Faced with adversity? Keep chirpy
COMPLIANCE with Covid restrictions can have an adverse impact on individual well-being.
Life and health are precious, but so is freedom, and not all can cope with pressure.
A remarkable long letter D.H. Lawrence sent his old friend and neighbour Gertrude Cooper from Florence on 23rd Jan 1927 concerns facing adversity with fortitude. Her lung operation impending, Gertie is “between the hammer and the anvil” in her “fight for life”. To “stay brave” and “not weaken or fret” is vital. “While we live we must be game. And when we die, we’ll die game too” is the heroic Lawrentian assertion.
Do listen to the doctor, Lawrence advises, but the “final decision” must come “out of your own real self.”
His nature diary is respite. Narcissi appear, shepherds whistle and call. The Appenine mountains glimmer with snow. He’s seen butterflies, a bee, and glimpsed “the tail of a little lizard go whisking down a hole.” One day Gertie “must come”!
His pal Brewster called, fresh from touring the Buddhist monasteries of India - “hoping for Buddhism to cheer his soul”. But “It hasn’t done him much good.”
He’s had from Pamela (nickname of his sister Emily) a “not very chirpy letter”. Although she “ought to be happy”, with “nothing really to worry her”, she “doesn’t look on the rosy side of life.”
Lawrence recalls how in Lynn Croft they had autograph albums and “put verses and little paintings in them.”
Francis Cooper once wrote in one some Anglicised lines from a satirical Robert Burns dialect poem, Twa Dogs. . .
“But human bodies are such fools
For all their colleges and schools
That when no real ills perplex ‘em
They make enough themselves to vex ‘em.”
Lawrence feels it’s true that people better off than Gertie are “growsing and grizzling and making their lives a misery instead of being thankful they’ve got off so lightly.”
So, “keep as chirpy as you can”. Don’t get “downcast and depressed”. For, “It’s a case of Onward Christian Soldiers”.
100 years ago, 18th Oct 1920, Lawrence writes to American agent Robert Mountsier that he’s back at Taormina on Sicily.
He thinks unstable Italy “will revolute, but. . .the final effect I don’t know.” The exchange rate “will drop”, Italy may “go bust”, but Sicily should “be quiet enough.”
Martin Secker, due to publish The Lost Girl, “is a shifty dog, as they all are.”
Seltzer can “do Studies in Classic American Literature in a limited edition, if he sees fit.”
Oxford Press are sending “final proofs” of Movements in European History, which “might sell for schools”.