One hardly need imagine what scenes must have erupted at the cottage in Zennor as Lawrence tried to cope with these successive ribbons. By the third week of July he was writing to Pinker saying that he had given up typing his novel (‘it got on my nerves and knocked me up’ and was proceeding with pencil. To Catherine Carswell he wrote even more adamantly: ‘Never will I type again. It is that which has made me ill.’ Not the typing per se, one imagines, but the exhaustion following from the rages that must have been incurred by the innumerable frustrations of trying to get the ribbon working. Then, on 1 August, it comes to an end. ‘Many thanks for the ribbon,’ he writes to Kot. ‘This is perfect. I suppose all the mistakes came from saying “Smith Premier”. I am very sorry.’
Now, nothing I have read about — or even in — Women in Love affords me as much pleasure as these letters about the Smith Premier. I read other letters in the same spirit, obsessively, eager to see what will set him off next.
One of the reasons Lawrence directed his grouchiest letter ever — the grouchiest letter ever? — at Brewster is because Earl and his wife Achsah were in Ceylon studying Buddhism. Lawrence had a fundamental antipathy to the peace they were searching for and which they wished on him. ‘But always remember I prefer my strife,’ he chided them, ‘infinitely, to other people’s peace, haven, and heavens.’ That, I think, is a daring, beautiful preference. Comforting, too: it offers the kind of solace that Lawrence would have gleaned in 1910 when he first read Nietzsche. He expanded on this claim early in 1922, in a series of letters to Brewster which show no trace of the temper of two months previously. ‘More and more I feel that meditation and the inner life are not my aim, but some sort of action and strenuousness and pain and frustration and struggling through. . men have to fight a way for the new incarnation. And the fight and the sorrow and the loss of blood, and even the influenzas and the headaches are part of the fight and the fulfilment. Let nobody try to filch from me even my influenza.’ All this time he was wondering about whether or not to go east. When he wrote to Brewster on 18 January he conceded ‘for the first time’ that Brewster might ‘be right’ and himself wrong. ‘No, I believe you are right. Probably there, east, is the source: and America is the extreme periphery: Oh god, must one go to the extreme limit, then to come back?’
This might well be Rilke crying out. It almost sounds — the influence of Frieda? — as if it were translated from the German. Lawrence’s reluctance to go east persisted but it was expressing itself less and less forcibly. ‘I only know it seems so much easier, more peaceful to come east. But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.’ A week later Lawrence gave in and arranged to go to Ceylon. He hated it, needless to say, and took what might be termed a profound personal dislike to Buddha ‘and his rat-hole temples and his rat-hole religion’. Still, as he had said, he had gone east in order to go west, had seen the tranquillity of the east and could put it behind him. Brewster’s way was not his. Rather, as he wrote to Rolf Gardiner, ‘I am essentially a fighter — to wish me peace is bad luck — except the fighter’s peace.’
And this fighter’s peace did come to him. A new calm enters Lawrence’s letters, from the beginning of 1926. It makes itself apparent not as an achieved or permanent state but as a tone. He had known interludes of repose before but, increasingly, the balance shifts towards contentment interspersed with outbreaks of rage. We must not sentimentalise Lawrence: again and again, especially when writing to the Brewsters, he affirmed his fighter’s nature — ‘My business is a fight, and I’ve got to keep it up. . Caro, don’t ask me to pray for peace. I don’t want it’ — but he was becoming calmer. His philosophy remained fundamentally the same, namely that ‘All truth — and real living is the only truth — has in it the elements of battle and repudiation. Nothing is wholesale. The problem of truth is: How can we most deeply live? And the answer is different in every case.’ That, it seems to me, is the nearest Lawrence ever came to summing up all the diverse elements and contradictory impulses in his thought, in his life. In his own case, by 1926, living ‘most deeply’ meant becoming more accommodating, less unyielding.
This tendency towards accepting the world rather than railing against it was closely connected to the unavoidable fact of his own approaching death. In November 1929, writing to Brewster, he made a connection between his illness and his rage: ‘But I do believe the root of all my sickness is a sort of rage. I realise now, Europe gets me into an awkward rage, that keeps my bronchials hellish inflamed.’ Now that he was in the grips of his illness, now that he had accepted that he was ill, he could be at peace.
Again one must not exaggerate. Lawrence would have been horrified by the thought of ‘mellowing’; rather he was in the condition evoked by Van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo: ‘One no longer rebels against things, but neither is one resigned — one is ill and does not get better.’ Perhaps Lawrence was close to the most difficult, elusively rewarding freedom of alclass="underline" freedom from himself. He was still irritable and easily annoyed but there was an underlying calm and, as ever, Lawrence himself was aware of this. (Has anyone ever been more sensitive to the ebb and flow of their own feelings? Of course this is what he is famous for doing, through the characters in his novels, but I prefer the epistolary monologue to the drama of fiction.) ‘For my part, though, I am perhaps more irascible being more easily irritable, not being well, still, I think I am more inwardly tolerant and companionable. .’
Felicitous, that ‘still’. Lawrence’s calm was all the lovelier for the rage that had preceded it and it was expressed, again and again, in terms of stillness. At the beginning of his wandering he had remarked how he hated shifting; now, when shifting had become second nature, stillness became a measure of happiness. From Munich in 1927 he writes that it is ‘very nice to be quite stilclass="underline" and this is one of the stillest places I know. The trees seem to make a silence. I really like it very much here, and I am honestly much better.’ After all the gales of anger that had blown between them, he wrote to Ottoline Morrell, hoping that they might come to enjoy ‘that stillness in friendship which is the best’.
‘A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.’ That was one of the first lines of Lawrence’s that I read; the image that accompanied it, of Lawrence standing with the wind pouring through the sky, was one of the first images of him that I saw. At times this wind by which Lawrence lived threatened to tear him apart and this is why it is lovely to see him in his last years, gazing at the world as if it were a Matisse or Dufy, ‘sitting in the sun and seeing the easy, drifting life of the place. That’s how I am happiest nowadays — just sitting still, quite alone, with a little friendly life to watch.’
In the letters from the last years of Lawrence’s life the realised ideal of stillness crops up again and again. It is like the ripe stillness preceding the autumn announced in his great poem ‘The Ship of Death’. In the letters we have heard the pulse of that poem preparing itself for many years. Now there is a perceptible hush as the poem and the death which it anticipates begin, definitively, to grow in him. It is the combination of an achieved, contented mood and the increasing awareness of his own death that makes many of his letters from this period so heart-breaking: ‘It is very lovely, the wind, the clouds, the running sea that bursts up like blossom on the island opposite. If only I was well, and had my strength back! But I am so weak. And something inside me weeps black tears. I wish it would go away.’