Excerpts from the Unpublished Private Letters of D.H. Lawrance

The following excerpts, from two letters to youthful friends, express Lawrence's mystic responsiveness to nature, his avidity to become one with it, and the vividness with which he perceived -- and recorded -- scenes that moved him.

"I feel the waking up, and the thrill in my limbs, and the wind blows ripples on my blood as it rushes against this house ... full of germination and quickening.... It is spring -- I always know it is spring by feeling. I always have a restlessness, a suddenness, a hotness, in spring. ... I want -- I want -- I want!

"Two weeks ago I went through Kingston Vale to Richmond Park and back over Wimbledon Common [All near the London school where Lawrence began and ended his brief career as a teacher]. Kingston Vale is sweet and beautiful -- a glade with groves of glistening silver birch trees, and a brook, and full of sunshine, with flashing birds -- very sweet and dear and graceful.... The hills rise up and look on the great oaks writhing and twisting -- the beeches are tremendous steel shafts -- there are broad spaces and great fierce groves, where the pale deer flee, where, I vow, there are dryads and fauns, where you might find a Viking asleep, where there are outlaws and knights in armour and ladies who exist solely to be succoured. ... Go on Wimbledon Common. The horsemen and the horsewomen dash and canter down the hill among the birch groves; on the great common, with the windmill in one corner, with the hills of Surrey running far south, the territorials play a game of war, the golfers in their vivid scarlet coats play a game of golf, dotted conspicuously far and near over the great plateau, the ladies play a game of strolling negligently in full view -- grooms canter with their charges -- girls trot and fathers gallop. ... I love it, and have a day of almost perfect happiness."

In this same period, during a trip to Italy with Frieda Weekley (wife of one of his former professors and later Lawrence's wife), he wrote a letter to Edward Garnett, his literary mentor in London, exalting and exulting in the earthy simplicity of Mediterranean peasant life:

"Everything ... is Italian and weird and tumble-down, and seems to belong to the past. And the men sing -- and the soldiers are always going by -- they are so good looking and animal -- and some of the women are adorable -- they have such fascinating straight shapely backs. ... The place smells rather of wine. They are treading it in the street, and in the courtyard ... you can go in a wine place -- and there's the family at supper by the fireplace, and you drink at another table. The father is a shortish, thick set, strong man -- these Italians are so muscular -- and the wife is straight and I like her -- he click-clicks to the bambino in her arms, across the table. And the white grandfather scolds a little girl, and the old grandmother sits by the fire. And I drink a 1/4 litre of red wine ... I love them all."

In other early letters to a friend, a woman suffragette and advocate of socialism, he admonished her for her passionless rationality and exhorted her to live with unfettered, unabashed sensuality.

"... you non-sentimental, practical, battling people are the most arrant sentimentalists alive .... It is not I, but you, who suffer from rude emotions .... Your likings and hates are unruled, unchastened, while your approvals are well-balanced .... To scorn emotions is to be a tottering emotionalist.

"Now, don't be a pale person -- I do like you to be -- what? Hedonistic -- nice and red-corpusculary -- sanguine .... [Life] is worth lots of living if you can only have your own jinks, kick your young heels to the tune of the pulse of the world .... You should spend yourself with a full hand, generously."

Lawrence had begun to write. His first novel, "The White Peacock," was a fervent, undisciplined expression of his Panic lust for life. Beseeching approval for this luminous work from the same correspondent, who was four years his senior, he revealed a genuflecting need for maternal approbation -- the legacy of an obsessive attachment to his mother, of whom he was later to say that he loved her "like a lover."

"Since you belong to a class which I conceive of as scorning conventional politeness ... I am going to be just natural, which is to be rude. I wish you -- I feel like one on the brink of a cold bath -- to read and criticise some writing of mine that purports to be a novel. There, I am in! I feel you laughing -- and you know what a Sensitive Plant is a young, sentimental man of some slight ability and much vanity! So pray cease to giggle -- I won't beg your pardon for the word ... while I tell you with earnestness, pathos, and some glory what a fool I am: In the first place, it is a novel of sentiment ... what the critics would call, I believe, an 'erotic novel' ... all about love -- and rhapsodies on Spring scattered here and there -- heroines galore -- no plot -- nine-tenths adjectives -- every colour in the spectrum descanted upon -- a poem or two -- scraps of Latin and French -- altogether a sloppy, spicy mess. Now madam -- I offer you the dish. You do me honour if you will taste .... I would not ask you to criticise it so much as a work of art ... my head is not very swelled, I assure you; but I would like you to tell me frankly whether it is bright, entertaining, convincing -- or the reverse ... don't be afraid of my feelings .... You will allow me to say I hope you will not be offended. I know I am trespassing ... on your time, your patience, and your goodness. There -- that's sloppy, isn't it? ... When you write, pray continue to call me David -- since it suits me so well -- and since it puts you in the position of safe, wise elder who will smile with an experienced woman's lenity at my absurdities; it is a position you have taken; and to be sure, I am very young .... I have never left my mother, you see."

But fawning self-deprecation was soon supplanted by truculent self-assurance -- if only where Lawrence's writing was concerned. In later correspondence with an Italian critic whose patly cerebral interpretation of his works had aroused his amused annoyance (one of countless contretemps with a largely hostile and censorious reviewing press), Lawrence issued this arrogant but eloquent manifesto, proclaiming an abhorrence of order which some have called a declaration of independence from literary formalism, others a rationale for literary anarchy.

"But really, Signor Linati, do you think that books should be sort of toys, nicely built up of observations and sensations, all finished and complete? I don't. To me, even Synge, whom I admire very much indeed, is a bit too rounded off and, as it were, put on the shelf to be looked at. I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be a bandit or a rebel or a man in a crowd. People should either run for their lives, or come under the colours, or say 'how do you do?' I hate the actor-and-audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering on to some mischief or merriment. That rather cheap seat [among] the gods where one sits with fellows like Anatole France and benignly looks down on the foibles, follies, and frenzies of so-called fellow men, just annoys me. After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me; nor a theatre; nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches -- like a god with a twenty-lira ticket -- and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and so superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. You need not complain that I don't subject the intensity of my vision -- or whatever it is -- to some vast and imposing rhythm -- by which you mean, isolate it on a stage ... I never will; and you will never have that satisfaction from me. Stick to Synge, Anatole France, Sophocles: they will never kick the footlights even. But whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read somebody else."

In another letter of criticism, Lawrence unwittingly shed less light on his subject than on his own compassion, mystical romanticism, nature-love -- and burgeoning cynicism.

"Bastien Lepage, the French peasant painter, had three terrible pictures -- ah yes, haunting. Life must be dreadful for some people. Grey pictures of French peasant life -- not one gleam, not one glimmer of sunshine ... the paint is grey, grey-green, and brown .... Oh the God that there isn't -- to enjoy. The little girl, Pauvre Fauvette, minding her gaunt cow beneath a gaunt bare tree, wrapped in a horrid sacking .... That little pinched face looking out of the sack haunts me and terrifies me and reproaches me .... It seems that the great sympathetic minds are all overwhelmed by the tragic waste, and pity, and suffering of it .... I have just finished [H. G.] Wells's Tono-Bungay .... It is the best novel Wells has written -- it is the best novel I have read for -- oh, how long? But it makes me so sad. If you knew what a weight of sadness Wells pours into your heart as you read him -- Oh, mon Dieu! He is a terrible pessimist. But, weh mir, he is, on the whole, so true. One has a bitter little struggle with one's heart of faith in the ultimate goodness of things. One thing Wells lacks -- the subtle soul of sympathy of a true artist. He rigidly scorns all mysticism; he believes there is something in aestheticism -- he doesn't know what; but he doesn't do his people justice .... Everybody is great at some time or other -- and has dignity, I am sure, pure dignity. But only one or two of Wells's people have even a touch of sincerity and dignity -- the rest are bladders."

Just seven years later, however, he wrote to another friend of his literary contemporaries, including Wells:

"They all bore me, both in print and in the flesh. By this time, they are such vieux jeu that all the game's gone out of it .... I don't care a rush for any of them, save Thomas Hardy, and he's not contemporary, and the early Conrad, which is also looming into distance."

World War I came as a shattering personal trauma to the 32-year-old Lawrence, wrenching him from a private world of sun-drenched meadows and guileless joi de vivre into the nightmarish realities of global carnage. His initial reaction of numb horror is graphically etched in a letter written shortly after the Battle of the Marne. (continued on Page 114) D.H. Lawrence (continued from page 110)

"Those five months since the war [began] have been my time in the sepulchre ... every moment dead, dead as a corpse in its grave clothes. It is a ghastly thing to remember."

As sensation began to return, he felt at first only a deep and melancholic longing for his time of innocence and its gentle prewar world, now irretrievably lost. In a letter to his old friend Mary Cannan, ex-wife of James M. Barrie, he communicated this yearning with poetry and sadness, ending on a note of bleak disenchantment with mankind.

"I can't tell you with what pain I think of that autumn at Cholesbury -- the yellow leaves -- and the wet nights ... and our cottage was hot and full of the smell of sage and onions -- there was something in those still days, before the war had gone into us, which was beautiful and generous -- a sense of flowers rich in the garden, and sunny tea-times when one was at peace -- when we were happy with one another ... there was a kindliness in us ... a certain fragrance in our meeting -- something very good, and poignant to remember, now the whole world of it is lost .... I am terribly weary in my soul of all things, in the world of man."

As the war progressed, Lawrence's up-welling Weltschmerz darkened swiftly into fatalistic resignation; he became imbued with an almost Biblical sense of impending doom, ominously prophesied in this wartime letter to a Scottish poet friend.

"I believe an end is coming: the war, a plague, a fire, God knows what. But the end is taking place: the beginning of the end has set in, and the process won't be slow .... I believe the deluge of iron rain will destroy the world here, utterly: no Ararat will rise above the subsiding iron waters. There is a great consummation in death, or sensual ecstasy, as in The Rainbow [his fifth novel]. But there is also death which is the rushing of the Gadarene swine down the slope of extinction. And this is the war in Europe. We have chosen our extinction in death, rather than our consummation. So be it: it is not my fault."

Fired at the same time with a kind of misanthropic idealism, Lawrence quixotically envisioned a Utopian manifest destiny in which he, as leader of an intellectual and spiritual elite in the manner of Shavian supermen, would survive Armageddon and thrust up an enlightened new civilization on the ashes of the old; he called his paradise Rananim, after the utopia of a Hebrew chant. In a series of ringing letters to various friends -- some bemused, some beguiled by the idea -- he outlined his Nietzschean design.

"I am very much frightened, but hopeful -- a grain of hope yet .... One must try to save the quick, to send up the shoots of a new era: a great, utter revolution, and the dawn of a new historical epoch .... Only wait, and we will remove mountains and set them in the midst of the sea .... We must revolutionise this system of life, that is based on outside things, money, property, and establish a system of life that is based on inside things. The war will come to an end, and then the Augean stables are to be cleansed .... I disbelieve utterly in the public, in humanity, in the mass .... The herd will destroy everything. Pure thought, pure understanding, this alone matters .... Oh, the sheer essence of man, the sheer supreme understanding -- cannot we save this to mankind? We must. And it needs a detachment from the masses, it needs a body of pure thought, kept sacred and clean from the herd. It needs this, before ever there can be any new earth and new heaven. It needs the sanctity of a mystery, the mystery of the initiation into pure being. And this must needs be purely private, preserved inviolate."

Lawrence's alienation from the world of men soon became complete. Just two months later, in a virulent letter to an American friend, he spoke of mankind with revulsion.

"I loathe humanity, and see in the Spirit of Man a kind of aureoled cash register, and am bored to death by humanism and the human being altogether .... What I should like would be another Deluge, so long as I could sit in the ark and float to the subsidence .... To hate mankind, to detest the spawning human being, that is the only cleanliness now."

Sickened by the war, plagued with chronic ill-health, enraged by Britain's suppression and burning of "The Rainbow" in 1915 as "immoral" and "pacifistic," Lawrence lashed out scathingly at his native England, and raised his eyes to America in search of an earthly Elysium, in other letters from this same dark period.

"I think there is no future for England: only a decline and fall. That is the dreadful and unbearable part of it: to have been born into a decadent era ... a collapsing civilisation .... Europe is a lost name, like Nineveh or Palenque. There is no more Europe, only a mass of ruins from the past .... I believe America is the New World .... I shall come to America. I don't believe in Uncle Samdom, of course. But if the rainbow hangs in the heavens, it hangs over the western continent. I very, very much want to leave Europe, to leave England forever, and come over to America .... It seems to me, the trouble with you Americans is that you have studied the European Word too much and your own word too little. As for us Europeans, I know our attitude, 'those Americans are such children.' But since I have known some Americans pretty intimately, and since I have really read your literature, I am inclined to think 'those Americans are so old, they are the very painted vivacity of age.'"

Late in 1922, after German-born Frieda finally received her English passport, Lawrence got his wish to leave England "forever" and come to America. It was not all that he had hoped. After a three-year visit -- during which Lawrence actually made an abortive attempt to colonize his Rananim in rural New Mexico -- he disconsolately went back to England, despite all avowals never to return. In a letter to an English friend written during his stay in New Mexico, he described this disillusionment.

"Almost every day one of the Indians comes with the horses, and we ride over to the pueblo, and round the desert. It is great fun, if a bit tiring ... so you see us really in America: on the go. Whether I really like it is another matter. It is all an experience. But one's heart is never touched at all -- neither by landscape, Indians, nor Americans. Perhaps that is better so. Time, I suppose, that one left off feeling, and merely began to register. Here, I register."

In another letter, he summed up his impressions of America with sledge-hammer directness:

"The last word of obscene rottenness contained within an entity of mechanised egotistic will -- that is what Uncle Sam is to me."

In 1928, following a desperate siege of illness -- soon to be diagnosed as incurable tuberculosis -- Lawrence waged his last and greatest crusade for literary freedom of speech. In pathetic letters to two loyal friends during this desolating period, he spoke matter-of-factly of his struggles, and touchingly of his gratitude (concluded on page 116) D.H. Lawrence (continued from page 114)for a few words of praise, as he privately published -- and attempted to distribute personally -- the first edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover." The book was immediately banned both in his native England and in America, where it remained outlawed for more than two decades, though numerous pirated editions (for which churchmouse-poor Lawrence received nothing) enjoyed enormous readership in several languages.

"I'm thinking I shall publish my novel Lady Chatterley's Lover here in Florence, myself, privately ... 700 copies at 2 guineas. It is so 'improper' it could never appear in the ordinary way -- and I won't cut it about. So I want to do it myself -- and perhaps make £600 or £700. Production is cheap here. And the book must come out some day."

And later:

"Now the fun begins -- [some] dealers are beginning to refuse to accept the books they ordered. Today I heard ... that Stevens and Brown, Booksellers, London, say they must return the thirty-six copies they ordered.... Would you hate to fetch away those thirty-six copies for me? ... I enclose £2 for taxi and expenses.... Foyles [another bookstore] also sent back six copies.... Damn them all, hypocrites.... I was awfully pleased that you liked the book.... I'm afraid it's cost me the beaux restes of my friends -- a ragged remnant, anyhow.... I get far more insults and impudence about my work, than appreciation; so when anyone comes out a bit wholeheartedly, I really feel comforted a great deal. I must say, I don't find much generous appreciation. It's usually superior disapproval, or slightly mingy, narrow-gutted condescension."

During the next two years, the frail Lawrence toured Europe, painted, continued to write (poetry, essays and short stories) and to doggedly pursue his fight, for royalties from "Lady Chatterley" -- which actually began to accrue, in a modest way. But his health was declining steadily. Though Frieda remained faithfully by his side, increasing irascibility had succeeded in alienating such long-suffering friends as Bertrand Russell and Katherine Mansfield. And then, in February of 1930, too weak to continue his restless Continental peregrinations, he was hospitalized at a sanatorium in Vence, on the French Riviera. From his bed he wrote this letter to his sister, Emily, bleakly describing his condition, but minimizing its true gravity.

"I had to give in and come here -- Dr. Morland insisted so hard, and I was losing weight so badly, week by week. I only weigh something over six stone [84 pounds] -- and even in the spring I was over seven, nearly eight. So I had to do something at once. Yet I haven't gained any weight here either -- nor lost any -- in the 8 days. I have had careful X-ray examination -- the lung trouble is slight, but the bronchial-asthma condition is very bad, it uses up my strength -- and I've lost my appetite. They try to give me things to pick me up, but as yet there is no change. I'm not in any sudden danger -- but in slow danger.... When one feels so weak and down, one doesn't want to see anybody.... Wait and see how I go on here -- then in the spring we may meet in some nice place.... Love.... P.S. There is no need for you to worry."

To Lawrence's bedside during the next two weeks came a procession of distinguished well-wishers. The extent of his estrangement even from these old friends is expressed in the detached, slightly querulous tone of the last letter -- and the last known lines -- he ever wrote:

"I'm about the same -- I think no worse -- but we are moving into a house here in Vence on Saturday, and I'm having an English nurse from Nice. I shall be better looked after. H. G. Wells came to see me Monday -- a common temporary soul.... The Huxleys are in Cannes -- came Tuesday, and coming again tomorrow. Queer -- something gone out of them -- they'll have to be left now to the world -- finished, in some spiritual way. Their play is running its final week.... Jo Davidson came and made a clay head of me -- made me tired -- result in clay mediocre."

Three days later, on a bed in the rented house to which he had been moved when he seemed to be feeling a little better, David Herbert Lawrence died. He had not been a man beloved by many. He had been called class-conscious, anti-Semitic, mother-fixated, childishly petulant, even latently homo sexual. He had been reviled as a madman and a pornographer. He was capable of unbearable arrogance and condescension. But he was also a man of painfully acute sensibility, of fecund emotional insight, of uncontainable vitality. He was a mystic, a visionary. His undimmed reverence for nature and final hatred of mankind were prefigured in these lines from a letter to a friend, written 13 years before his death. They constitute, perhaps, a fitting epitaph:

"To me, the thought of the earth all grass and trees ... and no works of man at all -- just a hare listening to the inaudible -- that is Paradise."

David Herbert Lawrence's early letters, written in his 20s shortly after the turn of the century, were infused with the effulgent, quasi-religious naturalism which was the seed of his literary fertility and ultimately of his destruction both as man and artist.