Darkness visible
OUR journey into winter darkness complete, let’s look forward to the light again!
Cheeky character Clive James once jested of DH Lawrence’s use of the word “dark” that, “not only (as is well known) is it the key adjective in all of Lawrence, but Lawrence’s travels can usefully be summarised as an interminable search for a noun it can be firmly attached too”.
A more serious Lawrence scholar, Keith Sagar, notes how “darkness had always been a positive for Lawrence, associated with origins, powers, and the resources of the unconscious”.
100 years ago, December 17, 1921, Lawrence wrote to publisher Martin Secker from Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, that he’s “getting a ship from Palermo to go to New Mexico,” and is “tight for money”. Would Secker pay anything owing on The Lost Girl into London County Westminster and Parrs Bank, on the Strand, please? He added: “Greetings for Christmas.”
■■On December 19, Lawrence thanks Dr Kippenberg for sending the 18,000-mark cheque to his mother-in-law. “How pleased she is! She can have a real Christmas.” He hopes the translation of The Rainbow will “pay” Dr K back, and offers: “Many good wishes for the season.”
On December 20, Lawrence tells SS Koteliansky “I sent you and Sonia a book for Christmas – though I feel very unchristmaslike. No, I can’t come back to England – can’t. Don’t believe in your good simple people.”
■■Also on December 20, he told Violet Monk “We are preparing for Christmas – but don’t feel a bit like it”. He asks after “Miss Lambert”. (Violet Monk and Cecily Lambert live at Grimsbury Farm, setting for Lawrence’s novella The Fox). “So sunny and beautiful here just now – warm as summer. Best wishes from us both.”
On December 21, Lawrence says he’s “glad” Robert Mountsier is “back in New York”: “I feel I can trust you. And is there a publisher on earth that one can really trust? I hope Seltzer isn’t going to go bankrupt again.” [Seltzer’s wife, Adele, told her sister: “People think marvels of Thomas that he has held his own during these fearful times. Old established businesses have gone crash, and he has kept up. But it has been a miserable struggle.”] Mountsier has been “discouraging about Taos”, but Lawrence senses he’ll “like New Mexico,” adding: “Don’t be so sure you won’t come to see us in Taos.”
Again on the 21st, Lawrence has sent Catherine Carswell an “amusing” novel, Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos. “We really want to sail away... feel so miserably tired of Europe.”