Frieda (D.H.Lawrence)
Early in
April, Lawrence visited his old professor from university, Ernest
Weekley, at his home in Nottingham, to seek his advice about
going to Germany. Professor Weekley had lectured in Germany and
had a German wife. He had fallen passionately in love with the 19
years-old Frieda with alert pale-green eyes and a confident smile
at a Black Forest holiday resort.
Frieda's mother, Baroness von Richthofen, couldn't refuse an offer of marriage from the handsome, scholarly, greying Englishman - her family had been impoverished by a series of economic disasters. Young Frieda (pictured above right with Ernest and his parents) was fond of her professor even though he was fifteen years her senior, and after marrying in Germany, they came to live in Nottingham where she bore him three children.
She sang in the women's choir, gardened and studied Italian with Ernest in the evenings. They didn't quarrel, but Frieda led a double life. After the birth of her third child she began to spend long periods in Germany with her mother and her sister Else who was rich, had a university degree and rubbed shoulders with poets, painters and socialists, all of them endlessly talking like mad.
In Munich, Frieda was introduced to the dazzling Otto Gross, an Austrian psychoanalyst whose motto was: 'Repress Nothing!' She followed his motto by becoming his lover. Believing in the liberating power of sexual love, she took another lover nearer home in Nottingham and conducted her life like some erotic melodrama.
She was convinced that her destiny was to nurture male genius and believed that she had found one when the thin, agile, figure of Lawrence came striding into her house. Looking dreadfully frail, he amazed her with his light, sure movements and his bright intense look, so unusual in an Englishman. She thought there was something ethereal about him that had nothing to do with his frail physique.
As for Lawrence, he had never before met a woman like Frieda and couldn't take his eyes from her. Her voice was husky and glamorously accented. She had high cheek bones and her tawny lioness eyes, green-flecked with yellow, fairly sparkled with vitality. They talked and talked, the theories coming thick and fast till darkness fell when Lawrence had to walk home to Eastwood. In his thank-you letter he wrote that she was the most wonderful woman in England.
Lawrence was hooked and he took Frieda with her two girls for a country walk in Derbyshire. 'She is ripping, she's the finest woman I know,' he wrote to his friend Edward Garnett in London but told no one else.
| Elopement Ernest Weekly was away one Sunday and Frieda invited Lawrence to stay the night. He refused. If she loved him, she must run away with him. There was no alternative. She decided she loved him. Lawrence told friends he was going on a visit to Germany. Frieda told her husband that she was leaving him, left their son with him, delivered their two daughters to his grandparents in London, and there met up with Lawrence.When they took the night boat from Dover to Ostend they had known each other six weeks. In his baggage was the manuscript for Sons and Lovers; and in hers, the letters of Otto Gross. Ernest Weekley collapsed. He wrote to Frieda's mother: 'Please Mama, make her understand what a state I'm in: I cannot see her handwriting without trembling like a cripple.' At her mother's entreaty, Frieda went home while Lawrence stayed at a hotel in Metz. Frieda's shocked father urged her to come to her senses and the rest of her family tried to convince her that the price was too high to pay - Lawrence was poor and she would have to give up her children. From Metz, Lawrence sent her imploring letters intricate with strategy: 'Is the divorce coming off? Are you going to England at all? Are we finally to pitch our camp in Munich?' Finally they met in Munich and went on to Beuerberg where they had eight days of honeymoon before beginning their travels through Germany and Italy. Their life together was passionate and stormy. Lawrence said that he never knew what love was before but they often argued violently, usually over her children. Loath to give them up, she now missed them. Her son observed many years later: 'Mamma was a great cake-eater and cake-haver.' When Lawrence sat down to write in her presence, his absolute concentration amazed her. He was gone, just like his sudden changes of mood when he would contradict something he had said a week before. Though he was happier than he had ever been, he was still sometimes overwhelmed by a malady of spirit that dragged him down by his heels. Ernest Weekley bombarded Frieda with pleading letters for her to return home before finally asking for a divorce. In May 1913 Sons and Lovers was published. Strongly autobiographical, perhaps the first English novel with a working-class background, the publishers lost money on the first edition. But Lawrence was trying to break new ground, believing that modern man placed too much reliance on reason and he was going to correct it: 'What our blood feels and believes is always true.' |
The Rainbow
The eloping couple returned to England in June 1913, Frieda burning to see her children. Ernest would not allow it while she remained with Lawrence, though she managed to steal a few moments by intercepting them on their way to school. Ernest took out a court order forbidding her from seeing her children. Frieda and Lawrence returned to Germany.
In the following May, Ernest Weekley was granted a decree nisi with custody of the children and costs. Lawrence and Frieda immediately returned to England and were married on 13 July 1914 at Kensington's Registrar's Office.
Things were beginning to look up for the promising writer - his poetry had attracted attention in America and in his pocket was a £300 advance for his new novel. Three weeks later Britain declared war on Germany. Being neither a patriot nor a conscientious objector, Lawrence just saw the war as intolerable interference with his work. He loathed it and denounced it.
Extremes of rage and depression would afflict Lawrence at intervals right through the war whilst his sense of mission grew more urgent, his manner more arrogant. Constantly moving around to avoid the prejudice against Frieda's German origins, there were quarrels, often violent ones. It was a battle for mastery, usually sparked off by Frieda refusing to break with her children. She tried once again to catch her children on the way to school but their aunt accompanying them shouted: 'Run, children, run!' And they did.
When he had finished writing The Rainbow he told his agent: 'I hope you are willing to fight for this novel. It is nearly three years of hard work, and I am proud of it, and it must be stood up for.' Published in September 1915, the critics slaughtered it, called it indecent. At Bow Street Magistrates Court, the book was declared obscene. A man who represented the police said in court that the novel was 'a mass of obscenity and thought, idea and action which he supposed would be regarded in some quarters as an artistic and intellectual effort.'
The publishers were fined 10 guineas and all copies were destroyed. In fact, there was little to cause offence in the book except the fighting men of the war were referred to as Wooden Soldiers which was unpatriotic at a time when thousands of men were dying on the Western Front.
Now publicly branded as obscene - no one would touch Lawrence's work for years to come - Lawrence's plans to go to America were dashed. 'I'll never write another word I mean,' he told Frieda. 'They aren't fit for it.'
| Cornwall The Lawrences moved to Cornwall, virtually without resources, and he had to borrow from his sister Ada. She never deserted him. Lawrence was called for a medical and rejected, but was urged to find work that would help with the war effort. He ignored it. Frieda's name became well-known because of her cousin, air-ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Of the 80 allied aircraft that the Red Baron shot down, only 33 pilots, or crewmen, survived. His brother Lothar von Richthofen was credited with shooting down Nottingham's hero Captain Albert Ball. Outspokenly naive with her opinions on the war, she kept in touch with her mother in Germany via a friend in Switzerland. Local rumours accused her of supplying food to German submarines off the Cornish coast and when Lawrence was heard to sing in German, suspicions grew that they were spies. An official file built up. |
| Moving On In October 1917 the Lawrence's cottage was searched and ransacked. They were given an expulsion order by the Military Authorities to leave Cornwall within three days. Without money, they returned to London where they were helped by friends. Frieda ached for home and Lawrence just wanted to 'move on for ever, and never have a neighbour.' One of his friends had given him a typewriter and he wrote in his thank-you letter: 'Now my realm is a typewriter. I am a man of property.' The police still kept a watch on the couple. Ada again baled them out, offering them a bungalow at Middleton-by-Wirksworth in Derbyshire. In September 1918, he was called to Derby for another medical but six weeks later the war was over.
In November 1919, he saw Frieda off to Germany and he himself left for Italy. He looked back to see England sinking into the sea 'with her dead grey cliffs and the white worn-out cloth of snow above.' The ties were gone. He no longer belonged there. 'Have typewriter - will travel', became his maxim as he and Frieda travelled extensively together: Capri; Sicily, 'peaceful and still'; Switzerland; Austria; Ceylon, 'a wonderful place to look at, but too hot to live in - now we are going to Australia'; and New Mexico, 'the greatest experience from the outside world I have ever had'. |
Women in Love
He wrote novels - Kangaroo contained marvellous descriptions of the Australian coastline, and The Plumed Serpent was a powerful evocation of Mexico and its Aztec religion - and hundreds of poems as well as travel books. Lawrence had completed Women in Love in 1917 but could not get it accepted by a publisher. In a letter to a friend he wrote: 'Nobody will publish my novel Women in Love - my best piece of work. The publishers say it is too strong for an English public. Poor darling English public, when will it go in for a little spiritual athletics?' It was eventually published in the United States where an action against it failed.
In 1923 Frieda came back to London to see her children and Lawrence came home to spend Christmas with his sisters. On their return to New Mexico, Lawrence fell ill with tuberculosis and the doctors warned Frieda: 'A year or two at the most.' Lawrence stubbornly never accepted it, calling his illness influenza.
Returning to Italy again, the Lawrences finally settled in Florence where he wrote his most controversial book, Lady Chatterley's Lover. 'Now I'm busy here printing my new novel for a private edition here in Florence . . . I expect the publishers will publish an expurgated version in the autumn. But I must bring out the book complete. It is - in the latter half at least - a phallic novel, but tender and delicate.'
An expurgated version was published in England in 1932 but the detailed and poetic descriptions of sexual union and his uncompromising use of four-letter words caused the book to be unpublishable in England until Penguin Books produced a complete text in 1960. Prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, Penguin Books were acquitted after a celebrated trial during which many eminent authors appeared as witnesses for the defence.
The censorship ban was lifted which had a profound effect on future writing and publishing. Lawrence himself said of the book: 'I put forth this novel as an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today.'
Despite his weakening illness, Lawrence refused to enter a sanatorium, referring to his attacks as 'bronchial haemorrhages.' As he became weaker he changed his mind and was admitted to the Ad Astra Sanatorium at Vence in the South of France.
On 1 March 1930 he discharged himself from the sanatorium to a nearby villa. Extremely ill, he allowed Frieda to put on his shoes for him - he normally did everything for himself. Next day he read a little - the life of Christopher Columbus.
In the evening, whilst Frieda was holding him, his breathing became laboured and he died. He was aged 44. Only ten people attended the funeral - Lawrence's two sisters, Ada and Emily, unaware that he was near death, had no time to get there.
'We buried him very simply,' said Frieda, 'like a bird we put him away, a few of us who loved him.'
Lawrence was a moralist, believing that modern man was in danger of losing his ability to experience the quality of life. As Lawrence once told a fellow novelist: 'All you young writers have me to thank for what freedom you enjoy. It was I who set about smashing down the barriers.'
Lawrence
didn't serve in the war, suffered less than most and was
still alive, but later wrote: 'The war finished me, it was the spear
through the side of all sorrows and hopes.' The alert young man of 1914
had given way to a slumped figure (pictured right) with emaciated cheeks and
listless, sunken eyes, and forever with a cold. Apt to
quarrel with friends, his mood changes were abrupt and
almost every opinion he gave could be contradicted by
what he had said, or written, earlier. During the war he
had met Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. They admired each other and
remained good friends until Lawrence's death. The warmth
of his letters to his friends never diminished.