DH Lawrence - what did he sound like?

on

Remarkably, there are no sound recordings or film of DH Lawrence. He came close to doing a recording for the BBC in 1928 but turned it down³ saying... "the thought of broadcasting makes my blood run cold..." He was never very keen on new technology and also in quite poor health at the time so maybe that put him off. There are however, plenty of first-hand descriptions of his rather unusual sounding voice. 

His stepdaughter, Barbara Weekley, said "he had a high-pitched voice, a slight Midlands accent". Some people noted his use of  "thee" and "tha" (usually associated with a Yorkshire dialect). He could certainly change the strength of his accent and his turn of phrase to suit "posher" situations. Others more enigmatically said his voice was "like the soft hoot of an owl" or rather less flatteringly that he "perpetually squeaked and squealed in a ridiculous manner, like a eunuch." 

I've collected together the accounts of his voice for this article. You can browse through them below along with anecdotes about his laugh, his accent, his singing voice, his whistling and people's first impressions of his appearance and manner. He was also a particularly good entertainer and mimic as we'll hear. There is also a contemporary recording of a voice similar to Lawrence's for you to listen too. You can then use your own imagination to add his voice to this "silent movie" of him below.....

Lawrence in Mexico 1923

Like a silent movie, no recordings of
DHL exist. There's just this recreated
video and your imagination.
Click twice to play it..


Monty Weekley aged 10
- There is a recording made in 1968 of Lawrence's stepson, Monty Weekley, an accomplished mimic, doing an impression of Lawrence's voice. Monty had spent his early years in Nottingham and on their first meeting in 1926 Monty was struck with Lawrence's Notts-Derby accent. He remembers him criticizing the painter John Singer Sargent saying... "Sargent, sooch a bad peynter."  The recording, made by David Gerard of Monty in old age, is perhaps the closest we can now get to the sound of DHL's voice. Once I get access to a copy I'll put it on here⁵. In the meantime, perhaps there's a sense of the high pitch and mild dialect of Lawrence's voice, like the way he pronounces "father", echoed here. It's a WW1 recording of a man of similar age, from a few miles away from Eastwood on the other side of the Derbyshire hills in Macclesfield⁶...

Willie Hopkin, Eastwood
poet, reporter, councillor¹
- Willie Hopkin, his Eastwood friend and mentor, thought his high-pitched voice was caused by a childhood illness... "After his first attack of pneumonia [aged 16 in early 1902] his voice grew high-pitched and light, almost like a girl’s.". Hopkin also said that, like his mother, Lawrence didn't generally talk in the local Eastwood dialect but could certainly put it on and sound more like his father if he wanted... "...he had an intimate knowledge of the local dialect which is a mixture of border Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Sometimes when at my house he and I would speak it for a time, much to the bewilderment of any visitor from elsewhere. These words - “How are you getting on? I hear you have been ill. I do hope it was nothing serious.” Spoken in the dialect would be - “How are ter gerrin on sirree? I hear as thou’s bin badly. I dow hope its nowt serious.”" DHL's sister Ada also comments on the Lawrence children speaking the local dialect but only when out with their friends where their mother couldn't hear them!
Listen to how the local dialect words "sirree", "cocker" and "mi duck" were used...

- Amusingly, Lawrence also liked conversing in broad Notts dialect with Bloomsbury high society hostess and daughter of the Duke of Portland, Lady Ottoline Morrell (left). She'd been brought up at Welbeck Abbey in north Nottinghamshire and from hanging out with the stable lads and teaching the local miners, she loved a good Notts accent² particularly when it came from the mouth of a handsome young man. 
- In 1908 when Lawrence was a newly-qualified teacher in Croydon, his school inspector, Stewart Robertson said... "A glance told me that Lawrence had never been robust. He had a pale face, stooping shoulders, a narrow chest, febrile hands, and a voice which I can only describe as contralto. [Very high pitched male singing voice]. He coughed occasionally, with that hollow cough...."  Tuberculosis would gradually wreck his health. Ten years before the 1923 coloured picture of him (shown above) was taken, he was fit enough to hike straight across the Swiss Alps, but less than ten years after it, he'd be dead. 

Aldous Huxley and DHL c.1928
- Despite this poor health, his friend Aldous Huxley recalls his distinctive laughter still coming through... "As infectious... were his high spirits and his laughter. Even in the last years of his life, when his illness had got the upper hand and was killing him inch-meal, Lawrence could still laugh, on occasion, with something of the old and exuberant gaiety." Lawrence's powers of perception also struck Huxley... "A being, somehow, of another order, more sensitive, more highly conscious, more capable of feeling than even the most gifted of common men." as well as his more down to earth skills... "he could cook, he could sew, he could darn a stocking and milk a cow, he was an efficient wood-cutter and a good hand at embroidery, fires always burned when he had laid them, and a floor, after Lawrence had scrubbed it, was thoroughly clean."
Dorothy Brett typing up DHL's work. Wife Frieda with
fag on and host Mabel Luhan, Taos New Mexico

His turn of phrase often comes through in his letters. He wrote to Huxley and his wife Maria in the autumn of 1927, a chatty letter full of new plans despite him having just suffered a serious bronchial haemorrhage. It ends with this spirited passage... "I'm glad Maria has met Mrs Beeton... [of cook book fame] Right-o! Maria! You wait a bit, and I'll be eating your puddings for you. God gives us a good meeting, as the Methodists 'd say - Though I'm sorry Rose has gone. The boy must miss her terribly, lessons or not! - Maria, have you greased the car? I feel I don't want to do a thing, except curse almost everybody. Never mind! Hasta la Vista! D. H. L" 

- Dorothy Brett, his ardent, long-time admirer and travel companion cooed... "that soft, Midland voice."  And of his laugh... "a high, tinkling laugh, mischievous." She notes his use of  "thee" and "tha", usually attributed to the Yorkshire dialect, and observes the way his mouth pulls down at one corner "the ever ready, amused jeer is on your lips". She's in her own colourful painting (above) set at the Lawrence's small ranch in the mountains above Taos in New Mexico. DHL is writing and looking prophet-like under a tree in the background. We also learn from Brett that Lawrence is a happy whistler, like many men of a certain age, whistling while they work... "...while you are in the woods with the Indians. You are going with John Concha and the wagon to cut wood. You hurry off, happily whistling and humming..."

- His headmaster at Croydon in 1908 Philip Smith also recalls DHL's jollity and sense of fun... "The proceedings were somewhat languid and should be accelerated. This he proceeded to do to an extent that threatened the old ladies to join in "hunting the slipper" and other boisterous round games. I heard then, for the first time, Lawrence's peculiar laugh which was in after years quoted (see Huxley) as a characteristic exhibition of his exuberance."

- Barbara "Barby" Weekley, his wife Frieda's daughter, came for an extended visit to Italy in 1923. She and Lawrence hit it off and formed a close bond... "I had not seen anyone like him before; nor have I since. He was tall and fragile - a queer, unearthly creature. He had a high-pitched voice, a slight Midlands accent, and a mocking, but spirited and brilliant manner. I liked his eyes. They were blue, wide apart, in cave-like sockets, under a fine brow. But they could be soft, and were kindly in the extreme. He had high cheekbones, a clubby “Midland” nose, and a well-shaped jaw. His skin and hair were fair, and his beard red. When he was excited, or looking well, his cheeks had a delicate colour... Lawrence talked to Elsa [her elder sister] and me with great friendliness.". 

- The novelist William Gerhardi (right), upon meeting DHL for the first time in 1925 says... "a curiously untidy person in a morning-coat, which bore evidence that he had put it on under protest, came up to me, with a very fetching grin on his face and a curiously girlish, hysterical voice. I guessed immediately that he was D. H. Lawrence. He at once conveyed to me his disapproval of nearly everybody else in the room, and this, coupled with his jolly sort of approval of my Polyglots and a lot of advice as to what I should avoid as a writer, all proffered in the most cheerful way, surprised me agreeably, since I had imagined Lawrence to be a disgruntled individual."

- On the island of Capri, Italy in 1921, he first met his long-term friend, the American painter Achsah Brewster (left) who says... "always a brightness of flaming beard and blue eyes, a shine of some fire glowing within. His voice was individual; low, with a reed timbre, flexible, full of variation. He had a silent little laugh when he would just open his mouth and swallow it down. Again he had a short snort of indignation, but mostly a low mirth-provoking laugh. Well, there he stood, laugh and all, debonair and gay, out in the poppies under the olives... Again in the afternoon Lawrence came swinging up the garden path. We were alone, and he told us that he was writing Aarons Rod, and began outlining the story.. It seemed more beautiful as he narrated it in his low sonorous voice with the quiet gesture of his hands, than it ever could written in a book."


The Brewsters in 1917 - Earl, Achsah
and daughter Harwood
- 1921 Capri, Achsah's husband, the artist Earl Brewster... "Lawrence had been described to me as an “agonized soul”! I had thought of him as haggard, brooding, and sensual. Our first meeting was in Capri. How different he was from what I had imagined! How different from his own drawings of himself! These he made appear physically stronger. Instead I saw a tall delicate man. His face was pale; his hands long, narrow, capable; his eyes clear-seeing and blue; his brown hair and red beard glowing like flames from the intensity of his life; his voice was flexible, generally of medium pitch, with often a curious, plaintive note, sometimes in excitement rising high in key. He always appeared to be carelessly dressed, but it was only that apparent carelessness which arises from a fastidious nature... He gave a quiet chuckle of surprise and added that those were the very possibilities he had seen... The next morning he came for a walk. In the evening he returned for dinner and stayed for hours. It was cold. The fire burned red in that small stove called a "Porcellino," beside which he sat on the green-tiled floor, his hands clasped around his knees, telling us the news and gossip of Taormina. We could see each person he mentioned, so perfect was his mimicry our first experience of him as an impersonator."

- Rebecca West, British journalist and travel writer, Florence 1920... "I had never seen him before. He made friends as a child might do, by shyly handing me funny little boxes he had brought from some strange place he had recently visited; and he made friends too as if he were a wise old philosopher at the end of his days, by taking notice of one's personality... Presently he settled down to give, in a curious hollow voice, like the soft hoot of an owl, an account of the  journey he had made, up from Sicily to Capri, from Capri to Rome, from Rome to Florence. There seemed no reason why he should have made these journeys, which were all as un comfortable as cheap travelling is in Italy, nor did there seem any reason why he was presently going to Baden-Baden. 

- Compton Mackenzie... On Capri, Lawrence also met contemporary young novelist Compton Mackenzie, most famous today as the author of "Whiskey Galore!". Mackenzie amusingly (and pretty accurately) parodies Lawrence, his accent and his German wife Frieda in his novel "The South Wind of Love"... "Rayner rose to his feet and in a broad Midland accent told them that he was taking the chance of Sunday afternoon to give the damned place a jolly good clean-up. Untying his apron, he went to the foot of a narrow staircase that led up from the sitting-room to the floor above and shouted in a brusque slightly rasping voice, an unexpected contrast to his usually soft tones which would sometimes trickle away into a musical falsetto: "Hildegarde! Hildegarde! Hildegarde! Roll off that bed and come down, d'ye hear? The Rodneys have turned up. Come on down and talk to them while I get tea." Mackenzie's sharp pen nails Frieda too but I'll save that for the notes below!⁸ The scene is based on a real-life meeting in 1914 when Mackenzie visited the Lawrences who were doing up their damp and gloomy cottage near Chesham.

- Jan Juta, South African painter and muralist who did the art work for DHL's "Sea and Sardinia" travel book, October 1921... "That time I was mainly aware of being in the presence of something I could not define, let us call it a force, something powerful, yet disciplined, nervous and alive as a flame, a piercing, upward-sweeping flame. And yet his voice belied that force; a strange voice he had, and a little laugh, almost a cackle that left me puzzled." Juta painted this portrait of Lawrence (left) in 1920, one of the best showing his hair and beard colouration and his intense "presence".

- Less flattering about DHL's voice was Cecil Gray talking about Philp Hestleltine (AKA Peter Warlock) the music composer, Oct 1921... "What one objects to chiefly in Lawrence’s innumerable caricatures of his best friends is the spiteful way in which he combines truth and fiction, not merely exaggerating slight defects out of all proportion but also grafting others of his own invention on to the original. A curious and psychologically interesting example of this is to be found in the fact that he represents Philip [shown on the right], in the person of Halliday in the novel, as speaking always in a high-pitched, hysterical squeal or squeak. Actually he had rather a deep and sonorous voice; it was Lawrence himself who in real life perpetually squeaked and squealed in a ridiculous manner, like a eunuch. To ascribe thus ones own ludicrous or revolting peculiarities to one’s friends is going a little too far, I think it will be admitted." 

- Norman Douglas, flamboyant expat writer and flagrant pederast, had the same opinion... "that squeaky suburban chuckle which is characteristic of an age of eunuchs." Lawrence hung out in Florence with Douglas and his fragrantly powdered chums. This painting shows him reading the as yet unpublished Lady Chatterley's Lover to them...

Lawrence reading Lady Chatterley's Lover to Reginald Turner, Norman Douglas and Pino Orioli (publisher of Lady C) at Orioli's home in Florence; painted from memory by Collingwood Gee⁹ in 1933

DHL in Australia - Mollie Skinner's "man-boy" and wife Frieda

Mollie Skinner
- Arriving in Perth, Australia in May 1922, Lawrence meets Mollie Skinner, budding author and guest house owner. She describes him as... "a man-boy with the little red beard, scarlet lips, strange eyes flashing with amused lights, and an upright body held with dignity."

- When Eva May Gawler, Perth socialite meets him... "My idea of the appearance of Lawrence was completely shattered when I found standing at the gate a man something between a reddish-bearded, able-bodied seaman and a handy man at the back door! But this was again shattered at once when he came forward and spoke a few words in a low gentle voice.... Frieda was sitting next to the driver, and I just noticed a rather large “motherly” looking woman who spoke with a strong accent."

- Witter Bynner (4th left), travel companion and fellow poet and translator. On their first meeting in Sept 1922 at Bynner's house in Santa Fe, USA, he took an instant dislike to Lawrence. He mentions the rising pitch of DHL's voice when taken over by his legendary fiery temper... "Lawrence’s thin shape cleaved air like the Eiffel Tower, his beard flamed, his eyes narrowed into hard turquoise, he dashed the panel to the earth, and his voice, rising in a fierce falsetto, concentrated on the ample woman behind him, “It’s your fault, Frieda! You’ve made me carry that vile thing round the world, but I’m done with it. Take it, Mr. Bynner, keep it, it’s yours! Put it out of my sight! ". And after a wagon trip with him... "his voice was occasionally like whistlings of the wind...We had heard the shrillness of the Lawrence voice over the broken wagon board and we heard its variations later that evening in satirical comments on persons and places." He also mentions his singing voice. On a boat trip in Mexico with Lawrence and Frieda in 1923, Bynner writes... "There was music on the roof of our one-room boat-house at night, all of us lying on the sloping boards in our night-clothes, Lawrence or myself astraddle the ridge-pole in pajamas, one of the crew posed like a Greek statue at the tiller... Then a guitar and Spanish songs. Or no guitar and Lawrence singing English ballads in the nasal falsetto of a country boy lost in the hills... ."

- another fan of his singing voice was Thomas Seltzer (right), his American publisher, New Years Eve 1922, New Mexico... "spending a memorable week on Del Monte Ranch with Lawrence and Frieda and two picturesque Danish artists, we gathered in Lawrence’s log house to celebrate New Year’s Eve. What I was struck by especially was the small but sweet voice of Lawrence. Do you remember his singing some English Christmas carols? I was particularly touched by his rendering of “Good King Quentin⁷.” I have heard it sung many a time and was never impressed. Everyone seems to consider it a trifle and so it is. But the way Lawrence sang it, it had a haunting beauty that gripped you. I have often since tried to recapture that beauty... I have asked others, with good trained voices, to sing it for me in the hope that they would reproduce for me the feel and the tang which it had in Lawrence's perfectly simply and unstrained recital, but always I was completely disappointed..." His youthful singing didn't impress his teenage sweetheart Jessie Chambers though.... "an echo of those family sing-songs with Bert conducting and singing all parts as required although he had by far the poorest singing voice of us all."

- Picture Post magazine also describe his singing voice. They sent a roving reporter to Eastwood in 1955 who interviewed several locals including a Mr. Goddard who had two good-looking sisters... 
"The young Bert, as he grew older, used to help them in the evenings with their mangling, or any odd job that they needed doing. "Very helpful, was young Bert," said Mr. Goddard. Mrs. Brice, one of the 'girls of the mangle', is the sister of Mr. Goddard. She is seventy, and must have been very lovely as a girl. Lawrence used to escort her from chapel, which the young Lawrences attended three times every Sunday, and after the choir practice, when Bert's high-pitched voice could be heard, soaring above all the rest. What did this attractive young woman and the young Lawrence talk about, as they wandered home? "Oh, flowers and wild plants. Bert loved the countryside, and there wasn't anything he didn't know about growing things." "

Ada & "Bert" (DHL),
Mablethorpe 1926
His sister Ada Lawrence talks about how the Lawrence children toned down their local accent in front of their mother who, not being from the area, struggled with it... "Try as she might, she could never speak the local dialect, and we children were careful about it when we were with her. even though we let fling among our friends." 
She was also very fond of her big brother... "My brother was never the great writer and artist to me. He was the simple, kind and loving brother who took me by the hand to school and always studied my welfare and happiness until he died... One day he will come home to them in his books, and they will learn the truth about him and understand his life; and, what is perhaps more important, they will learn a little truth about themselves."


Jessie Chambers -
"Her beauty-that of a shy, wild, quiveringly
sensitive thing seemed nothing to her" 
- Jessie Chambers was Lawrence's teenage sweetheart and confidante. She said "Lawrence's speech abounded in vivid and oddly characteristic turns. I remember hearing him say in his blithe way: 'Ah, there's a custard for dinner, it rejoiceth my heart to see. If he wanted a small piece of cake he would say in his rather high-pitched voice 'Only give me a smeggin.' Anything he didn't like was 'a measly thing' and an inferior thing 'wasn't a patch' on something else. He amused us mightily by showing us how a girl acquaintance laughed. He would open his mouth wide and emit a sudden explosive giggle that was so comically like the original we laughed to exhaustion." May Holbrook (Jessie Chamber's sister) said "He always spoke rapidly and in a high voice tingling with excitement or perhaps enthusiasm."

- Richard Aldington, English writer and poet, who DHL stayed with on Port-Cros in the south of France³ in 1928 says "such a pleasant devil's voice, with its shrill little titters and sharp mockeries and even more insulting flatteries.... I welcome his 'tee-hees' and 'too-hoos,' which puff away a deal of silly cant and affectation." Aldington also comments on his singing and mimicry... "For help in the music and singing which he also loved Lawrence went to his sister Ada. He learned quickly to read song music and knew a large number of songs, chiefly English and German, which he ruthlessly repeated in a shrill but true voice on every available occasion. These were always folk songs... Their rowdy renditions of German folk songs had gotten him and Frieda into trouble in wartime Cornwall when they were suspected as German spies and expelled from their cottage at Zennor. Despite another bout of ill heath on Port-Cros..."He was his charming self, amusing us with his stories or making us laugh at his parodies and imitations."

- Taos, New Mexico Oct 1922, Maurice Lesemann, American poet... "When he talked, one forgot almost at once that first impression of frailness and weariness. One forgot the heavily knotted brow under the shock and surcharge of his eyes. He spoke gaily and whimsically. His voice was high pitched and thin, soaring high upward for emphasis, and still higher in a kind of amused exultation...And then Lawrence would remember one thing more, and it so ridiculous that he would have to sit down; and his voice would break and go careering away into a chuckling laugh before he could tell what had overpowered him."

- a very similar description of a much younger Lawrence came from school friend George Neville... "at the Beauvale Board School... here it was that I first made the acquaintance of Lawrence... A book and a quiet corner were always his delight and he would much more often be found with girl companions than with boys. He had a high-pitched, girlish voice which always rose in pitch with the least excitement, a feature which he retained to early manhood, as he retained also that impatient toss of the head he got from his mother and that unruly lock of hair that always would persist in drooping to one side of his high forehead." Another school friend J.E Hobbs said... "And now I can hear his high-pitched, squeaky voice. Sometimes the boys tried to get him to join in their games, but no: Lawrence refused, and the boys called him, wagging their fingers, “Th’art a mard-arsed kid.”"

- a few years later in 1901 on Lawrence's first visit to his beloved Haggs Farm near Underwood, David Chambers remembers... "My memory of D. H. Lawrence goes back to when he was a young man of eighteen - tall, pale, with the liveliest eyes I have ever seen and a high pitched voice that would trail off into a squeak of excitement or of exasperation. He had originally come to help in the hayfield as part of his convalescence from an attack of pneumonia and had by the time I remember him become almost a member of the family - certainly the most exciting person I had ever met." 

Ada Lawrence, Willie Hopkin and Aldous Huxley visiting
 Haggs Farm, Eastwood in 1930 - all have described DHL's voice


- Sarah Gertrude Millin (right), South African author, London 1923... "Lawrence himself is a lively man of thirty-eight with an opaque white face and opaque blue eyes and a reddish beard and a shock of hair. He has an excited voice and his hands feel like an Indian’s, as if the bones were too small. He wore a checked jacket, thick woollen socks, and sandals. He talked so much about the snobbery and class distinctions of the English that I was afraid he might be a bit snobbish himself. The English lived, he said, behind hedges through which they peeped at their neighbours."

- Frederick Carter, illustrator for DHL’s final book, "Apocalypse", Shropshire, 1924... "But once inside the old rectory where I was living his delight burst out in that high nasal singing voice of his. He was pleased with the place, its oak floors, adze-hewn, black with time and old polish and showing the rippling lights that only such solid wide floorboards can give, took him greatly." 

"Apocalypse" was Lawrence's last published book, the final philosophical words of a dying man... "The vast marvel is to be alive... The magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time." 

==========================================



DH Lawrence World Travels Map

If you enjoyed these anecdotes about Lawrence as he travelled the world, there are plenty more on my "DH Lawrence World Travels Map". 

You can tell from the quotes in this article that Lawrence did a lot of travelling. Like a pioneering budget backpacker he was always short on cash and often in poor health but his compulsion to travel pushed him and wife Frieda ever onwards and they stayed in some extraordinary places, meeting equally extraordinary people. 

You can follow him around the world using the "DH Lawrence World Travels Map" which shows all the places he visited in timeline order. 

Zoom in and click the "red phoenix" markers to learn about each place with photos and quotes from his letters and writing inspired by the places he saw. 

The map is available to browse by clicking here.

Buxi Duan's more locally focused map is here with good links to DHL reference books https://www.mappingdhlawrence.org/


Notes and Sources

DH Lawrence Interviews and Recollections - Norman Page https://archive.org/details/dhlawrenceinterv0001unse/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater

Aldous Huxley - Letters of DH Lawrence, Introduction; Notts dialect examples https://coalanddialect.wixsite.com/coaldialect/camaraderie-of-miners; Thanks to Buxi Duan for his excellent archive knowledge and ever helpful attitude.

1 - Willie Hopkin - one of Eastwood's most influential residents and D.H. Lawrence's friend and mentor. A prominent figure in Lawrence's home town of Eastwood during the 20th Century Hopkin was a poet, philosopher, social reformer, local historian and humourist, and he interested himself with every aspect of Eastwood life.

William Edward Hopkin, born 12th June 1862, was the son of Henry Hopkin who was listed in White's Directory of 1894 as 'postmaster, bookseller, stationer and bootmaker'. Henry was postmaster for 34 years until 1918. His daughter, Louisa, became postmistress in 1925 until she retired in 1944. William joined the family business at the age of eighteen, and through the years became a Town Councillor, a County Councillor (where his many years of service were recognised when he was made County Alderman), School Governor and Justice of the Peace for the county. He was Nottinghamshire County Councillor for Eastwood for more than 20 years. William was famous throughout the Midlands as an independent social reformer, writer, broadcaster, wit, poet and naturalist. His wide circle of friends encompassed peers, tramps, renowned literary figures and, above all, colliers and farmers amongst whom he lived at Eastwood. William and his wife Sallie befriended the young D. H. Lawrence and remained loyal confidants throughout the writer's life. Lawrence's indebtedness to the Hopkins is clear in many of the letters which now form part of the Lawrence collection at Eastwood Library. Further evidence of his affection for the couple is shown in the inscriptions on many of the signed first editions also on show in the collection. Many of Lawrence's books in the Lawrence collection bear William Hopkin's personal ownership mark in the form of a caricature. For many years, William contributed his 'Rambling Notes' and 'Rhymes of Truthful Bill' to the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser. [He also campaigned for ramblers rights and freedom to roam] In 1950, at the age of 88, William Hopkin laid the foundation stone for the Eastwood War Memorial Cottages (the stone laying ceremony was on Saturday 24th June 1950). The cottages themselves were opened by Her Grace the Duchess of Portland on 23rd September 1950. Hopkins died in 1951. (information from 'Into the Breach, a personal view of Eastwood' by Alan Rowley)

2 - BBC Great Lives Ottoline Morrell https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b05qgch9 at 19:14 mins

Nancy Pearn 1920,
DHL's literary agent at Curtis Brown
3 - Lawrence came close to doing a recording for the BBC in 1928, just a year after the corporation had been set up. He'd started writing shorter journalistic articles for newspapers trying to make some easy money for a change. He wrote for the Daily Chronicle, the Sunday Dispatch, the Evening News and the Daily Express, but turned down an invitation from Film Weekly to contribute an article on the sort of film he would write or produce if there were no censor. His journalism drew him to the attention of the BBC and he was invited to broadcast. However, despite his agent Nancy Pearn's urging him on 5 September 1928... "The BBC is still keen for you to broadcast: especially so since those articles appeared in the “Evening News.”  We have found that broadcasting really is quite a useful and dignified bit of publicity", Lawrence's blood ran cold at the thought and he refused, replying on 8 September 1928... "the thought of broadcasting makes my blood run cold anyhow." He was never one for anything remotely high tech.

He was also in poor health at the time and quite feeble. He was seeking relief from his ever-worsening tuberculosis in a hotel in the Alps. A month later and back at sea level, Richard Aldington describes his state of health while staying on the island of Port Cros in the S of France... 

"Poor Lawrence! He was far too ill to enjoy a place more delicately beautiful and undisturbed even than his New Mexi- can ranch, for this was the Mediterranean beauty he had thrilled to at Taormina, but fresher and more pristine. It was a bitter heart-break to realise that it had come to him too late, and to find that he had to spend his days in bed or in a deck chair, so weak that he could pass the drawbridge only for a few yards, and was almost too weak to climb to the glassed-in look-out. Most unfortunately, Frieda came back with one of her usual heavy colds which Lawrence instantly caught, and this ended up in a haemorrhage [tuberculosis causes haemorrhage of the lungs] after he had read the [terrible] reviews of Lady Chatterley's Lover which reached him. there. Night after night, I listened to his deep hollow cough, and realised that I had taken on a responsibility I had never dreamed of. How get a doctor up there, with a gap of ten miles of mistral-tossed sea? How get him safely away? Only then did I realise how frail and ill he was, how bitterly he suffered, what frightening envy and hatred of ordinary healthy humanity sometimes possessed him, how his old wit had be- come bitter malice, how lonely he was, how utterly he de- pended on Frieda, how insanely jealous of her he had become. Well, there were good times too, as of old, when he was his charming self, amusing us with his stories or making us laugh at his parodies and imitations.

Richard Aldington 1930

For a time Frieda felt she could relax her nursing vigilance so far as to indulge in the luxury of a washing day, and the rest of us could not avoid noticing that the wife of the erotic genius was con- demned to underclothes of an austerity combining the extreme decorum of the nun with the cheerlessness of the charlady. He was far too ill to write anything except trifles, and seized on any event as a theme for one of his "Pansies"-from the arrival of Huxley's Point Counter Point to a new French book on Attila. Getting Lawrence back safely to the mainland was not easy. We managed to coax him down to the port safely, and to fortify him with lunch at the hotel before starting. Unluckily, a heavy mistral was rising, and we spent a couple of hours in a small open launch in a sea rising as rapidly as only the Mediterranean can. We shipped a good deal of water,"


4 - Huxley on Lawrence - a different species - "In a spasmodically kept diary I find this entry under the date of December 27th, 1927: "Lunched and spent the pm. with the Lawrences. D. H. L. in admirable form, talking wonderfully. He is one of the few people I feel real respect and admiration for. Of most other eminent people I have met 1 feel that at any rate I belong to the same species as they do. But this man has something different and superior in kind, not degree. 

"Different and superior in kind,". I think everyone who knew him well must have felt that Lawrence was this. A being, somehow, of another order, more sensitive, more highly conscious, more capable of feeling than even the most gifted of common men. He had, of course, his weaknesses and defects: he had his intellectual limitations-limitations which he seemed to have deliberately imposed upon himself. But these weaknesses and defects and limitations did not affect the fact of his superior otherness. They diminished him quantitively, so to speak; whereas the otherness was qualitative. Spill half your glass of wine and what remains is still wine. Water, however full the glass may be, is always tasteless and without colour."

The letters are introduced by Aldous Huxley, whose tone betrays a personal relationship with the author that, undoubtedly, swayed his ability to treat Lawrence at all critically. It reads more like a eulogy, and a mystical one at that:

“Lawrence’s special and characteristic gift was an extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called ‘unknown modes of being’… Lawrence could never forget, as most of us almost continuously forget, the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind.”

Yet, as startling and, at times, comically earnest, this mode of expression may seem to our post-postmodern eyes, used to noncommittal understatements, there is something mesmerising about such stark and unfaltering belief. Lawrence, by his own estimation, comes from a time that was teetering on the edge of history, in the process of collapse. A time when conviction like his still bespoke Utopian ideals, rather than death camps or purges, or the terrifying buffoonery of reality TV presidents.

Source : Old favourites: Selected Letters by DH Lawrence, introduced by Aldous Huxley. A year of Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s favourite books

5 - David Gerard was city librarian in Nottingham, where he left his mark on the DH Lawrence collection through taped conversations with the writer's family and friends (Lawrence's brother George was recorded on his 92nd birthday). Originals are currently in limbo between the old central library and the new Nottingham Central Library, Local Studies section. Copies are held at the British Library http://cadensa.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchdata1=CKEY1321430&library=ALL%20

6 - The Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings is a subset of an audio archive made between 1915 and 1938 by German sound pioneer, Wilhelm Doegen. Enlisting the support of numerous academics, Doegen sought to capture the voices of famous people, and languages, music and songs from all over the world. The collection acquired by the British Library in 2008 comprises 821 digital copies of shellac discs held at the Berliner Lautarchiv at the Humboldt Universität. It includes recordings of British prisoners of war and colonial troops held in captivity on German soil between 1915 and 1918 and later recordings made by Doegen in Berlin and on field trips to Ireland and elsewhere. The content of the recordings varies and includes reading passages, word lists, speeches and recitals of songs and folk tales in a variety of languages and dialects. https://www.bl.uk/collections/berliner-lautarchiv-british-and-commonwealth-recordings

This particular recording is Phillip Jarvis from Macclesfield a POW https://sounds.bl.uk/sounds/parable-of-the-prodigal-son-in-a-macclesfield-accent-1001102286980x000002

7 - The vast BBC Music Library has no record of a song or carol called Good King Quentin so perhaps Seltzer instead means Good King Wenceslas. Hence his referral to it as being a "trifle" as it is a very commonly performed carol. It was certainly around in Lawrence's childhood when his church and family sang traditional English Christmas carols together. 

Good King Wenceslas - In 1853, English hymnwriter John Mason Neale translated the lyric from a Czech poem by Václav Alois Svoboda, in collaboration with his music editor Thomas Helmore, and the carol first appeared in Carols for Christmas-Tide, published by Novello & Co the same year. Neale's lyric was set to the melody of the 13th-century spring carol "Tempus adest floridum" ("Eastertime Is Come") first published in the 1582 Finnish song collection Piae Cantiones.

8 - A description of one of the more colourful minor characters in the story is that of Hildegarde Rayner... "She was a typical figure of Germanic womanhood, dressed in a floppy dress of some light material, her hair inclined to collapse like a badly made stook, her white teeth glittering in a wide smile, her forget-me-not blue eyes dancing with pleasure". Sounds just like Frieda Lawrence!

9 - Collingwood Gee - But recently I found a reference to ‘Collingwood Gee, the fan-painter’, who is mentioned in passing in Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop by Joy Grant (1967) as one of the English expatriate community in Florence. Here, he was an acquaintance of D H Lawrence, and is depicted by him in Aaron’s Rod (1922) as Louis Mee, ‘little Mee, who . . . sat with a little delighted disapproval on his tiny, bird-like face’, an artist who has existed on meagre means but has recently come into money. In 1933 Gee painted from memory a portrait (not on a fan) of Lawrence reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Norman Douglas, the bookseller Giuseppe Orioli, and the Wildean aesthete Reggie Turner, the author of King Philip the Gay (1911) and other rococo fantasies. According to some sources, Gee was also a musician, who once gave performances in the English provinces.  I was so struck by the idea of a fan-painter in Florence, and the aura this suggested, that I wrote a poem on this theme, now boldly published, in its first issue, by a new online poetry magazine edited by Colin Bancroft, 192 (named after the former telephone directory enquiries line in Britain). You'll find it under the fan. https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-fan-painter-of-florence.html

Comments

Post a Comment