Businesslike but questing beast
Michael Levey
THE LETTERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE, VOL. IV: 1921-1924 edited by W. Roberts, J. T. Boulton and E. Mansfield
CUP, ,£35
D. H. Lawrence is one of the greatest letter-writers in the English language. The proof lies less in the substantial volume under review than in the slim Penguin edition of Selected Letters, covering in brief the whole course of his eventful, fevered, wandering life. Concentrated in that anthology, their vivid, direct, rich and ultimately poignant scent conveys, almost too headily, the personality of the writer.
Writing as naturally as he breathed — if not indeed, tragically, with greater ease, given his tubercular condition — Lawrence seems to have needed to write letters as an assertion of his existence. What he has done, felt and — especially — seen, all rises from the pages with a fierce clarity and conviction, recalling nothing so much as the paintings of Van Gogh (whose own letters, though very different, share the ability at times to see and seize an image with utter immediacy, as in 'a red vineyard all red like red wine').
Somehow Van Gogh seems near at hand when Lawrence writes of darning his underclothes, or setting joyfully to scrub a filthy floor, or of the gorse that 'blazes in sheets of yellow fire'. For both men, it is nature in the sense of the natural, visible world that excites their deepest, most delirious response. Cities are anathema. People tend to be suspect, often with good reason. The ideal life would be a plain, puritan one, of domestic industry and application to art, passed in the company of a few like-spirits, in some paradisal, perpetually burgeoning, sun-warmed coun- tryside.
Searching for such a place, yearning for somewhere beyond what he already knows (away from Europe, with thoughts of Japan, possibly Siam . . .), Lawrence starts the present volume in Germany, fretting to be on the move. 'Peripatetic' poorly de- scribes the ensuing travels, which might have daunted Odysseus himself. Paris, Florence, Capri, Taormina, are succeeded by the long, exotic and wilfully roundabout journey ending, via Ceylon and Australia, at Taos.
That promised paradise proved to con- tain a large-scale snake in the shape of Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan, the instigator of the venture. Disillusionment brought on fresh travels, of bewildering pattern and doubtful purpose. Even Frieda Lawrence eventually rebelled. She returned to Europe and to England. Unwillingly, after argument and delay, Lawrence followed. `Loathe London — hate England — feel like an animal in a trap', he tersely informed his American publisher. So vio- lent were his feelings that he wished he was in New York, 'and I don't like New York either'. The volume closes — after trips to Paris and Germany — with the couple arrived back in New York, en route for Taos once more. 'New York looking vile,' is Lawrence's parting salvo.
During these hectic, unsettled years, exhausting just to read of, and tragi-comic in their cycle of places enthused over, only to be rapidly decried, Lawrence wrote ceaselessly. Travel sparked off fresh fic- tion; most obviously, New Mexico was to inspire The Plumed Serpent. As well as writing and planning books, short stories and essays, translating the work of others and correcting proofs of his own, he found time to write letters. A good many of those in this volume are business letters — not more absorbing in themselves than anyone else's. Yet what is remarkable about them is how conscientious, clear-headed and
businesslike (in the old-fashioned sense of straightforward and efficient) Lawrence remains, wherever he is and whatever the upheavals of travelling.
The volume also confirms Lawrence's kindness and thoughtfulness towards his mother-in-law in Germany and his family in England. He sends presents and is generous with money when he has some. Moody, restless, driven by daemons, not least the daemon of creativity, he is yet capable of calmly putting down the precise times of the trains and providing informa- tion about hotel costs. He pays what he owes and says exactly what he means. The same character is at work driving economi- cally to the point in a business note and in summing up the impact of the wild West- ern coast of Mexico: 'a blazing sun, a vast hot sky, big lonely inhuman green hills and mountains . and the door of life shut on it all'.
Something of Lawrence's eye for detail has gone to the editing of this volume, which is notably thorough in identifying people of often considerable obscurity. However, the standard of scholarship is marred by some inept, occasionally inaccu- rate translations of Lawrence's Italian words and phrases. The most glaring inst- ance occurs over the word transcribed as pesce-carne and translated literally but meaninglessly as 'fish-meat'. Lawrence either wrote, or should have, pescecane, meaning shark; and the context shows he was using it metaphorically, with reference to post-war profiteering. A different form of ineptness misses the point of Lawrence's reference to J. M. Barrie's fatal touch for those he loves (`They die'). It was almost certainly not of Barrie's own family that he was thinking but of the Llewellyn Davies family, the parents dying in 1907 and 1910, and the eldest son, George, on the West- ern Front in 1915.
Three more volumes of letters are sche- duled, to cover the remaining, unsettled years of Lawrence's life. The result will be the full, detailed monument that he de- serves. In his letters he is arguably at his finest, his most consistent and his most sympathetic as an artist. And up to the last they chronicle the story of a 'questing beast' (as he calls himself, in one of the letters printed here), whose quest ended only at death. The 7-leimweh' he often wrote of was for a home never found never perhaps findable. To one of his final letters, when he was near dying, he added a postscript: 'This place no good'. It might be his ultimate verdict on the world.
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