February is a rotten month for the Lawrences as they struggle with various illnesses.
February is a rotten month for the Lawrences as they struggle with various illnesses. ‘The tail-end of my influenza got tangled up with a bit of malaria in my inside – very unpleasant’ and then there’s the inflammation of the bowels. Lawrence takes his anger out on his immediate environment, informing William Hawk ‘I don’t think I shall ever come to Mexico again while I live’.
Amy Lowell, who had published Lawrence in Some Imagist Poets, is admiring of Lawrence’s resilience, exclaiming, ‘your energy amazes me. My many operations took a great deal of my energy away.’ Lowell would die a few months later of a brain haemorrhage.
The Lawrences get an overnight Pullman from Tehuacan to Mexico City and book into a fancy hotel as they are ‘too feeble to rough it.’ Lawrence describes himself as ‘pale green’ and that he has got ‘thinner and thinner.’ Now it is a waiting game. Waiting to get better and waiting a couple of weeks to sail from Veracruz to Plymouth.
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, see our playlists for 1922,
1923, 1924, 1925.
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