Locating Lawrence: January 1925

Lawrence’s latest home in Oaxaca isn’t quite living up to expectations and this is partly because everyone seems to have influenza. As he becomes seriously ill himself, he begins imagining living by the sea or anywhere apart from ‘dry dry dry Mexico’.

He realizes that ‘the more one travels, the more one doesn’t arrive.’ This is often deliberate on his part - being a master deviator - and so he fantasizes about boarding a Cargo ship which will ‘loiter with us to Yucatan or Jamaica or somewhere’ on his way back to Europe. 

Everything we need to know about Lawrence as a writer can be found in a fascinating letter to Carlo Linati, an Italian critic who sought Lawrence’s advice on an article he was writing about him. He is immediately taken to task. 

‘Do you think that books should be sort of toys, nicely built up of observations and sensations, all finished and complete? I don’t (…) I can’t bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel (…) The world is not a stage (…) and art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches – like a god (…) whoever reads me will be thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it – if he wants a safe seat in the audience – let him read somebody else.’   

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.