Locating Lawrence: March 1925

Lawrence is never that keen on returning to Blighty, but ‘this time I really want to get back to Europe, for this sickness has taken all of the energy out of me,’ he informs Idella Purnell.

Perhaps it is the thought of escaping Mexico by sea that leads him to begin the unfinished play Noah’s Flood. But it is not to be. After ‘various examinations and blood tests,’ the doctor informs him that he cannot risk a sea voyage as he is too ill and that he must remain on the continent.

This leads to some depressing observations to friends that ‘Nothing has gone right’ and ‘there is doom on us all’ and then optimism returns when he remembers the British weather: ‘Perhaps the sure sun over here is better than the hypothetical sun over there.’

Lawrence was regularly ill, but this was his first official diagnosis of tuberculosis. But he quickly blocks it out and woe behold anyone who tries to remind him. Instead, he returns to cabin life in Santa Fe and takes comfort in ‘the peach trees coming into bloom’ and is positive that the air is ‘so fine and pure. It will soon make one well.’ It won’t.

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, from 1923, click here, from 1924, click here, from 1925, click here.