Eight years earlier, while at college in Nottingham, he had become acquainted with Professor Ernest Weekley. The Professor had helped him with the French necessary for his certificate, and had noted his intelligence, but had not then asked him to his house. Now, however, that he was spoken of as a poet, Lawrence was bidden there. Upon his very first meeting with the Professor's wife his course was determined. During the last year there had been a love affair with a married woman older than himself in his home district. But it was an affair in which the woman had set the course and marked the end. When Lawrence met Frieda Weekley he was free, and this time he would lead. Never again would he be mothered by any woman. He would even put behind him that first mothering that had meant more than anything else to his youth.
After the provincial women he had known, this daughter of a Continental aristocracy was a revelation to him. He lost no time in committing himself. Early in May he and Frieda Weekley were both in Germany, though not together. She was with her people, he wandering and waiting about with the unfinished manuscript of Sons and Lovers.
It was over a year since he had written The Trespasser, and there had been a long-drawn debate about it between him and his publisher, Heinemann. For the first and last time in his career Lawrence was definitely unwilling and a publisher eager to print. The book recorded an incident of which he was ashamed. But suddenly in the spring of 1912 all this was in the past and did not matter - not at least to Lawrence. Though he disliked the incident and did not much like the book, the first was true and the second was his honest account at the time. Vogue la galère! The wide and terrifying prospect which he now faced was everything. Courage to proceed entailed the courage that lets the dead past bury its dead. Some money too was absolutely necessary. At the end of twelve months there was nothing left of the fifty pounds from The White Peacock, and he had no savings, for at Croydon he had earned but a bare living. This new book would not bring much, but it was honesty earned. Weighing the old importance against the new, Lawrence made his choice. He paid his fare to Germany in May, 1912, with money from The Trespasser.
Lawrence was sure of himself but not yet sure of Frieda. As for Frieda, she was sure neither of herself nor of Lawrence. How should she be? She was several years older than he, and vastly more 'experienced' in every worldly sense of the term. A daughter of Baron von Richthofen, who had been Governor of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war, she was socially confident. In the midst of a gay and eventful girlhood she had married before she was twenty, and when Lawrence met her she had three children, a boy and two girls, the younger girl being only three years old. She was not unhappy, had never known unhappiness. Merely she lived in a placid dream, which was variegated at times by love affairs that were almost equally unreal. This made a rich tapestried background that satisfied her well enough so long as nobody woke her up and made her aware that it was no more. And until Lawrence came nobody had. Lawrence, incredibly raw and really innocent, felt the glamour deeply. But he refused to be intimidated. He held by his own experience, that was limited but intense. With Frieda added to him and dominated by him he could start in and live.
Frieda did not see it so. There were other things besides pure life for her to consider. And there were her children, who were certainly a large part of life to her. She was carelessly generous of herself, as no provincial woman could have been generous. There was nothing of bargaining here, nor of coquetry. This in itself was dazzlingly attractive to the many times wounded Lawrence. But all the more, and in its accompanying contempt for 'faithfulness', it made him suffer. From first to last Lawrence was for fidelity in marriage. While he admired this woman's 'freedom' it was torture to him. At the same time he would hold his own and not be at her mercy. I have been allowed to see some of these early letters written by him from different parts of Germany. They are unlike any others I know in the range of poets' love-letters. They rarely mention love, yet love-letters they are, and they are exquisite as they are extraordinary.
He spent the early summer going from place to place alone, suffering intensely, seeing the Rhine, and little German places like Trier and Mayrhofen, with the clarity of suffering; getting on immediate human terms with the humble hosts and hostesses at his various lodgings; working on Sons and Lovers (which already belonged wholly to the past); and every day sending off letters of an explosive quality, that was contained in quietness, to a wayward and uncertain and beautiful woman with features like those of a handsome creature of the wilds. It was as when a friend once introduced Lawrence to a tame fox that was his pet. Lawrence would not rest till he had found some touch that made the pet forget its tameness. Frieda has a nose like a puss fox, so fine and tremulous about the nostrils, and her eyes might be the eyes of a lioness into lady. It was not for nothing that Lawrence's mind often ran upon poachers - and gamekeepers.
By midsummer Frieda had thrown in her lot with his. It would not be true to say that she had found her master. Rather she expected to rule but could not resist this man who had discovered the secret of her wildness and was so insistent on his own power. Or perhaps it was the challenge more than the man that she found irresistible. Anyhow it was no conclusion, but only a beginning, when she and Lawrence set out one day in August on foot together to cross Tirol into Italy. They had almost no money. Frieda was entirely courageous.
That autumn and winter and the following early spring they stayed at Lake Garda, moving only once from one place to another. In February Love Poems and Others came out with Duckworth in London. In the same year that publisher issued Sons and Lovers, which Heinemann had refused, giving as his verdict - or endorsing the verdict of his reader - that it was 'one of the dirtiest books he had ever read'. The reviews were mostly favourable. Some were enthusiastic.
In April, 1913, Lawrence and Frieda went to the Isarthal in Bavaria and stayed in a pleasant corner at Irschenhausen. The little wooden house with the fir and beech forest behind, the 'big open country' in front, and the mountains beyond, had been the scene of their setting forth together the summer before. Here Lawrence wrote the first part of The Lost Girl (The Insurrection of Miss Houghton). In June they came home, visited the Garnetts in Kent and went on to London.
It was in July that Lawrence and Frieda first met Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield in the flat above the office of Rhythm in Chancery Lane. Murry, as the editor of Rhythm, had been offered a story by Lawrence, from which the meeting naturally arose.
Lawrence once described to me his first sight of Katherine Mansfield. She was sitting on the floor of a bare room, he said, beside a bowl of goldfish. When I asked him to describe her, Frieda, who was with us, took the words out of his mouth. 'So pretty she is, such lovely legs!' she shouted. But Lawrence broke in violently, if not so loudly with, 'If you like the legs of the principal boy in the pantomime!' Here was a flick of a spinsterish tartness that he always had, but there was something more - an expression of his distaste for certain of the accepted forms of beauty, a distaste that later could alienate and puzzle a critic like Mr Gerhardi.
But it had nothing to do with Katherine Mansfield, to whose great charm Lawrence made response as eagerly as to the emotional readiness of Middleton Murry. To them he had come from the circle of the Garnetts where, in spite of much kindness and appreciation, he had felt himself regarded as essentially 'a sort of queer fish that can write'. He foresaw too that neither the Garnetts nor the Hueffers would like his next novel. But with Murry and Katherine all was young, hopeful and untried. When Mr 'Eddie' Marsh, always on the spot when fresh genius was about, introduced Lawrence and Frieda to Herbert and Cynthia Asquith, and the Asquiths invited the Lawrences to Broadstairs, where Mr Marsh also was, Lawrence would have it that Murry and Katherine must come too. Murry has told how, as they could not afford the journey, Lawrence insisted on paying for it, with solemn injunctions on the obtuseness of not letting others pay in such case. They went and they bathed.
By Murry's later account it was a happy time, a holiday with nowhere a strain.
When, after another weekend with the Garnetts, they went back to the Isarthal at the beginning of August, they had Murry's light promise to join them in Italy with Katherine Mansfield - a promise that was not fulfilled. Lawrence, who would go anywhere if he wanted to go and felt it mattered, was disappointed. Had he made too sudden and sweeping a demand on this other man so that he was obliged in self-defence to withhold himself? Lawrence often blamed himself thus, and quickly knew the point of strain in any relation. But he built upon seeing much of them on his return to England the following summer. By the middle of September he and Frieda were at Lerici near Spezia, and, after a fortnight, at Fiascherino, where they stayed till June, 1914.
After seven beginnings and many burnings the manuscript of The Rainbow was complete before the middle of May. Lawrence sent it to J. B. Pinker, who was now to act as his literary agent. At Fiascherino too he wrote - or more probably rewrote - The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, for a New York publisher. He has recorded in print how he rewrote the play yet again almost completely over the proof, and how the enterprising publisher bore with him, but - can it have been out of revenge? - how the same publisher also persuaded him to part with the American copyright of Sons and Lovers. Early in June Lawrence and Frieda were once more in England. By this time there was no barrier to their marriage. It was Lawrence, though he was far more terrified of the married state than was Frieda, who insisted upon regularising their union.