Spooks and Lovers: Halloween With D. H. Lawrence

 

Although - as far as I'm aware - D. H. Lawrence didn't celebrate Halloween, he did write a number of spooky tales with supernatural elements [1] and he had an abiding interest in the occult and things which go bump in the dark. 

 

And so, I thought it might be fun to look at what he writes in nine of his letters (and one postcard) dated the 31st of October ... 

 

 

[31 October 1903] [2]

 

On a postcard sent from Peterborough to his childhood friend Gertrude Cooper, Lawrence writes to say he is safe and sound and that he has been to visit the 12th-century cathedral, famous for its Early English Gothic façade featuring three large arches.

 

However, Lawrence will increasingly grow disillusioned with monumental religious architecture and reach the stage where he is weary of huge stone erections In other words, he will come to believe in the ruins [3] and will, like Deleuze and Guattari, seek to release desire from all that overcodes it, rejecting the myth of wholeness or completion [4]. 

 

And that is one of the reasons I so admire Lawrence as a writer: because he anticipates both punk and poststructuralism. 

 

 

[31 October 1913] [5]

 

In a letter to Henry Savage - a minor literary figure who had written a positive review of Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock (1911) - Lawrence sets forth his view that what women fundamentally want is sexual satisfaction:

 

"A man may bring her his laurel wreaths and songs and what not, but if that man doesn't satisfy her, in some undeniable physical fashion - then in one way or other she takes him in her mouth and shakes him like a cat a mouse, and throws him away. She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honour, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run."

 

In other words - and in the long run - she simply desires a good fucking; a fairly conventional view which Lawrence holds too for the rest of his life. Less conventional, however, is the claim (and confession) that follows: "And an artist - a poet - is like a woman in that he too must have this satisfaction. [...] He must get his bodily and spiritual want satisfied [...]

 

Is it just me, or is there not an ambiguity to this sentence which invites a kinky interpretation ...? (Some readers might recall that I've written before on Lawrence's autogynephilia, his perverse tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman being penetrated by a large cock: click here.)   

 

In this same long letter, written from Italy, Lawrence also admits that whilst he dislikes Charles Dickens for his mid-Victorian moralising, he's jealous of his characters. 

 

He closes, in typical Lawrence fashion, by requesting some books, giving an update on his health - he has a rotten bad cold - and by admitting that he wishes he had some money, so needn't work. 

 

 

31 October 1914 [6]

In a rather sweet note to his Russian friend S. S. Koteliansky, Lawrence asks the latter if he can do him a favour next time he's in Soho:

 

"I saw a necklace I wanted to buy for Frieda. It is in a shop almost at the south end of Wardour St near Leicester Square [...] a second hand jeweller's - a necklace of lapis lazuli set in little white enamel clasps - costs 30/- It hangs up at eye level near the doorway. I send you a cheque. If you find the necklace, please buy it me - round beads of lapis lazuli - you can't mistake it - marked 30/-"

 

Just to be on the safe side, Lawrence even enclosed  a sketch of the necklace. However, unsure of Kot's ability to locate the piece - despite his detailed description and drawing - he then adds a PS to the letter: "If you don't find it you can give me back the cheque."

 

I suppose that's fair enough - 30 bob might not sound like much, but it would be about £190 today and the averge coal miner in 1914 would only expect to earn about 9 shillings per daily shift. 

 

Lawrence, of course, had a thing for lapis lazuli - he had once given a piece to the poet Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. as she was known) and readers might also recall that Hermione smashes Birkin's skull with a beautiful crystal ball made of such [7].    

 

 

31 October 1916 [8]

 

Lawrence is in Cornwall and has just finished writing his latest novel, Women in Love. Along with a letter to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, Lawrence encloses the final part of his manuscript - "all but the last chapter, which, being a sort of epilogue, I want to write later".   

 

He also encloses the short story called 'The Mortal Coil', which he is clearly proud of, although not optimistic about its commercial prospects:

 

"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 [...] I really grieve when I send you still another unmarketable wretch of fiction. But bear with me. I will write sweet simple tales yet."  

 

Poor Lawrence! Always hoping to strike it rich with his writing and find the philosopher's stone, if only so that he can escape to sunnier climes and find better health: "I am tired of being unwell in England." 

 

 

[31 October 1919] [9]

 

It would, however, be three years later before Lawrence was finally able to leave England and head south once more: in a letter to Martin Secker expressing his concern about the Women in Love manuscript which has been sent to the US, Lawrence also adds: "I shall be in [London] Monday, preparatory to going off for Italy". 

 

He left London on 14 November: to Turin via Paris on the train and then on to Florence (via Spezia). 

 

Unfortunately, poor health and money worries continue to dog him no matter where he travels, although at times Lawrence affirms his sickness - better than a bourgeois model of good health - and his poverty; for it is preferable, he says, to sit still on a large rock than ride in the car of a multi-millionaire.   

[31 October 1921] [10]

In a Halloween letter sent from Sicily to his literary agent Robert Mountsier, Lawrence says he's thinking of heading out West and trying his luck in the New World: "What's the good of Europe, anyhow?"

 

It was a particularly busy period for Lawrence as a writer:  

 

(i) Sea and Sardinia was about to be published, as well as the poetry collection Tortoises ...

 

(ii) he was rewriting some old short stories and finishing his novella 'The Captain's Doll' ...

 

(iii) Fantasia of the Unconscious had just been sent off to his American publisher ...

 

(iv) he was also busy working on Mr Noon, although he confessed that he didn't know whether he'd actually finish writing the novel: "I get so annoyed with everybody that I don't want to tackle any really serious work. To hell with them all. Miserable world of canaille."

 

Interestingly, this letter also gives us an insight into D. H. Lawrence the wine connoisseur:

 

"We have been trying the new Fontana Vecchia wine: though it shouldn't be tried till November 11th - I don't very much like it - it's going to be rough. I'm glad I had a barrel of last year's from the Vigna Sagnoula." [11]

 

 

31 October 1922 [12]   

The following year, on the same date, Lawrence again wrote to Robert Mountsier ... 

 

He was now in Taos, New Mexico, and thinking of moving into the ranch that Mabel Sterne was offering him and Frieda; somewhere they could they finally call home and make a real life together.  

Having already invited a friend of Mabel's - Bessie Freeman - to come and live with them, Lawrence now invited his literary agent to do the same:

 

"M.S. has got a ranch, 180 acres, on Rockies foothills, about 20 miles away, wild. We went there today. It is very lovely. There are two rather poor little houses [...] all rather abandoned. But we think of going there either this week or next, to try it. If we find it possible, move in there. The ranch is utterly abandoned now, so it will be a good thing for it to have somebody there. If we go, come there with us, and we'll make a life. [...] It's a wonderful place, with the world at your feet and the mountains at your back, and pine-trees. [...] You'd have one of the houses: they almost adjoin. We'd have to get a few repairs done."

Obviously, being neither impetuous nor insane, Mountsier wasn't tempted by this offer. 

 

And one might have imagined that after his experience in Cornwall with Mansfield and Murry, Lawrence would have abandoned plans for communal living, but apparently not; as he said in a letter to Koteliansky from this period, his idea had been sound, but the people invited to build Rananim were not up to the task [13] - which is the bitter conclusion that all utopian dreamers reach.  

 

 

[31 October 1925] [14]

 

And speaking of Jack Murry ... Lawrence wrote to him on Halloween in 1925, whilst staying at his mother-in-law's, on the edge of the Black Forest, which he loved, but always found somewhat spooky; like something from a dream (or nightmare). 

 

Although obviously a little bored and wishing he'd gone to Paris instead, he nevertheless offers the following observation on Germany at the time:

 

"Just the same here - very quiet and unemerged: my mother-in-law older, noticeably. I make my bows and play whist [...] Titles still in full swing here, but nothing else. No foreigners [...] and the peasants still peasants, with a bit of the eternal earth-to-earth quality that is so lost in England. Rather like a still sleep, with frail dreams."  

 

Murry by this stage regarded himself as a radical Christian - he would publish his Life of Jesus the following year - but Lawrence doesn't have much time for this:

 

"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. By the Creator. More important to me than Jesus. But of course God-the Father, the Dieu-Père, is a bore. Jesus is as far as one can go with god, anthropomorphically. After that, no more anthropos." 

 

And that's the Lawrence which the pagan me still loves: anti-Christian (or, at the very least, post-Christian) and in search of queer, inhuman gods who inhabit the outer (and inner) darkness ...

 

  

31 October 1927 [15]

Not the best of days for poor Lawrence. He wrote to Koteliansky:

 

"Altogether the world is depressing - and I feel rather depressed. My bronchials are such a nuisance, and I don't feel myself at all. I'm not very happy here [Florence], and I don't know where else to go, and have not much money to go anywhere - I feel I don't want to work -  don't want to do a thing at all the life gone out of me. Yet how can I sit in this empty place and see nobody and do nothing! It's a limit! I'll have to make a change somehow or other - but don't know how."

 

And as he wrote to the German writer Max Mohr:

 

"I unfortunately can't yet promise to dance - my bronchials and my cough are still a nuisance. But I want so much to be able to dance again. And I think if we went somewhere really amusing, I should quickly be well. My cough, like your restlessness, is a good deal psychological in its origin, and a real change might cure us both. The sun shines here, but the mornings are foggy. And I no longer love Italy very much - it seems to me a stupid country."

 

Oh dear, when one falls out of love with Italy that's not a good sign ...

31 October 1928 [16]

 

Lawrence's final Halloween letter was again written to Koteliansky. 

 

In it, whilst still feeling poorly - this time with Italian flu given to him by Frieda - Lawrence sounds much perkier than a year ago; more full of fight and ready to take on the British press and customs officials who are united in their opposition to Lady Chatterley's Lover (which had been printed privately in Italy ealier that year).   

"What fools altogether!", writes Lawrence. "How bored one gets by endless mob-stupidity."

Lawrence is holed up on the tiny French island of Port-Cros; only four miles across and covered in pine trees; there's a hotel, a port, and a handful of houses. Nevertheless, Lawrence says that, were it not for his cold, he should like it: "I feel very indifferent to almost everything."

 

Interestingly, that's not something one expects to hear from Lawrence, who often contrasts indifference negatively with insouciance, arguing that whereas the latter is a refusal to be made anxious by idealists gripped by a moral compulsion to care, the former, indifference, is an inability to care resulting from a certain instinctive-intuitive numbness (often as a consequence of having cared too much about the wrong thing in the past) [17].

 

Of course, this is just another false dichotomy. At any rate, I'm quite happy to view indifference more positively (within a transpolitical context, for example).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Perhaps the best known of these tales is 'The Rocking Horse Winner', which can be found in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 230-244. My take on this story can be found here.

 

[2]  D. H. Lawrence, letter to Gertrude Cooper, [31 Oct 1903], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 23.

 

[3] See The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-91, where Lawrence writes of Anna's experience of Lincoln Cathedral and see 'Sketches of Etruscan Places', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33, where he writes in favour of small wooden temples rather than enormous stone buildings. I have discussed this material in the post entitled 'Believe in the Ruins' (16 April 2019): click here.

 

[4] See Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 41, where they write in favour of partial objects, fragments, and heterogenous bits, rather than any kind of totality. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Henry Savage, [31 Oct 1913], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 94-96

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 31 Oct 1914, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, p. 228.    

 

[7] See Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 105. Hermione uses the ball as a paperweight, when not using it as a weapon. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to J. B. Pinker, 31 Oct 1916, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, pp. 669-670.    

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Martin Secker, [31 Oct 1919], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 408. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier, [31 Oct 1921], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-108. 

 

[11] To describe a wine as rough means that it has a coarse texture. It would usually refer to a young tannic red wine, before it has had time to soften or round out.  

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier, [31 Oct 1922], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, p. 334.

 

[13] In 1916, Lawrence invited Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to come and live in a cottage next door to him and his wife Frieda, in Zennor, near St. Ives; a tiny place, near the moors, full of black rocks, and overlooking the sea. 

      The idea was to establish an artists' colony or commune of some kind, that Lawrence wanted to name Rananim. Of course, it soon led to tension and conflict and ended in tears and tantrums.

 

[14] D. H. Lawrence, letter to John Middleton Murry, [31 Oct 1925], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 328.

 

[15] D. H. Lawrence, letters to S. S. Koteliansky and Max Mohr, 31 Oct 1927, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 203- 205. 

 

[16] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 31 Oct 1928, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, p. 604. 

 

[17] Readers who are interested in this might like to see the post entitled 'Dandelion' (10 Dec 2015) which addresses the question of care in the thought of D. H. Lawrence: click here.  

May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1921 - 1929)

Claude Flight and Edith Lawrence Maypole Dance (1936)
goldmarkart.com 

 

 

1 May 1921 

 

Lawrence is back in Germany - staying at a country inn just outside Baden. 

 

He informs his American literary agent Robert Mountsier that it's lovely, although in a lettter written two days earlier, also to Mountsier, he confesses he doesn't really like Germany - even though things are cheap (always an important consideration for Lawrence). 

 

He expands upon this in a letter written the following day - May 2nd - to Mary Cannan, the actress wife of the British writer Gilbert Cannan: 

 

"The country is beautiful, Baden a lovely little town, and there are some exquisite things in the shops. Everybody is very nice with us: and we live for about 5/- a day the pair of us. Food is very good: wonderful asparagus." [1] 

 

And yet: "Germany is rather depressed and empty feeling [...] The men are very silent and dim." [2] 

 

To be fair, they had just lost a war and Germany had not fully recovered from the shock caused by the overthrow of the old way of life and the ongoing economic misery caused by the Treaty of Versailles's demand for punitive war reparations. 

 

Soon, however, the Nazis would be along, promising to address these issues ...

 

 

1 May 1923 

 

Two years later, and Lawrence is in Chapala, Mexico - which he describes in a telegram to Frieda as paradise (whether this is meant ironically or not, I don't know). 

 

She duly arrives from Mexico City the following day by train and they move into a little house of their own (near but not overlooking Lake Chapala): "It is hot and sunny and nice: lots of room." [3] 

 

They even have bananas growing in their garden - so much more exotic than the apples growing in mine! 

 

 

1 May 1925 

 

Many of Lawrence's short letters written from Del Monte Ranch, New Mexico, are full of relatively dull domestic details and conventional remarks about the weather and his state of health. 

 

And this includes his May Day letter to the American modernist painter (and early exponent of Cubism) Andrew Dasburg: thanks for sending a new ribbon for the typewriter; we've got the workmen in laying pipes; the cold winds cause my chest to play up, etc. [4] 

 

There's really not much one can say about this. But it's reassuring to know that Lawrence wasn't raging or in genius mode all of the time. 

 

 

1 May 1926 

 

Although Lawrence mockingly portrayed Reggie Turner as little Algie Constable in Aaron's Rod (1922), I will forever hold him in high regard due to the fact that he was one of the few friends who remained loyal to Oscar Wilde when he was imprisoned and supported him after his release.

 

On May Day, 1926, Lawrence wrote to Reggie from the pensione where he was staying, in Florence, hoping to clear up a misunderstanding. Apparently, they had agreed to meet at a popular bar, but, due to some confusion over the day, they managed to miss one another. 

 

Surprisingly, rather than be angry about this and blame Reggie, Lawrence sincerely regrets the lost evening and confesses that he was involved in a similar mix-up in Mexico City "with the one man I really liked in that damnable town: he said Thursday, and I heard Friday ... But anyhow I'm awfully sorry, and a thousand apologies" [5]. 

 

This is maybe explained by the fact that, as well as needing spectacles, Lawrence was a little deaf.

 

 

1 May 1928 

 

Harry Crosby, the young American playboy, poet, and publisher, epitomized the Lost Generation and would, in December 1929, commit suicide, aged 30, having first shot his young mistress, Josephine Rotch, through the head as part of an apparent death pact.

 

Twenty months earlier, however, in the spring of 1928, Lawrence had offered to write an introduction to a collection of poetry by Crosby and he sent this off to him at the beginning of May [6]. 

 

In a letter of April 29, Lawrence writes: "I have done the introduction to Chariot of the Sun [...] 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." [7] 

 

That's very generous of Lawrence; as was his proposal to promote Crosby's book by trying to get the introduction published separately; "a magazine article would be a bit of an advertisement for you" [8].

 

Just before Lawrence had the chance to post this letter, however, he received some further poems from Crosby in the mail. Unfortunately, he didn't think much of them - and in a PS written on May 1st, he advised Crosby not to add them to Chariot of the Sun:

 

"They don't belong; they are another thing. Put them in another book. Leave Chariot as it is. I send my foreword [...] It's good - but it won't fit if you introduce these new, long, unwieldly, not very sensitive poems. Do print Chariot as it stands. The new ones aren't so good." [9] 

 

 

1 May 1929

 

This would be Lawrence's final May Day; he was to die the following year on March 2nd. 

 

And he spent it in Spain (Palma de Mallorca): "Brilliant sunny May Day here, but wind cool - everything sparkling." [10]

 

In fact, he liked Mallorca so much he thought about staying the whole month and then do a little tour around Spain: Burgos, Granada, Cordoba, Seville, Madrid ..."I don't expect to like it immensely [...] Yet it interests me." [11]  

 

In fact, Lawrence had already decided the Spanish were rancid and lifeless: 

 

"The people seem to me rather dead, and they are ugly, and they have these non-existent bodies that English people often have [...] Dead-bodied people with rather ugly faces and a certain staleness. [...] The Spaniards, I believe, have refused life so long that life now refuses them [...]" [12]

 

Despite this, Lawrence lingered on in Palma until June 18th, when he finally sailed for Marseille (and from there headed by train to Italy).    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 710. 

      The May Day letter to Robert Mountsier is also on p. 710. 

 

[2] Letters, III. 711. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, writing in a letter to Thomas Seltzer (2 May 1923), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 436. 

      The short May Day telegram to Frieda is on p. 435 of this volume. 

 

[4] See the letter to Andrew Dasburg (1 May 1925), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 248. 

 

[5] Letters, V. 445-46. 

 

[6] This introduction by Lawrence - entitled 'Chaos in Poetry' - can be found in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116. It is one of my favourite pieces of writing by Lawrence and, I think, one of the most important. It was first published in Echanges, in December 1929.  

 

[7-8] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cabridge University Press, 1991), p. 389.

[9] Letters VI. 390. 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Nancy Pearn (1 May 1929), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cabridge University Press, 1993), p. 269.

 

[11] Letter to Maria and Aldous Huxley [9 May 1929], Letters, VII. 276. 

[12] Letters, VII 275-76. 

      Lawrence is still denigrating the Spanish - whom he compares disavourably to both the Italians and the French - in another letter to Aldous Huxley written on the 17th of May [VII. 283]. Just for the record: I love Spain and I love the Spanish.

 

 

To read the first part of this post - May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1911 - 1917) - click here.

That City of Dreadful Night: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Paris

Paris est toujours une bonne idée

 

 

I. 

 

I'm currently reading a big fat book of essays, short stories, and poems by over seventy authors, edited by Andrew Gallix [1], exploring the fascination that writers from the English-speaking world have for the French capital - although, as becomes clear, they are mostly enchanted by a myth of their own invention, rather than by Paris as a place that can be located on a map.       

 

Of course, not all English writers have been enamoured with the City of Lights. D. H. Lawrence, for example, famously wrote in 1919: "Paris is a nasty city, and the French are not sympathetic to me." [2] 

 

Five years later, however, Lawrence had changed his tune: "Paris isn't so bad - to me much nicer than London - so agreeably soulless" [3]. 

 

Indeed, in almost every letter and postcard sent to friends at the beginning of 1924 from Le Grand Hotel de Versailles (on the Boulevard Montparnasse), Lawrence was saying much the same thing: "Paris looking rather lovely in sunshine and frost - rather quiet, but really a beautiful city" [4]. He even cheerfully informed his mother-in-law that the Parisians were very friendly [5]. 

But of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, there were sudden (and frequent) mood changes during his short stay in Paris, as this letter written to Catherine Carswell illustrates:

 

"Today it is dark and raining, and very like London. There really isn't much point in coming here. It's the same thing with a small difference. And not really worth taking the journey. Don't you come just now: it would only disappoint you. Myself, I'm just going to sleep a good bit, and let the days go by [...] Paris has great beauty - but all like a museum. And when one looks out of the Louvre windows, one wonders whether the museum is more inside or outside - whether all Paris, with its rue de la Paix and its Champs Elysée isn't also all just a sort of museum." [6]   

Several days later, and Lawrence is still lying low in Paris (whilst Frieda buys some new clothes), but feeling a little more positive about the city and its residents:

 

"Paris is rather nice - the French aren't at all villain, as far as I see them. I must say I like them. They are simpatico. I feel much better since I am here and away from London." [7]

 

And so, despite informing one correspondent that the city was far from gay, Lawrence mostly enjoyed his short stay: "Paris has been quite entertaining for the two weeks: good food and wine, and everything very cheap." [8]  

 

II.

 

In 1929, Lawrence returned to Paris where he oversaw publication of a new (inexpensive) edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover to try and stop the pirated editions then in circulation. If, five years earlier, he had been mostly positive in his response to the city, now he was as hostile to it as he was to most (if not all) large cities:

 

"I don't a bit like Paris. It is nowadays incredibly crowded, incredibly noisy, the air is dirty and simply stinks of petrol, and all the life has gone out of the people. They seem so tired." [9]   

 

Sadly, of course, it was Lawrence himself that the life had almost entirely gone out of; he was to die eleven months after writing this, aged 44, in Vence (428 miles south of Paris, as the crow flies).           

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Andrew Gallix (ed.), We'll Never Have Paris, (Repeater Books, 2019). If I ever manage to work my way through the book's 560+ pages, then I'll doubtless post some kind of review of the work here on Torpedo the Ark.  

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 18 November 1919, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 417. It should be noted that Lawrence hadn't at the time of writing this letter actually been to Paris and wasn't to make his first trip there until January 1924.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler, [2 February 1924], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elzabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press 1987), p. 567. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [24 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 561. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 24 January 1924, in Letters IV, p. 561. In the original German, Lawrence wrote: "Paris ist doch netter wie London, nicht so dunkel-grau. Die Leute sind ganz freundlich."

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [25 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 563. 

      This letter has parallels with a short essay written at the same time in which Lawrence asserts that whilst Paris is still monumental and handsome, it has lost its true splendour, and become "like an old, weary peacock that sports a bunch of dirty twigs at its rump, where it used to have a tail". He blames this sorry state of affairs on: (i) modern democracy; (ii) too much bare flesh on display in French works of art;  (iii) an overly rich diet; and (iv) the dead weight of history and its architecture.

      See: 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 141-146. The line quoted is on p. 143.

      As for the idea of Paris disappointing: 

      "Disappointment, according to Stuart Walton, is actually a 'constitutive factor' in English speakers' experience of France, and its capital in particular: 'It is at least as important to the British, for example, that Paris should fall short of what they expect of it as it is to the Parisians that les Anglais have never really understood it' (p. 332)." 

      See Andrew Gallix's Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 29. And see also the TTA post 'On Disappointment' (24 May 2020) in which I discuss (amongst other things) le Syndrome de Paris: click here.  

        

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, [31 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 565. 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Hon. Dorothy Brett, [4 February 1924], in Letters, IV, p. 568. The fact that Paris was, at one time, cheap to live in, was absolutely crucial:

      "Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s as a place 'where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were', adding that this was 'like having a great treasure given to you'. That treasured lifestyle was swept away by the onset of the Depression in the 1930s. As Will Ashon remarks, artists thrive where there is 'affordable, preferably semi-derelict, real estate. Which is to say, you can't be an artist in Paris, anymore, or in London either' (p. 301)." 

      See Andrew Gallix, Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 24.   

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 3 April 1929, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 234. 

Those interested in knowing more about Lawrence's 1929 visit to Paris - and how his stay at 66, Boulevard de Montparnasse has now been officially commememorated with a plaque - might like to read Catherine Brown's blog post of 29 May 2019, available on her website: click here.     

 

And those interested in Lawrence's wider relationship with French culture, might like to read the following essay by Ginette Katz-Roy: 'D. H. Lawrence and "That Beastly France"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, (1991), pp. 143-156. This essay is available to download or read online via JSTOR: click here.   

 

 

Musical bonus: the debut single from Adam and the Ants, Young Parisians (Decca, 1978): click here. 

 

 

On the Art of Character Assassination cum Eternal Salute: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's 'Memoir of Maurice Magnus'

Lawrence and Magnus photographed in Italy (c.1920)

 

Also - Maurice! Ich grüsse dich, in der Ewigkeit.

 

If I'm grateful to the author of Burning Man for anything, it's for sending me back with fresh interest to D. H. Lawrence's Memoir of Maurice Magnus, a queer text (about a queer figure) first published in 1924, which Frances Wilson regards - like Lawrence himself - as perhaps his greatest single piece of writing as writing [a].  

 

The sixty-odd page text - which Lawrence wrote as an introduction for Magnus's book telling of his (wretched) time in the French Foreign Legion - opens on a "dark, wet, wintry evening in November 1919" [b]. Lawrence has just arrived in Florence: poor as the proverbial church mouse and Friedaless (she having gone to visit her mother in Germany). 

 

Needing help finding his feet, Lawrence turned to exiled British writer and paedophile Norman Douglas [c], whom he had known for several years and regarded as someone he could trust; someone who had, as he put it, never left him "in the lurch" [11]. Douglas it is who introduces Lawrence to Magnus, a figure who will both fascinate and exasperate, attract and repulse, with his mincing walk and high-pitched voice.

As first impressions seem to matter a very good deal, here's how Lawrence initially sized Magnus up: "almost smart, all in grey, and looked at first sight like an actor-manager, common [...] a touch of down-on-his-luck about him" [11]. Lawrence continues: "He looked a man about forty, spruce and youngish in his deportment, very pink-faced, and very clean, very natty, very alert, like a sparrow painted to resemble a tom-tit" [12].  

 

It's difficult to know quite what Lawrence found so irresistable about Magnus; perhaps it was his light-blue but rather tired-looking eyes, or his "crisp, curly, dark-brown hair" [13] that was just beginning to grey at the temples [d]; or perhaps it was the nice 'n' sleazy element that captured Lawrence's interest every time ... Who knows? But there was something (much to Frieda's later disgust and irritation) [e].

 

Despite insisting on Magnus's essential commonness, Lawrence can't help admiring the man's sensitivity and appreciation of fine things. Entering Magnus's room the morning after a gay and noisy night before, Lawrence notes:

 

"He was like a little pontiff in a blue kimono-shaped dressing gown with a broad border of reddish- purple: the blue was a soft mid-blue, the material a dull silk. So he minced about, in demi-toilette. His room was very clean and neat, and slightly perfumed with essences. On his dressing-table stood many cut glass bottles and silver-topped bottles with essences and pomades and powders, and heaven knows what. A very elegant little prayer book lay by his bed - and a life of St. Benedict. For Magnus was a Roman Catholic convert. All he had was expensive and finicking: thick leather silver-studded suit-cases standing near the wall, trouser-stretcher all nice, hair-brushes and clothes-brush with old ivory backs. I wondered over him and his niceties and little pomposities. He was a new bird to me. For he wasn't at all just the common person he looked. He was queer and sensitive as a woman [...] and patient and fastidious." [15]

 

Rather sadly, Lawrence suspects that Magnus finds him a bit of a bore; someone fearful of spending the money he hasn't got; someone fearful of letting go and getting into the gay spirit of things whilst his wife was away. Without saying there was always something a bit pinched and provincial about Lawrence, it's true that he certainly wasn't a wild bohemian or louche libertine.  

 

When not running round on errands for Douglas and managing his affairs, no one quite knew what Magnus did. Though he liked to hang about with the monks at a monastery near Rome and dream of leading a spiritual life. One day, Lawrence goes to visit him at the monastery, which, according to Lawrence, makes Magnus very happy:

 

"He looked up to me with a tender, intimate look as I got down from the carriage. Then he took my hand. 

      'So very glad to see you,' he said. 'I'm so pleased you've come.'

      And he looked into my eyes with that wistful, watchful tenderness rather like a woman who isn't quite sure of her lover." [21-22]

 

This homoerotic tone is a constant feature of Lawrence's Memoir. He can't help finding Magnus a quaint creature full of a certain tenderness; the sort of man happy to lend you a beautiful warm coat when, like Lawrence, you are feeling the cold: 

 

"Magnus [...] made me wear a big coat of his own, a coat made of thick, smooth black cloth, and lined with black sealskin, and having a collar of silky black sealskin. I can still remember the feel of the silky fur. It was queer to have him helping me solicitously into this coat, and buttoning it at the throat for me." [24]  

          

Of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, he can't just appreciate this act of kindness and enjoy being wrapped in splendour for once: happy to be warm, he nevertheless secretly detests the expensively tailored coat. Nor can he bring himself to simply say something polite when shown a photograph of Magnus's mother:

 

"Magnus showed me [...] a wonderful photograph of a picture of a lovely lady - asked me what I thought of it, and seemed to expect me to be struck to bits by the beauty. His almost sanctimonious expectation made me tell the truth, that I thought it just a bit cheap, trivial." [26]. 

 

It's precisely this kind of remark that prompted Norman Douglas to issue a plea for better manners from Lawrence [f]. As a rule, dear reader, if someone shows or sends you a photo of their mother, newborn baby, much-loved child - or even their cat! - just smile and say something complimentary. 

 

Pretty soon, Lawrence finds life at the monastery unbearable: "'The past, the past. The beautiful, the wonderful past, it seems to prey on my heart, I can't bear it'" [33]. It wasn't the rich authenticity of the past that distubed him per se, but that he was reminded of just how much he remained a "child of the present" [27] who could never return to a time gone by, no matter how nostalgic it made him feel. 

 

This is important: too many Lawrentians mistakenly believe Lawrence wants to go back and worships the peasant and noble savage. He doesn't. 

 

Thus, for example, whilst he rather admires the mindless Italian peasants living their lives "as lizards among the rocks" [30], Lawrence is quick to add that this doesn't make them superior beings: "I don't give much for the wonderful mystic qualities in peasants. Money is their mystery of mysteries" [31] - just like the industrial workers living in the big cities and worshipping the machine. 

 

Ultimately, says Lawrence, one has to press on and accelerate the process of modernity and in this way hope to get beyond it.     

 

At some point, mention is made by Magnus of a manuscript on which he is rather pinning his hopes. Lawrence reads it, but thinks it poor: "And yet there was something in it that made me want it done properly" [29]. And that - in part - is how and why Lawrence ends up adding an introduction and overseeing publication of the work (then called, rather wonderfully, Dregs).

 

The book - eventually published under the title Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, in October 1924, was, sadly, not one that Magnus would ever hold in his hands; for he had committed suicide in November the year before, just three days shy of his 44th birthday (the age that Lawrence would die at in 1930) [g].    

 

Lawrence tells us that news of Magnus's death (briefly) caused the world to stand still for him: 

 

"I knew that in my own soul I had said, 'Yes, he must die if he cannot find his own way.' But for all that, now I realised what it must have meant to be the hunted, desperate man: everything seemed to stand still. I could, by giving half my money, have saved his life. I had chosen not to save his life. 

      Now, after a year has gone by, I keep to my choice. I still would not save his life. I respect him for dying when he was cornered. And for this reason I feel still connected with him: still have this to discharge, to get his book published, and to give him his place, to present him just as he was as far as I knew him myself." [62-63]

 

That's kind. And generous. But what follows in the introduction is rather less so; in fact, one might describe Lawrence's words as unkind and uncharitable - even cruel:

 

"The worst thing I have against him, is that he abused the confidence, the kindness, and the generosity of unsuspecting people [...] He did not want to, perhaps. But he did it. [...] What is one to feel towards one's strangers, after having known Magnus? It is the Judas treachery to ask for sympathy and for generosity, to take it when given - and then: 'Sorry, but anybody may make a mistake!' It is this betraying with a kiss which makes me still say: 'He should have died sooner.' No, I would not help to keep him alive, not if I had to choose again. I would let him go over into death. He shall and should die, and so should all his sort: and so they will. There are so many kiss-giving Judases. He was not a criminal: he was obviously well intentioned: but a Judas every time, selling the good feeling he had tried to arouse, and had aroused, for any handful of silver he could get. A little loving vampire!" [63]

 

Magnus's book, says Lawrence, is dreadful. But Magnus is worse than dreadful; he is a liar and hypocrite. Particularly when it comes to the question of sodomy. For like his friend Norman Douglas, Magnus had a taste for young boys and willingly paid for sexual favours. 

 

For Magnus, however, it's not what's done that matters - it's how its done (and who's doing it); a brutal legionaire raping a boy-child lacks the sophisticated spirituality and style of the educated man who looks to the ancient Greeks for his code of sexual conduct. Lawrence doesn't agree:

 

"To my mind he is worse than the poor devils of legionaires. They had their blood-passions and carried them defiantly, flagrantly, to depravity. But Magnus had whitish blood, and a conceited spiritual uplift, and he kept up appearances: and filched his sexual satisfactions, despising them all the time." [64]

 

Memoirs of the Foreign Legion is, says Lawrence, "in its way a real creation" [67]. But he would "hate it to be published and taken at its face value, with Magnus as a spiritual dove among vultures of lust" [67]. But again, on the other hand, Lawrence's introduction isn't merely an exercise in character assassination; he also passionately sticks up for the dead man, admitting his courage and saluting him in eternity:

 

"He had his points, the courage of his own terrors, quick-wittedness, sensitiveness to certain things in his surroundings. I prefer him, scamp as he is, to the ordinary respectable person. He ran his risks: he had to be running risks with the police, apparently. And he poisoned himself rather than fall into their clutches. I like him for that. And I like him for the sharp and quick way he made use of every one of his opportunities to get out of that beastly army. There I admire him: a courageous isolated little devil facing his risks, and like a good rat, determined not to be trapped. I won't forgive him for trading on the generosity of others, and so dropping poison into the heart of all warm-blooded faith. But I am glad after all that [a friend] has rescued his bones from the public grave. I wouldn't have done it myself, because I don't forgive him his 'fisacal' impudence and parasitism. But I am glad [someone] has done it. And, for my part, I will put his Legion book before the world if I can. Let him have his place in the world's consciousness. 

      Let him have his place, let his word be heard. He went through vile experiences: he looked them in the face, braved them through, and kept his manhood in spite of them. For manhood is a strange quality, to be found in human rats as well as in hot-blooded men. Magnus carried the human consciousness through circumstances which would have been too much for me. I would have died rather than be so humiliated, I could never have borne it."  [68-69]

 

This last idea is vital for Lawrence: man can only achieve his self-overcoming by daring to know himself and know everything at last, with "full, bitter, conscious realisation" [69]; this includes all the great horrors and agonies of life. Knowledge, concludes Lawrence, is a kind of vaccination: "It prevents the continuing of ghastly moral disease." [69] 

 

Magnus dared to enter the sewers and to know what lies beneath. But he also had the courage to fight to retain (or regain where lost) his integrity and spiritual liberty:

"And so, though Magnus poisoned himself, and I would not wish him not to have poisoned himself: though as far as warm life goes, I don't forgive him; yet, as far as the eternal and unconquerable spirit of man goes, I am with him through eternity. I am grateful to him, he beat out for me boundaries of human experience which I could not have beaten out for myself. The human traitor he was. But he was not a traitor to the spirit. In the great spirit of human consciousness he was a hero [...] a strange quaking little star." [70]  

Thus, whilst not trying to forgive Magnus, Lawrence beautifully attempts to do him justice and, in this way, allow his restless spirit to be appeased.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 152.      

      Readers interested in the fascinating background and publication history of the Memoir can either read Wilson's book, or, of course, they can consult volume two of the Cambridge Lawrence biography - Triumph to Exile 1912-1922, by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, Memoir of Maurice Magnus: Introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, by Maurice Magnus, in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 11. Future page references will be given directly in the text.   

[c] For a recent post in which I discuss child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome with reference to the case of Norman Douglas, click here. 

[d] Later, Magnus would admire the colour of Lawrence's hair - though was sure the red-brown tint had come from a bottle, much to Lawrence's amusement. See Memoir of Maurice Magnus, p. 18.  

[e] Frieda first meets Magnus when he turns up at a house she and Lawrence are renting in Taormina, Sicily. He's on the run from the law who wish to question him about unpaid debts. If at first she thinks he seems quite nice (having kissed her hand in the correct German fashion), she soon calls him a dreadful person and a nuisance and is annoyed at Lawrence getting involved with him. See Memoir of Maurice Magnus, p. 40.  

 

[f] In response to the introduction written by Lawrence to Magnus's book, Douglas published a small pamphlet entitled D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners (1925). The work attacked Lawrence on a number of fronts and voiced the author's unhappiness with the mean and unfair manner in which, he said, Lawrence had portrayed him and his friend Magnus. Lawrence was eventually obliged to reply and set the record straight in a letter published in the New Statesman (20 Feb 1926).      

[g] 44 is a dangerous age for men - particularly men of artistic temperament and/or a philosophical frame of mind - and there is a long list of figures who have died at this age, including: Spinoza, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Hancock. Pop stars, of course, always keen to live faster and die younger, have their own fatal age of 27.   

Concrete Afterlife: Or How to Become Your Own Gravestone

 

The result is a unique, self-contained and virtually eternal 

concrete object that represents what the person was in life.

 

 

I. 

 

Concrete is a composite material made up of fine and coarse aggregates often bonded with cement that hardens over time into a durable stone-like substance. It is one of the most frequently used building materials in the world; we use twice more concrete (ton for ton) than we do steel, wood, or plastic combined.

 

For the Romans, who also used concrete extensively, it was a revolutionary material which allowed them to build structures that were not only more complex, but bigger and stronger than previously possible; the Colosseum is largely made of concrete and the Pantheon is sealed beneath what remains to this day the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. 

 

It's not, as one might imagine, the kind of material likely to appeal to D. H. Lawrence; a writer who hated stone monuments intended to last for millennia and who hated Imperial Rome which "smashed nation after nation and crushed the free soul in people after people" [1]. 

 

Within his hierarchy of materials, Lawrence ranks wood way above concrete and he praises peoples like the Etruscans who built their houses and temples of the former, so that their towns and cities eventually vanished as completely as flowers: 

 

"Myself, I like to think of the little wooden temples of the early Greeks and of the Etruscans: small, dainty, fragile, and evanescent as flowers. We have reached the stage where we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is better to keep life fluid and changing, than to try and hold it fast down in heavy monuments. Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections." [2]

      

It's the imposition of stone and concrete that Lawrence loathes; the attempt to impress with a display of wealth and power and to materially manifest the superiority of one's culture over that of one's neighbour who prefers to build in softer materials and keep things on a human scale. 

 

 

II. 

 

Now, one might have thought that Lawrence's wife, Frieda, would've been (or should've been) aware of her husband's views on this subject. Thus her decision - made five years after his death - to have his corpse exhumed and cremated, so that she might then mix the ashes into a concrete block remains puzzling and troubling [3].

 

I mean, wtf was she thinking? Lawrence would've hated the thought of a concrete overcoat. It seems, however, that some people today love the idea ...

 

Indeed, there are now businesses offering to add the cremains of your loved one to concrete and then pour the mix into a mould of your choosing. You can, for example, turn great-uncle Bertie into a concrete bird bath, or perhaps transform a hen-pecked husband into a lovely set of paving stones so that you can continue to walk all over him in death as you did in life. 

 

As Diego Belden and Arturo Acosta of project Concrete Afterlife note: 

 

"The corpse's ashes become a self-sufficient and unique statement of who he/she was in life, almost as eternal as the soul it has parted with. The flexibility of the material and process, allow this concrete avatar to blend much more easily with its surroundings. Whether it is placed among decorative items on a coffee table or shelf, stands silently in the garden, or is disguised as an odd looking rock in a remote natural location." [4]

 

Far be it from me to criticise those who want to have this done - either with their own ashes, or the ashes of a loved one - but, personally speaking, I'm not convinced. I want my remains mixed up with the wind and the rain, not confined within concrete and I have no desire to effectively become my own gravestone.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta De Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 9.  

[2] Ibid., p. 32. It might be noted that Lawrence doesn't just object to ancient monuments; he also complains of "new concrete villas [and] new concrete hotels" [p. 25] being built along the Roman coast in towns like Ladispoli.   

[3] I have written in an earlier post about the fate of Lawrence's ashes: click here.  

[4] To know more about Diego Belden's and Arturo Acosta's project - Concrete Afterlife - see the online magazine Designboom (19 April, 2013): click here. Note that the image and blurb used above is taken from here (the latter having been very slightly revised).  

Repress Nothing! In Memory of Otto Gross

Otto Gross (1877 - 1920)

Otto Gross - the maverick psychoanalyst and utopian anarchist whom radicals and exponents of free love continue to revere - died 100 years ago today: from pneumonia; aged 42; in a Berlin hospital, having been found lying in the street, starving, penniless, and half-frozen to death.

A sad and premature (arguably all-too-predictable) end to the life of a charismatic drug-addict who spent much of his adult life in and out of psychiatric institutions and who rejected all caution and restraint; a man who was even evicted from the community of bohemians at Ascona for trying to instigate orgies at which participants could openly explore their bisexual desires. [1]    

Inspired by his readings of Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Kropotkin, it's said that Gross influenced in turn many artists and writers with his neo-pagan (and proto-feminist) attempt to revalue all values, including D. H. Lawrence - which, of course, is where my interest in him comes from, rather than his relationship to Freud and Jung, who basically thought him a hopeless madman about whom the less said the better.

Lawrence, of course, never met Gross and doesn't directly refer to him in his writings. [2] But his wife, Frieda, had had an affair with the latter in 1908 (at the same time that Gross was also involved with Frieda's sister, Else) and so a lot of his revolutionary ideas to do with politics, culture, the unconscious and human sexuality, were transmitted via her. It's almost certain that Lawrence also read Gross's letters to Frieda (which she treasured throughout her life):

"They affirmed the idea of the saving sexual relationship outside the bonds of society: they stressed how a sexually liberated woman could escape the trammels of the ordinary and be an inspiration for intellectual and striving men; they showed a passionately thinking man struggling to come to terms with the new and to escape the past. In many ways, they offered Lawrence the themes for his next eight years of writing; and (above all) they offered a way of thinking about Frieda [whom Gross regarded as the woman of the future]." [3]

Having said that, it's important to stress that Lawrence would have mistrusted (and disliked) Gross in person and to note that he soon saw through his idealism - including his sexual and political idealism.

And for us, living here in 2020, does Gross's thinking still trouble, still challenge? Or does it only bore and depress? Unfortunately, that's a question that some also ask of Lawrence ...

Notes

[1] Perhaps more interesting from a thanatological perspective, is the fact that Gross affirmed the sovereign freedom of the individual not merely in sexual terms, but also as the right to be ill and to die in a manner (and at a time) of their own choosing. He regarded neurosis and suicide as legitimate expressions of protest against a repressive social order.    

[2] Lawrence gives us a fictionalised representation of Otto Gross in his unfinished novel Mr Noon (written 1921-22); the character of Eberhard appears in Part II of the work. 

[3] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443-44.

See also: John Turner, Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, 'The Otto Gross - Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated, and Annotated', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Summer, 1990), pp. 137-227. Click here to read online. 

In Memory of Dollie Radford

Robert Bryden: Dollie Radford 
Woodcut (1902)

The English poet and playwright Caroline Maitland - better known as Dollie Radford - died 100 years ago today. 

I know this not because I'm a great fan of her work, which combines a conservative aesthetic with radical politics - Radford was a close friend of Eleanor Marx - but because of the D. H. Lawrence connection.

She first met the latter in the spring of 1915 and, unusually, found him to be rather sweet; "so simple and kind, touchingly childlike, and brim full of sensibility and perception".*

Responding to her warmth and generosity, Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, became firm friends with Radford. In a letter written to Dollie in January 1916, Lawrence told her that whilst her poems were exquisite, they made him feel rather sad:

"They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem almost like little lights in the twilight, such clear, vivid sounds."** 

Which is just about as nice a thing as Lawrence ever said to anyone ... 

Notes

* Quoted in Edward Nehls, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (3 Vols.), (University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-59), Vol. I., p. 292.

** The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 515.

Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence

I. Voir Vence et Mourir

There are not many places in the world I would like to visit, but the small medieval market town of Vence, on the French Riviera, is one of them.

For one thing, Lawrence died in Vence (2 March 1930) and having been to the town in which he was born, Eastwood, I'd like to complete the pilgrimage as it were (fully aware of the fact that his body no longer lies in the local cemetery, having been exhumed, cremated and shipped over to the United States at Frieda's bidding in 1935).

My primary reason for wanting to go to Vence, however, is to see a place of Catholic worship designed and decorated by an artist whom Lawrence loathed: the Chapelle du Rosaire was built between 1949 and 1951 under the direction of Henri Matisse, who regarded it as his masterpiece.


II. Going to the Chapel

From what I've read and seen, the chapel is not particularly striking from the outside; white walls, a rooftop decorated with a blue-and-white zigzag pattern and an elaborate metal cross. The interior, however, is both a very beautiful religious space and a great modern art space; doubly sacred, if you will.

The altar is made of warm brown stone and was chosen for its resemblance to the colour of bread and the Eucharist. Matisse also designed the bronze crucifix on the altar, the candle holders in bronze, and the small tabernacle. Behind the altar is a large image of Saint Dominic.

For the walls, Matisse designed three murals. Aged 77 when he began work on the chapel, Matisse was in such poor health that he could only work from a wheelchair using a long stick with a brush strapped to his arm. The images he drew on paper were then transferred to the ceramic tiles by skilled craftsmen.

On the side wall there are abstract images of flowers and of the Madonna and Child, all created in simple black outlines. On the back wall are the traditional scenes known as the Stations of the Cross, depicting the gruesome last days of Christ. Whereas these fourteen scenes are usually depicted individually, Matisse cleverly incorported them into a single composition.

As much as I admire his minimalist wall designs, what I really love are the three sets of stained-glass windows, upon which Matisse spent a great deal of time. The windows make use of just three colours: an intense yellow for the sun; a vibrant green for vegetation; and a Virgin blue for the sea and sky. The colour from the windows floods the chapel's all-white interior and, via a play of nothing more than lines and light, Matisse miraculously opens what is a very limited space on to infinity.


III. In the Footsteps of Sylvia Plath

For me, Matisse's chapel possesses what Lawrence would have termed a fourth dimensional quality and one can't help wondering what the latter would have made of it had he lived to see it: would he still dismiss Matisse as a clever trickster who masturbated in paint and produced works full of nothing more than willed ambition and the impotent glories of virtuosity ...?

Whilst we can only guess Lawrence's critical response, we can know for sure what the American poet Sylvia Plath thought of Matisse's Chapel, as she recorded details of her visit to it (along with then lover Richard Sassoon) on 6 January 1956 in her journal. She also sent a postcard to her mother the following day from Nice, in which she wrote:

"Yesterday was about the most lovely of my life … How can I describe the beauty of the country? Everything is so small, close, exquisite and fertile. Terraced gardens on steep slopes of rich red earth, orange and lemon trees, olive orchards, tiny pink and peach houses. To Vence - small, on a sun-warmed hill, uncommercial, slow, peaceful. Walked to Matisse cathedral - small, pure, clean-cut. White, with blue tile roof sparkling in the sun - I just knelt in the heart of the sun and the colors of sky, sea, and sun, in the pure white heart of the Chapel."

It sounds so lovely: one can only hope Vence hasn't been ruined in the intervening 60 years by commercial and residential development, tourism, immigration, etc. like many of the other towns in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.


See: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol 1: 1940-1956, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, (Faber and Faber, 2017).