The hot weather is affecting Lawrence’s ability to write, but he has the energy for sword-dancing…
The time for lounging about in sandals in Italy is over. ‘I am a bit bored by the Latins, there is a sort of inner helplessness and lack of courage in them.’ And so the Lawrence’s head to Baden Baden to celebrate Frieda’s mother’s 75th birthday. And the minute Lawrence starts moving, he begins to contemplate sitting still as ‘we are getting to the age when we shall really have to think of establishing ourselves some little spot on the face of the earth.’
Lawrence is affected by the seasons and confides ‘In the real summer, I always lose interest in literature and publications. The cicalas rattle away all day in the trees, the girls sing, cutting the corn with the sickles, the sheaves of wheat lie all the afternoon like people dead asleep in the heat’.
When they arrive in London, they find a top floor flat at Rossetti Garden Mansions in Chelsea for $4 a week, though today these luxury penthouse apartments would set you back three million. My son, whose been dragged along on this literary pilgrimage, is of furrowed brow, given he’s just had to move back home because he can’t afford to rent…
Perhaps some sword dancing will cheer him up, as it did Lawrence when he shared his desire to dance with ‘iron stone miners above Whitby’…
These video essays are based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence one hundred years ago and are published monthly. To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1926, click here, from 1923, click here, from 1924, click here, from 1925, click here.
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