D. H. Lawrence In Bandol

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This essay by Brewster Ghiselin originally appeared in the December 1958 edition of The London Magazine. 

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One afternoon early in January 1929, while walking toward the railway station on the slopes above Bandol, I heard quick steps of approach and, looking up from the red earth of the roadside, saw a blonde woman and a red-bearded man in a faded sky-blue jacket striding rapidly towards me. The man was slender and slightly stooped, lithe and easy in motion. There was a country looseness in his figure and clothing. As they passed, I caught the glance of his clear blue eyes, and I thought, though the photographs had suggested dark hair and beard, this may be Lawrence.

In Paris I had written asking permission to come and see him. Expecting some days of waiting for his consent, that I never doubted would come, I had gone on at leisure to the south. His reply, already long delayed, must arrive within a day, and until then it would be better to say nothing.

A day or two later, on Friday, January 4, I concluded that one of our letters must have miscarried and that if I was to see Lawrence at all before leaving for Nice the next Monday I had better try to find him. That afternoon, at the town hall I obtained his address. The Hotel Beau-Rivage stood on a wooded rise along the western sweep of the shore, overlooking the harbour. On the gravel terrace before the hotel entrance, I paused to look down on the water and the plage. There, sitting alone and motionless on a bench against a small tree, was the man I had seen on the hill. He wore an overcoat and hat, and as if cold he was huddled a little, his head slightly forward and sideways in an attitude I afterwards knew to be characteristic.

Descending the long stone stairway, I crossed toward the water’s edge and as he glanced up I asked, ‘Are you Mr D. H. Lawrence? I’m the young American who wrote to you.’ I explained how I had waited for his answer that had never come. ‘Your letter or mine must have miscarried. I wouldn’t have bothered you with such intrusion, except that I’ve needed to talk with you.’

Lawrence looked at me closely and asked me to sit down. He questioned me about what I was doing, how long I was staying, where I was going. I told him I had come to Europe mainly in the hope of seeing him, partly to find a graduate school in which the whole need of the mind would be of foremost concern, in order that my education might be an organic development of power rather than only a professional discipline. But during my first term as a graduate student at Oxford I had found much the same procedures, atmosphere, and expectations as at the universities in America. I said I was trying to find a fresh mode of life, a new way of being alive, that I had only intimations of, amid the stale ways of thought and feeling the world was content with. I said I believed he had gone far in discovering some such way of being and in developing a true understanding, that everyone else seemed to lack.

To most of this he answered briefly, or merely ‘Yes… Yes,’ in varying intonations of sympathy or acquiescence. Presently Mrs Lawrence came down the stairs from the hotel with a handsome young woman, her daughter Barbara Weekley, and I was introduced. We strolled along the sunny quay, toward the few moored pleasure boats and, beyond them, the many fishing boats scattered over the water. When the two women went on into town, Lawrence and I sat on a bench facing the sea.

There for more than an hour, under the palms in sunshine among the passing people, we talked of many things, of the intent and fate of his latest book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I had just read, of the plight of the civilized world, of England and America, and chiefly of means of keeping a vital awareness in our civilization which was tending always to destroy it. Having read a dozen volumes of Lawrence, I was familiar with his terms of expression and with the outlines of his thought. He spoke casually and freely, with much variety of tone and feeling, often with humour, sometimes scornfully, never with solemnity. The value of his conversation lay less in the force of what was being said, for all its swift flexibility, diversity, colour, good sense, and constancy to a single vision of truth, than in the interest and charm of his presence, that this talk made articulate. I listened a great deal and asked a few questions.

The few words of Lady Chatterley’s Lover which he had brought back into clean usage after their three hundred years on the dung-hill had lost him many of his following, he said. The old maids, as he called them with acid amusement, faithful until then, had shut the book with a snap. And yet those words were in good use, he declared, for fourteen hundred years; then ‘the dirt of the Renaissance got on them’. His use of them was part of his effort to restore the confused, degenerated feelings of modern people. ‘Sex,’ he said, ‘must be taken out of the w.c.’ There was no hope of a sane society otherwise.

‘The uttermost mystery’ for him, Lawrence said, was how man, in the state of an animal moving in instinctive unconsciousness, in dynamic relation with his environment, ‘came to say “I am I”.’ Now the whole world was ‘under a net of ideas’, and one must make holes in the net as a means of slipping through – and keep them open for others. If America should ever achieve a new way of life it could be only in the far future, for the psyche of all Americans was essentially European: ‘Look how they take up one idea after another, while their feeling is the same old dead one!’

Still, he might be at his ranch in New Mexico in the summer, he conceded, and if he were I must come and visit him there. Even if he were not, I should go to the ranch and live there as long as I liked: a man could live in that country for a thousand dollars a year — for less on the ranch. I should see something of the Pueblo Indians, and if possible go into Mexico, learn something of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, from which he himself had learned much.

Asked about England, he said he was always miserable there: the climate, but worst of all the hopelessness of the English. The working classes were alive when he was a boy, he said, and he would go back if he thought he could waken them; but he had not gone back; and he said he would not think or talk about it. ‘I want to believe they aren’t quite dead,’ he finished. But while he spoke it was plain, from the misery of his voice and eyes, that he was sure they were.

The depression of his spirit was momentary, however. Lawrence was never doleful, he could not stand lugubriousness. In disgust, he ridiculed Keats’s yearning for death and quoted with scorn, ‘ “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”!’

By this time Mrs Lawrence had returned to sit with us. ‘Do you like being here in Europe?’ she asked.

Some things I had liked: at Oxford, a series of lectures on Greek vases, for instance; the sombre glass in the Cathedral at Chartres in the dusk, the hills and sea at Bandol. Finally I emphasized my distaste for the feeling in the cities and towns by a gesture toward the group of buildings behind us.

Lawrence, who had been musing and as if half listening, turned suddenly full around and urgently said, ‘What is wrong with it? What is wrong with it?’

I answered, ‘It’s the people, it’s the way of their being.’ And indicating the facades along the water-front, I said I supposed everything a man laid his hand to took the impress of his being and gave it forth again.

He relaxed from the attitude into which he had moved with the energy of his question, and in a voice full of weariness, but alive with profound emotion that I can attribute only to humour, he said, ‘Yes, yes, it’s dead. Everything they touch is dead. Even if they make a little cake! Their bread – haven’t you noticed it? – tastes of death.’

It was tea time, then, and they invited me to the hotel for tea, but I excused myself, suspecting they must be weary of me. Lawrence insisted that I come to lunch on the following day.

At noon next day they were waiting in the sunlight on the terrace before the hotel, and we went in immediately, to a white table at the north wall of the dining room. The soft-eyed young Negro who waited on us came from French Africa, they explained. As he stepped slowly, negligently about on his errands, Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed with pleasure, ‘He walks like Lorenzo!’ And amid laughter Lawrence sat chuckling his appreciation and shaking his head in denial.

The talk went on in gaiety and extravagance. With humorous relish and some irony, Lawrence described a ‘tea’ in Hollywood, at which an appalling pint of whisky and soda was thrust into his hand by the host, an actor wearing white riding breeches and carrying a riding crop, while the shrinking refined wife drooped in a corner and a small son marched about dressed up exactly like father and swinging his little whip. Often Lawrence spoke vividly and unsparingly of human absurdity, but never coldly, never really uncharitably. He was without a trace of the delusions that drive so many to find their own elevation in the abasement of others.

After coffee on the terrace, we went upstairs to the Lawrences’ rooms, on the second floor of the hotel overlooking the bay. Lawrence read aloud some of the Pansies and the first ‘Introduction’, which he had recently completed. Finishing the passage on Swift’s poem to Celia, he looked up in concern for whatever embarrassment his stepdaughter might be suffering. ‘Poor Barby! Poor Barby!’ he said, in caressing tones of sympathy tinged with amusement, much as one might comfort a rain-soaked kitten, and went on with the reading.

That afternoon he showed me some of his paintings: ‘Leda’, and a watercolour of two figures in grey, terra cotta, and rose, and others. He had turned to painting, he said, as a means of defining some things better expressed in that way than in writing.

At the end of my visit, I spoke of leaving Bandol on the following Monday, to travel along the coast toward Italy, perhaps as far as Genoa, then back to Oxford to begin the new term. Lawrence said, ‘Oxford is squalid!’ and gave his opinion that I would have done better to live here and there in Europe instead of studying at Oxford.

The following morning the sky was grey over a level sea, the mimosas drooped with moisture, and the stems of the olives on the darkened hills were black with rain. The Lawrences were coming to tea at the hotel where I was staying, some distance along the road toward Toulon, quite outside the village. Though I was distressed to think they would need to come through ugly weather to see me, I could think of nothing appropriate to do, and at last did nothing.

They arrived during a downpour, in a lumbering old taxi, but cheerful and friendly and full of reassurances that nothing was amiss. During the hour of their visit, Lawrence asked if I really wanted to travel on to Nice and other crowded places. When I admitted that I had no great interest in the journey, he suggested that I stay through my whole vacation in Bandol and that I come to the Beau-Rivage in order to be near them; he would arrange for me to have the choice of two vacant rooms across the hall from his own.

It was an invitation, I discovered, to become virtually a member of the Lawrence household. I was expected to share their activities through the day, to be with them in the evening, and to have a part in whatever plans were made. Breakfast, of course, in the Continental style, did not bring us together. After lunch in the dining room and coffee on the terrace, we spent the hours until tea time in talk and in walking along the shore. Every evening after dinner, we gathered in Mrs Lawrence’s bedroom, Lawrence usually sitting on the bed, Barbara Weekley or I beside him, and Mrs Lawrence in a chair by the window. Often Lawrence read briefly from the manuscript he had written during the day, and I frequently carried some of it off later to my room. In this way I read his ‘Introduction’ to the Paintings as it came from his pen and some of the Pansies.

Lawrence worked in the mornings, sitting in bed in his narrow room, facing the window and the sea, which usually was blue and white with sunshine. When I left my room after breakfast, his door was always shut, in the long, still, shadowy hall.

Until eleven o’clock or noon I was alone on the populous plage, sometimes writing or sketching. Then the Lawrences, with Barbara Weekley during the first five days, came down from the hotel to sit in the sun, to walk about, or to visit the teeming market in the square behind the church, to look on or to buy fruit.

In those days Bandol was little more than a lively village. Dogs foraged along the shore or haunted the market place, standing or lying in the luxury of human presence, among the booths, the racks of clothing, the live catch heaped in wet baskets or dropped on bare concrete. Women passed back and forth on their errands or in idleness, many of them wearing their fashionable bright red, purple, green, or black bed slippers. Fishermen in blue jeans sat against the railing around the war monument, talking and laughing while they mended their nets or baited their lines with small prawns and wound them into a basket like a nest, the hooks plunged in along the rims. Drying nets like a gross brown lace striped the quay. Lawrence liked the warm scene, the contentment of the men and their pleasure at their work.

One morning early in the week Lawrence came from the market to sit beside me, his pockets bagging full of yellow apples. The weather had warmed, after the snow and rain of the weekend, and the sea towards which we looked was a slick of light and the sky was a bright distance. Eating one of my large sweet tangerines, he said with musing pleasure, ‘It tastes like Africa.’ Less by his words than by the full texture of circumstance and scene, I knew his feeling and meaning. I recalled that during our first conversation he had spoken of his belief that the civilizations of the future would be in the sunny lands. It was not only for his health’s sake, as some have said and continue to say, that Lawrence moved about the world. He went in search of light and to explore the various life in warm places and to enjoy it.

Bandol is in southernmost France. The winters are mild and sunny, and during most of that second week in January there was scarcely a cloud. Along the plage the broad palms flourished unpinched, and white circlets of flowers hung among the higher leaves of eucalyptus trees. Yet Lawrence was not wholly satisfied.

One afternoon we climbed the hills above Bandol, past fields of yellow and white narcissus, and up among the olives where the stones of centuries were piled between the trees, broad walls the height of a man, and further along paths among heather, where Lawrence pointed out to me wild rue and fumitory, and still higher past the pines. On the rocky ridge, Lawrence stood musing ancient aspect of the land and talking of the races that had possessed it before the present. We looked down on a long inland valley, on many grey rocks, wild ridges blotched with pines, and further downslope the black cypresses, the fields, the olives and the deciduous trees about the few buildings.

‘It’s not far enough south,’ he said.

Coming down from the ridge, Lawrence pondered his future. Though his publishers were eager for him to write another novel, he did not want to; he would not do it. ‘If there weren’t so many lies in the world,’ he said, looking at me earnestly, ‘I wouldn’t write at all.’ What he might do and where he would go remained uncertain. Many times, he said, he had felt it would take ever so little to make him an American, though not in the way of consciousness dominant in the United States, based on money, the universal disease of mental obsession. All the real America, he declared, moves in that ‘deep, terrible, tigerlike vibration of destruction’ – the opposite of Europe – which the aboriginal civilizations, Mayan, Aztec, Incan, and the dying civilization of the Pueblos, realized so profoundly. Somebody should study the living remnant and ‘find out where the Indians’ energy comes from’. Even now, he felt, he might end in America, perhaps in the American way of being.

Lawrence meanwhile awaited without impatience what might define itself in him. He found satisfaction in what the place and time afforded, especially in human relationships, imperfect though these might be. He rarely preferred to be alone, and when he did, as one evening when he put on his overcoat and went out to walk in the dark, without inviting companions, he was not long away.

Lawrence responded to everything with the organic strength of his feeling for the substance and shape of life, in himself and around him. He was never indifferent. Yet sometimes he was quiet, or even quiescent, as on the blue and yellow afternoon of January 9, when we walked out to the end of the jetty and sat on huge blocks of stone, dangling our legs over water. P. R. Stevensen, the publisher, who had come to see Lawrence on business, was with us. The sun was warm, the wind light, and I wanted to swim, but my suit was far back at the hotel. Standing on cold slabs in the shadow in a deep slot between the blocks of stone, I made a loin cloth of two big coloured handkerchiefs, with one of Lawrence’s for a belt. When I went into the breathless water over weed-darkened boulders, Lawrence nodded down to me from the rock against the sky, reassuring me: ‘You’re perfectly decent; you’re perfectly decent,’ he called. After some minutes I clambered on stones by the rockwall and stood in the ripple while Stevensen read aloud a story he had recently written.

The self of most men is important enough to demand protection and various enhancements. For Lawrence, self seemed to have no interest. This detachment was the source of some of his freedom. It perhaps accounts for his enormous, uncalculated generosity of spirit. He never withheld himself. He was unreflectingly bounteous, in kindness and sometimes, very rarely, in anger.

His anger is famous for the fury of its open outbursts, yet in all those days I saw him angry only once, in a flare of ferocity as he turned to Mrs Lawrence with a rebuke for her launching on a thoroughly Laurentian denunciation of some aspect of the world. ‘You don’t know anything about it!’ he cried. Startled to stillness, she stared at him, her blue eyes glinting like rinsed china and her face tense and flushed. Almost at once it was over: he relaxed and turned to me quietly, smiling a little, with a brief comment on the evil of unfounded talk. Others could not change quite so abruptly, but within a few minutes the usual easy, lively atmosphere was restored.

On Thursday afternoon we took the bus to Toulon and there walked by the harbour and drank rum and coffee at a table before a café by the water. We wandered in the dark streets, bought roasted chestnuts, and looked over racks of flowers offered for sale. Afterwards we had tea in a quiet place. Waiting for Mrs Lawrence and Barbara Weekley, who had gone shopping, Lawrence and I talked of the disruptive and constrictive effects of the presence of so many people intent on hasty routines.

Perhaps as a consequence of this feeling about the city, we chose on the following day, January 11, to ride out on the sea in a motorboat instead of driving in a carriage inland to one of the hill towns, an alternative we had considered. The trip was planned for the afternoon.

Late in the sunny morning, Lawrence found me on the plage finishing a watercolour of some brilliant fingerlings I had bought in the market. He remarked on their vividness and on the full detail of the painting, for which he himself could never have found enough patience, he said. If I should do a series of such paintings, he suggested, they could probably be exhibited at Dorothy Warren’s gallery in London. Yet one should work only when one wanted to, he warned me; it was wonderful how ability grew if one did that.

Most of all he was concerned about the uncoloured ground of white around the figures. He felt the paper – yet in all watercolour he worked with he felt ‘the tyranny of the paper’. The feeling for the fishes themselves was true, he said, but they were isolated in the midst of bare space in a way that deprived them of their actual relation to other things, to water, for instance. My pleasure in setting them apart like intense flames in consciousness was ‘a form of spiritual will desiring power’, refusing to admit and to express the relatedness, the vital interchange, between them and all other things, each in their special quality and degree.

‘I think the consciousness of the future will be intuitive,’ Lawrence said, ‘in its intellectual form a knowledge of relations.’

Early that afternoon, in an open motor boat, we travelled out on the sea to circle some lonely islands. All but one of them, on which the lighthouse stood, were desolate stones stuck up into the midst of sun and sea. As we passed over pale green streaks in the deep channels Lawrence remarked that the colour was of sunken lime-stone, but the boatman confirmed my belief, based on knowledge of similar waters and seaground in California, that it was the pallor of sand. Passing one of the smaller islands, a sunny slab over a cold shadow of waves, I remarked that I would like to go onto it.

‘Why?’ Lawrence asked sharply, as if scenting folly.

‘Just to be there,’ I answered.

‘Yes,’ he conceded after an interval, as if he had been considering.

Beyond the familiar hills of the shore other hills had lifted into view, the inland upland rising snowless toward the white bar of the farthest mountains. We must have been four or five miles from land when Lawrence told the boatman to turn round. The ride back was colder.

It was probably that same afternoon that we went downshore past the town to a little tea garden under pepper and eucalyptus trees by the sea. The sun would be down in an hour. Though the air was beginning to chill, I intended to go swimming again; I had brought a suit and towel this time. But Lawrence fiercely forbade it, because of the increasing cold, and in order not to distress him I gave up and sat still with the others, talking and drinking hot coffee.

We used to go a good deal along that eastward stretch of shore. One of our pleasures was seeing a flock of about forty goats that often grazed near the roadside, attended by a fat man. Idly watching his flock, he would sit like a slightly deflated balloon, while beside him his dwindled black dog lay breathing with closed eyes and pricked ears. The man’s faintest whistle would make the goats swerve like a pool of minnows. When we whistled, the goats heard nothing.

On my last afternoon in Bandol, Tuesday, January 15, Lawrence and I walked together along the shore a mile or so eastward toward Toulon. Near the mouth of a little creek we sprawled on the gravel beside the waves to talk. ‘A flower is the most perfect expression of life,’ Lawrence said. He liked the symbol of the Lotus, ‘coming out of the mud’. What was wrong with all the religions was that they had always ‘plucked the lily’, had found one or another symbol and had clung to it, refusing to relinquish it as its vitality was exhausted. Yet a symbol, he had found, lasted only about twenty minutes – he didn’t know why; then it had to be replaced by another. The ultimate symbol he called ‘the Sun, the great central sun around which all the universes are circling’.  Sometimes he preferred, he said, the symbol of the great white bird beating the water with its wings and sending out waves. I asked why he did not write a book about symbols, and he answered slowly, as if reflecting, that he might, sometime.

I looked at him without speaking, feeling that though I had understood in some degree I could not wholly reach him. Coming down the shore, we had talked of the difficulty of conveying new insight, of the likelihood that even the clearest embodiment of it will be misunderstood, as so much of his work had been, and of the fact that apprehension of any new work of art requires a growth of consciousness, an expansion of the psyche, in the perceiver. I knew that insight is a living thing and that in full understanding of Lawrence’s work I must comprehend in myself a vast fabric of living experience.

Knowing he would interpret my words by their context and sense their irony, I said, ‘Even I don’t really understand you.’

‘No,’ he said soberly, ‘no….’

Early next morning when I was ready for the train, I went to the Lawrences’ rooms to say goodbye. In the clear full light before sunrise Lawrence sat in bed, propped against the headboard. We said only a few words and shook hands. His eyes were on mine while I crossed to the door at the foot of his bed and went out.