After Christmas Lawrence was perplexed as to how best to scheme for health throughout the difficult coming months. The Huxleys, marking the seriousness of his condition, pressed the wisdom of an escape from the uncertainties of a Florentine midwinter. They were themselves going in January to Les Diablerets. A separate little flat could be found in the snow there for Lawrence and Frieda. Lawrence hated the snow. He was now told, however, after a re-examination by his doctor, that the altitude of Les Diablerets (4,000 feet) was just right for his healing. At the same time, in the doctor's opinion, the altitude of the ranch, even in summer, had become dangerous, and must be put out of all question. Upon this Lawrence reserved his own judgement, but he would follow the immediate counsels of doctor and friends. He promised to go to Switzerland shortly after the middle of January.
'I want really to try and get myself better,' he wrote to me on the 10th. 'Cough still troublesome - and I want to lay hold of life again properly. Have been down and out this last six months.' It was the second time he had used this phrase 'down and out', and it came now at the end of the-longest passage concerning his health that had ever occurred in a letter to me. We knew he must be ill then, though still we did not take it as really serious.
But he had finished Lady Chatterley, keeping quiet about it as usual till it was finished. This was the first I heard of it.
I wrote a novel last winter and rewrote it for the 3rd time this - and it's very verbally improper - the last word in all its meanings! - but very truly moral. A woman in Florence said she'd type it - she's done 5 chapters - now turned me down. Says she can't go any further, too indecent!... But will you find me some decent person who'll type it for me at the usual rates? You'd do it, I know, if you were a person of leisure. But you're not. So turn over in your mind some decent being, male or female, who I could trust not to let me down in any way and who'd do the thing for the proper pay, and write me soon.
Then I think I shall publish my novel privately here in Florence, in March-April - a thousand copies, two gns each; and so, D.V. earn myself a thousand pounds, which I can do very well with - rather low water. I'll call it Tenderness - the novel.
But please don't talk about to anybody - I don't want a scandal advertisement.
I do hope I'm not bothering you. But I feel I must get another blow in at the lily-livered host. One's got to fight.
To someone else he wrote of this book: 'It'll infuriate mean people: but it will surely soothe decent ones.'
When Lawrence said this of Lady Chatterley he meant, as I understand it, that the book was a manifesto to a modern world which doubts the sufficiency of bodily love even at its best. It is not, Lawrence would say, the body that fails - it is the modern man and woman, who despise or fear or exploit for sensational ends the subtle simplicities of nature. The intellect and spirit have tried by turns to deny the flesh, and degrade it, and the flesh has had its revenge by turning physical love into mere frictional excitation, of which the fruit is apples of Sodom.
Four days later he sent a postcard to say that an attack of influenza had driven him to bed and postponed his journey to Les Diablerets. It was 'misery' but 'not bad', he insisted. 'Seems to me I always decide to go away a bit too late - or the 'flu gets me a bit too soon. It's my unhappy bronchials that lacerate so easily.'
The delay, so that he was caught again by the dampness of Florence, was probably due to a variety of causes - to his shrinking from the snow, to his arrangements for the Florentine production of Lady Chatterley, which had to be made at once, and to his growing dislike of moving. 'One gets older,' he had written to Ada a week earlier, telling how he longed to find a place in which he could really settle. He even thought of trying 'Devonshire or somewhere there for a time, and if it suits me, really make a home there'. The Mirenda, though he loved it, provided a home neither for midsummer nor for midwinter. Nor was it a place in which to take to one's bed, even for a short spell.
By the end of January he was able to 'creep up' to Les Diablerets with Frieda. He did not like it, finding himself unable to walk the slopes, still more debarred from the mildest of winter sports. But in a very few weeks he felt greatly the better for being there.
Though much wishing to do it, I had been unable to undertake the typing of Lady Chatterley myself for Lawrence. But I had arranged to have it done for him, and he had sent the first half of the manuscript to me, retaining the last chapters to be typed by Maria Huxley. He wanted to know which tide I preferred. Lady Chatterley's Lover, My Lady's Keeper or Tenderness. I did not care much for any of them, but have forgotten my own alternatives. Actually, owing to an unforeseen delay, I was obliged to sit up two nights typing the last few thousand words myself. Lawrence was in more of a hurry than I had realised. The typescript was in his hands, however, by the 1st of March.
At Les Diablerets, with the breaking of the snow in March, the atmosphere had gone 'warmish and cloudy'. Lawrence dreaded the descent 'to the levels and the germs', but it was time to go. Everybody up there was starting a cold.
He went down alone to Florence on the 6th; and though it was to find the Mirenda veiled in sleet after a frost that had killed outright the first crop of peas and beans, he felt so much better that five days later we find him writing home to say he was thinking of the ranch for the summer. Up at Les Diablerets he had spoken much of it to the Huxleys, and he believed that they would go with him, and Brewster as well. The doctor was not necessarily right on the subject of altitudes. What could an Italian doctor know about the air of the Rockies in summer?
Meanwhile the weather in Florence convinced him that he must give up the Mirenda. Throughout the latter part of the month it poured cold rain upon him; and if it had not been for Lady Chatterley, he would have given his landlord notice there and then and fled the place. His term was due to expire at the end of April. He must see the book through, however, and of course there were delays. The little Florentine printer knew no English: he was short of type: he ran out of the special paper, which had to be handmade. But, except for the difficult question of copyright, prospects were encouraging. Order forms had been sent out earlier: now they came back filled in with cheques attached. For the first time one of his books was going to bring a solid sum safe to his pocket.
During the difficult printing he fell ill. Frieda, who had gone from Les Diablerets to see her mother, was not yet back from Germany. But Pino Orioli, who was acting as publisher and distributor of the book, came out every night all the way from Florence at great inconvenience (though with his accustomed cheerfulness, which nothing ruffles) to sleep at the Mirenda, bringing with him a load of comforts, material and otherwise. On the news Frieda returned. Lawrence was soon up and about again. But it meant the end of the Mirenda for them. He could never live there now. At the same time he must have seen that the ranch would be impossible, for that summer at least.
It is not too much to say that he had sacrificed it to his book. Because, upon first leaving Les Diablerets, he had felt quite strong enough for the journey to New Mexico, where he believed he would re-establish his health. But the task of production was not completed till the middle of June. This obliged him to take on the Mirenda, though he would not stay there himself once Lady Chatterley was launched. Friends could have the house if they cared to come for the holidays. I do not think that it was occupied that summer after the Lawrences left; but during May, while they were still there, they had a fortnight's visit from Enid and Laurence Hilton, who came out from London. Enid Hilton's mother had been Lawrence's mother's dearest friend long before at Eastwood, and her father a staunch friend since Lawrence's boyhood. Later she and her husband were to be of great service to Lawrence in London over the Lady Chatterley troubles.
A second small trip with Millicent Beveridge, for which he had hoped, had to fall through because he was not strong enough for it. Better obey the doctor and go to Switzerland again. After a couple of months there to 'fix up his chest', he would go to England in August. The question of exhibiting his pictures that autumn was under discussion.
'. . . make a few more enemies', as he wrote to me. 'But you'd like some of them. I'll tell you.' Dorothy Warren thought highly of those he had sent for her to see and she was willing to undertake a one-man show for him at the Warren Gallery. She was a good friend whom he had known since the Garsington Manor days.