Lawrence never felt ‘less literary’ than when he was milking his cow...
Farm life throws up daily problems, such as his recently purchased cow Susan who, like Lawrence, is desperate to escape her confinement. When he eventually retrieves her from a nearby field he confesses ‘I felt more like killing her than milking her’.
His time is spent irrigating the dry land, re-roofing the barn, and ‘forever milking’ the cow. Then there’s the daily fights with nature as an eagle nabs one of his hens and a skunk steals eggs from his nine chickens. He confesses ‘I never felt less literary.’
Although Lawrence appreciates the health benefits of his physical lifestyle, he still has a hankering to ‘see English meadows before they’re mown, and to eat cherries in Germany, and grapes in Italy.’ America is emotionally draining, ‘so eternally and everlastingly tough’ which, he admits, is ‘very good for one, for a bit; but after too long it makes one feel leathery in the soul.’ He accepts it is time he was ‘softened down a bit, with a little oil from Europe.’
Many artists fled to remote places in the Americas post WWI in the hope of creating new communities which would provide alternatives values to those created by modernity. But Lawrence is far happier running his farm than joining the latest artist colony and so warns Idella Purnell about her plans for communal living: ‘Artists and ‘live people’ are usually most lively hating one another’ but then, slightly more optimistically, encourages her to ‘try it and see. Anything’s worth a try.’
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.
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