157, 164

Newstead Abbey, 673 (Father in choir as boy)

New York, 287 (Rainbow published in), 561, 563, 567 (going to), 569, 575. 605, 856

New York Times, 144 (reviews Sons and Lovers), 647 (reviews Porcupine)

Nibbana (Nirvana), 542 (Buddhism)

Nice, 780, 787, 846, 849 (sanatorium at)

Nichols, Robert, 479, 794 (in

Majorca), 832 (Bemax); Letter to, 800 (and Nell)

Nicoll, Robertson, 694

Niederlahnstein, 41

Nietzsche, 120 (D. H. L. quotes)

Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), 681 (review by D. H. L.)

Nightingales, 683

Nina, 692

Nineveh, 318

Nirvana, 542

Nitria, 365-6 (monks of)

Noah’s Ark, 424 (suggested title: sequel to Rainbow)

Noguchi Yone (Japanese poet), 135

Nob, 642

None of That, 718, 763

Nordic races, 618 ("I believe they’re dead, dead, dead”)

Norta (Etruscan), 742

Northern Syndicate, 132, 136

"Nostalgia” (poem), 588

Nottingham, 449 (munitions explosion), 675, 724

Nottingham Guardian, 43

Nottingham University, 294

Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 744, 787 Novelle Rusticane (Vergo), 528-9, 5Z8. 544. 546. 552. 568

Nukehera, 485

Numea, 485

Nuttall, Mrs., 619, 620, 675

Nuwara, Eliya, 541—2

Nylander, J. W. (Finnish sailor and writer), 534 (Seevolk)

Oaxaca, 597, 616, 619, 620-2 (pronounce "Wa-ha-ka"), 629, 6zo, 635, 856

Ober Ammergau, 39, 40

O’Brien, 636 (anthology)

Occult Review, 476

Occultism, 440

Odour of Chrysanthemums, 72, 86, 201

CEdipus, xi, 7, 117 O’Keefe, 743, 752 Olive picking, 174 Olive Tree and The Vine (books on), 830 (want to write on trees)

Olivier, Noel, 59

Oilerton, 675

Once (story ), 143

Oos (river 1, 809

Open the Door, 549, 576

Opera, 430

Ophelia, 206 208

Oraibi (Hopi village), 607

Orazio, 486

Orbita, R.M.S.P., 573, 575, 576

Orient Express, 716

Orioli, Pino, 693, 699 ("little bookshop in Florence”), 707 ("lunched with"), 715, 717, 720, 723, 725, 730, 735, 740-1 (orders for Lady Ci), 745. 757 (A Huxley), 762 (ib.. Sachette, Bandello), 765 ("gone very vague”), 766 ("no use in Paris”), 768, 774 (2nd edition of Lady Ci), 778, 792, 803, 818. 823, 829 (new little venture), 838, 841, 846; Letter to, 810, 857

Orizaba, 565—6

Orleans, 793

Orsova, R.M.S., 544-5

Orvieto (Etruscan), 742

Osgood, J R., 539 (published Verga in London, 1891-3)

Ostend, 659, 677

Osterley, R.M.S., 536-7. 540

Otford, 477, 480

Ovid, 441

Oxford, 344

Oxford University Press, 297, 4'49 879

(school Look on European History), 455 ("the history can wait a bit busy with American essays”), 461 ("hate doing that European History '), 510 (extra chapter on Italian unification), 513 (agreement), 517 (Movements in European History, published: nom de plume Laurence H, Davison), 614, 640, 829 (and Orioli)

Pacific, 485 ("why don’t we go to the”), 547, 550 ("a lovely ocean”), 574

Padstow, 299 (J. D, Beresford lends house), 303

Paintings (book), 823, 830

Palermo, 500, 515

Palestine, 470-1 (? going to) Pali 534

Palling, 738 (?go there)

Palinera (hotel), 566

Pall Mall Gazette, 496, 718 (Two

Blue Birds)

Palm Springs, 573

Pamela (i e. Virtue Rewarded), 469 (nickname of Emily, D. H. L’s sister)

Pansies, 775 (“done my pansies, nice and peppery' ), 778 (MS. to Pollinger), 782 (MS ), 784 (Scotland Yard and), 786 (nearly re-typed), 787, 803 (MS.), 814 (ready, unexpurgated), 818, 821 (socialists dislikel, 826, 828 (£300 for it, and another £200 due), 830, 832, 840, 857

Papplewick, 675

Papeete, 551 (picked up cinema crowd)               '

Paradise Lost, 194

Paraguay, 420-1

Paris, xxx, 595, 605, 719, 789, 856

Parker, Gilbert, 30

Pascal, xiii, xix, xx

Passage to India, 605 (am reading), 615 (interested me very much)

Pater, Walter, 158

Patmore, Bridget. 756

Paul Morel, 5, 7, 35, 38. 46, 48, 55, 60-1 (better than The White, Peacock or The Trespasser), 66—8 76 (MS. to Duckworth), 77 (dedicated to Edward Garnett), 82 (to be called Sons and Lovers?)

Paulhan (editor of Nouvelle Revue Francaise), 744, 787

Pavlova, 109

Pawling, Sydney S (of Heine-

mann’s). Letters to, 1, 4

Payne, Iden, 32, 34

Peabody, Josephine Preston, 399 (Harvest Moon)

Pearn, Miss Nancy, Letters to, 632, 650, 658, 660, 670, 678—9, 681-2, 691, 717, 780, 810, 834

Pearses, The, 166, 173, 359

Pegasus Press, The (Paris), 774, 776-7, 787

Peloponnesian war, 361

P.E.N. club (Mexico), 619, 621

Pensues (poems), 766, see also 770, 776, they really are pens les)

Penzance 332, 335, 352, 365-6, 3«3. 385

People's Theatre Society, 477, 481

Perahera (Kandy), 537, 541 ("wonderful sight”)

Perth (W. A.), 541

Peru 468

Perugia, 655-6, 659

Perverts, the grand, 716

Petrie, Flinders (quoted), 547

Petronius, 313 ("a gentleman, when all is said”)

Philadelphia, 804 ("bootleg edition of Lady C.”)

Phillpotts, I2i

Picinisco, 487, 492

Pictures, 717 ( for N.Y ), 755 (not to America), 788 (printers "terrified of Jix”), 795 (reproductions "disappointing and smudgy”), 799 (seen proofs, "some rather good, some lamentable”), ib. (10 vellum copies at £50, all ordered), 802 (had 21 proofs), 808 (13 seized)

Piehler, H A., Letter to, 633

Pilgrim’s Progress, 327 ("bad art, false truth ”)

Pint Signorina Giulia, 745; Letters to, 754 (in Italian), 797 ’ib.)

Pino (see under Orioli)

Pinker, J, B , 77, 90 (literary agent), 132, 136. 143, 189, 191, 197, 199, 200. 209, 287, 315, 358, 388 (Women in Love), 392, 401, 430, 432 (“grinning patronage”), 442 (and Beaumont), 488 ("should like to break with him altogether”), 496, 497 (break with), 513-4, 536 (transfers to Curtis Brown); Letters to, 207-8, 212, 219, 222, 225, 230, 242, 269, 276-7, 280, 295, 302, 3Z3, 350, 354, 372. 378. 380, Z93-5. 402, 413-4. 451, 480-1, 489, 494

Pirates and piracy (of D H L,'s books). 749 (Lady C. in America), 765 (id ), 767 (it ), 776 (ib.), 789 (Lady C), 792 (ib.), 804 (Leder-handler and news about), 809 (Lady C. illustrated, in Philadelphia)

Pisa, 650, 680

Pizarro, 364

Plat tig The, 809, 812 ("that beastly P that I loathed so much"), 811

Plays (D. H. P.'s methods of writing) , 90 (''come so quick and exciting”)

“Plays for the People’s Theatre,” 481 (suggested series)

Plumed Serpent, The, 637 ("my most important novel so far"), 644 (published by Knopf, 23 Jan. ,'26), 649 (reviewed in Timet: Lit. Suppt.: "rather feeble”), (ib.) ("contains little sketch of Witter Bynner”), 654, 665 (translated into Swedish), 683, 703 (MS. at the ranch in New Mexico), 826 (MS "gone"), 856, 857

Poe, Edgar Allan, xii, xvi 69

Poems of a Married Man, 396 (suggested title)

Poetry, 154 (D. H. L. on scansion of)

Poetry (American magazine), 179 (poems in), 211 (War Number), 399. 457.       473. 563, 588

("Nostalgia"), 598, 708

Poetry and Drama, 137

Poet's Geographer, The, 133

Poet’s Wedding. 195 (suggested poem, for Abercrombie)

Point Counter Point, 757 (see also 783)

Polignac prize committee, 172

Pollinger, L, E , 682-3, 705 (MS. of John Thomas, etc.), 722 (in Curtis Brown’s London office), 781 (copies of Lady C. confiscated), 782, 827; Letters to, 720, 748, 778, 791, 803, 809, 810, 850, 852

Pompeii, 565

Popayan, 421

Popo (i.e. Popocatepetl), 587

Porcupine, 644, 646 (Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine), 647 (reviewed in N.Y. Times , 710 (copy at the club)

Port-Oros, 744, 753, 755■ ⁸57

Porthcothan 315 (J. D. Beres

ford's house in Cornwall Porta Catania (Taormin ), 534 Porto Ven ere, 169

Port Said, 540 (still like the Arabian Nights)

Possessed, The, 313, 325, 327

Potter, Miss, 6

Pound, Ezra, 126-7, I39> T43. 172, 181

Predecessors, our, 104 (must hate them: “to get free from their authority")

Primitive Culture (Tylor), 344, 359 Primrose Jesus, 648 (Brett) Primrose Path. The 171, 173, 526, 532

Princess, The (story), 614, 616, 618, 630, 632, 636-7

Printers, 209 (at Plymouth: "they never make a mistake"), 347 (strike in Edinburgh); see also under Misprints

Prior, James, 18 (“Why is he a failure?")

Pritchard, Katharine (Mrs. Thros-sell), 548

Proper Study, The, 578, 693 (see also 578)

Proof-reading, 139 (left to another) Proust. 686 (“can’t read him”), 716 Prussian Officer, The, 213-4, ²7x> 855

Prussian rule, 266 (D. H. L. on)

Psychoanalysis in Theory and in Life (Burrow). 675, 687 (criticism of present-day psychoanalysis)

Publishers 32 ("more sickly than lepers”), 189 (offers from England and America), 123 ("curse the publishers”), 413, 123 (English daren’t: ?go to Dublin) 437 (increased post-war costs), 554 ("Ah, they weary me”), 617 (failure of a), 691 (“why should anybody want to be a”), 721 ("I'm a lost soul to the publishers”), 791 (Albert Boni and uniform edition?), 794 ("damn all publishers, and all the trade")

Publishing schemes, 289 (Murry s), 320 (Heseltine’s), 324 (ib.), 330 (ib.), 595 (D H. L., Murry and - Kot)

Puebla, 565, 620

Pulborough, 215, 855

Punch, 603

Purnell, Dr., 581

Purnell, Idella, 588, 619, 624, 826 Purple Anemones (poem), 513

Queen, The, 509 (The Lost Girl)

Questa, 560

Quetzalcoatl (i.e. The Plumed Serpent), 623 ("my Q. novel"), 629 (MS. of), 630 (ib.), 639 (galley missing), 640 ("most important of all my novels”)

Rachel, 655, 665, 667, 669

Radford, Dollie, 349, 357, 364, 401, 425, 430, 438

Radford, Maitland, 315, 320 Ragionamenti (Aretino), 717 Ragusa, 639

Railway people, 457 ("independent and Bolshy”)

Rainbow, The, xxi, 193 (alternative title: The Wedding Ring), 213, 230 (MS. to Pinker), 240, 255 (published 30 Sept.. 1915), 260, 269 ("the magistrates and"), 270 (sale suppressed), 271 (ib.), 276 (ib.), 277 (ib.), 278 (question in Parliament?), 283 (Prince Bibesco and Sir John Simon), 285 (?private reprint), 287 (published in N.Y.), 288, 292, 294 Hatchard’s), 295 (America, P. Morrell), 302 (American edition), 310 (D. H. L. loses copy). 315-6, 321. 3²5» 3Zo, 35°. 359. Z66 (sequel to), 377 (ib.), 378 (suppressed for immorality), 387, 394-5, 400, 423, 424 (sequel INoah’s Ark), 488 (Seeker), 495 (Seeker’s offer), 496-7, 499 (to be republished in London), 503 (Seeker’s terms), 513, 633, 789 (D. H. L. not got copy), 830 (1st edition, Methuen), 854, 855

Rainbow Books and Music, The, 325 (circular for)

Rainusso, Signora Eva, 294. 359

Ramblas, 833

Ramie, Marian, 211

Ramon, 640

Ramsey, 112

Rananim, xxix, 336 ("our R.” i.e. cottage at Zennor) 391 ("the ultimate place we call R. ”), 426

Random House, 756

Ransome, Arthur, 122 (essays)

Rapallo, 800

Rasmussens. The, 662

Rasputin, 768

Rauh, Ida, 845, 833

Ravello, 681 Razumov, 70 Read, Mr., 807 (of Taos Bank)

Reading, 483 (D. H L.’s books sold in)

Reality of Peace, The, 401 (seven little essays), 402, 404, 408, 413-4 Fed Indians (apaches), 552

Red Sea, 540

"Red Wolf” (Mexican poem), 563

Reece, J. Holroyd (Pegasus Press), 774> 776

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, 646 (see also under Porcupine)

Reginald Turner, 693

"Reinheit," 310

Relaxations for the Impotent, 558 (I). H. L.’s title for Fantazius Mallare)

Religion (D. H. L. on artist's need of)

Religion for the Young, A, 810

(Everyman)

Rembrandt, 216, 518

Renaissance, 344 (art was holy in the R.)

Reputations (Goldring), 508

Resets, Baronnessa di, 191

Revolution, 243-4, 5¹² (must be very soon), 771 (need of a), 772 (O. Start a R.)

Rex, 532 (animal sketch)

Reynolds, Stephen, 84

Rhesus, 174

Rhine Valley, 517

Rhythm, 84, 103-4, TO9

Rhythm and rhyming, 308 (D. H. L. on)

Ribnikov, 342 ("by far the best of the lesser Russians”)

Rice, Anne Estelle (American artist) 474

Rich, Edwin 804 (N.Y manager of

Curtis Brown’s)

Richard, 449 (a poet)

Richards, Grant, 258, 262

Richthofen, Baron von, 32, 36, 38

Richthofen, Frau Baronin von, 47, 209, 516, 663

Rickword, Edgell, 679

Rider, 476 (publisher of Occult

Review)

Riders to the Sea,7

Rio Bravo, 630 (Hamburg-American boat)

Rio Grande, 561

Ripley, 255, 298-301, 457, 459, 460-

1, 464, 633 674-5

Ritual and Art, 149,. 164

Riva, 56, 58, 60, 63, 538

Robermond, Villa, 857

Robertson, Mr., 34

Rocky Mountains, The, 554, 550, 592, 604, 618

Rogozhin, 326-7

Rolland, Romain, 343 (Life of Michael A ngelo)

Rome, 114, 374 (“should like to go to'') 484 'going to), 485, 492 (“I hated it”), 515, 523, 527, 565 (the Forum), 643, 644. 652

Roman Catholicism, 304 (D. H. L. and), 531 (“The Catholic Church is a deep one”), 543 (“saving Europe”)

Ronda, 768

Rose-hearted Camellia, 531 (D.H.L.’s suggested title for Camomile)

Ross, 451

Ross, Janet, 724

Rossetti, 3

Rouen, 506

Rouge et le Noir, Le (Stendhal), 21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 716 Royal Literary Fund, 447, 448 ( 'that beastly fund")

R.P, Mrs. (Rosalind); Letters to: 485, 501, 509, 512, 537, 540

Ruskin, 77 (D. H. L. on)

Russell, Bertrand (Earl Russell),232, 235-242, 246-7, 249-252, 255, 257 (quarrel with), 284 (Garsington), 291 ("growing much better: I have more hopes"), 292 ("I have hopes of Bertie”), 297, 317, Z23 (letter from Berris, “very miserable”), 386, 440 (magic: “rubbish"), 538 (Bertie’s "theoretic socialism”), 784 (perhaps will do something after all—' better than hrs donning away in Cambridge”)

Russell, Lady, 373

Russia, 561, 565, 644 ("like to go to”), 649 ("might go to"), 651 (learning Russian to go to R.)

Ryan, Mrs., 278 (Rainbow)

Sachetti, 762

Saga of Siegfried, The, 3, 4 (published asThe Trespasser), 15,17,18 Sahara, 365

St. Anthony, 365-6

St. Bernard’s Letters, 360 (D. H. L. reading)

St. Catherine, 656 ("can’t stand”) St. Clare, 656 ("can’t stand”) St. Columb, 363

St. Cyr-sur-mer, 836

St Francis, 322, 716 (see also s. v. Francis

St. Gervasio, 502

St. Helier, Lady, 199

St. Ives, 328 (house-hunting), 335, 746

St. Ives Times, 415

St. Mawr, 614, 616, 618, 629, 630, 636

Saintsbury, Professor (quoted), xxii Sale of St. Thomas (Abercrombie), 194

Saleeby, Mary, 230 (D. H. L. teaching)

Salerno, 493, 498 (Salerman Gulf)

Salimbene's Biography, 322

Salisbury, 419 (“competent Military

Authority at”)

Sallie (see under Hopkin)

Salo, 66, no

Salt Lake, 578

Salvation Army, 115

Samson and Delilah, 532 (English

Review)

Samuelli, Signora, 67

San Cristobal, 652

Sand, George, 468 ("I am very fond of”), 796 (Valdemosa)

Sanderson Cobden, 625 (The Contemporary Magazine)

Sandgate, 31

Sands, Miss, 240

San Francisco, 544 (“if I don’t like Australia, then S. F ”), 548 (going to), 849, 856

San Gaudenzio, 112, 114, 538 ("I loved it")

San Paolo (in Florence), 713

San Remo, 842

Santa Barbara, 578

Santa F6, 551, 554, 562, 5⁸9 ("I wish I was in S. F."), 591—2, 615, 619, 656, 679, 709, 723

Santa Lucia, 644 (hotel in Naples)

San Terenzo, 145 (Shelley’s place), 147 (id.)

Sappho (Collings), 71, 82, 94

Sardinia, 510 (’going to), 511 (liked it very much), 512, 515 (’walking in), 516 (seekingphotos of), 517 (Seeker and book about), 856

Sardinia Films, 516 (suggested title)

Sargent, 263

Sarzana, 153 (station for Lerici), 165

Sass, 587 (“old S. from Taos”)

Saturday Review, The, 26

Savona, 783

Savonarola, 343

Scarborough, 446

Scargill Street, 66 (beginning a comedy)

Schaffhausen, 140, 142 (walking) Schleswig, 671-2 (camp at) SchOneberg (Berlin), 699 Schopferische Pause, 669 (read most of it and was interested), 689

Schreiber, Max, 519 (cost of plates) Schreibershofens, The, 522 (Johanna’s husband, son, daughter) (i.e. F.'s younger sister’s family)

Schwarzwald (see under Black-Forest)

Scilly Isles, 338, 340

Scotch, The, 694 ("miserable specimens, all told”)

Scotland, 666 (going to), 668 ("if I go to .")

Scotland Yard, 425, 781 (and Lady C.), 782 (and pictures) , 784 (Lady C. and Pansies)

Scott, Mi infield, 566 (manager of Arzopalo Hotel)

Scott-James, 13 (IThe Nation) Scott-Moncrieff, 693

Scrutiny (of the Works) of John Galsworthy, 679. 681, 716, 718

Sculpture, 384 (the lowest of the arts)

Sea and Sardinia, 530 (“the slight S travel book”), 533, 538-540, 546, 662, 683

Seacombe, 21

Seeker, Martin 13, 19, 27, 455 (New Poems), 457 (ib.), 468 (ib.), 483 (Women in Love), 500 offer for Rainbow), 504-5 (Women in Love and Rainbow), 506 (agreements signed; 509 (enthusiastic about Lost Girl), 516 (agreement), 517 (Sardinia book), 524 (trouble with Women in Love), 527 (John Bull article) 528 (Garnett to go to 5, John Street, "and kill him at once"), 529 (next 3 books), 532 (wants book of short stories), 536 (and Curtis Brown), 539 (ib), 567 (L125 for Kangaroo), 585 (Boy in the Bush), 599 (Magnus), 600 (ib.), 625 ("good at changing his mind ’ (ib.) ("rakes in £2/2/-"), 629 ("a more popular publisher than S ”), 630 (St. Mawr). 639 (1Quetzalcoatl), 643, 648 (photo of), 655 (David), 683 (Lady C.), 701 (suggests “Collected Poems”), 707 (John Thomas and Lady Jane). 710 ("won’t do Lady C."), 714 (Lady C.), 724 (against Lady

C. ), 737 (Sun), 747 (de luxe. “Sun”) 751 (Sun), 778 (Pansies), 794 (ib.), 851 (Lady C.); Letters to, 8, 481 487-8, 495, 501, 503, 507-8, 550, 603, 605, 662, 683, 705, 714, 738, 846, 855, 856, 857 (Pansies)

Seeker, Rina 648, 663, 714 Seckendorf, Count. 173 Secolo, 173 (newspaper) Second Best, 202

Seevolk, 534 (Nylander)

Seldes, Gilbert, Letter to, 564 Selfridges 480 ("very* slow”) Seligmann, H. J , Letter to, 759 Seltzer, Thomas, 519, 520, 530 (Tortoises), 533 (Sea and Sardinia) 535 (Aaron’s Rod), 538 (Tortoise poems;, 551 (Fantasia of the Unconscious), 560 (?to Mexico), 561 ("a nice tiny man* I think I may trust him, really”), 562, 564, 57i. 595-6 ("won't write"), 597 ("on the wharf"), 600 (Magnus), 614 ("so bothered about S ”), 618 ("still hovers on the brink of bankruptcy”), 629, 749, 759 (copyrights), 791, 856

Seiwood Terrace, 424

Semmering 564

Serape (or sarape? both correct), 640 Sergeant Grishka, 785

Service of all the Dead (poem), 206 Seven Arts, The (American magazine), 386

Seville, 797, 799, 837

Shadow in the Rose Garden, The, 202

Shakespeare, 101, 525

Shaw, G. Bernard 103 ("time for a reaction against ), 121 (“God help him”), 738 (and Hardy)

Shearman, Montague, Letters to, 4r9 424. 432

Sheffield, 254

Shelley, 134, 145, 147, 156, 166 (preferred to Milton), 237, 299

Sherman, Prof., 565 (criticism of

D. H. L.)

Sherwood Forest, 675

Shestov (by Russian author), 482, 487-8

Shirebrook, 27

Short, Capt., 434 (Tregerthen landlord)

Shorter, Clement, 496

Shrivelled Zeus, The (Abercrombie), 194

Sicily, xxix 500 (? going to), 501 (in S.511, 563 ("cry for help from 884

their dead”), 575, 605, 745 ("I love S765, S55, 856

Sick Collier, A, 201

Sickert, 31 (D. H. L. and his “dislike of the nude")

Sidgwick, 315 (offer of poems to)

Siebenhaar, W., 577 (Max Have-laar); Letters to, 553, 559, 658

Siegfried, Siegmund, see under Saga Siena, 527 ("didn’t like S. a bit") Sierra Mad re, 592

Sierre (?Sion), 726, 729

Signature,, The, 251 (projected paper), 253-7, 259, 293, 330 (circular)

Silence, 95 (Carlyle's 50 volumes on value of)

Simmond s Yat, 452

Simon, Sir John, 283 (Rainbow)

Sinclair, May, 364 (Three Sisters)

Sinister Street, 212

“Sister Helen” (Rossetti), 3

Sisters, The (afterwards Women in Love), 118 (novel begun), 122, 124, IZ2, 137 (two false starts), 139 (“going well—100 pp done”), 144, 172 (IThe Wedding Ring), 178, 189, 190, 354 (finished), 364 (? Women in Love)

Sitwells, The, 667

Skinner, Miss M. L., 600 (Boy in the Bush), 603 (ib); Letters to, 570, 577. 5^4-5- 638

Slade, 643 ("a criminal institution”), 732 (D. H. L.'s pictures "rolling in faults—Sladeily considered"), 751 ("an eternal S student”)

Slaley (village), 469

Sloependen, 534

Smart Set, The, 126 (and American

Review), 132, 143, 172

Smith, F E., 344

Smith, P. F. T., Letter to, 33

Snake Dance (article) (see under Hopi)

"Snapdragon” (poem), 64, 68, 175, 313 (in Georgian Anthology, “autobiographical”)

Sneinton, 214

Snowden, Philip, 344

Socialism and Socialists, xxv, 359, 386, 490 (the Roumanian and), 512 (in Italy), 538 (Russell’s “theoretic,” IP H. L. “awfully irritated with”), 622-3 (an "absurd sort of,” in Mexico)

Soffici, 195

Soiled Rose, The, 30 (Forum story), 104, 121

885

Solaro, Monte, 403

Soller, 796

Somerset, 289, 291

Song (poem), 206

Song of a Man who is Loved, 413, 416

Sonnets (Crosland), 178 (“objectionable”)

Sonora, 573

Sons and Lovers, xi, 103 ("doing proofs of”). 104 (Foreword), 105 (Duckworth), 109 (doing proofs), no (proofsreturned), in ("don’t mind if Duckworth crosses out 100 shady pp. . It’s got to sell, I’ve got to live"), 113 (design for wrapper), 115 (ib.), 117 ("hung fire”), 119 (Duckworth’s "a damned dilatory lot”), 121, 122 (sales important), 124 (financially important), 125 (review in Standard), 126 (“liked the reviews of”), 129, 135, 142, 144 (N.Y Times), 147, 150, 172-4 ( 'shall not write quite so violently . . . any more”), 177 (joy in creating vivid scenes), 190-1 (a loss to Duckworth), 194 (Abercrombie on), 427, 633 (topography of), 728 (MS. of), 854, 855 Sorrento, 488-9, 493, 511

South Seas, The, 392, 498 (Compton Mackenzie talks of), 499 (‘ thinking of”), 547 (want to stop in . . a bit)

Southwell, 724

Spam, 764-6 (?going to), 768, 775-6 (ib.), 779 (ib.), 781 (' really think we’ll really leave for”)

Spaniards, 797 ("refused life so long, etc ”)

Speiser and Speiser, Letter to, 804 Speyer, 530 (forfeited nationality) "Spirit of Place,” 451-2 (1st of

American essays)

Spoodle (see Johnson, Willard) Spoon River Anthology, 308 Spotorno, xxix, 642-652, 856, 857 Sprague, Mrs., 611

Spud (Spoodle) (see under Johnson, Willard)

Squib, The, 819 (wants Lahr to start), 832

Squire, Jack, 513 (The Mercury), 606 (“suburbanite”) (see also ref., p. 801) (“the Squires instinctively dislike me”)

Stage Society, The, 170, 174

Stained Glass, 86

FF

Standard, 125 (reviews Sons and Lovers)

Stanley in Africa, 161

Stanway, 248, 405, 453

Star, The, 496 (review of Rainbow)

Star Review, 834 (article for) Stavrogin, 326-7

Steele, 740

Stein, Gertrude, 742, 751 ("amuses me, but soon palls")

Stendhal, xxii, 21

Stepanovitch, Pyotr, 326-7

Stephens, James, 164 ("another disappointmen t' ’)

Stephenson, P, R767-8 (Fanfrolico Press), 780, 782, 788 (reproduction of pictures), 794 ("getting vaguer and vaguer”), 799, 803 (book of pictures nearly ready), 813 (lent name as printer of Pansies), 819-823

Stepniak, Mme., 405

Stern (Stern and Rubens, New York), 852

Sterne, Mrs. Mabel Dodge, 530 (offers house in New Mexico), 550, 560, 656, 662, 677-8, 728 (MS of Sons and Lovers), 795, 810

Sterzing, 55

Stieglitz, Alfred, 747 (gallery in N.Y.); Letters to, 742, 749, 752

Still Afternoon in School, A, 72 (D H. L.’s first publication)

Stoke, 248

Stoney Middleton, 633

Story of my Heart, The (Jefferies), 15, 21

Strachey, 220 ("Curse the S who asks for a new religion"), 237 ("I don't like S ")

Strand Magazine, The, 414, 532 (Tickets Please), 603

Stranger, The, 21

Strasburg, 641, 667, 789

Strindberg, 66 ("I hate S.”), 84, 104 ("I don’t want to write like S.”)

Strindberg, 70 ("that rotten 5.”) Studies in Classic American Literature, 451 (7 or 8 essays in all), 468 (12 in all), 521, 535-6 (Seltzer to publish 111 N.Y.), 578

Stuttgart, 519

Styx, 646 (nearly fell into the)

Suetonius, 491

Suez Canal, 541 (loved coming through)

Suhrawardy, 283-4, 288

Sullivan, J. W. N., 686, 690

Summerhurst Green, 477

Sun (story), 644, 646 ("a bit too long ’), 650, 703 (MS), 717-9, 724 730, 735-7 (de luxe edition), 779, 792 (included in The Woman Who Rode Away), 804 (pirated), 807 (the only MS. sold)

Sun. The (newspaper), 759 (review of Lady C)

Sunday Dispatch, The, 763

Sunday Times, The, 648

Suresnes, 766, 768, 796, 838

Sussex Place, 482-3

Sutro, Alfred, 427

Swan storv, A (Rhys Davies), 780

Sweet, Algernon, 58

Swift, 773 (poem to Celia)

Switzerland, 139 (walking in), 145 (ib.), 147 (walk across), 180 (ib.), 199 (ib.), 466, 538, 642 ("I don t like §.”), 696, 699, 706, 715, 717, 719, 722, 726, 736, 857

Sydney, 542, 547 (harbour, one of the sights of the world, but "talk about crude, raw, self-satisfied”)

Symbolistes, The, 196

Synge, 103

Tagore, Rabindranath, 350 (D H. L on)

Tahiti, 550, 856

Tahiti, (boat), 551

Tamerlane, 347 (D H L. copying portrait of)

Tansley Moor, 675

Taormina. 502, 504, 513, 522, 524, 527 (Englisn church for), 654, 765, 775. 855

Taos (New Mexico), 530 (house offered), 547, 550-560,' 591, 598, 616 679, 719, 763 ("wish I were there”), 795 (Hon.Dorothy Brett), 856

Tarquinia (Etruscan), 659, 682

Tarragon, 775

Tarry, Mrs., 349

Tauchnitz, 56, 62

Tchekhov, 33, 103, 770

T D D., Letters to, 202, 293, 304, 308, 310, 358, 373

Tehuacan, 565

Teiborch, 518

Tellaro, 141,146-8, 163, 168, 175-6, 188. 294

Templeman episode, The, 177 Tenderness, 697 (suggested title) Tenente, The, 663

Tennyson, l ord, 115 (D. H. L *s self-comparison with)

Tension, 431 (D. H. L. on)

Teotihuacan. 565, 605

Thais, 553

Thatcham, 477

Theatre Arts, The, 623

Theater Essays, 719 (Miss Isaacs)

Thimble, The, 625 ("Hopi Snake

Dance" article)

Thirroul (N.S.W.), 547

This Quarter, 844 (Rhys Davies)

Thomas, Helen, 480

Thompson, Francis 215

Thompson, Clarence, 61 x

Thorne, Guy, 336, 373

Tlioth, 558

Three Sisters (May Sinclair), 364

Tilling (Authors’ Society), 496

Throssell, Mr., 548 (husband of

Katharine Pritchard)

Thrusher Mrs., 512 (offers farm in America)

Thucydides, 343, 361

Thurston, Mrs., 12

Tiberius, 491

Tickets Please, 532 (Strand Magazine)

Tietjens, Eunice, Letter to, 412

Times, The, 387, 459 (Freeman of), 461 (essays on Education offered to), 462 (four nice little essays "nicely curried' ), 465 (essays returned), Zoo

Times Literary Supplement, 352 ("idiotic and false review of Twilight in Italy")

Tinner’s Arms (Zennor), 328, 554

Titus, 8x6 (sold first 3,000 of Lady C and printing again)

Tlalpam, 585, 620

To the Pure, 760

Toledo, 587, 799

Tolstoi, 198, 383

Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 601

Tom Jones, 83

Tomlinson, 632 ("attacks on me” by

Murry’s friends)

Tono-Bungay, 2

Tor bole, 62

Torkard, Hucknall, 673 (Byron’s heart buried)

Torrents of Spring, 18

Tortoises, 530, 533 (chap-book), 538, 54°

Touch and Go (play), 477, 481, 507 (published)

Toulon, 758, 763, 786, 788, 833

Toulouse, 717, 793

"Trag6die de Salomd,” 184 (Collings)

Tramontana, 654 (the wind)

Transcendental Element m American

Literature, The, 414-5

Transition, 742 (Paris magazine), 75 l

Tie Croci (Verga), 537 (Seeker)

Tree, Iris, 457

Tregeithen, 338 (cottage at Zennor), 342, 428-9, 434, 436

Trevelyan, Sir, G., 695

Trevelyan, Robert, 164, 502

Treverroc Farm, 306

Treves, Fratelli (Milan), 537 (publishers of Verga), 539

"Trevogan,” 314 (house suggested by J D. Beresford)

Trespasser, The 4; note 17 (Trespassers in Cythera), 19, 20, 22-3, 26, 28, 30, 32 (first proofs), 43-Z, 48 (in America), 60, 71, 84, 91, 105 (£50, and more coming?), 855

Tribune, The, 670

Trient, 58

Trier, 35-6

Trinidad, 284, 288, 664 ("Trinidad,” a person?)

Tristan, 44 1x4

Tristram Shandy, 149 ("I love

T. S.’’)

Trojan Women, 7

Turgenev, 198, 383, 809 (pathos and bathos of)

Turin, Zoo, 650

Turkey Cock. 553 ("one of my favourites”), 559 (alterations in)

Turner, Reggie, 66x, 663 ("doing book, but I doubt if he’ll finish it”), 693

Tuscany, 511, 769

Twilight in Italy, 350, 352, 358, 394

(American edition) 855

Two Blue Birds, 658, 7x8 (Dial and Pall Mall)

Two Ladies and a Horse, 614 (alternative title for St Mawr)

Two Marriages, 11, 136 (i-e.

Daughters of the Vi car)

Tylor (Primitive Culture), 344, 359

Typee, 391 ("the ultimate place we calx T ”)

Tyrol, 39, 133, 136 (articles), 523

Tyrwhitt, 664 (Lord Berners)

Uberlingen, 140

Uccello, 474-5 (D. H L. wants to copy)

Uffizi, 592

Ulysses (Joyce), 498, 776

Umbria (Etruscan), 655

Unconscious, The, 635 (see under Fantasia)

Under Western Eyes, 62 (' bored ) "Unholy Family’’ (picture), 672 Unset Gott (Manan Ramie), 211 Underwood, 633, 674

Unwin, Stanley, 465 (educational essays)

Vagabondaggio (Verga), 529

Valdemosa, 796 (Chopin and George Sand)

Valencia, 768, 775. 797, 836

Vallombrosa, 745

Vanguard Press, 748 (Lady C in America)

Vanity Fair (American), 830 (producing 4 paintings), 834 (?con-tract for a year)

Van der Goes, 518

Van Gogh, 233

Van Gogh, 231

Van Vechten, 681 (Nigger Heaven)

Vandiver, Willie, 830 ("old W.V.")

Ven (Etruscan), 680

Velasquez, 184

Vence, xxx, xxxii, 851, 857

Venice, 5x0 (?book on, for John Lane), 523 (writing story about), 821 (to meet Dorothy Warren about pictures)

Ventimiglia, 652

Vera Cruz, 561, 587, 588, 625-6, 629, 630, 856

Vere (see Vere Collins)

Verga, Giovanni, 528 ("a fascination for"), 529 (Sicilian novelist), 536 (died, age 82), 538, 540, 544, 546 (translating), 554 (publishers say "too old-fashioned”), 568, 578 (not "da")

Verlaine, 164

Vennala Montana, 726, 729

Verona, 114, 116, 166, 823

Vesuvius, 493, 502

Via Gellia (near Cromford), 438, t>33, 675

Viareggio, 181

Vickers Maxim, 217 (see also under Lewis)

Victoria Park, 403 (peace demonstrations)

Vienna, 565

Vietri, 510

Viking Press, 759

Villach. 685-6 (going to)

Villemer, 468

Villiers-Stuart, Mrs., Letter to, 12

Vin Ordinaire, 202

Vingone, 659, 713-4

Violets (poem), 132

Virgil, 546

Virgin and the Gipsy, The, 650 ("a long story”)

"Vogelnest, Haus,” 48, 116

Volador, The, 587, 620

Volterra, 659, 680 von Stein Irau, 76 Vosges, 517

Wadebridge, 303 Waldbrol, 33, 35 Wales, Prince of, 541—2 Walpi (Hopi village), 607 Walpole, 509 (?Hugh) War, The Great, 235 (Capital v

Labour), 546 (“we’ve all lost it”) Warren, Dorothy, 721 (?pictures for exhibition), 723 (ib.), 726 (gallery in Maddox Street), 727, 732, 738, 743-4. 749. 75°. 765, 805, 81S, 823 (to Venice to meet her), 825 (and her husband), 826 (ib.), 828 (Maida Vale), 842, 844, 857

Waterfield, 164 (a man called W ), 166, 724 (the W.’s)

Watnall (park and hill), 633, 673-5

Watson, Herbert, 401

Watteau, 745

M atts, 263

"Wayward Woman” (ballad), 153 Weariness (poem), 206

Weber, Professor Alfred, 40-1

Wedding Ring, The, 172 (or The Sisters), 189, 193 (or The Rainbow), 197, 213 (The Rainbow)

Weingartner, Fraulein Creszenz, 477, 480

Well of Loneliness, The, 776

Wellington, 550, 562

Wells, H. G., 119 (D. H. L. on), 194 (Country of the Blind), 606 ("suburbanite”), 774

Wells, Mr., 778

Welsh, 676 (psychology), 817 (countryside)

Westminster, 291 ("spectral sunlit towers")

Westminster Gazette, The, 34 (The Saturday), 37, 43, 48, 51, 55-6, 60, 133, 158

Westmoreland, 217 (walking in)

What About Europe? (Douglas), 839 Whatstandwell, 675

Where Bonds are Loosed, 307 (D. H. L. on)

Whibley, 444

Whitby, 667

White Fox, 704-5, 769 ("this silly W. F. blarney”)

White Peacock, The, 1 (offered to 888

William Heinemann), 2 (Nether-mere, first title of), 5, 6 (aged 20 when began), 12-13, 20, 37, 60, 72 (Hueffer and), 633 (landscape of), 674 (Felley Mill farm), 854

White Stocking, The, 202

Whitman, Walt, too (quoted), 135, 444 (writing essay on), 520 (essay in The Nation), 817 ("your W, joke”)

Wickham, Anna (Mrs. Hepburn), 258

Widowing of Mrs, Holroyd, The, 132 (provisional title for play), 138-9 (? Afterdamp, alternative title), 673, 675 (Mrs. H. "was an aunt of mine”), 677 (played)

Wilde, Oscar, 716

Wilhelm Meister, xiii, 716

Wilkinsons, The, 659, 676

Wilks, The, 717

William Henry, 420-1, 434 (Tre-gerthen given up)

Williams, Miss and her father. 652

Williamson, George, 727

Willie (see W E. Hopkin)

Willington Men (New Year’s Greeting to: for 1929), 771

Wilson, Charles, 771 (poem: Willington Men)', Letter to, 770

Windeam, 537

Wingfield Manor, 675

Wirksworth, 439, 446, 633- 675, ^55

Wishart (publisher), 718

Witch a la mode (story), 537

Witt, Mrs., 692 (mother of Mrs.

Hamilton Eames)

Wolfratshausen, 40, 45* I25« ¹*6.

134, 140

Wolverhampton, 24a

Woman Who Rode Away, The, 614, 616, 618, 636, 792 (includes Sun), 856

Women in Love, xxi, 364, 372 (? Dies Ira), 376 ("shall keep the title ), 386 (sequel to Rainbow), 388 (Methuen will cancel agreement), 391 (no English publisher), 393 lib.), 394-5 (in America), 483 (Seeker to publish), 487 (IThe Sisters), 488 (Vol. I suggestion), 495 (Seeker's offer), 496-7* 499. 500 (>Duckworth, 503 (Seeker’s terms), 507 (Day of Wrath, alternative title), 514 ( like best

of all my books”), 524 (Seeker trouble with), 526 (“hear I am in worse odour than ever for W. in L. but pah!”), 539 (signed copies of), 561 ("American edition going into 15,000”), 633, 68z, 855 "Woodlanders," 437 (the Hardy country)

Woolf, Leonard, 552 (Novelle Rusti-cane)

Worksop, 27

World from a Woman's Window,

The, 576 (suggestion for Catherine Carswell)

Worthing, 226

Wright, 126 (editor of American

Review), 132 (Smart Set), 139 Wurzburg, 828 Wye, 451,4 53

"Wyewurk,” 547—9 (house at Ihir-roul, N.S.W.)

Yale Review, 402. 414

Yeats, 24 (Morality Players)

Yorke, Dorothy, 420, 447

Yorkshire. 667 (‘ should like to go to”)

You Touched Me, 532 (original title of Hadrian)

Young, Brett, 494-5, 498

Young Soldier with Bloody Spurs, The (poem), 51

Youth (Rolf Gardiner), 666

Ypres, 439

Yucatan, 619, 621

Y.W.C.A (Boston), 657

Zanboni, Professor, 539 (D. H L wrote to about Verga- no answ er)

Zapotec (Indians), 616, 622, 624, 626

Zell-am-See, 537 ("is dear”), 564 (The Captain’s Doll ends in), 856 Zennor, 328, 332, 428, 554 ("sounds too much changed”)

Zeppelin. 252-3, 256, 367 (in Daily Mirror)

Zillertal, 48, 50, 537

Zomban (?), 439 (civilisation in

Africa)

Zossima, Father. 326

Zululand, 763 ("I should like to go to Z. and paint Zulus")

Zuni, 735         ,

Zurich, 140, 142

THE INTELLIGENT HEART

The Story of

D. H. LAWRENCE

by

HARRY T. MOORE

“There could hardly have been a more opportune time for a new biography of I). H. Lawrence, and for the painstaking, thorough kind of book which Mr. Moore has written... He lias unearthed and organized a great deal of new material, including wonderful unpublished letters; he has conferred with those who knew Lawrence intimately, and he has related Lawrence’s books, in detail, to his complex experiences. Best of all, instead of taking sides passionately and defensively (the persistent original sin of those who have written about Lawrence), he has consulted and visited all sides and explored every point of view of those involved in Lawrence’s career . . . Mr. Moore’s labors have increased the value of Lawrence's testament and made it more available to the reader by giving it a concrete biographical context and a coherent objectivity."

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

New York Times Book Review

“The Intelligent Heart, in its fairness, gives shape and perspective to this remarkable life as no previous book has done.’’

Times Literary Supplement

THE PHOENIX EDITION OF

D. H. LAWRENCE

Novels:

THE WHITE PEACOCK

SONS AND LOVERS

THE TRESPASSER

WOMEN IN LOVE THE RAINBOW

AARON’S ROD

THE LOST GIRL

KANGAROO

THE PLUMED SERPENT

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER

Short Novels:

Two volumes containing.

LOVE AMONG THE HAYSTACKS ST. MAWR

THE LADYBIRD               THE VIRGIN AND THE GIPSY

THE FOX                   THE MAN WHO DIED

THE CAPTAIN’S DOLL

Travel:

Three volumes containing:

TWILIGHT IN ITALY SEA AND SARDINIA

MORNINGS IN MEXICO and ETRUSCAN PLACES

Poems:

Two volumes containing:

RHYMING POEMS              PANSIES

look! WE HAVE COME         NETTLES

THROUGH!                LAST POEMS

BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS MORE PANSIES

Short Stories:

The collected short stories in three volumes

Heinemann