Richards later told Robert Graves that after he had moved to digs outside the college, Lawrence would frequently visit him after midnight, and once, he said, he had asked Richards to join him on a bizarre bathing trip – they would dive through the ice on the frozen Cherwell to find out whether it was thin enough to let them in and out again. Richards dismissed the idea as ridiculously dangerous, but Lawrence went off to do it alone, and repeated it several times later. Richards explained that his friend’s pleasure in these strange outings derived partly from the astonishment he saw on the faces of orthodox people such as himself. It is a key observation, for while Lawrence’s fasting, dieting, and denial of sleep were expressions of his masochistic nature, they were also aspects of his reverse exhibitionism. If he had been simply ‘hardening himself for the ordeal to come’ in the classical ‘heroic’ sense, an audience would have been unnecessary, but Lawrence had no penchant for ‘suffering in silence’: his ordeal must be witnessed. It was characteristic of him throughout his life, Richards said, to seek some private gallery for his exploits.
Together, Lawrence and Richards explored the world of William Morris, the colossus of Victorian art and design who would influence Lawrence for the rest of his life. It is not clear when Lawrence first became aware of Morris (not to be confused with the industrialist William Henry Morris – Lord Nuffield), but living in north Oxford during the 1890s he could scarcely have avoided hearing about him, since Morris’s pomegranate wallpaper designs were
de rigueurin the houses of university dons. Morris was precisely the kind of polymath that Lawrence would have liked to be: a poet of distinction, novelist, master craftsman, designer, printer and painter who had pioneered the art of brass-rubbing, toured Gothic cathedrals in France in the 1850s, trekked through the cold deserts of Iceland, rediscovered Malory’s classic Morte d’Arthur,inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, espoused radical socialism, helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and set up the famous Kelmscott Press. Morris’s inspiration, like Lawrence’s, was the medieval period, and his objective was to revive the spirit of individual craftsmanship which he believed the industrial Victorian era had lost. This made him a giant in Lawrence’s eyes, for as a youth he was always engaged in some kind of handicraft – if not brass-rubbing, then poker-work, stone-carving, metal-work, wood-carving or even sewing. While Richards admired the diligence with which Lawrence worked at his crafts, he rarely admired the results. Lawrence once showed him an electric lamp he had hammered out of brass, modelled on a Moorish lantern in Holman Hunt’s engraving The Light of the World.Richards thought the lamp poor, but was more impressed with the griffon-figure Lawrence once carved on the bar of a table in his room. Bob Lawrence wrote that even as a child Ned had a great aptitude for improving and fixing household appliances – an ability Lawrence would later boast of as his ‘faculty for making and repairing things’. 24Though Ned called himself ‘a wanderer after sensations and an artist of sorts’, Arnie thought his brother more of a craftsman than an artist, and believed he had a craftsman’s appreciation of sound work in sound material irrespective of artistic merit. 25Later, in his writing career, Lawrence would behave as if there were a craftsman’s technique to literary expression, which, if it could only be learned, would enable one to create a masterpiece ‘by numbers’ as it were. He was adept at learning technique, but discovered with some bitterness that great literature lay not in mastering ‘tricks’, but in the power of creative vision. The truth was that the dominating force in Lawrence’s psyche – that supreme will he had built up against the barbarian hordes which were ever hammering and sapping at the frontier of his consciousness – was inimical to creativity. If it kept out maverick emotions it also attenuated the originality of vision those emotions entailed. Lawrence was too controlled, too mechanistic, too rational, ever to be a poet or an artist. The great tragedy of his life was the discovery that creativity was in reality the outpourings of the dark side which he had spent his life trying to suppress.