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Lawrence and the “homeless soul”

Jane Costin

Résumé

Beginning by exploring ideas of “home,” this article shows how Lawrence’s reaction to Zennor in Cornwall establishes that, at least for a while, this was a place Lawrence regarded as home. In examining what contributes to feelings of “home,” it will make reference to “The Cathedral” chapter in The Rainbow where Will’s soul is depicted as being “homeless” because it is challenged by ideas outside of the church. It will then contrast this with Lawrence’s reaction to such matters. It will explain how a particular aspect of Zennor during the time Lawrence lived there were its connections to Aleister Crowley and occult ideas - things that were outside the church and that questioned Lawrence’s thinking. It will then look at Lawrence’s interest in the occult around this period, which will lead to the suggestion that, for Lawrence, a place that made his soul feel “homeless” was a place that he felt “at home.”

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Texte intégral

Introduction

1When thinking about Lawrence and ideas of home and homeland it is quickly apparent that Zennor in Cornwall holds a unique position because it is the only place that became his home and from which he was forcibly made homeless. In July 1916 Lawrence told Katherine Mansfield, “Really, one should find a place one can live in, and stay there. Geographical change doesn’t help one much. And people go from bad to worse. I think I shall be staring out from Higher Tregerthen when I am a nice old man of seventy” (2L 632). But, just fifteen months later on 12 October 1917, Lawrence was served notice under the Defence of the Realm Act that he had to leave Cornwall by 15 October.

  • 1 Jane Costin, “The Legacy of D.H. Lawrence’s Time in Cornwall.”
  • 2 Roger Slack’s taped interview with Stanley Hocking (undated). This is a more forthright account tha (...)
  • 3 Private correspondence with David Tovey Editor of The Flagstaff, the magazine of the Lamorna Societ (...)

2Lawrence was devastated and, as I have explored elsewhere, this banishment instigated his deep and enduring nostalgia for Zennor.1 The pretext for this expulsion was that he was suspected of assisting the enemy, of being a spy. There was no evidence. But, in those xenophobic times of the Great War when, as Lawrence suggests in Kangaroo “tales began to go round full-tilt” and there was “a mass of secret feeling against him,” when submarines were seen “off the coast,” boats were torpedoed within sight of land (3L 88), and there were stories that Germans from a submarine had gone ashore in Penzance (227, 228, 239), no evidence was needed. Fear had gripped Cornwall. Lawrence protested his innocence. But his very presence disturbed the community: a seemingly able-bodied man who took no part in the war, he had strange friends (including Cecil Gray who featured in local newspapers after being successfully prosecuted for breaking black out restrictions and heavily fined), a German wife, sang German songs and didn’t attend church. According to Stanley Hocking, it was this last offence that proved Lawrence’s undoing as the Reverend Rechab Vaughn – or his daughter – informed the authorities that they suspected Lawrence of colluding with the enemy, Hocking suggesting that if only Lawrence had gone to church everything would have been well.2 This seems rather naïve. Other people also had problems in Cornwall during the Great War: artists including Laura Knight had to petition the authorities to be allowed to work en plein air near the coast and David Tovey advises of “various instances of foreigners being hounded out of Cornwall during WW1 – Rolf Jonsson in Newlyn, Count Larisch in St Ives and a music teacher with a German Governess in Penzance.”3 Yet, as we will see, Hocking may, perhaps inadvertently, have pointed towards one source of the Reverend Vaughn’s animosity towards Lawrence: his interest in ideas that lay outside of the church.

3An episode in The Rainbow, when Will takes Anna to Lincoln Cathedral, offers a helpful context to this suggestion because Lawrence depicts Will’s encounter with symbols representing ideas outside the church as the cause of his soul becoming “homeless.” I will contrast this by exploring the idea that a place where Lawrence’s soul felt “homeless” was where he felt “at home.” But first I want to look at what the notion of “home” might have meant to Lawrence.

Lawrence and ideas of “Home”

  • 4 Feigel 118.
  • 5 Ibid., 139.

4In her recent book on Lawrence, Lara Feigel draws attention to how, for Lawrence, “to have a home or not to have a home” was one of his many “urgent, undecided questions,”4 and observes the “luxury” of his position, in that he could “discard houses at will” knowing that he would “still be homed.”5

5However, I would draw a distinction between having a house and having a home – as Lawrence appears to do himself. In the aftermath of his traumatic expulsion from Cornwall, Lawrence swiftly found several other houses to live in, initially going to Dollie Radford’s house in Well Walk in London before moving to Mecklenburgh Square to stay with H.D. and then, for a few months, he settled in Chapel Farm Cottage, another of Dollie’s properties. But Lawrence does not seem to regard any of these temporary accommodations as a home. In May 1918, Lawrence’s sister Ada gave Lawrence some stability by paying a year’s rent for Mountain Cottage (TE 436), a place Lawrence describes as “beautiful,” but not as “home” on arrival, describing himself as feeling “very lost and queer and exiled” and wishing he “could have gone back to Cornwall” (3L 241-242).

6Earlier than this, Lawrence’s separation of house and home can also be detected in the declaration he made, cited by Feigel, about his relationship to ideas of home and homelessness: “I know I shall be restless all my life. If I had a house and home, I should become wicked. I hate any thought of possessions sticking on to me like barnacles, at once I feel destructive. And wherever I am, after a while I begin to ail me to go away”. (2L 318) This letter was written to Lady Ottoline Morrell in April 1915 when they were discussing plans to renovate one of her cottages for him and Frieda to live in; here, Lawrence’s seeming grandiosity is amusing, yet provides an example of how he adapted his prose style to his reader: “A bathroom is infinitely more valuable in a cottage than in a big house, because in a cottage there is so little room, and very often, no servant, so it is well to escape the necessity of washstands and bath-tubs in the bedrooms” (2L 317). But Lawrence clarifies that he would not regard this as his own house, or as a home, and advises Ottoline “to furnish the cottage: then the whole thing will be always yours, complete” assuring her that “We shall be most glad to have a place we can always come to. And if you have need of the cottage, you will tell us at once”. (2L 318)

7Hence it is particularly striking that, in contrast to the life-long restlessness Lawrence anticipates in this letter to Ottoline, less than a year later, he is expressing an immediate sense of attachment to Zennor. Lawrence moved to Zennor on 29 February 1916 (2L 553), initially staying at The Tinner’s Arms, which he describes as “Maitland’s Inn” (2L 565). Lawrence was yet to move into his cottage at Higher Tregerthen. But, on 5 March, writing to Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry in a bid to encourage them to join him in settling there, Lawrence declares: “It seems to me we must strike some sort of a root, soon: because we must buckle to work. This here is the best place to live in which we shall find in England, I firmly believe” (2L 565 original emphasis). Three days later, whilst still staying at the Tinner’s Arms, he is calling the next-door cottage “Katherine’s house” and telling Mansfield and Murry “we will live there a long long time” (2L 569).

8Even at the early-stage it is clear that Lawrence’s intention is to put down roots in Zennor; this is more than just a temporary place to live in, he is envisioning Zennor as home. In his letters at this time Lawrence also discusses Rananim, his much talked about idea of a small community of like-minded people, hinting that he is viewing Zennor as a potential site for this organisation. Once he moved in to his small cottage in Higher Tregerthen, Lawrence’s letters describe his engagement in sustained bouts of home making for himself and then for Mansfield and Murry after they agreed to join him. In his own cottage he painted the walls pale pink and the ceiling white. From second hand wood his landlord gave him, Lawrence made book shelves that he painted royal blue (still in situ in 2016 although repainted white) and also a dresser “with a cupboard below and shelves for plates above” (2L 591). Furthermore, in the summer of 1917 Lawrence was extensively involved in preparing a house about three miles away, at Bosigran, so that Cecil Gray could move there.

9In order to furnish his own cottage Lawrence tasked Dollie Radford with sending him some practical necessities from his previous house (2L 578-579). But, belying his earlier statement to Ottoline about hating the idea of possessions sticking on him like barnacles, a letter to Mark Gertler on 22 March 1916 reveals there was one particular possession that had – emotionally – stuck on to him and which he desperately wanted: “I only miss my pair of brass candlesticks. Did Murry bring them to you? I do hope they are not lost, because they are the only thing that I have kept from my own home, and I am really attached to them. Will you let me know about them, if you can?” (2L 584).

10Here, Lawrence’s repeated questioning indicates his anxiety. These were his mother’s candlesticks. Writing to Samuel Koteliansky on 28 March 1916 Lawrence describes them as “old family relics” and asks “If you see anything of Gertler, ask him if he knows anything of my pair of brass candlesticks” (2L 589). Acknowledging his bond to this souvenir from his parent’s house, Lawrence is making efforts to acquire this token of his old home to place in a new location; suggesting that he is trying to “home” his cottage in Zennor.

11The candlesticks are physical objects, but clearly what is more important to Lawrence is the emotion they evoke. This provides some evidence for Joanna Richardson’s recent argument that home is: “A feeling, not a structure, […] but always likened to a space […] and a place […] Our home, or our quest for a home, is inextricably linked to our identity. […] Home is a feeling internalised, represented through emotions, memories, freedom to be our authentic selves.” Indeed, Lawrence’s attachment to the candlesticks seems to confirm Richardson’s notion “that even small objects carried with us to help us carry “home” in our heart.”

12Richardson’s ideas of “home” being linked to feelings and identity are also relevant to an episode in “The Cathedral” chapter in The Rainbow (187-191), when Lawrence depicts Will Brangwen’s soul being made “homeless.” The newly married Will takes his wife, Anna, to his “beloved” Lincoln Cathedral, which dominates the surrounding city and flat countryside; a place where he feels “at home.” Will assumes Anna’s desires are in total unison with his own because, at this point, he sees her not as an individual, but as an extension of himself. When the couple enter the cathedral, Lawrence uses long, rapturous, passages to convey Will’s ecstatic consummation with the building, it enfolds him – as he wants to enfold Anna – in the comforting and familiar certainty of patriarchy. For Will, the cathedral is a symbol of all he holds dear, of all that makes him feel “at home.” But, in contrast, Anna is described as “silenced rather than tuned to the place” recognising it as “a world not quite her own” (188).

13Anna is resentful of Will’s “transports and ecstasies” because they are confined by the building and what it represents. She recognises that outside of that structure are the wonder of “the stars and crystalline dark spaces […] where stars were wheeling in freedom, with freedom above them always higher”; the comparison making Anna feel persistently “roofed in” by the ethos of the church (188-189). Nevertheless, Anna is shown to be saved from being swept away by Will’s tide of emotional coercion by her recognition of female gargoyles in the cathedral. Lawrence imbues these small sculptures with significant meaning, presenting them as a visual metaphor for the many things that are left out of the church – including women – and as challenging illusions of omnipotence by both patriarchy and the church:

These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church. “However much there is inside here, there’s a good deal they haven’t got in,” the little faces mocked. (189)

14Perhaps in recognition that the gargoyles are a symbol of the threat posed to his ideals, Will is unwilling to even look at them, and refutes Anna’s idea that they are female. But Anna is unrepentant. She speculates that the sculptor put an image of his wife in the cathedral. This inclusion of women in the church makes her feel that she has got free of the patriarchal confines of the church and triumphed over Will. But it makes him bitterly angry. Lawrence states: “Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter – but dead, dead.” (R 190)

Will’s “homeless soul”

15Lawrence then goes on to complicate this situation even further by his startling revelation that something in Will, “responded more deeply to the sly little face that knew better, than he had done before to the perfect surge of his cathedral” (190). It is this unexpected ambivalence that “unhomes” Will’s soul. Instinctively, Will responds “more deeply” to what the gargoyles represent; the ideas that he knows exist outside of the church. But, at the same time, he is unable to refute the teachings of church and society and cannot relinquish his desire for the comfort of what the church represents. Being caught between these polarities instigates a conflict within Will’s soul. We are told his soul became “wretched and homeless” and that, “he could not bear to think of Anna’s ousting him from his beloved realities”. But, in what seems like a desperate attempt to cling on to convention, there is a suggestion that Will’s upset will only be temporary; that his soul is only “wretched and homeless” […] “for the time being” (190).

16Yet later in this chapter, Lawrence demonstrates that optimism was ill-founded. We see Will, now with two daughters, still struggling, but failing, to reconcile his passion for the church with “serving his wife and the little matriarchy” (193). Caught between these two poles, Will is trapped in a situation he is unable resolve; his soul will remain “homeless” because he can no longer find the certainty in which it is “at home.” Frustrated, he is keenly, and often angrily, aware of the limitations within himself that make him unable to either forsake one or accommodate both. It is this uncertainty that prevents Will’s soul from finding a home; offering an example for Richardson’s view that home is a feeling not a structure and is inextricably linked to our identity.

Lawrence’s “homeless soul”

  • 6 Jane Costin, “Lawrence and the Sea in Cornwall.”

17This contrasts with Lawrence’s experiences in Zennor. Previously, I have spoken about how Lawrence went to Cornwall with preconceived ideas linking that place with Arthurianism and patriarchy, and explored how Lawrence’s thinking changed once he got to Zennor and seems to have intuited an impression of Phoenician matriarchal society – an idea outside of the church.6 Like Will, Lawrence was attracted to such ideas. But, in total contrast to Will, whose soul was made “homeless” by his inability to reconcile new ideas with his established passions, I suggest that for Lawrence to feel “at home” his soul needed to be “homeless.”

18In my earlier quote from Lawrence’s letter to Ottoline where he spurned the idea of having a house and home, he recognised he would be “restless all his life.” But I suggest that restlessness should be seen not just as a physical restlessness to travel to different places, but also a deeper restlessness to engage with diverse ideas that were, like those represented by the gargoyles, outside of the church. Lawrence recognised he was a deeply religious man but, having found Christianity wanting, he tried to fill that void with other forms of religious belief, in 1907 telling the Reverend Robert Reid:

[…] it appears to me, a man gradually formulates his religion, be it what it may. A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification. So I contend that true Socialism is religion; that honest, fervent politics are religion; that whatever a man will labour for earnestly and in some measure unselfishly is religion. (1L 39-40)

19At this point, Lawrence’s nascent ideas of alternative religious belief focus on political thinking but, importantly, recognise the necessity for development and change. Hence, I see, Lawrence’s innate curiosity as leading him to explore all sorts of ideas outside of the church; not to necessarily adopt them for long – if at all – but to be alive to their possibilities in his quest to explore the mystery of living as part of the animate cosmos. Thus, I consider a “homeless soul” as an essential for Lawrence; and, importantly, a place that made Lawrence’s soul feel “homeless;” could be a place where he felt “at home.”

Ideas outside of the church in Zennor; Aleister Crowley and the occult

20Phoenician matriarchy was not the only idea outside of the church that Lawrence encountered in Zennor’s tiny community. During the time Lawrence lived in Zennor, a disproportionately high number of people there were actively engaged in exploring alternative ideas about society and many of them had a keen interest in the occult and magic religion. Here, I am not thinking about the longstanding connections between this specific area and traditional witchcraft, although Lawrence seems to have been aware of those. Rather, I am thinking of the ideas of Aleister Crowley, regarded either as the “wickedest man in England” or as “the cleverest Magician in England” depending on your perspective. Crowley visited Zennor many times both before and after Lawrence lived there and also lived there for a while.

  • 7 Lawrence never met John Westlake who died in 1913, but his widow, Alice Westlake visited Lawrence i (...)

21Crowley, a keen mountaineer, was initially attracted to Zennor by the excellent climbing opportunities the coastline offered there. Both Crowley and George Mallory (who later died in the third Everest expedition), were brought to Zennor by Arthur Westlake Andrews, an enthusiastic climber, who established a climbing club at Bosigran near Zennor. Andrews lived at the Old Poor House in Zennor, next door to his uncle John Westlake’s house Eagle’s Nest, which dominates the skyline above the cottage at Higher Tregerthen where Lawrence lived.7

22In 1907, with George Cecil Jones, Crowley had co-founded the A. A., an esoteric order through which he propagated the new religion of Thelema he was trying to establish. This organisation used various initiations – and drugs – with the aim of improving the individual in different ways so that they could better work for the advancement of humanity.

  • 8 Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon.

23It is not thought that Lawrence and Crowley ever met, and Lawrence was unimpressed by Crowley’s literary efforts; in 1910 he returned Ambergris to Grace Crawford with the comment that he “didn’t like it” (1L 171) and in 1929 wrote that he was feeling a “bit sorry” for P. R. “Inky” Stephensen because “you’ve got Aleister Crowley at such heavy tonnage, I feel his day is rather over” (7L 469). But then, as Ronald Hutton has noted,8 Crowley’s “only truly remarkable distinction lay in the field of magic” (178). Interestingly, Hutton considers the advice Crowley gave a friend in 1914, when trying to persuade him to start a new religious movement, as perfectly capturing “the spirit that was driving people like Lawrence.” And it is hard not to see echoes of Crowley’s ideas in Lawrence’s later writing, for example in The Plumed Serpent. Crowley states:

The time is just ripe for a natural religion. People like rites and ceremonies, and they are tired of hypothetical gods. Insist on the real benefits of the sun, the Mother-Force, the Father-force and so on; and show that by celebrating these benefits worthily the worshippers unite themselves more fully with the current of life. Let the religion be Joy, but with a worthy and dignified sorrow in death itself; and treat death as an ordeal, an initiation […] In short be the founder of a new and greater Pagan cult. (184)

24Yet, despite Lawrence’s disparagement of Crowley’s literary efforts, it is clear that he was also aware of Crowley’s popularity as an occultist and magician, as is indicated by a letter he wrote to Ernest Collings in March 1914 encouraging him to keep working at his art: “I think if you persist you will one day have a real boom. Because people will think you are an esoteric wonder-freak, and it will be a kind of aesthetic qualification to know you, as it was to know Beardsley, and is rather now, to know Alastair [sic]” (2L 157).

  • 9 In 1988 these were collected into a volume known as Golden Twigs which Crowley dedicated to Lawrenc (...)

25Hutton notes that Crowley shared preoccupations with other literary figures of his generation including Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, but considers “the most obvious is probably D.H. Lawrence” and links this to the influence that J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough had on both men. Crowley described Frazer as “the only man worthy of our attention” and Golden Bough as “invaluable” (177) – the work inspiring him to respond in 1916 in a series of short stories that were published anonymously.9 As we know, just prior to going to Cornwall in December 1915, Lawrence stated that reading Golden Bough convinced him of a belief that he had held for around ten years; the existence of “another seat of consciousness,” other than that of the brain and nerve system that he names as blood-consciousness (2L 470); a notion that he examined for the rest of his life.

26It is unfortunate we don’t know which edition of Frazer’s work Lawrence read because, as Hutton explains, there are important differences between them:

One of the purposes of The Golden Bough was to discredit Christianity. The most important argument of the whole work was that ancient peoples had believed in a dying and reviving god who represented the animating spirit of vegetation […] and had been represented in human form by sacred kings, who were killed after a set term or when their power of mind or body failed. Frazer’s implication was that the figure of Christ had been an outgrowth from this body of (to him erroneous and unnecessary) belief. (118)

27Hutton notes this was explored in the first edition (two volumes 1890) and explained a bit more clearly in the second edition (three volumes 1900), but in the third edition (twelve volumes 1906-1915), he observes that Frazer “drew back from speculation that Jesus had been killed as a divine king” instead praising his “beautiful spirit” (119).

28Viewing Frazer’s work, together with Sir Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture (which Lawrence read during his time in Zennor) as “doing further damage to the status of Christianity” by fostering “a delight in the primitive and the unreasonable” (121), Hutton links this impetus to an idealization of rural England; the “old ways” being viewed as a “comforting resistance to modernity” (121). Noting that Lawrence was influenced by the mystical socialism of Edward Carpenter rather than the traditions of theosophy and the Irish literary revival which inspired his contemporaries, W.B. Yeats and George Russell, Hutton sees all three men, and many others of their generation, as preoccupied with “reconciling humanity with the natural world, man with woman and Christianity with paganism” (165).

29In this context, and with reference to his own research on languages of paganism, Hutton observes the progression that takes place between The Rainbow (1915) and Kangaroo (1923). For whereas in The Rainbow Hutton considers that Lawrence demonstrates no special predilection for paganism, in the “Nightmare” chapter of Kangaroo, Hutton determines that Lawrence uses what he describes as the first language of paganism when Lawrence recounts Somers’ experience of Zennor, and comes very close to using the fourth affirmative language of paganism when Somers believes he succeeds in calling down the old Celtic deities from the moors behind his house in Zennor. (166) This indicates that Lawrence’s interest in paganism developed significantly during his time in Zennor, where he was mixing with people who had strong links to Aleister Crowley.

30Lawrence’s close friends Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine were acolytes of Crowley. As were Meredith Starr and his wife Lady Mary Stamford who moved to Zennor after their marriage in 1917 and lived just a short walk away from Lawrence. Starr came from a wealthy family and, in the early Twentieth century, wrote for Crowley’s publication The Equinox and also for The Occult Review which published articles and correspondence by many leading occultists, including Crowley. Lawrence mocked Starr and his wife describing them as “herb eating occulists” who “fast, or eat nettles: they descend naked into old mine-shafts, and there meditate for hours and hours, upon their own transcendent infinitude” and also complained that “they descend on us like a swarm of locusts and devour all the food on shelf or board” (3L 158). But, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes points out, Lawrence was interested in Starr’s books about occultism (TE 386).

31Lawrence’s interest in the occult whilst he was living in Zennor is also revealed by a letter he wrote to Frank Waldo in July 1917. Lawrence asks if he is a theosophist and, although confirming that he didn’t regard himself as one, observes: “the esoteric doctrines are marvellously illuminating […] Magic has interested me a good deal.” Furthermore, despite seeing flaws in occult ideas and magic, Lawrence states “There should be again a body of esoteric doctrine, defended from the herd” (3L 143).

32Lawrence’s letters from Zennor don’t tell us any more about his interests in the occult and magic, but this is unsurprising as Heseltine, Gray and Starr were neighbours he saw regularly. Besides which, he knew his letters were being opened and may well have been concerned about antagonising the authorities. However, after Lawrence was expelled from Zennor, this changes and his letters express a sustained interest in occult ideas.

33For example, in November 1917, during a heated and forthright exchange with Gray, Lawrence states that henceforth he will “abstain” from underworlds. The next day, Lawrence tells Gray that he and Frieda “need to go one world deeper in knowledge” and sharply criticises him – and others – for not revealing the different knowledge they have. Accusing Gray and others of what might be termed a “smoke and mirrors” deception, Lawrence accuses Gray and his associates of inhabiting “an underworld which is forever an underworld, never to be made open and whole” and of wanting everyone else to “inhabit a suggestive underworld which is never revealed or opened, only intimated, only felt between the initiated.” As Hutton suggests in his criticism of Crowley’s obscure and tortuous prose style, this obfuscation is characteristic of Crowley’s utterances (179), and it seems that here Gray was regurgitating his master’s style. Lawrence’s response to all this is that “I won’t have it. The old world must burst, the underworld must be an open and whole, new world” (3L 178-180). In April 1918 a letter to Mark Gertler confirms Lawrence’s continuing interest in the occult, his belief in magic and reveals with whom he was discussing these ideas:

I have been reading another book on Occultism. Do you know anybody who cares for this – magic, astrology, anything of that sort. It is very interesting, and important – though antipathetic to me. Certainly magic is a reality – not by any means the nonsense Bertie Russell says it is (3L 239).

34On 13 November of that year Lawrence’s advice to Nancy Henry demonstrates his familiarity with, and enthusiasm for, a range of occult works including The Occult Review:

  • 10 Editor’s note – Probably Dr David and Edith Eder, then in Jerusalem. Editor refers to an earlier le (...)
  • 11 Editor’s note – the two-volume work would be The Secret Doctrine.

Try and get hold of Mme. Blavatsky’s books – they are big and expensive – the friends I used to borrow them from are out of England now.10 But get from some library or other Isis Unveiled, and better still the two vol work whose name I forget.11 Rider, the publisher of the Occult Review – try that – publishes all these books […] But look in the Occult Review. (3L 298-299)

Conclusion

35Therefore, what I hope all this demonstrates is that Lawrence enthusiastically engaged with ideas outside of the church during his time in Zennor. In a similar manner to the way the gargoyles in Lincoln cathedral affected Will Brangwyn, these ideas strongly attracted Lawrence. I suggest it was the stimulation of these new ideas that helped to “home” Lawrence; that Lawrence, unlike Will, could only feel “at home” when his soul was challenged and “homeless.” Hence, a place that confronted established ideas could become a kind of homeland for him and that – for a time – his “homeless soul” was “at home” in Zennor.

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Bibliographie

Costin, Jane. “The Legacy of D.H. Lawrence’s Time in Cornwall,” in Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies. Vol. 4 no. 3 (2017), pp. 131-152.

Costin, Jane.Lawrence and the Sea in Cornwallin Études Lawrenciennes. Vol. 55, 2023 https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3500.

Feigel, Lara. Look! – We Have Come Through!: Living with D.H. Lawrence. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: a History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021 (first published 1999).

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Lawrence, D.H. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence Vol. II 1913-1916. Eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence Vol. III Part 1 1916-1921. Eds. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Richardson, Joanna. Place and Identity: The Performance of Home. London: Routledge, 2018.

Slack, Roger. D.H. Lawrence: Recollections and Poetry. 1990. A pre-existing taped interview with Stanley Hocking of unknown date, was mixed with poetry readings by Bob Devereaux and others and played at The Salt House Gallery St Ives on 7 September 1990 to raise funds for the St Ives Tate Action Group.

Stevens, C.J. Lawrence at Tregerthen. Troy, New York: Whitston Publishing Company, 1988.

Stevens, C.J. The Cornish Nightmare (D.H. Lawrence in Cornwall). Phillips, Maine: John Wade, 1996.

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Notes

1 Jane Costin, “The Legacy of D.H. Lawrence’s Time in Cornwall.”

2 Roger Slack’s taped interview with Stanley Hocking (undated). This is a more forthright account than the one Hocking gave to C.J. Stevens in the winter of 1967-1968 from which Stevens compiled his two books Lawrence at Tregerthen (1988) and The Cornish Nightmare (1996) which bear many similarities to each other. Stevens’ information was first published in The D.H. Lawrence Review Vol. 6 No. 3, Fall, 1973. In his later book, Stevens claims he was warned by the librarian of St Ives Library to ignore any information he might have been given about the vicar of Zennor or his daughter’s role in Lawrence’s banishment (96). As far as I am aware, no interviews with William Henry Hocking ever took place because by the time researchers became interested in such reminiscences, William was already suffering significantly from dementia.

3 Private correspondence with David Tovey Editor of The Flagstaff, the magazine of the Lamorna Society. I was also told by a member of the St Ives Old Cornwall Society that, further along the coast from Lawrence, lived a German Jew who was so harassed by the surveillance and hostility of the locals during the Great War that he took his own life. Although I have been unable to verify this information, it perhaps suggests the hostility Lawrence and Frieda may have faced in Zennor and that Lawrence describes in Kangaroo.

4 Feigel 118.

5 Ibid., 139.

6 Jane Costin, “Lawrence and the Sea in Cornwall.”

7 Lawrence never met John Westlake who died in 1913, but his widow, Alice Westlake visited Lawrence in July 1916 (2L 632). It is possible that John Westlake’s close involvement with the Balkan Crisis of 1912-1913, when government meeting were thought to have been held at Eagle’s Nest, may have resulted in a perception that this was a politically sensitive area, which may have contributed to pressure for Lawrence’s expulsion.

8 Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon.

9 In 1988 these were collected into a volume known as Golden Twigs which Crowley dedicated to Lawrence.

10 Editor’s note – Probably Dr David and Edith Eder, then in Jerusalem. Editor refers to an earlier letter, 3L 150, which, as well as revealing the Eder’s plans to go to Palestine also expresses Lawrence’s enthusiasm – and reservations – about these books.

11 Editor’s note – the two-volume work would be The Secret Doctrine.

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Jane Costin, « Lawrence and the “homeless soul” »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 56 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 octobre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3740 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12olt

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Jane Costin

Jane Costin is the Reviews Editor of the Journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society and a regular contributor to the annual D.H. Lawrence conference at Nanterre. In November 2023 she spoke at the Eastwood meeting of the D.H. Lawrence Society on “Zennor in the Time of Lawrence.” Her recent publications include “Lawrence and the Sea in Cornwall” in Études Lawrenciennes Vol. 55 (2023). She is working on a chapter on Lawrence and the visual arts for a forthcoming book by Edinburgh University Press, Lawrence and the Anthropocene, edited by Terry Gifford.

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