Chapter 8: Europe once more: 1925-1928
Part I
They had come back to Europe for very different reasons than those which had brought them back in 1923. Then, Frieda had wanted to see her family, Lawrence had come most reluctantly to join her and had gone for as short a time to the Midlands as possible. This time, obliged to leave the USA, it was Lawrence who wanted to come as much as Frieda: and it was England he wanted to see - "one's native land has a sort of hopeless attraction, when one is away" (Letters V: 312). He had not been back since his father had died, and he wanted to see his sisters. Frieda's youngest daughter Barby was now also 21 and could choose to see her mother. After a week in a London hotel, Lawrence and Frieda spent nearly a fortnight in the Midlands (with Barby coming to visit them there), and then another week in London, before travelling on to see Frieda's mother. Both England and the Midlands, however, depressed him thoroughly - he was in bed with a cold as soon as he reached Nottingham, complaining how "the weather's awful and we simply hate it up here" (Letters V: 316). Their original plan of staying for a month or so, so that Frieda could see her children, quickly turned into a decision to go south: first to Germany, and then back to Italy. Martin Secker's wife Rina (1896-1969) had her family living in Spotorno, and that was where they would head. Before they left the Midlands, however, the weather improved and they toured around a bit; but even that was painful. "I can't look at the body of my past, the spirit seems to have flown" - "England just depresses me, like a long funeral" (Letters V: 318, 322). All he was writing were a few book reviews.
They stayed a fortnight in Baden-Baden, Lawrence "playing whist with old Baronesses, Countesses and Excellencies, and behaving like the sweetest house-spaniel" (Letters V: 331). He also wrote a couple of essays on books: and Frieda had her hair fashionably bobbed. But he was happy to move on to Spotorno: where, within three days, they had rented the Villa Bernarda for four months. And once again they had a view, "just above the village and the sea. The sun shines, the eternal Mediterranean is blue and young, the last leaves are falling from the vines in the garden" (Letters V: 337). It became the setting for one of his first three post-America piece of fiction - his first prose fiction since finishing The Plumed Serpent in Oaxaca, in fact. One was the tiny short story "Smile," a tailpiece to his three anti-Murry stories of 1923-4; one ("Glad Ghosts") was a commissioned ghost story for Cynthia Asquith. But "Sun" grew straight out of the situation in Spotorno, where a woman suffering from nerves and with a small child goes to live and to take sun baths - until her grey-suited husband comes out to her. Secker's wife Rina, nervous and with an eighteen-month-old son, was waiting for her publisher husband to come out from England; and Lawrence used that situation in a recreation of the situation of the Fontana Vecchia in Sicily, in another of those stories exploring the relationship between the human being and the circumambient universe: but this time a story in which they eventually get into a better and more creative relationship. In one way it seems extraordinary that Lawrence should have written so directly and so closely about a situation in front of him as he wrote (Martin/Maurice arrived early in December, and Lawrence sent the story off for typing on the 12th) - but it was what he had always done. And the creation of the experience of the sun paved the way for the writing, in these last years of his creativity, of that theme of the relationship between person, sun and universe over and over again; it is in "The Escaped Cock," in Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Another significant event was in their meeting their landlord: a married officer in the Italian Bersaglieri, Angelo Ravagli (1891-1976), a striking figure in uniform and a cheerful, immensely practical one when out of it: and Frieda made sure he was out of it fairly soon. She started an affair with him that continued at intervals over the next four years. He took English lessons from Lawrence, and also helped Lawrence fix a smoking chimney; Lawrence remarked to Frieda afterwards "That is a man who would be useful to have at the Kiowa ranch" (Nehls 1959: 18). In 1931, Angelo would leave his wife and family and accompany Frieda back to the ranch and would live with her there until her death in 1956.
For the moment, it was simply one of those affairs Frieda had, all her life. Lawrence certainly knew about them - it seems possible that Frieda actually told him about them, as she had told him about Hobson in 1912 and had also discussed Gray with him in 1917. Her affairs seem to have made no difference to her dependence upon Lawrence or to her fundamental belief in him as the extraordinary man in her life, one whose sheer understanding of her and of the world surpassed that of anyone else she knew. The worst quarrels of their lives did not occur over her affairs (or his, for that matter) but over other people altogether: people he insisted on bringing into their lives, like Ottoline, or Mabel, or Brett, or - at other times - his sister Ada: or over Frieda's daughters: or (at times) almost anyone with whom one of the two felt the other was siding with, against them. It was those who invaded their living space that mattered, not those who briefly occupied their beds. His friends were the people she tended to hate, because when they were present (and being singled out for special attention) she felt ignored or slighted. She seems in fact to have been far more jealous of his non-sexual relationships than he was of her sexual ones; but, then, she had reason to be alarmed. As a writer he was financially independent: could live where and how he wished. He might conceivably leave her: not (probably) for another woman, but just leave her, as had nearly happened in August 1923, to go his own way. But she could not leave him, as she pointed out, for purely practical reasons: "how could I earn a living? I was never taught anything which might earn me a living ... I am helpless. I am caught" (Bynner 1951: 62). But, crucially, she also did not want to leave him: "I wish to be caught. We love each other" (Bynner 1951: 62). She certainly loved him. For his part, Lawrence may well have regarded her affairs as the price he had to pay for so often going his own way regardless, in ideas and relationships (though not in sexual ones), as well as for her opposition to him, and his opposition to her. This was something marvellously important and useful to him; and this she knew very well. She told Bynner that "he quotes me and often what he quotes from me is attacking what he himself says and in the book he lets me have the best of it ... He knows that I'm useful. He likes to have me oppose him in ideas, even while he scolds me for it" (Bynner 1951: 62).
The relationship with Angelo Ravagli did nothing to come between them. Frieda's children, of whom Lawrence often disapproved, were another matter: as was Lawrence's sister Ada. Barby was staying in Alassio, quite near, during the winter 1925-26 and they all saw a good deal of each other. And this led to the usual quarrels, with Frieda telling Lawrence that (according to Barby) "now I was with her at last, he was to keep out of our relationship and not interfere" (Nehls 1959: 21). Anyone who came between Lawrence and Frieda and their complex need of each other (and need for space between them too) was likely to become a focus for quarrels.
Things grew calmer for a while when Elsa Weekley also came, and Barby remembered that "Unlike me, she hated "rows." At the Bernarda she lectured Frieda about them, being concerned to see, after one of their quarrels, that Lawrence had tears in his eyes ... a rare thing for him" (Nehls 1959: 26). Lawrence talked to both girls about their upbringing, especially about their father, and about life with their father's clergyman brother in Essex, and their aunt and grandmother, and these conversations were the direct source of the short novel he almost immediately began to write, The Virgin and the Gypsy. This gave him the chance to bring together a good deal of his hatred of the strength of the female will (such as he had seen in a woman like Mabel Luhan) with the real-life situation of the Weekley girls, and his own recent observations of the Midlands; the story used some of the landscapes he had seen in October 1925. When he had finished it, however, he decided not to publish it, feeling that it would be unfair to the girls and their father. (After he died, Frieda had no such compunction and published it at once.)
It was in her new role as mother, however, that - early this spring - Frieda also briefly became the author of the household; she translated Lawrence's play David into German, and "loves it, and has become the authoress. I the cook and the captain bold, and housemaid of the Villa B.-" (Letters V: 388) Early in February Lawrence, however, suffered another bronchial haemorrhage "like at the ranch, only worse" (Letters V: 390); an ominous prelude to an intensely disturbed period following. Lawrence's sister Ada (together with a friend) was coming to stay with them abroad for the first time in their marriage - and Frieda would have her daughters staying in a nearby hotel; the weather was dreadful, and everyone seems to have got on the others' nerves. Lawrence declared that he felt "absolutely swamped out, must go away by myself for a bit, or I shall give up the ghost"; there had been "another rumpus," a "bust-up" (Letters V: 394, 392, 401) and Frieda had gone to stay in the hotel. The casual words conceal quite how savage and serious the quarrel had been; Lawrence went to Nice and Monte Carlo with Ada, and when she left he didn't return to Spotorno but went to see the Brewsters and Brett, all of whom were now in Capri. Again there seemed to have been a real possibility that Lawrence and Frieda would not get together again; and it can hardly have been a coincidence that it was at this juncture that Lawrence twice went to bed (rather unhappily and unsuccessfully) with Brett (Brett 1974: II-IV). But nothing came of that; and after about a month, Frieda wrote to Lawrence "much more quietly and humanly - she says, we must live more with other people ... not cut ourselves off" (Letters V: 406). Her daughters had been giving her good advice, doubtless. It was certainly the case that the Lawrences' most serious rows always seemed to be provoked by the presence (or threat) of other people intruding into their relationship; if they could find a way of living less exclusively for and with each other, so that the "other people" did not divide their loyalties so violently, that would have been all to the good.
That, at least, is what they tried. Lawrence went back to Spotorno after being away for seven weeks, to find "the three females very glad to see me," though he confessed to having "a bit of anger still working in my inside" (Letters V: 413-14). After a brief time back together in Spotorno (the term of their house rent was almost up), they all went to Florence for a while; and then the girls went back to London, leaving Lawrence and Frieda to find somewhere to live. Lawrence opted for Tuscany, and very quickly found an old villa where they could rent the top floor very cheaply. The moment for taking a decision about America had come, and gone. Brett, indeed, had gone back to her cabin at the Del Monte Ranch, having successfully applied for immigrant status, and doubtless hoping that Lawrence would be back soon; but Lawrence decided not to go. It was a crucial moment. He was not going to apply to live in America for good, so would only probably be allowed six months there, as before - and would then have to travel on. There was, too, the enormous journey which, in his run-down state, he could not easily face; but, too, "even the ranch is a sort of effort, a strain - and for the moment I don't want to make any efforts" (Letters V: 429). He was a man consciously starting to conserve his energy: and this is a clear indication of it. He concluded that "I really don't want to go to America: and am getting weary, and wearier, of the outside world. I want the world from the inside, not from the outside ... I don't want to go west" (Letters V: 437). It was probably with an equally strong sense of his own condition that he wrote this; the ranch demanded more physical effort (as well as the "strain" of combating the place) than he could afford. There was also the unspoken problem of his health, which had almost prevented his re-admission to the USA at El Paso in March 1925: there remained a possibility that he would, humiliatingly, actually be refused entry. But there was a signal, too, of the kind of writing which he would be engaged with during the final years of his writing career: "the world from the inside, not from the outside."
Part II
The Villa Mirenda was 10 miles out from Florence, "a big heavy old villa," and - of course - like all the Lawrences' houses, "perched on a hill and looking far out over the valley of the Arno" (Letters V: 448). An English family, the Wilkinsons, lived nearby; but the Villa was the centre of a whole peasant community too, and the Lawrences got to know their neighbors well. This was doubtless following their decision to "live more with other people ... not cut ourselves off" (Letters V: 406). And, unlike the ranch, the Villa Mirenda not only had no responsibilities, it was rented "with service" (Nehls 1959: 59): they had a local woman, Giulia Pini, as housekeeper. The Mirenda would be the Lawrences' base for just over two years.
But always "base" or "pied-à-terre," not home. It was very barely furnished, and they didn't spend much money on it; and they were away a good deal. They spent just a couple of months there now, apart from a visit to the English aristocrats Sir George (1860-1943) and Lady Ida Sitwell at their castle outside Florence (they had probably met in Florence). Lawrence was now properly back at work, typing out Frieda's translation of David, writing essays about Florence, and producing two pieces of work provoked by conversation - in Capri back in March - with Compton Mackenzie's wife Faith (1888-1960), "another who loves her husband but can't live with him" (Letters V: 403). "Two Blue Birds" was a skit and no more, but "The Man Who Loved Islands" was one of Lawrence's great works: a profound and tragic study of the temperament which - like his own - seeks out isolation from the world and lives to itself if possible. Lawrence was also planning a book on the Etruscans and doing a lot of preliminary reading for it (something he had started back in the spring).
But by the end of June it was getting hot: on 12th July, they left for Baden-Baden, spent a fortnight there, and by the end of the month were in London, in a borrowed flat. Lawrence wanted to see the early rehearsals of his play David, which the Stage Society was supposed to be putting on, while Frieda wanted to see her children. Lawrence very soon made a visit to Scotland, to see Millicent Beveridge (1871-1955): a Scottish woman painter he had got to know in Sicily in 1921 and who had then painted his portrait, and whom he had met again in Capri in the spring: "One of Lorenzo's old maids," Frieda would doubtless have said, knowing his "weakness for these English spinsters" (Nehls 1959: 278).
On the way back from Scotland, Lawrence visited his family on the coast in Lincolnshire; and this stay beside the sea in the Midlands again turned out to bring him unexpected pleasure. He recalled 1901, "where I first knew the sea, so I feel at home" (Letters V: 522): he found it "very bracing and tonicky - picks me up like a shot" and felt "I've got quite into touch with my native land again, here - and feel at home" (Letters V: 518, 534). After he had spent a week with his family, Frieda joined him; and they stayed together there for another fortnight, waiting for the Stage Society to sort out their plans for David, with Lawrence (by himself) visiting his sister Ada in Ripley. Here, however, he was depressed by the effects of the continuing miners' strike: "there is a lot of misery - families living on bread and margarine and potatoes - nothing more" (Letters V: 536). He wrote about it shortly afterwards in the essay later entitled "Return to Bestwood." Back in London, it turned out that there was in fact no point in waiting for the play, which had been postponed; so after lunching with the intended director, and now anxious to be back at the Mirenda for the harvest, Lawrence and Frieda left on 28th September and were back at the Mirenda by 4th October. Although they had enjoyed it, it had been a tiring and rather expensive trip; Lawrence was becoming very aware of how little he was currently earning, with the drying-up of the money which Seltzer had made for him in America, and his own failure to write very much over the previous couple of years (he had not started a new novel since April 1923, but his experience in finishing The Plumed Serpent certainly inhibited him from beginning another). He told his sister-in-law Else on 18th October: "I feel I'll never write another novel" (Letters V: 559). In spite of this - and with his new sense of England as a place he could feel at home in, and might write about again - around 22nd October he started a new work of fiction, a long short story. And this had altogether unexpected consequences: for it became Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Part III
The Lady Chatterley's Lover novels would occupy Lawrence from October 1926 to the publication of the third version in the summer of 1928 - and beyond, as he would go to Paris primarily to arrange the publication of a cheap edition in the spring of 1929. The book was one which changed his career, and has in many ways completely altered his reputation. From being the author of a number of books, not particularly well known, he became - for the next 60 years - primarily the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It made him more money than he had made in his life, and this (as it turned out) came just when he needed it: when his own strength did not allow him to write very much, when he was ill and needed doctors and a sanatorium, and when Frieda would have to live on without him, but supported by his earnings.
The book began as a long short story, however, of the kind he had frequently written during the past three years, but it grew to around 95,000 words: almost half as long again as St. Mawr had been. It used an idea which lay behind the as yet unpublished Virgin and the Gypsy - the middle- or upper-class woman awakening into a new life because of a relationship with an outsider, a man from outside even the working-class. But whereas the Virgin and the Gypsy and even the first version of Lady Chatterley's Lover are aware enough of the constrictions of class not to show the relationship turning into a marriage, by the time Lawrence wrote the third version of the novel he was being idealistic enough (with some adjustments to the character of the gamekeeper) to make this possible.
But the book changed enormously while being written. Two years after starting it, Lawrence made a remark to the writer Brigit Patmore (1882-1965) which suggests one of the motivations which lay behind its development from a short story about class to a novel about sex. He remarked to her of the sadness he felt "When you think you have something in your life which makes up for everything, and then find you haven't got it .... Two years ago I found this out" (Nehls 1959: 258). The novel which did more than anything else to seal Lawrence's reputation as an erotic writer was written by a man deeply nostalgic about the life of the body which - for him - had always culminated in sexual desire. He wrote a number of poems about this: for example, "After all the tragedies are over":
When love is gone, and desire is dead, and tragedy has left the heart
then grief and pain go too, withdrawing
from the heart and leaving strange cold stretches of sand ...
Yet even waste, grey foreshores, sand, and sorry, far-out clay
are sea-bed still, through their hour of bare denuding.
It is the moon that turns the tides.
The beaches can do nothing about it. (Comp Poems 509)
But what he could do was write; and after finishing the novel's first version probably in late November, he started the second; and this one would become the first sexually explicit book he had ever written. It took him much longer; he was still working on it early in March 1927, and found it "good, I think, but a little too deep in bits - sort of bottomless pools" (Letters V: 605). His other new occupation this first winter at the Mirenda was painting. He had always painted; had made innumerable copies as a boy; had continued making copies of paintings and done occasional originals, all his life. But in November 1926, Maria Huxley (1898-1955) - he had met her and her husband the writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) in London in August and they began a lasting friendship in Italy in the autumn - had presented him with four blank canvases. And he had started to produce a series of paintings - all originals, this time - and many of them also sexual. Coincidentally with the end of the first Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, he had created his "Boccaccio Story," with its half- naked gardener and bevy of startled nuns. He created a series of striking images, not very skillfully handled but frequently symbolic and oddly powerful.
In the spring of 1927 he finished the second Lady Chatterley's Lover - "verbally terribly improper" (Letters V: 655) - and did not know what to do with it: it was quite unpublishable as it stood. All he could do was let it stand. He badly needed to publish, however; the cheapness of the Mirenda did not make up for a lack of earnings, and he had spent the winter writing the novel drafts and - apart from that - only writing book reviews and some poems. With the novel out of the way, however, he wrote at least one short story - "The Lovely Lady" - and went back to his idea of a book about the Etruscans; this would allow him to pursue his interest in an older civilization which could speak to the 20th century, but in a form which would not plunge him into the morasses of The Plumed Serpent. He had not been particularly well that winter, but together with Earl Brewster, he toured Etruscan sites in April, and during the next three months wrote a number of essays about the Etruscans, some of which were taken by magazines; but he never finished the book, the fragments of which were only published posthumously. It took up, nevertheless, a good deal of his time and energy in research which he wanted to do for it and in obtaining pictures for it. And it gave him the chance which for several years he had been looking for, to recreate a primitive society which would model some of the things which he felt the modern world had lost. He had tried this, to some extent, in The Plumed Serpent and again in the play fragment Noah's Flood written shortly afterwards, and then again at length in David. But this was his best chance yet; and he wanted to reach a wide audience with it, telling Secker that "I want this book - which will be a bit expensive to you, owing to illustrations - to be as popular as I can make it" (Letters VI: 93).
An equally significant thing which he started, however, was a new story, at this stage a short work called "The Escaped Cock." Just as Lady Chatterley's Lover had broken sexual taboos, this would infringe religious ones, as it described Jesus, after the resurrection, coming back not as the son of God. nor to his mission as a teacher or healer, nor to ascension (in the Biblical sense) but to the life of the body; it was another of these works exploring the sense of the individual's relationship not with society, or even with another person, but with the marvellous and extraordinary phenomenon of being alive in the body - and thus inhabiting not just the inner world of everyday experience but, like Gethin Day, possessing a strong sense of the "Greater Day," too: of his version of Wordsworth's "active universe."
This, he was able to publish, even though its publication caused something of a storm for the magazine involved, the Forum. During the early summer, he kept busy with short essays and some new short stories, "None of That!" and "Things," drawing on acquaintance as diverse as Mabel Luhan, the painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932) and the Brewsters; but (having not felt well for some days) on 11th July suffered his third and then a series of bronchial haemorrhages - the most serious yet; it took him three weeks or so to get back on his feet. It was clearly time he started going to places purely for his health's sake; the weather was going to be uncomfortably hot at the Mirenda from now onwards. As soon as he could comfortably travel, he and Frieda went to stay with her sister Johanna at Villach in Austria; and "I feel a different creature here in the cool" - "It is such a mercy to be able to breathe and move" (Letters VI: 119, 120). He was doing almost no writing, just some further translations of Verga, which always seem to have been his regular stand-by when he did not feel he could concentrate properly on his writing. After Austria, he and Frieda went on to their long-planned return to Bavaria, to stay in Else's (once Edgar Jaffe's) house in Irschenhausen, which they had last inhabited in 1913, and where Lawrence had written "The Prussian Officer": a little wooden house of the kind Lawrence always liked living in, "with forest behind, looking across a wide valley at the blue mountains." "I like it very much - there is no time, and no event - only the sun shines with that pleasant hotness of autumn, and in the shadow it is chill" (Letters VI: 154, 139). Again, he did very little writing apart from his translations - "I am glad when I don't work - I have worked too much" (Letters VI: 151); but they had a good, quiet, social life, being visited by all kinds of friends, including their 1912 Icking landlady. And Lawrence was fairly well, even allowing himself to be examined by the poet-doctor Hans Carossa (1878-1956), who specialized in tuberculosis, and who commented afterwards to a friend: "An average man with those lungs would have died long ago. But with a real artist no normal prognosis is ever sure. There are other forces involved." (Nehls 1959: 160)
In many ways, Lawrence would have liked to have stayed in Bavaria; but Frieda wanted to go back to Italy; so, via Baden-Baden, they went, with Lawrence taking an inhalation cure in passing. Once at the Mirenda, Lawrence set to work on two projects: a new volume of short stories and a collection of his poems, which Secker had asked for - "means typing them out and arranging and doing" (Letters VI: 195). But in Florence, after talking with the bookseller Guiseppe "Pino" Orioli (1884-1942), with Norman Douglas, and with the successful popular novelist Michael Arlen (the transformed Dikran Kouyoumdjian), he realized that there was - after all - a way, if a slightly risky way, of publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover: privately, printed in Florence, and distributed by himself. The enterprise filled him with enthusiasm; it is not overstating the case to say that it probably added months, if not years, to his life. The first thing he did was to re-write the novel - an astonishing feat in itself, for someone who had been as run down as he had been. He wrote up to 4000 words a day for a period of about six weeks, between late November 1927 and early January 1928, and transformed a novel which had been about class barriers and the hopelessness of England to one in which the gamekeeper can, shockingly, become an appropriate future partner for Constance Chatterley. The sexual explicitness remained (was indeed slightly enhanced), but the novel acquired a new, simpler, hard-hitting quality which went with its new task: that of asserting its outrageousness in public. Clifford became a far less sympathetic character, for one thing: he was now treated with the kinds of savage irony and satire which Lawrence had used about a character like Rico in St. Mawr. And the novel acquired an exemplary tone: this is how to live and to love, it says.
Part IV
With the book finished, Lawrence embarked on the fascinating business of publishing and distributing it himself. It was already being typed, though one typist cried off because of the explicitness of the book: part of the manuscript had to be sent to London for typing, and it seemed an age before Lawrence had it all back: Maria Huxley also lent a hand. There was a printer to find, and a binder: and publicity leaflets to print and distribute: "D. H. Lawrence / Will publish in unexpurgated form his new novel / LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER / OR / JOHN THOMAS and LADY JANE / limited edition of 1000 copies, numbered and signed / at £2.0.0. net (of which 500 copies for America / at $10 net). / Ready May 15th 1928." Lawrence thought he had better tell the printer, who had no English, what it was he was handling: the printer apparently smiled broadly and said "But we do it every day!" It was a small printing shop; they only had enough type to set up half the book at a time. The first half was printed, proof read, and 1200 copies printed (1000 for the first edition, 200 in reserve); the type was then distributed, and the same done to the second half. Advance orders started to come in; it became clear that Lawrence was not going to lose on the venture.
But the specially-ordered hand-made paper was late in coming, and thus the printing was delayed; the book was still at the printers during the previously announced date of publication; and not until 28 June did Lawrence have a copy in his hands, by which time he had escaped the summer heat of Florence and was up in the mountains in Switzerland. Orioli was left in charge of receiving the subscriptions and posting the copies.
While in Switzerland waiting for the book to come out, Lawrence - in a most unusual way for him - wrote a second part to his previously finished and published story "The Escaped Cock," to make it a fitting partner to the enterprise of the novel; the man who had died is now not only a man who has given up his mission to live within the Greater Day, but one who finds a new relationship with a woman too: Christ is also Osiris, restored, made whole, revivified, resurrected to the Father in sexual desire. "I think it's lovely," he wrote of it: but "somehow I don't want to let it go out of my hands" (Letters VI: 469). In so many ways it now mirrored his sense of all that, bodily, he was not (and could no longer be) himself. He always tended to think of his illness as corresponding to his state of mind: "that's why I too am ill. The hurts, and the bitternesses sink in, however much one may reject them with one's spirit" (Letters VI: 409). But the writer of fiction could still make a world which the person could no longer inhabit. As he had written in 1925, "And that again is what I think about writing a novel: one can live so intensely with one's characters and the experience, one creates or records, it is a life in itself, far better than the vulgar thing people call life" (Letters V: 293).
© "Biography of D.H. Lawrence" John Worthen, 1997
Next page: Chapter 9: Last years 1928-1930