The genius and the gentians
THE feast day of Michaelmas, marking the culmination of the productive season, falls on September 29 this year.
It receives an honourable mention in the opening to DH Lawrence’s great poem Bavarian Gentians: “Not every man has gentians in his house/in soft September, at slow sad Michaelmas.”
Lawrence began drafting this work in September 1929 while seriously ill in the Bavarian Alps. His sister-in-law, Dr Else Jafferichthofen, recalled visiting him “in a shady valley by Tegernsee... he was lying in a bare room in the mean village inn. Beside him stood a great bush of pale blue autumn gentians as the only furnishing.”
He was near to death. His wife Frieda recorded “some autumn nights when the end seemed to have come. I listened for his breath through the open door, all night long, an owl hooting in the walnut tree outside. In the dim dawn an enormous bunch of gentians I had put on the floor by his bed seemed the only living thing in the room”.
That doctors were administering phosphorus and arsenic to Lawrence didn’t help!
He improved at the end of the month with a move to the Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol. His bed faced the sea and the sunrise. “See, another day is given me,” he rejoiced to Frieda, as the morning sun lit up the bay.
Lawrence experienced flowers with uncanny empathy and imaginative intensity and, in Gladness Of Death, had declared: “I have always wanted to be as the flowers are, so unhampered in their living and dying.”
His genius responded to gentians. These erect, ribbed, torch-like, living flames of blue darkness might be his guide to the “sightless realm”, to the dense gloom of Pluto’s underworld, where Persephone must go in “frosted September”. The journey of the soul from death to renewal might begin... ”lead me then, lead the way/ Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!”
■ 100 years ago, on September 29, 1921, Lawrence wrote to Earl and Achsah Brewster that he and Frieda returned to Sicily “in the dark and the rain of last night”. “But how lovely it is here, with the great window of the eastern sky seaward,” It’s his favourite place in Italy. He adores Fontana Vecchia. But “the threads” of his heart and soul are “broken” in Europe, Next year he’ll travel “very gently monetarily”, possibly by “tramp steamer”, east, then west. His post included “would-be official denunciation of Women In Love, from John Bull” – who’s “all things evil”! Philip Heseltine’s libel action is “impending”. “Mille fois merde!”, Lawrence curses.