Washed away in the wild
HE exalted all things wild – so no surprise DH Lawrence celebrates wild-swimming too!
When Cyril, George and Trip the dog brave an “icily cold” pond, in The White Peacock, there is “vigorous poetry of action”. Heroine of The Rainbow, Ursula, skinnydips intimately one rainy night with teacher, Winifred Inger.
From his Cornish paradise in 1916, Lawrence writes of “waves mountains high” lifting and flinging him. How “exciting”, “alarming”, “frightening” too, “when one is naked”, near “so many rocks”! The sea rises “in a threatening wall”, with “pale green fire shooting along, then bursting in a wild incandescence of foam”. It’s “great fun” and “so lovely to recognise the non-human elements”, even being hurled by this “wonderful water”.
Harriet and Somers, in Kangaroo, take “a frightened dip” in Australia. Frequent “great rollers” rear up “so huge and white and fanged, in a front attack”. From their shallow “dribbling back-wash” they’re thrown helplessly, “rolling a dozen yards in” and “banged against the pebbles”. Somers hadn’t realised “he weighed so little... was such a scrap of unimportance”. Nearby, boys bathe in “warm lagoons”, then “roll in sand and play... like real young animals, mindless as opossums, lunging about”.
Johanna and Gilbert, of Mr Noon, on the jetty at Alpine Lake, Kochelsee, dangle their feet in “heavy clear water”. Johanna wanders off. When she returns, Gilbert is gone. Has he slipped into “the deep, ice-heavy water”, and drowned? He re-appears. He’s been looking for her!
It’s no false alarm, in Women In Love, when Diane Crich falls into Willey Water from a pleasure craft. We’ve seen her brother Gerald dive into the pond at Breadalby, “scarlet silk kerchief round his loins”, joining others, swimming “like a shoal of seals”. Now he submerges, frantically searching for his missing sister. He clambers out, “breathing hoarsely... like an animal that is suffering”. There’s “a whole universe down there,” he stammers, “teeth chattering”,.
The lake’s drained: two drowned bodies found. Diane’s arms tight around the neck “of young Dr. Brindell”, who’d sought to save her, choking him.
■■ 100 years ago, on August 17, 1921, Lawrence tells Schofield Thayer (editor, The Dial) how snowfalls caused seven people to perish on an Austrian glacier. He loathes that “accursed white element”. Is leaving “to eat yellow figs” again. Having “drowned four months” in “the Teutonic world”, now he’s “going to swim out. . .like a watersprite”. But, his “knees lose their brassy strength at the thought” of “AMERICA”!