- 1 Lawrence of course considered himself a serious writer first and foremost. As he wrote to Edward Ga (...)
- 2 See Bayley 4. In Katherine Mansfield’s October 1918 letter to Ottoline Morrell she wrote of Lawrenc (...)
1Lawrence is widely seen as a “serious”1 and by some a humourless2 writer. He is smiling in less than a handful of his surviving photographs, which number well over a hundred. However, the 1996 collection of essays Lawrence and Comedy, edited by Paul Eggert and John Worthen, has shown how much of a generalisation these opinions are. The essay contributed by Mark Kinkead-Weekes focused on Lawrence as a humorous letter-writer but concentrated on relatively short periods of Lawrence’s career (Eggert and Worthen 180-191). This survey will cast the net wider and examine whether Kinkead-Weekes’ conclusions hold good over the whole period of Lawrence’s surviving correspondence, how resistant to tragedy he was, and how, despite all adversity, hope was expressed in his correspondence through his humour.
- 3 Such as the “country of my heart” letter to Rolf Gardiner (Lv 591-3, 592) or the “I shall never for (...)
2I will begin by looking at why Lawrence’s correspondence is important. First, the significance of Lawrence’s correspondence compared to that of other writers has been widely appreciated. As each volume of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters was published it was widely and generally very favourably reviewed. Now that project has been completed Joyjit Ghosh has published a full-length book on the correspondence, Imaging D.H. Lawrence His Mind and His Art in Letters (2012). He commented that “[i]t is a well-recognised fact that D. H. Lawrence was a remarkable letter writer and in the domain of English letter writers his place is perhaps next only to that of John Keats” (14). James T. Boulton, general editor of the Cambridge Letters, compared the correspondence to that of Byron and Henry James (The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence xxx). The second significance is what the letters tell us. Writing in his 2008 doctoral thesis on Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, Oliver Taylor noted the fact that the letters “remain undervalued as literary products in their own right” and they have been used not just for biographical information but as a “means of understanding the aims and production of Lawrence’s other writing.” Recognising that while individual letters have been “celebrated for their virtuosity and bravura’3 Taylor points out though that “attention has yet to be given to Lawrence’s changing epistolary voice across his career and to his complex relationship with the letter form itself” (55). To state the obvious, understanding his correspondence is important to understanding Lawrence. We know from the vast amount that survives that it was part of his daily routine, continuing even when he was very ill, but still managing at times to remain humorous. For example, in a letter to Rhys Davies of 26 May 1929, Lawrence wrote that his letter was his “most serious contribution to literature these [past] six weeks” (Lvii 309). As a spontaneous form of communication that did not require formality, correspondence was an ideal medium for Lawrence. As he wrote to Cynthia Asquith in November 1913:
Because I feel frightfully disagreeable, and not fit to consecrate myself to novels or to short stories, I’ll write a letter. I like to write when I feel spiteful: it’s like having a good sneeze. Don’t mind, will you. (Lii 106)
3And comedy was another of the plural voices that Lawrence deployed in his letter-writing. In a similar vein, comedy is often evident in the inscriptions provided by Lawrence, the quasi-correspondence contained in the presentation copies of his books, which I have written about elsewhere (Long).
4Mark Kinkead-Weekes’ essay, “Humour in the Letters of D. H. Lawrence,” examines in detail the comedy in Lawrence’s lengthy letter to Esther Andrews of 23 August 1917, sent from Zennor. It focused on a concert put on in St. Ives by eccentric minor poet and “occultist hippy” Meredith Starr and his wife, which Lawrence went to with his farming neighbours the Hockings. The Starrs were the couple that Lawrence later described in his letter to Cynthia Asquith of 3 September 1917:
There are nearby some herb-eating occultists, a Meredith Starr and Lady Mary ditto: she half caste, daughter of Earl of Stamford. They fast, or eat nettles: they descend naked into old mine-shafts, and there meditate for hours and hours, upon their own transcendent infinitude: they descend on us like a swarm of locusts, and devour all the food on shelf or board: they even gave a concert, and made most dreadful fools of themselves, in St. Ives: violent correspondence in the St. Ives Times. (Liii 158)
- 4 The introductory sections to most of the chapters in Eggert and Worthen provide useful background o (...)
5Kinkead-Weekes therefore had excellent material for his essay, describing the subject-matter of the letter as the “gift of a clownish plot” and Lawrence’s “fine eye for incongruity,” “pleasing exactitude” in his language (182), “powers of observation and staging,” with the “familiar made exceeding strange.” He noted Lawrence’s characteristic verbal wit through “playing off two unlikely words against each other” but humour that is “very often oral – which is why it can often be missed – it needs to be read out loud.” He commented on Lawrence’s “comic mimicry,” his “bathos” and occasional “malice”(183). He then continued with brief examples of comedy in a few other letters over the six months from June to December 1913, where he found Lawrence’s ability to “laugh at the worst of times” as he “met the disaster […] by humorous exaggeration.” Looking at the letters as opposed to the works (where, as the other essays in the Lawrence and Comedy collection show, Lawrence had a rather different relationship with his readers4). Kinkead-Weekes noted that he could see in Lawrence’s temperament something “more spontaneous than worked-up set pieces like the Starr concert.” There were examples of a “comic character created wholly as a voice” (184), the “touch of malice in deflating the sentimental or pretentious,” “humour turned on himself,” and the “comedy of incongruity” (185) but also the “controlled anticlimax,” “puncturing” and a “playfulness of language” (186) as well as regular “comic self-deprecation.” Kinkead-Weekes identified Lawrence’s use of humour “to proportion things that otherwise could be painful” (187), his working up a “comic frenzy” (188) and his “joy of incongruity for its own animated sake” as well as “more elaborate ‘turns’” (189).
- 5 ‘The division of letters between volumes has been made to satisfy two criteria: rough equality of v (...)
6My methodology will be the opposite of that of Kinkead-Weekes. His approach was to identify a single humorous letter and to dissect the comedic elements in it, then to carry out a brief survey of correspondence over a short period early on in Lawrence’s writing career, somewhat after the trauma of the death of his mother but before the great challenges of World War I, his lack of success in his writing career, his regular ill health and final decline. My approach is to survey the whole period of the surviving correspondence, and to see if the comedy in it varied over time. In other words, was what Kinkead-Weekes described as “spontaneous humour in letter after letter, written without revision” indeed a “constant of his temperament” (186)? For those purposes I have divided Lawrence’s life into sections. In the absence of any better scheme I have followed the volume divisions in the Cambridge Edition of the Letters.5 I will describe the features and particular challenges of each period. Space only permits me to provide a few examples in each period to demonstrate whether and how Lawrence fought those adversities, and whether hope shone through via his humour.
7Turning to the first period under review, that of the first volume of Letters which takes us up to the publication of Sons and Lovers in 1913 and Lawrence’s arrival as a major writer, the correspondence begins generally quite seriously, relating to his relationships with younger women, his early writing, the background of the declining health of his mother and of course his own ill-health. Relatively little comedy is to be found early on but after the initial difficulties with Ernest Weekley his transformative relationship with Frieda became a source of more humour in the correspondence. As early as 7 September 1912 in a letter to Edward Garnett from Riva, typically for its time very much a joint composition, much of what is said is about the writing of Sons and Lovers and the plans the two of them had. Then on a completely different note Frieda mentioned the hats that her sister had sent to her, adding that Lawrence “is trying them on in an undescribable get-up and the most beautiful Asphodel pose!” to which he interjected “‘by ‘get-up’ she means ‘sans anything.’ She always was a brazen bitch” (Li 449). And on 17 January 1913 he wrote for school-teacher and former colleague Arthur McLeod a tour de force description of the trip he made to see an Italian production of Hamlet in Gargnano, during which he “almost fell out of my little box trying to suppress my laughter” and “thought my ears would fall off” (Li 505).
8In the second volume, taking us to 1916 and the completion of the writing of Women in Love, there is considerable oscillation in Lawrence’s mood. This time included a substantial increase in the number of his literary contacts, his marriage, and meeting the lifelong friends and significant correspondents Catherine Carswell and S.S. Koteliansky. However, his literary career did not proceed as intended. His great novel The Rainbow was banned and war was declared, blocking his plans to travel overseas. The war years are those most analysed in essays on Lawrence’s correspondence, and there was no greater challenge to his morale. But this period started well. For example, writing to Cynthia Asquith from Irschenhausen on 20 August 1913 he told of the happy times he was having and was able to laugh off the bad weather:
But it rains – oh Lord! – the rain positively stands up on end. Sometimes one sees the deer jumping up and down to get the wet out of their jackets, and the squirrels simply hang out by their tails, like washing. I take one morning run around the house in my bathing suit in lieu of a shower bath. (Lii 63)
9And in other insights into his life with Frieda after they moved to Lerici he described her finding “a nice little steak” when he had filled himself up with nothing better than carrots (Lii 105), the “thunderstorms of tragedy” they experienced (Lii 107), or the hilarious saga of the delivery by steamer and rowing boat of Frieda’s piano (Lii 107-8).
10The correspondence becomes decidedly more sober after the outbreak of war, but he was still able to write an amusing letter to a depressed Amy Lowell to try to cheer her up, describing the entertaining party he planned at The Triangle in Chesham at Christmas 1914 and some play-acting of scenes between Frieda and Ernest Weekley, her “quondam husband” as Lawrence described him (Lii 243-5). There followed some bleak correspondence as the reality and length of the war sank in, his seeing a Zeppelin raid over London in September 1915 (Lii 389-90), and his medical examinations. But there could still be humour even if it was perhaps sometimes unintentional. For example, writing to J. D. Beresford from Porthcothan on 11 February 1916 he was severely criticising the Cornish people:
But curse them, they are entirely mindless, and yet they are living purely for social advancement […] They ought all to die. Not that I’ve seen very much of them – I’ve been laid up in bed. But going out, in the motor car and so on, one sees them and feels them and knows what they are like. (Lii 520)
11In another example of his mood, a fortnight later he wrote to Ottoline Morrell thanking her for the blue and black counterpane that she had sent him, that made him “laugh” and be “jolly” (Lii 538).
12The third volume of Letters, taking us to 1921 and the first publication of Women in Love in England, begins with a particularly bleak period. Initially in Cornwall, Lawrence was away from London and the most visible effects of the war but he was never far from abject poverty. Even amongst all his financial hardship and lack of literary success on 23 August 1917 he was able to send Esther Andrews the brilliantly funny letter analysed by Mark Kinkead-Weekes referred to above, describing the concert put on by Meredith Starr (Lviii 24-7). Even with the war over he still suffered. An example of the rebukes he issued at the time was to publisher of Bay Cyril Beaumont, who was taking so long over the book that Lawrence quipped “I believe you intend this to be one of my posthumous works […]” (Lviii 29). Desperate to get away from the controls of bourgeois society, in 1919 he travelled to the Continent. From Picinisco, he wrote to Rosalind Baynes on 16 December 1919 of the “primitive” conditions he was living in. Again, in spite of all adversity he was undefeated and was able to write humorously of his local setting and of Orazio Cervi, who had been an artist’s model for her father:
Orazio is a queer creature – so nice, but slow and tentative. I shall have to dart around. […] At the moment a terrible commotion, bagpipes under the window, and a wild howling kind of ballad, utterly unintelligible – Christmas serenade. It happens every day now, till Christmas. (Liii 432)
13In rather happier circumstances, at Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, on 31 March 1920 he wrote to Francis Brett Young’s wife Jessica of the great fun he was having in the local social scene, delivering a hilarious description of the eccentrics he met at Mary Cannan’s:
My hat, the people: the poor ricketty Baroness (American married to a Dane) with buttercup hair: the gaga Duca di Brontë, alias Mr Hood, but always called (by the English, not by natives) The Duca – like The Lord: then the runaway French couple whom the police arrested (what for? is the motto): then Dr Rogers from Cambridge hypnotising Danish damsels with fox-skins over their shoulders and glaucous eyes across the lunch table, over poached eggs, and making the table heave when the oranges are skinned: then the actress from the Opera, very chic de la chic: then – but why enumerate. (Liii 496)
14And so it continued. Visiting his mother-in-law for a couple of months from April to early July 1921 he was able to send a generally jovial letter to Achsah Brewster, and referring to a mutual acquaintance wrote “Nellie Morrison is an ass who would say a pudding on a dish looked like Buddha, if only you crossed the spoon and fork in front to look like two cross-legs” (Liii 720).
15The fourth volume of Letters takes us up to Lawrence’s arrival in New York, a period in which he tired of Europe and wanted to see the New World, specifically a place where he and his writing would flourish. He travelled from place to place, restively. The earlier letters from Italy are generally serious, factual and business-like, lacking in humour. Happy to be traveling east he wrote to his mother-in-law of his stop-off in Egypt en route to Ceylon, giving an amusing description of the local women shopping as “little waddling heaps of black crèpe” or “black woman-parcels” (Liv 211). And from Buffalo in a generally business-like letter to Thomas Seltzer of 25 August 1923 he touched on his visits to the “blue blood” of America. With his regular self-parody he wrote: “You would hardly know me, I am so well-behaved. A perfect chameleon. But the same old sphinx of a me looking at the different grimaces of the sphinx of life” (Liv 492). He was equally dry in his humour about the locals in Mexico. Writing to Witter Bynner on 5 October 1923 he described seeing a dead dog at a market: “The meat vender said to the vegetable man: You’d better throw it out. The veg-man looked at the dead dog and saw no reason for throwing it out. So no doubt it still lies there” (Liv 506).
- 6 Further disparaging (but intended to be humorous) remarks about German “old ladies” were made in La (...)
- 7 Whilst there Lawrence’s trip to the eccentric Sitwells inspired further material for amusing corres (...)
16Turning to the period covered by the fifth volume, taking us to March 1927, his peregrinations did not diminish. Although very fond of the Kiowa Ranch in New Mexico, Lawrence’s relationship with Mabel Dodge Luhan broke down and so did Frieda’s with his disciple Dorothy Brett. Moving to Mexico he was seriously ill and he returned to Europe. During a visit to his mother-in-law in Baden-Baden he wrote an entertaining letter to Brett on 4 November 1925, describing how he had to “play whist with ancient Baronesses, Countesses and Excellencies”6 and providing his (then) unfavourable opinions of Frieda’s children with their “sort of suburban bounce and suffisance” and her son Monty who “kept his loftiness to the Vic[toria] and Albert Museum, and soon, very probably, will sit in one of the glass cases, as a specimen of the perfect young Englishman” (Lv 333). But he then continued to Italy, where he lived longer than anywhere during his career, initially in Spotorno, then at the Villa Mirenda near Florence.7 At this time he started painting again and wrote the first two versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. These were relatively happy, productive times but these creative outpourings led to considerable controversy.
17In the sixth volume, covering the period from Lawrence’s Etruscan tour to his move to the south of France, the correspondence is dominated by the publication and distribution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He was becoming so unwell that he was travelling much less – he never again left Europe. As he wrote to Koteliansky on 23 December 1927: “I do think that this is the low-water mark of existence. I never felt so near the brink of the abyss” (Lvi 247). But with characteristic optimism and resilience he continued: “in 1928 something is bound to begin new” (ibid.). That hope and resistance to the tragedy of his premature terminal illness was reflected in his correspondence, which was voluminous at this time. Lawrence was a very good correspondent with the young – a good uncle for example to Peggy King and John Clarke, and a friend to his close friends’ children, such as Harwood Brewster, sending money, books and other presents. He wrote to her a chatty letter on 12 August 1927. It ended with a typically witty reference to the statues in the grounds of the palazzo she was staying in: “give the blue Venus a kiss from me, and wipe young Mercury’s nose. As for the rest of the statues, I refuse to have any communication with them” (Lvi 126).
18Lawrence’s outrage at criticism of his work can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from humour, for example when he grumbled about Compton Mackenzie being identified with The Man Who Loved Islands adding “I may be identified with the Man in the Moon, or with Mr Crippen [...] but wherein does it alter me?” (Lvi 218). His dislike of the middle class was a constant theme, for example when he commented on Catherine Carswell’s life of Robert Burns. He mentioned the biography by Lockhart, opining: “Those damned middle-class Lockharts grew lilies of the valley up their arses, to hear them talk” (Lvi 231). As always, the humour during this period is very varied. In another example he satirised Frieda’s behaviour, this time in a letter to her mother of 18 December 1927:
You’ve heard that Frieda wants to play the holiest of the holy – she is already Saint Frieda, butter couldn’t melt in her mouth: because she has got a Bandelli child into hospital. But thank the Lord the child is being difficult, and Saint Frieda begins to be bored and turn all-too-human again. (Lvi 243)
- 8 Ironically as late as 1 September 1929 Lawrence wrote to his sister Ada that he had no children “at (...)
19The business of producing, and making a healthy profit from, Lady Chatterley’s Lover produced some of Lawrence’s best correspondence. Just one example of the humour in it is the 2 April 1928 letter to the Huxleys in which, having joked about the book destroying his “at last respectable reputation” he teased Maria for her typing errors: “all those little mistakes you made, and I followed like Wenceslas’s page so patiently in your footsteps: now it’s a Florentine printer. […] The word is his blind spot” (Lvi 353). And still, in spite of how serious it was, he was able to joke about his ill-health. He wrote to them again on 31 July 1928: “have been under the altitude – felt perfectly wretched, and made design for my tombstone in Gsteig churchyard, with suitable inscription […] However, I decided to live a little longer […]” (Lvi 483)8
20The final volume of the Letters covers the period when Lawrence’s work had its greatest challenges from the authorities in Britain – not just over Lady Chatterley’s Lover but his poetry collection Pansies and the paintings he exhibited too. His health and good spirits were damaged by that and the pirating of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Even so, writing to Pino Orioli from Germany on 22 July 1929 he could still satirise people there, and in particular Frieda:
She [Frieda] is very well, and as usual, pretends to love it here, and as usual, secretly rather hates it. The Germans are most curious. They love things just because they have a sentimental reason for loving them – das Heimatland, der Tannenbaum, das Brünnele, das Bachlein [the homeland, the fir-tree, the little fountain, the rivulet] – the very words send a German into a swoon of love, which is as often as not entirely false. (Lvii 384)
21And Lawrence never lost his appetite for telling amusing anecdotes. For example, in a letter of 21 November 1929 he told Max Mohr of the entertaining visit by Madame Douillet, the proprietress of the Hotel Beau Rivage in Bandol, where he had stayed, some months before and how she was puzzled by the Buddhist eating habits of the Brewsters. He then continued: “she is going to send us some little gold-fish – alive and swimming […] I’m afraid Monsieur Mickie Beau Soleil, le chat jaune, la trouvera fort à son gout [the marmalade cat will find it very much to his taste]” (Lvii 570). And as late as 17 January 1930 he wrote to Madame Douillet that “le poisson vit gaiment, toujours un peu cicatrisé [the fish lives joyfully, always a trifle scarred]” (JDHLS Volume 1, Number 2 (2007) 17)!
22As the examples from each period of Lawrence’s life show, against a background of significant and changing challenges, he used comedy as a coping mechanism, as was his writing generally. But more than that, its regularity reflected his ability and desire to resist tragedy in the many forms he faced during his relatively short life. The nature of the humour changed and was very varied, with blacker humour, sarcasm and rebuke being more frequent in his later years than the lighter hearted humour of the earlier years. The vast majority of his correspondence was indeed serious and often very direct in style, whether it be about politics or his business affairs, literature, his travels or family matters. But as the extracts provided demonstrate, the correspondence is regularly humorous, even when at times it might not be expected. As Kinkead-Weekes concluded his own essay:
What humour is (or what is humorous) seem questions impossible to pursue sufficiently humorously – and tastes in jokes notoriously differ. But that Lawrence had a sense of humour, ingrained, and constant, admits I think of no doubt, though there are periods of his life (more miserable than June to December 1913) when it appears more fitfully. We know that his comic turns could make listeners helpless with laughter. The letters however tend not to be worked up to that extent; and are mostly rather playful than side-splitting. But though Lawrence was notoriously liable to fall into rages, the evidence shows that, in the full sense of the term, his sense of humour was good-tempered, proportioning, as well as delightful.
(Eggert and Worthen 190)
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