The Darkest Place is Under the Candlestick ...
(SA/2025)
'I hate any thought of
possessions sticking on to me like barnacles,
at once I feel
destructive.' - D. H. Lawrence [1]
I.
Apparently, brass candlesticks of the kind my mother kept on the mantlepiece from the early 1970s until the day she died in 2023 have seen a resurgence in popularity of late. People seem to think that they add a touch of warmth and maybe a hint of sophistication to a room.
Of course, the British have loved their brass candlesticks since the 18th century when new casting techniques allowed them to be mass produced and to supersede and replace those made from wood or other materials, such as pewter.
Brass - a metal alloy composed of copper and zinc - was seen as both practical and aesthetically pleasing due to its bright golden appearance and various styles and designs of candlestick emerged at this time; some with round, some with square, and some (like my mother's) with octagonal bases.
Again, as with many of the objects I have inherited, I don't quite have the heart to throw them away or donate them to a charity shop (my sister, of course, would have sold them at a car boot sale at the earliest opportunity and been happy if she'd got a couple of quid for the pair).
II.
Funnily enough, I find support for my decision to keep my mother's brass candlesticks in the following tale concerning D. H. Lawrence ...
At the end of December 1915, he and his wife Frieda moved to Zennor, in Cornwall, staying initially in rooms at the local pub, The Tinners' Arms, before renting a cottage of their own, in which they lived for nearly two years.
Clearly, unlike many of the other places he and Frieda lived at, Lawrence regarded Tregerthen Cottage as a genuine home; somewhere he could put down roots and it was his hope that the tiny village of Zennor, about 5 miles from St. Ives, might become the centre of a small community (Rananim) composed of friends and like-minded individuals, such as the literary couple John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield.
As one commentator notes:
"Once he moved in to his small cottage [...] Lawrence's
letters describe his engagement in sustained bouts of home making [...] he painted the walls pale pink and the ceiling white.
From second hand wood his landlord gave him, Lawrence made book shelves
that he painted royal blue [...] and also a dresser 'with cupboard below, and shelves for plates
above' (2L 591)." [2]
What Lawrence desperately wanted to finish furnishing his cottage with, however - as revealed in a letter to the artist Mark Gertler - were the brass candlesticks that had once belonged to his mother:
"I only miss my pair of brass candlesticks. [...] I
do hope they are not lost, because they are the only thing that I have
kept from my own home, and I am really attached to them." [3]
For Lawrence - as, I suppose, for me - his mother's candlesticks are more than just physical relics; they possess an almost magical allure and are invested with all kinds of memories; capable thus of evoking powerful thoughts and feelings.
Lawrence's anxious questioning of his friends on the whereabouts of his candlesticks indicates just how important they were to
him and makes us wonder how sincere he was being in the epigraph that appears at the top of this post ...
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrel [15? April 1915], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II., ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 318.
[2] Jane Costin, 'Lawrence and the "homeless soul"', in Études Lawrenciennes
56 (2024): click here to read online.
Note that (2L 591) refers to The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II., p. 591. Lawrence was writing to Lady Ottoline Morrell (7 April 1916).
[3] D. H. Lawrence in a letter to Mark Gertler (22 March 1916), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II., p. 584.
See also the letter written a few days later to S. S. Koteliansky (28 March 1916), in which Lawrence is still banging on about his pair of brass candlesticks and their whereabouts (II. 589). I don't know if he ever retrieved them, but I hope so.
Readers who liked this post might also like: 'Objects Make Happy' (4 May 2024) - click here - and 'Be a Little Deaf and Blind ... How Cynical Pragmatism Secures Wedded Bliss' (23 Feb 2025) - click here. Both these posts feature objects that had belonged to my mother.
