Locating Lawrence: October 1924

It’s October 1924 and there’s only one thing on D.H. Lawrence’s mind and that’s preparing for his next adventure, Mexico. The latest move is primarily determined by the weather and the desire to be ‘where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce.’ 

Lawrence is usually dismissive of a place before leaving, but this time he is more contemplative: ‘Frieda is washing in the porch. Brett is probably stalking a rabbit with a 22-gun: I am looking out the kitchen door at the far blue mountains.’ But he must go because he needs to be in Mexico to finish off The Plumed Serpent. 

On arrival, he is dismissive of the capital as ‘shabby’ and finds ‘everybody rather depressed.’ The contrast with the tranquillity of cabin life in the Taos mountains is overwhelming and he acknowledges this prejudice: ‘I don’t like cities: and once more I realise it.’ Cities are places to socialize and so he hooks up with Zelia Nuttall, author of Principles of Old and New World Civilisations (1901), which would be source material for The Plumed Serpent.  Booze is always a good way of dealing with city life and so he goes on a bender where he ‘drank Absinthe, gin, bouilli, Chablis, Beaune, port, and whisky from beginning to end of an evening, and was not comforted.’

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.