Chapter 4: War: 1914-1919
Part I
The Lawrences (as they can now be called) did not return to Italy until 1919. Lawrence was on a walking tour in Westmoreland with three men friends (including Koteliansky) at the start of August when they
came down to Barrow on Furness, and saw that war was declared ... and in all the tram cars þWar'. - Messrs Vickers Maxim call in their workmen - and the great notices on Vickers' gateways - and the thousands of men streaming over the bridge ... and the amazing, vivid, visionary beauty of everything, heightened by the immense pain everywhere. (Letters II: 268)
Lawrence later declared that "The War finished me: it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes" (Letters II: 268). Not just of his hopes of returning to Italy, or of living happily with Frieda, or having his novel published - though all these things were indeed affected by the War: but, more profoundly, the making certain that his belief in the potential progress (in sorrows and hopes) of civilization was dead and finished. Ever since 1908 he had nursed a Whitmanesque belief that
the great procession is marching, on the whole, in the right direction ... you must be earnestly certain of the wonder of this eternal progression ... I think there is a great purpose ... I am sure I can help the march if I like. It is a valuable assurance.(Letters I: 57)
His early writing had been based on the unspoken assumption that what he wrote was a "help" because it addressed the deepest needs of people: as he wrote early in 1913, "I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people" (Letters I: 511). Every now and then he would articulate this feeling: as in 1912, when he angrily remarked of his countrymen that "I should like to bludgeon them into realizing their own selves" (Letters I: 424), or in 1913 when, more blithely, he remarked "I do write because I want folk - English folk - to alter, and have more sense" (Letters I: 544). What the War took away was his confidence that this was possible. At a stroke, the country's energies re-directed themselves into barbarous opposition, hatred and a relapse into communal - not individual - emotion; and the writer who believed in the progress and development of "the great racial or human consciousness, a little of which is in me" and who wanted people to read his fictions and "be made alert and active" (Letters II: 302), to alter their relationships, to realize their own hearts and desires, felt himself utterly displaced. "The war is just hell for me. I don't see why I should be so disturbed - but I am." (Letters II: 211)
There were other, more practical, consequences for him as well. In August, Methuen returned him the manuscript of The Wedding Ring. There was some doubt about the explicit nature of some of its sexual scenes, which he was asked to tone down; and (anyway) the War meant an immediate cut-back in what they would publish. He was asked to resubmit the book, revised, in six months time: but was thus deprived of the money which, due on its publication, he was relying on. Returning to what was now their home in Italy also became impossible, and the cheapness (and happiness) of living they had found there, especially in Fiascherino, was denied them. "What is going to become of us?" Lawrence wrote to Pinker (Letters II: 206). All they could do was rent as cheap a place as they could find, near friends like Murry and Katherine Mansfield, in the country outside London: and wait.
Lawrence had one small project to be going on with: a 15,000 word book on the novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) in a series "Writers of the Day" which had been commissioned from him in July. Down in Chesham in a tiny cottage, twenty miles from London, and helped enormously by a wedding present from Edward Marsh of a complete set of Hardy's books, he spent the autumn working on it; though his current state of mind led to his turning it into an expression of his own personal philosophy, "a sort of Confessions of my Heart" (Letters II: 235). It was "supposed to be about Thomas Hardy, but ... seems to be about anything else in the world than that" (Letters II: 220). It was never published in the series; it seems doubtful whether Lawrence even submitted it. But it did give Lawrence a new understanding of abiding human dualities which he would employ directly in his revision of The Wedding Ring for Methuen.
And this final rewriting, between November 1914 and March 1915, changed both the novel, and Lawrence's career, irrevocably. For one thing, the novel split: the material which had been accumulating round the original "Sisters" of the title had become too long for one volume. The new novel - to be called The Rainbow - would consist of the story of the sisters' grandparents, Tom and Lydia Brangwen, their parents, Will and Anna Brangwen, and the early life of one of the sisters (now called Ursula), including her first - and unsuccessful - love affair. The second book would show the subsequent relationships of both Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and how those relationships finally worked out: Ursula's successfully, Gudrun's unhappily. But The Rainbow also apparently became even more sexually overt in this revision, not less so; and the things which Methuen had been troubled by in the summer of 1914 became still more worrying. This would have unimaginable consequences.
For the moment, Lawrence was simply happy to have a new novel to be involved with, and to take his mind off the War. He was also starting to meet people who impressed him, and whom he impressed. The old friendship with David Garnett had brought him, during the winter of 1914, to meet Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), a great hostess for artists, writers and other intelligentsia; and dining with Ottoline had brought him into contact with both the novelist E. M. Forster (1879-1970) and the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). He also got to know the young painters Mark Gertler (1892- 1939) and Dorothy Brett (1883-1977), and kept their friendship; while his meeting with Cynthia Asquith in 1913 had also developed into a steady friendship, in spite of the pressures of the War on her (her husband was already on active service). Many of these friends came to see Lawrence and Frieda in Sussex in the spring of 1915; they had moved down there in January, overcome by the cold and damp of the Chesham cottage. Lawrence felt himself taken seriously by all of them, while Frieda seems to have relished the fact that she was now moving in the higher echelons of English intellectual society, and was the friend of two titled ladies. For his part, Bertrand Russell was at first enormously impressed, seeing Lawrence as "infallible. He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet ... he sees everything and is always right" (Ottoline 1963: 273): though the two men quarrelled later in the summer, and their plans for a joint lecture course (Russell on Society, Lawrence on Eternity) never materialized. But Lawrence's letters of the winter of 1914 and the spring of 1915 are among the most remarkable he ever wrote. They chart his developing ideas about how to understand and symbolize the historical development of human consciousness, society and self- responsibility: how it came to be the fact that "one is not only a little individual living a little individual life, but that is in oneself the whole of mankind, and ones fate is the whole of mankind, and ones charge is the whole of mankind" (Letters II: 302). This philosophy was something which grew to be at the heart of The Rainbow. He finished the novel, triumphantly, on 2 March: "bended it and set it firm. Now off and away to find the pots of gold at its feet" (Letters II: 299): and immediately turned back to the re-writing into a new form of the philosophy which had taken over his Hardy book.
He had not, however, finally finished with The Rainbow; the typescript needed (he found) extensive revision; and the proofs, later in the summer, further work still. In between work on the novel, he wrote away at his philosophy, with occasional breaks - as for the first version of his story "England, My England," which he wrote in June, and which summed up his sense of why men were so eager to fight. Its central character, a failure in his marriage, gives up on "love and the creative side of life ... He had a right to his own satisfaction. He was a destructive spirit entering into destruction" (EmyE 225). In such ways Lawrence expressed his fundamental opposition to the War, and to the spirit of War.
It was with a sense, however, of being too much on the fringes of life (and also perhaps so that Frieda could resume her attempts to see her children) that in August Frieda and he moved back to London, to Hampstead, where they had a circle of friends: the imminent publication of The Rainbow meant that he would at last be paid his final advance. He had other plans, too: a small magazine, which he and Murry would edit and which would say the kinds of thing he thought needed saying to the public at large, in Wartime; and a series of small public meetings, advertized in the magazine, which might perhaps draw together a body of sympathetic people. It was characteristic of Lawrence at this stage of his career that he should be doing so much to make contact with people and to change their ideas: through his writing, his magazine and the meetings. He was, in spite of the War, still a believer in his own capacity to make people "alert and active," as he had put it in March (Letters II: 302).
But the autumn of 1915 turned out to be a sequence of failures and disasters. First, the magazine (called The Signature) failed to pay its way, in spite of Murry and Lawrence sending subscription forms to all their friends, old and new: they only managed to produce three numbers rather than the six they had originally planned for, so that only three parts of Lawrence's new philosophical writing "The Crown" got into print. The public meetings, too, turned out to be a complete failure: only two, apparently, were ever held. But by far the worst blow was the fate of The Rainbow. It was savagely attacked by nearly all its reviewers on publication, and at least two called for it to be suppressed. It was not adopted by the public libraries or bookstalls: and early in November, the police moved in on it, collecting all the undistributed copies from Methuen. On 13th November 1915 the Bow Street Magistrates heard a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which Methuen failed to defend, saying instead that "they regretted having published it" (Rainbow l): the book was ordered to be destroyed. All Lawrence could do was sit on the sidelines and watch as the book he was so proud of, together with his reputation, and also his earning power as a professional writer, were destroyed. Having the matter raised in Parliament by Ottoline Morrell's MP husband Philip (1870-1943) got nowhere, and none of Lawrence's literary friends was (it turned out) prepared to argue for the book, only against the idea of censorship: even friends as close as Murry and Katherine Mansfield thoroughly disliked the book itself.
During October - following the failure of The Signature, and even before the suppression order - Lawrence had been thinking of trying to go abroad. America, still out of the War but a place where an English writer could publish, seemed the obvious place: for two months Lawrence and Frieda tried to get passports, and to encourage their friends to come with them and form a kind of colony in Florida (a move which seemed even more urgent after the novel's suppression). But matters came to a head on 12th December when Lawrence - in order to get a passport - had to stand in line to "attest": that is, to enrol himself as ready for military service when called up, something in which he absolutely did not believe. None the less, he went down to Battersea Town Hall, over the river from Westminster and Parliament, to do it.
But I hated it so much, after waiting nearly two hours, that I came away. And yet, waiting there in the queue, I felt the men were very decent, and that the slumbering lion was going to wake up in them: not against the Germans either, but against the great lie of this life ... In the long run I have the victory: for all those men in the queue, for those spectral, hazy, sunny towers hovering beyond the river, for the world that is to be. (Letters II: 474) Such optimism came only at moments. If they could not go to America, Lawrence and Frieda would do the next best thing, and go down to Cornwall, as far from War-mongering London as possible. The novelist J. D. Beresford (1873-1947), a friend of Murry, had a cottage in Cornwall which he was prepared to lend; after a Christmas visit to the Midlands, on the penultimate day of the old year Lawrence and Frieda travelled down to Porthcothan, on the Cornish north coast, not knowing any more what they would live on or what they would do in the long run: but, Lawrence felt, it was "like being at the window and looking out of England to the beyond. This is my first move outwards, to a new life" (Letters II: 491).
Part II
He had, fortunately, one more book on the stocks, its publication arranged before The Rainbow had been suppressed; his Italian essays, heavily revised, some of them first drafted beside the Lago di Garda in 1913, were being published as Twilight in Italy. That brought in a little money. Duckworth was also prepared to publish a volume of his poems, and in the early months of 1916 he worked at his old University College notebooks, digging out and rewriting poetry. He also wrote a story, this time nothing to do with the War; an early version of "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter." He developed a plan for the private publication of The Rainbow, by subscription. And he was ill in bed a good deal of the time.
But he and Frieda both liked Cornwall; the rocks, the sea, the sense of being almost out of England. And it became their plan to bring down congenial friends. They had visitors during January, including the musician Philip Heseltine (1894-1930), his mistress Minnie Channing (b. 1894) and his friend the writer Dikran Kouyoumdjian (1895-1956); but in the long term, the idea of living together with Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield remained the dominant one. At the start of March the Lawrences went down to Zennor, in the far west of Cornwall, and found there two houses side by side, "just under the moors, on the edge of the few rough stony fields that go to the sea" (Letters II. 563), which they decided immediately were meant for the Murries and for themselves. The rent was very little; they decorated, moved in, began to buy second-hand furniture, and waited for their friends. Frieda wrote to them that "we are friends and we wont bother anymore about the deep things, they are all right, just let's live like the lilies in the field" (Letters II: 571). It was an impossible dream; Katherine hated the place, Frieda felt herself squeezed out by the literary talk of the other three, Lawrence found Murry oppressive, at times Murry found Lawrence dangerously unstable. They lived in adjacent cottages for only about eight weeks, until mid-June.
There had remained for Lawrence, of course, the problem of what he was going to do as a novelist: because he was a novelist - a magistrate's decision could not alter that, and purely commercial considerations did not have much to do with his desire to go on recreating and re-interpreting the society and the consciousness of the contemporary human being which fascinated him. His mind had at first gone back to those 200 pages of manuscript, left in Germany in 1913 when he had abandoned that particular novel to write "The Sisters." Could he do something with them? But getting the manuscript out of Germany in Wartime proved an insuperable problem; and sometime in April he went back to the material left over from The Sisters when he had carved out The Rainbow the previous year; and between April and July created his most extraordinary work yet, the novel which became Women in Love. The tensions of life with the Murries, something of the sense of small, brightly colored figures moving against a large landscape, the details of house furnishing, Lawrence's profound desire to work out a way of life away from the industrial and cosmopolitan centers, his tragic sense of a society and individuals driven by (and riven by) the passions of War - all these got into it. He went on working on it for months: first typing the first half out himself, revising it as he went, and then in the early autumn writing it out by hand; on 31st October he sent the last of it to Pinker. "It is a terrible and horrible and wonderful novel. You will hate it and nobody will publish it. But there, these things are beyond us." (Letters II: 669) He proceeded to revise it massively in the typescript copies: so that when it finally began to make the rounds of publishers in December, one asked if it really was complete.
It met with universal rejection: he was obliged by the terms of his contract to offer it first to Methuen, and (naturally) they refused it; but even the faithful Duckworth turned it down, along with three or four other publishers to whom Pinker offered it. Another novel by the author of The Rainbow was commercially quite unacceptable. It was no more than Lawrence had feared; but it was, still, a nasty indication of his potential future as a writer. The circulation of one of the two typescript copies among his friends had also led to the end of his friendship with Ottoline Morrell, who detected in the character of Hermione a portrait of herself. Lawrence vehemently rejected the connection: but it meant the loss of a good, supportive friend. His thoughts turned again to the possibility of leaving for America, "that far-off retreat, which is the future to me" (Letters III: 75); a dream encouraged by a new friendship with two young Americans, Esther Andrews and Robert Mountsier (1888-1972). "I must go soon," he wrote to his agent: "One's psychic health is more important than the physical" (Letters III: 75). But this plan, too, came to nothing; his application for passports was refused. All he and Frieda could do was sit tight in Cornwall; and Lawrence could research and flesh-out his American dream by starting to write the essays which became Studies in Classic American Literature, a pioneering study. They also became something he could publish, in these barren years, along with yet another version of his philosophy, this time called (in direct opposition to the War) "The Reality of Peace." The English Review continued to support him, printing both the American essays and part of the philosophy; but, that apart, his publishing had almost come to a standstill. Almost all he could do was grow vegetables in his garden ("It looks like a triumph of life in itself" - Letters III: 125), help in the neighboring farm, read, and occasionally add revisions to the typescript of Women in Love. His only publishing in 1917 was a small volume of poems, Look! We Have Come Through!: the old sequence of poems written 1912-1917, centered on his relationship with Frieda, now wholly revised and made coherent.
The year 1917 passed like 1916, with Lawrence making just one brief journey away from Cornwall, up to see his relatives in the Midlands; but this time with the possibility of military conscription just a little closer. He had been rejected on health grounds in June 1916 and then again in June 1917; but some local people were clearly not happy with having this odd, anti-war individual with a German wife in their midst. The usual war-time rumors developed: there was a stock of petrol for German submarines at the bottom of the cliffs near the Lawrences' cottage: the patterns on the Lawrence's chimney were a signal for patrolling submarines (the main Atlantic convoy route lay along the nearby coast). Individuals clearly spied on them, and heard the singing of German songs in the cottage. They were stopped on one occasion by a military patrol and their shopping searched (a square loaf of bread was seized on as a camera). Things were made worse by the presence on the same coast of other non-conscripted artistic individuals. Heseltine had a house nearby, and the musician Cecil Gray (1895-1951) also lived in the neighborhood; he and Lawrence discussed the nature of a Revolution in the state, much as Lawrence had discussed it with Russell in 1915, and all three of them (doubtless also overheard) sang the Hebridean songs which were a recent musical discovery. In September, Gray was summoned for letting a light show in his house after dark in a seaward facing window, and was fined punitively. In the end, it was easier for the authorities to act than to spend time finding out whether there was anything in the rumors; in spite of the fact that, as Lawrence wrote, "We are as innocent even of pacifist activities, let alone spying of any sort, as the rabbits of the field outside" (Letters III: 168). Their cottage was searched while they were out one afternoon, and some papers taken away (probably the texts of Hebridean songs: clearly coded messages). The following day, they were served with a military exclusion order, forbidding them to reside in Cornwall; they had to be out within three days.
Part III
It was a financial disaster, as well as a moral blow; the cottage was cheap and the rent paid, and they had no money to rent other accommodation. They were taken in by friends in London, and moved from room to room for a couple of months: the poet H.D. (1886-1961) was especially helpful, and Cecil Gray's mother also provided them with a room. Look! We Have Come Through! came out at the end of November: an ironical reminder of those prewar days in Icking and beside the Lago di Garda, when the building of a new relationship was the most important thing in the world. Lawrence now published those poems as a salute to the past, and perhaps also as an acknowledgement that it was over; as a thinker and writer, Lawrence was now less interested in mutual love and marriage than in what happens within a loving relationship, and in how the male struggles to escape what he now called "the devouring mother ... I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man, and he must take this precedence. I do think men must go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for permission or approval from their women." Frieda disagreed with him, "says I am antediluvian in my positive attitude" (Letters III: 302): and it was around this time that she probably had a brief affair with Gray, as if to prove her point.
But it was in this new spirit that, in London in the autumn of 1917, Lawrence started yet another novel: always a sign in him that his new thinking had to meet the test of experience and actuality. But the new book about a man who walks out on his destructive relationship with his wife, to find a new life - one day to be Aaron's Rod - did not get very far; shifting from one friend's property to another was hardly conducive to the writing of large-scale fiction. They were finally rescued by their friend the poet Dolly Radford (1864- 1920), who let them have a cottage in Berkshire when she wasn't using it; this became one of their two main homes during the next two years. The only writing Lawrence could do was yet another version of the American essays, which had become both a new version of his philosophy and pioneering essays of literary criticism; and yet another small collection of poems, to be called Bay. Fiction from him was no longer acceptable; essays and poetry were all he could expect to be published.
By February 1918 they were desperately hard up: "in another fortnight I shall not have a penny to buy bread and margarine" Lawrence told his agent (Letters III: 211). Pinker helped out with a loan, as did other friends; and Lawrence's sister Ada assisted by renting a house for them, for a year, back in the Midlands, at Middleton-by-Wirksworth. They moved up there at the start of May, feeling "queer and lost and exiled" with Lawrence "queer and desolate in my soul - like Ovid in Thrace" (Letters III; 242). They saw more of his family and of old Eastwood friends than for years; "We live practically on my sister - and that is very painful, too" (Letters III: 251). He finished his American essays, he put together yet another little book of poems out of the old notebooks, misleadingly called New Poems; this time for a new young publisher, Martin Secker (1882-1978), who would one day become very important to his career. But there was no change to his prospects, as a man or a writer; he confessed that "I am very tired of it, and irritated by it - terribly irritated. And it is not the slightest use my trying to write selling stuff, in this state of affairs" (Letters III: 251). The war went on, in spite of rumors of its ending; visitors came and went; and Lawrence grew steadily more desperate: "I look at the months and know there must be a change" (Letters III: 283).
There was. On 11th September, his 33rd birthday, he received his third notice of medical examination for call-up; by this stage of the war, almost no-one was rejected. He was classed as Grade 3 ("conscripted for light non-military duties"). The decision maddened him: "from this day I take a new line. I've done with society and humanity - Labour and Military can alike go to hell. Henceforth it is for myself, my own life, I live" (Letters III: 288). This was perhaps the culmination of his long redirection of his energies away from a belief in society and its well-being, to a concentration on the life of the individual. As it turned out, he was never actually called-up for service. But his ejection from Cornwall and this final attempt to conscript him were perhaps his breaking-points. Some of the profound problems of his work during the rest of his career derived from the peculiar kind of isolation to which he deliberately subjected himself, from 1918 onwards.
His next pieces of writing summed up the problems of his career. He wrote, very quickly, a play in November 1918: Touch and Go, drawing in part upon still unpublished Women in Love material, but concentrating upon the current industrial unrest which living in the Midlands had given him an insight into. Yet it was most unlikely to be published or performed, and in spite of some dramatic moments of confrontation it suffers from a kind of slackness of construction very unusual in his writing: it needed a revision which it never got. The other piece of writing, which he did with gritted teeth, marked the only time in his whole career when he did a piece of work almost entirely for money: he wrote a brief history for schools, entitled Movements in European History. In one way it fitted rather well into reading he had already done earlier in 1918, when he had gone through Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire thinking of the parallels with modern times. He took the school- history job seriously, and did quite a lot of reading for it; but apart from a few moments of pleasure as he grasped "the thread of the developing significance," mostly he hated it "like poison" (Letters III: 322, 309). The only things he was able to put his heart into were some short stories he wrote in November including "The Blind Man" and "Tickets, Please," and the first version of his short novel "The Fox"; "I hope we shall sell them, for I can't live" (Letters III: 299). For the moment, Pinker was only able to place the weakest of them, "Tickets, Please."
As a culmination of his desperation, and in a kind of response to the "vile sick winter," in February 1919 he went down with influenza, during the wave of illness which swept Europe that spring. He was seriously ill for six weeks: for two days, he told Koteliansky, the doctor "feared I should not pull through" (Letters III: 347, 337). Friends rallied round with presents of wine and decent food: but the spring never seemed to come, with snow still lying round the cottage late in March: "I stare out of the window like a sick and dazed monkey" (Letters III: 340). The year in Derbyshire, which on almost all counts had been a depressing failure, was coming to an end, rather to his relief. At the end of April he first finished the history book - rejoicing "I am a free man" (Letters III: 352) - and then he and Frieda travelled back down to Berkshire, to Dolly Radford's cottage. He had to do something to re-establish himself as a writer; the only book he would publish during 1919 was the tiny book of poems Bay. Pinker suggested that short stories might be sold to an American magazine, and - like a proper professional writer - Lawrence promised to write nothing but short stories for six weeks, "if the short stories will come" (Letters III: 355). They did, of course: "Fannie and Annie," "Monkey Nuts," "Hadrian" (published as "You Touched Me"). But the best news, in July, was that "The Fox" had been accepted for publication; Lawrence's reputation was, little by little, being rebuilt; while a publisher also decided to take the play Touch and Go.
But Lawrence himself had made the contact which led to the latter success; and he was increasingly wondering whether it was sensible for him to continue with Pinker as his agent. He had certainly never made his agent much money. He had once previously broached the idea of leaving Pinker, back in November 1918; but now, in the latter half of 1919, he became increasingly disillusioned with what Pinker was doing for him, especially in the American market. Things came to a head with the publication of Women in Love. It turned out that Pinker had never even sent Benjamin Huebsch (1876-1964), who had published all Lawrence's works in America since 1914, a copy of the typescript of the novel; Lawrence only discovered this when he had arranged (again, without Pinker's assistance) for the American publisher Thomas Seltzer (1875-1943) to take the novel. American publication particularly appealed to him: "I would like the book to come first in America. I shall never forgive England The Rainbow" (Letters III: 391). He revised the novel slightly in September for Seltzer and wrote it a Preface, while - in England - Martin Secker had expressed interest in it.
During the summer, spent in Berkshire, Lawrence and Frieda made friends with Rosalind Baynes (1891-1973), among others: she was recently separated from her husband the psychoanalyst Godwin Baynes (1882-1943), and also longed to get away to Italy. Lawrence and Frieda were now both itching to get away from the England they had felt trapped in for the past five years: "The thing to do is to get on the move" (Letters III: 412), Lawrence remarked. Frieda wanted to see her German family - her father had died in 1915, but she had of course not been able to go across; Lawrence wanted to go back to Italy, and would actually go to prospect a house in the Abruzzi which Rosalind Baynes knew about and was considering for herself and her children. They had to wait till October for passports to come, but Frieda then left as soon as she had got hers, on the 15th. Lawrence stayed a month longer, arranging his affairs with magazines and publishers, not wanting to go to Germany "so soon after the war" (Frieda 1935: 91). At last, on 14th November 1919, he sailed for the continent. At least twice, he reproduced in fictional form his feelings on leaving behind the white cliffs of Dover: the version in his novel The Lost Girl contains a vision of England haunting in its power:
" ... there behind, behind all the sunshine, was England. England, beyond the water, rising with ash-grey, corpse-grey cliffs, and streaks of snow on the downs above. England, like a long, ash-grey coffin slowly submerging. She [Alvina Houghton] watched it, fascinated and terrified. It seemed to repudiate the sunshine, to remain unilluminated, long and ash-grey and dead, with streaks of snow like cerements. That was England! (Lost Girl 294)
The War years had brought Lawrence to a deliberate exile which would, in one form or another, last for the rest of his life.
© "Biography of D.H. Lawrence" John Worthen, 1997
Next page: Chapter 5: Exile: 1919-1922