Furniture cluttering our minds
WHEN May Chambers Holbrook, sister of DH Lawrence’s career-launching “princess” Jessie Chambers, first visited the new Lawrence family home at Brickyard Closes, Eastwood, perched “above the clay pits” as on a “cliff”, she was “shown with pride the parlour, the carpet, the suite, the vases and ornaments, the family group in a handsome frame on the wall facing the bay window” and the “wide view over the valley crowning its far side.”
As May stood in admiration, Lawrence’s elder sister Emily asked “Have you got a suite?” Mrs Lawrence snapped, “Mind your own business. If you ask me no questions, you get no lies, do you child?”
Lawrence inherited this sharp tongue, and touchiness over furnishings.
Cynthia Asquith recalled him tensely pacing around her drawing room in 1919 in a sudden state of “violent aversion” to “a fairly harmless little French table.” To Lawrence it epitomised the “Would-be”, “the selfconsciously pretentious.” Such was his stream of invective that the “offending object” began looking “terribly trivial and strainedly elegant.” Soon after the Asquiths sold it!
Condemning our materialistic preoccupation with the “furniture of life” at the expense of human relationships, Lawrence insisted Cynthia “Come away!” immediately. “Free yourself, at once, or before you know where you are, your furniture will be on top instead of under you.”
Cynthia subsequently dreamed that the legs of her tables and chairs were trampling her to death!
Lawrence’s 1928 story, Things, rather unfairly, portrays his devoted friends the Brewsters as an American couple burdened by a mania for acquiring such possessions.
Three poems lament these obsessions. . .The Human Face once a window “to the strange horizons”, is now a grimace “with eyes like the interiors of stuffy rooms, furnished.”
Portraits - are “uninteresting”, because human expressions are “arranged”, like drawing-rooms, with similar “sets of emotional and mental furniture.”
Furniture - whether “the idiotic furniture of their houses”, or “the conceited furniture of their minds”, or “their emotional furnishings”. . .”it all amounts to the same thing, furniture, usually in suites.”
■ 100 years ago, May 1921, Lawrence scatters a brilliant bouquet of letters. To Dr Kippenberg he blasts post-war “national prejudice”, as “so boring and stupid” “it wearies me.” He asks Else Jaffe to find a German home for young student, Stephen, son of Dr. Haden Guest. Prize bloom goes to the Brewsters. “I believe in wrath and the gnashing of teeth and crunching of cowards bones”, he raves. He’s finishing his novel Aaron’s Rod. Aaron’s “misbehaving. . .putting ten fingers to his nose at everything. Damn heaven. Damn holiness. Damn Nirvana. Damn it all.”