Locating Lawrence: July 1924

In July 1924 Lawrence is high up the mountains ‘building a porch over the kitchen door’ of his cabin. He finds comfort in the simple things, like sleeping outdoors under the ‘hanging sky’ and feeling ‘the stars entering into one.’ Perched on the foot of the Rockies, he realises there can be no ‘comic unity’ between man and plans for ‘world unison’ are pointless.

‘No more unison among man than among the wild animals - coyotes and chipmunks and porcupines and deer and rattlesnakes. They all live in these hills – in the unison of avoiding one another.’  

Publisher Thomas Seltzer, who had defended himself against accusations of obscenity on numerous occasions, is finding things financially difficult and Lawrence advises ‘if you truly serve ‘the arts,’ they won’t let you down. They won’t make you very rich, but they’ll give you enough.’ It seems fitting that one hundred years on, Nottingham City Council has removed all funding to the arts and now artists can neither eat nor publish.    

Lawrence is working ‘slowly’ on St. Mawr ‘a queer story’ – and presumably inside the cabin given ‘July is the month of rains.’ But as he curtly informs Mabel Dodge Luhan, ‘a little too much thunder lately, in the sky. It wearies one. But not so badly as people.’

These video essays are based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence one hundred years ago and are published monthly as part of the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre project.
 
To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1922, click here.  
To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1923, click here.     
To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1924, click here.