DH Lawrence: A Journey Without Shame: A Culture Show Special The Culture Show

DH Lawrence is one of the outstanding

and most prolific English writers of the 20th century -

author of novels like Sons And Lovers, The Rainbow,

and most famously Lady Chatterley's Lover, as well as a large

collection of short stories, poetry, plays and essays.

But Lawrence is a writer with a bad reputation,

first and foremost because he dared to write about sex.

When he died in 1930, Lawrence was viewed by many as little more

than a pornographer.

On top of this, he has often been slurred as a woman hater,

as a racist, condemned as unpatriotic,

and scoffed at for lacking a sense of humour and for committing

every crime against the conventions of good writing.

Lawrence didn't help himself.

His ferocious temper along with an unflinching appetite for speaking

his mind combined to make him plenty of enemies especially in England,

which he cursed for its snobbery

and repression and which he declared, "Nauseates my spirit and my body."

Lawrence's bad reputation, the snobbery, accusations and prejudice

drove him into exile

and out on a journey in pursuit of intellectual and personal freedom...

..a journey that reveals Lawrence to be so much bigger, more engaging,

and more interesting than the stereotypes would have you believe.

There isn't an essence of Lawrence and that's his essence.

There is so much of it. There are so many Lawrences.

He wrote in every genre. Who else did that?

The whole bent of Lawrence is towards freedom. That is

what his writing is. It is free.

It's like watching somebody doing open-heart surgery on themselves.

You don't know where to look on occasions.

He is willing to struggle with confusion in broad daylight.

We always need mentors to do that for us.

Lawrence wrote his way around the globe,

from the Mediterranean to Ceylon, and on to Australia,

ending up in the mountains of New Mexico,

where, for a brief period, he found a kind of home.

But his travels started with a journey across the Alps, an expedition

that enabled him to complete his first great novel, Sons And Lovers.

It's 100 years since Lawrence's working-class coming-of-age

novel was published, blasting a hole

in traditional fiction with its intensity and freshness.

This is a film about the journey that brought that book to

fruition, a soul-changing

and spectacular mountain hike that reveals how the stereotypes

of this writer bear only a passing resemblance to the real DH Lawrence.

It was a journey that began on the well-to-do

leafy streets of the Nottingham suburb

of Mapperley as the 26-year-old David Herbert Lawrence made his way

to a luncheon one Sunday in March 1912.

It was an appointment that would unexpectedly and dramatically

transform his life.

Lawrence, who was then a schoolteacher,

was visiting his old university lecturer, Professor Ernest Weekley,

but when he arrived at the house, it wasn't

the professor who greeted him at the door,

but the professor's German wife Frieda.

'She is not an intellectual but she knows her way around.'

They talk about Oedipus before lunch.

You don't often do this with Nottingham housewives.

You really don't. And she's fascinated.

He's a writer as well. That's interesting.

"Tell me more about your writing."

'They develop a rapport immediately.

'Lawrence finds her absolutely staggering.

'He has fallen for her like a ton of bricks.'

Ernest Weekley was perhaps half an hour late for lunch -

a minor error in timekeeping that brought about the end of his

marriage and the beginning of one of the great literary love affairs.

Only two months after their encounter in Nottingham,

Lawrence and Frieda travelled to Germany together

and on 25th May 1912 they arrived here in the small Bavarian village of Beuerberg.

-You don't like Women In Love?

-I was reading it a bit last night.

Writer Geoff Dyer, author of a book about his own passion

and pursuit of Lawrence,

and academic Catherine Brown, who specialises in Lawrence's

writing, have come here at the start of a hiking

expedition following the journey over the Alps that Lawrence

made with Frieda in the summer of 1912.

It's beautiful.

Although Lawrence had only known Frieda for a few weeks,

he was already convinced that she was the woman of a lifetime.

He called the week they spent here in Beuerberg a honeymoon.

-You can imagine it - quite a place for a honeymoon.

-Yes.

This is where it began to look more like a honeymoon.

This was the first place they had together.

They had it for about a week.

This was their first place where they could properly spend a whole

week together. It was a revelation to them.

I think that that's why Frieda, in her memoirs of Lawrence,

actually starts the narrative at this point in Beuerberg.

Yes, but as always with Lawrence it's a working honeymoon, isn't it?

Yes, that's right.

If you look at the collected Lawrence, you've got about two

shelves' worth, and he died before his 45th birthday.

You're thinking, "How did he write that much in that time?"

The answer was that even when, for example, having a honeymoon,

or quasi-eloping, he was writing,

and Frieda notes this, that he

would just put himself in a corner and the words poured out.

Sure.

Lawrence never dreaded writing. He could always do it.

-So he's writing, keeping up with his correspondence.

-That's right.

If they have any kind of experience, he'll immediately sell

-it into a sketch, a bit of journalism, that he hopes he can sell.

-A poem.

There'd be a poem.

Then hanging over him is the big major project of revising

the manuscript of Paul Morel which he'd brought with him, the manuscript

which with subsequent revisions becomes Sons And Lovers.

-You do have a brisk stride, don't you?

-No.

I was matching you. I thought you were just setting a different pace this time.

Sons And Lovers, the novel

in Lawrence's suitcase in Beuerberg tells the story

of the family, childhood and coming of age of a young painter, Paul Morel.

It's a book that closely mirrors Lawrence's own life

and the story of how he became a writer.

DH Lawrence was born into a coal-mining

family in the Nottinghamshire town of Eastwood in 1885.

Right from early childhood, Lawrence seems to have been marked

out from the crowd.

There's a photograph of Lawrence in his class at the Boys' School, Albert Street.

Even in that picture he's a bit different from the others.

He is the only boy of 72

with a white handkerchief

in his vest pocket.

He is clearly well brushed and combed,

all the other kids are.

He's a special child, specially looked after.

Looks a bit smaller than the others. People liked him a lot.

The young Lawrence, just like his alter ego Paul Morel

in Sons And Lovers, was shaped by his intense relationships with two women.

His mother, people often say, "Oh, a schoolteacher."

She wasn't a schoolteacher and she married Arthur Lawrence

because she thought he had a rather important

job in the coal mine - mining contractor.

That just means being a miner. She thought it meant more.

But from the start of the marriage she was trying to get her boys to

be different and not be either like her, or her father, or like their father.

She wanted them to be out in the world doing professional jobs

and to hell with Eastwood mining, the grubbiness, the mining community.

The other powerful influence was Lawrence's teenage girlfriend,

Jessie Chambers.

Jessie was the bookish younger daughter of a farming family.

Her home, Haggs Farm, which sat a couple of miles

away in the country below Eastwood was the place where Lawrence

developed his passion and knowledge of the natural world.

Jessie saw in Lawrence what she described as,

"That radiant joy in being alive."

She wanted him to be a writer,

I'm not sure he did so much in the early days. Here was the idea of,

"A great man, you can be a writer."

Lawrence had this wonderful remark, "A collier's son a poet?"

He really had a lot of irony about that,

but Jessie believed in him.

Jessie would have helped him see himself as a tragic hero.

After finishing his studies in Nottingham in 1908 at the age

of 22, Lawrence moved to the South London suburb of Croydon

where he took up a job as an elementary school

teacher at the Davidson Road School.

His literary career began in 1910 when a London magazine called

The English Review printed one of his short stories,

Odour Of Chrysanthemums.

Publication came about largely due to the great enthusiasm

of the magazine's editor, Ford Madox Hueffer,

who was struck by Lawrence's instinctive gift for storytelling

and also his compelling insight into what, for his middle-class

readership, was the unknown world of working-class life.

The publication of the story introduced

Lawrence into the fashionable circles of London literary

society where this son of a collier,

and his account of the intimate lives of ordinary working people,

was treated with a mixture of curiosity and condescension

by a cultural elite who smirked at his clothes, looks and manner.

However, Hueffer was a sincere enthusiast for Lawrence's

writing and helped him to get his first full-length novel,

The White Peacock, into print,

repeatedly declaring, "You've got genius!"

Towards the end of 1910, encouraged by the first hints of literary

success, Lawrence began work on a new book.

It would be a novel set in the mining world that

so appealed to his editor and publishers -

a novel about his own family and his own life, Sons And Lovers.

However the book did not come easily.

Not only was this painful, emotional territory,

but Lawrence was deeply frustrated by the demands that school life

placed on his time and energy.

It is hard to find the time to be the writer

and to do all these things which the publishing world wants of him

to do and to go on marking his essays at school and the heaps of 72

copybooks to do by the end of the evening and all that.

So, "What are you going to do with your life?" is the real problem

and he still doesn't know.

But the whole problem is resolved, oddly, by Lawrence getting

fearfully ill in November, 1911. He gets double pneumonia, nearly dies

and struggles back into life during December, January, February

and doesn't want to go back to school teaching, and really feels that

that strain of the life at school - he can't go back to that.

If there's ever a moment come for a break, it's come.

It was at this point that Lawrence went for lunch in Nottingham

and met the extraordinary Frieda Weekley...

..the woman who became both the central character in his life

and, by extension, in his writing.

Only two months later, they travelled to Germany together

although to begin with, for Frieda,

this was no more than a summer holiday.

Frieda has every intention of going back,

of course she does, she's got three children.

If an affair happens with Lawrence, how very nice

and the two of them go back home again

after a sort of regenerative summer. That is not what Lawrence intends.

Lawrence thinks this is the woman of a lifetime.

That's his phrase for her, "She is the woman of a lifetime."

And he tells her she's got to marry him, not go back.

Will Frieda do that? She'd be crazy to do that.

But by the time they reached the little village of Beuerberg,

Frieda realised that Lawrence had become what she called "a deep necessity".

The feeling was certainly mutual.

After their week of honeymooning, Lawrence

and Frieda continued the summer in Bavaria with Lawrence working

hard on the third draft of Sons And Lovers.

He submitted the manuscript to his publisher, Heinemann,

but was horrified to receive a rejection letter.

Although Lawrence quickly found a new publisher,

thanks to his friend, the editor, Edward Garnett,

he was keenly aware that after two and a half years

labouring on the book, he desperately needed to complete it,

not least out of financial necessity.

Six months after meeting Lawrence, in August, 1912,

Frieda agreed that instead of going back home to her husband

and children in England,

she would accompany him to Italy where they hoped to find a place

where they could live cheaply while he settled down to his writing.

The spectacular journey Lawrence and Frieda undertook over the Alps

and the following months they spent in northern Italy were life-changing

for Lawrence, providing him with an extraordinary creative stimulus.

Not only was he working on another draft of Sons And Lovers,

but he would also produce a wealth of new writing,

including ground-breaking poetry, the first of his incomparable

travel sketches, a sequence of essays, two plays, as well as

the beginning of both a comic novel and his masterpiece, The Rainbow.

It would be a journey on which Lawrence

came into his own as an artist.

Lawrence and Frieda decided to begin the journey to Italy on foot

and from Lawrence's various accounts, it is abundantly

clear they were hopelessly ill-prepared for the trip.

Where are we going now, Catherine?

-You getting stung?

-No, just bitten a bit.

Where are we meant to be heading, up here?

I'm not sure, and nor did they know.

-Do you think they had maps with them?

-Surely they'd have had a map.

At some point on the route, they took the wrong turning

and by the time that the light began to fade, they were clearly lost.

-Oh, here we are.

-Look at that.

And then they stumbled across a small mountain chapel.

It is very well kept up.

It is certainly like the kind of place they...

-It is clearly a functioning Catholic chapel stop. Shall we go in?

-Yeah.

"There was a click of the latch in the cold, watchful

"silence of the upper mountains, and we entered.

"By the grey darkness coming in from outside,

"we made out the tiny chapel, candles on the altar

"and a whole covering of ex-voto pictures on the wall."

Throughout this Alpine journey, Lawrence wrote essays and sketches,

some of which reveal an often overlooked aspect of his writing -

his deep fascination and preoccupation with religion

and spirituality.

I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about.

You've got a man

crushed by a log.

It's a ridiculous picture and it's a kind of doggerel poem to Maria,

but thanking her for the fact that he didn't die when this log

landed on his belly, as it looks.

It seems to me this is so much about what's best about Lawrence.

You get this description of the pictures and then you get

that immediate transition into some kind of metaphysic.

You know, deepest of all things, among the mountain darkness

was the ever-felt fear.

First of all gods was the unknown God who crushed life at any

moment and threatened it always.

It's classic Lawrence, isn't it? You know, he's only been here a little

while and he's already got a sense of what

he thinks is the deepest experience of being up here in the mountains.

Lawrence was completely enchanted by the little chapel

and thought it would make an ideal place to stop for the night.

Frieda had other ideas.

For this daughter of a Prussian aristocrat,

tramping panellists over the Alps like a vagabond was a great

romantic fantasy and to complete the picture,

she insisted on sleeping in a haystack.

This is really nice, or would be if it was about 20 degrees warmer

and four hours earlier, but I guess this is not unlike

the circumstances in which Lawrence and Frieda found themselves -

getting dark, freezing cold, hungry.

I wonder if it has got any hay inside? Oh, wow!

-OK. Well, there is no hay. There's logs.

-Just a load of logs.

Yeah, you couldn't sleep on that if you tried.

"'It's lovely, lovely,' said Johanna.

"But alas, gentle reader, worse than fleas,

"worse even than mosquitoes on a sultry night is hay.

"It trickles insidiously in.

"It trickles and tickles your face. It goes in your ears

"and down your neck and is around your waist.

"The tickling becomes an intolerable irritation, then an inflammation."

-I think the chapel would be better, do you think?

-Probably.

-I said we should have gone there.

-That's right, you did.

No, Lawrence was right.

After a damp, itchy night in the hay barn, Lawrence describes wryly in

Mr Noon how the following morning,

freezing cold with sodden boots, like two ghosts, he and Frieda

stumbled back down the valley to find the road.

Somewhat grumpy, both dressed in Burberry raincoats,

they made the next stage of their journey through the wide

Austrian valleys on a combination of omnibus and train,

as they headed for what was then the small farming town of Mayrhofen.

One of the things that strikes me increasingly about Lawrence -

I mean, a great genius, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff,

but Lawrence often seems to me a sort of...a quite ridiculous figure.

But that was something that he was very well aware of

and he writes it into the essays of Twilight In Italy.

He was keenly aware of the ridiculousness of their situation

and certainly in person, he was fun to be with.

Everybody says this about him.

Jessie Chambers, his first girlfriend, says it,

Frieda says it. He was very good at impersonating people

and he could parody himself as well.

Yeah. I find he is not very successful in the novels.

I mean, I don't find him a very humorous writer there.

We may have different senses of humour.

I find him frequently hilarious in his novels.

I mean, Mr Noon, I laughed pretty much from beginning to end

and then in his poetry as well,

"There was a little wowser, John Thomas his name,

"and for every bloomin', mortal thing,

"that little blighter's to blame."

It goes on and it's about the male member

and how it's responsible for all the troubles in the world and that's

a pure comic poem, and then sometimes you get his mimicry,

his capacity as a mimic in the poem, so there's one called

The Oxford Voice that ends,

"We are, we are, you know we are superior."

Mayrhofen was the end of the road.

From here it was just the mule tracks into the high Alps.

Lawrence and Frieda ended up staying here for a couple of weeks.

Lawrence worked on his poems, essays and the manuscript of

Sons And Lovers and in the evenings,

they enjoyed drinking and dancing with the local peasant farmers.

They also went on hikes into the mountains and Lawrence,

who was a keen botanist, made plant-hunting expeditions,

including one particular trip into the deep,

gloomy, clam gorge that runs south of the town.

-Oh, my.

-Gosh, it is horrifying.

-Yeah.

It's a very, very tortured man.

Lawrence, brought up in the plain Puritan

environment of the Methodist Chapel, was alarmed

and fascinated by the gruesome crucifixes that

appear on every peak and bend of the mountain roads and pathways.

He wrote one of his most evocative essays describing the way

the carvings of Christ change as one head south through

the Tyrolean landscape.

Part travelogue and part philosophical reflection,

this was the first of the many idiosyncratic travel pieces

which Lawrence wrote throughout his life

and which found a ready audience in newspapers and magazines.

Lawrence and Frieda were joined in Mayrhofen by two English friends,

David Garnett, the son of his new editor,

and a man called Harold Hobson.

You can tell why Lawrence loved it here.

And on Wednesday, 28th August,

the small party began the five mile climb to the summit of

a mountain that today straddles the border between Austria

and Italy and which would, in every sense,

prove the high point of Lawrence's Alpine expedition.

God, this is stunning! Transcendently beautiful.

Lawrence was seeing it...something of this kind for the first time.

Oh, yeah. Well, that is something. Jeez!

"And then it was the top.

"Smooth as plates of iron,

"a flat summit with great films of snow like silver

"plating on the black, bronze iron, and a wind,

"a painful, cold wind and low in the near distance, a brown shelter hut.

"And beyond the brow, a great peak,

"a magnificent wedge of iron thrust into the upper air

"and slashed with snow slashes, as if it were dazzlingly alive.

"So brilliant and living

"the snow stripes on its aloof, dark body.

"For Gilbert, it was one of the perfect things of all his life,

"that peak, that single, great sky living blade of rock."

He clearly had an ecstatic moment on this spot looking at Italy

and he writes about it several times.

He gives this moment of joy to several of his characters

and I would say that amongst prose writers,

nobody describes mountains as well as Lawrence does.

I mean, he's got these great, great terms for them like

"white fanged" or

"striped snow panthers circling around a great camp."

Thank you, Lawrence, for having come here so that we can come here too.

There's something beautifully moving about it,

the working-class boy from Nottingham, which has been

blighted by industrialism, and he comes here to this pure

and wonderful place, and it's great.

There's a real sense of arrival, but also I think it's so moving

because, you know, this is the start of Lawrence's great

life of global adventure, of the savage pilgrimages he calls it.

It's just wonderful.

-So, Geoff, where now?

-I think...

-Italy?

For Lawrence, his transcendent moment on top of this mountain

was a point from which there was no going back.

The adrenaline of travel, of looking at the world, inspired

a growing sense of ambition and freedom in his writing.

The poetry collection that he was working on at the time,

Look! We Have Come Through! -

a collection whose title seems to capture that moment

of emergence through the Alps, was a radical

and shocking break with the poetic conventions of Edwardian England

and it provoked a reaction of prurience

and snobbery in the literary circles of London.

I think a lot of his friends were appalled

and a lot of reviewers were appalled.

It's the directness of utterance that's so shocking

and especially coming out of a period

of Georgian poetry when everything

had been rhyming and manufactured and manicured and presented as

almost sort of baroque units of thought, this wasn't that at all -

it's a great, big, direct splurge onto the page.

Lawrence is all about feeling and sensation

and I think he thought that man had become cut off from that

and it was his job, both as a poet and as David Herbert Lawrence,

to reopen negotiations with the world and finding that form of poetry,

what became, I suppose, free verse, was his way of doing that.

"Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

"A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

"If only I let it bear me, carry me,

"if only it carry me!

"If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate a winged gift!"

I remember reading Lawrence when I was in my early 20s

and even then I thought, "I don't know what to do with this stuff."

It just wasn't like anything else that I was reading.

It's hippy poetry.

It is really wild. It's like watching somebody...

doing open-heart surgery on themselves.

You don't know where to look on occasions, and it is exciting

and it is arousing as well.

Of course, Lawrence's appetite for defying convention was not

restricted to his poetry.

In the years after he completed Sons And Lovers,

he went on to write two revolutionary novels, The Rainbow

and Women In Love, substantial works of fiction that are both

technically ground-breaking and which deal with political

and sexual content that provoked one reviewer at the time

to comment that The Rainbow "is a greater menace to our public

"health than any of the epidemic diseases".

The book was banned after only a few weeks in print.

Women In Love took five years to find a publisher.

It wasn't until the 1960s that Lawrence finally found

popular acclaim after he was championed by the influential

critic FR Leavis,

made famous by a failed legal attempt to ban

Lady Chatterley's Lover and celebrated in one

of the iconic films of the decade, Ken Russell's Women In Love.

For a time, Lawrence was the pin-up of the hippy generation

but in 1970, the pendulum swung back in the other direction

when an American feminist made a furious

and incisive attack on Lawrence, labelling him a misogynist.

Lawrence undoubtedly had a case to answer.

He made plenty of unpalatable statements about women

but his venomous outbursts are contradicted in his best

writing, particularly in Women In Love

and The Rainbow, where he answers his critics head on by creating

some of the most vital,

liberated and fully realised female characters in literature,

powerfully brought to the screen by Glenda Jackson

and Jennie Linden in Ken Russell's film.

You don't think one needs the experience of having been married?

Oh, Gudrun, do you really think it need be an experience?

It is bound to be. Possibly undesirable,

but it is bound to be an experience of some sort.

BABY CRYING

Not really. More likely to be the end of experience.

He was a great forward-thinking, prophetic person

and, you know, one way of looking at where

he leaves his women at the end of the whole cycle of The Rainbow

and Women In Love is, you know, very much

the position of the modern woman, who could be completely

autonomous in having a child, for instance.

She doesn't need a man to do that necessarily,

she can live on her own.

Everything that people think that is suspect about Lawrence,

it's merely the degree of freedom

and licence that he permits the female mind in the way that a woman

might think about her body and about the sexual relationship with a man.

He doesn't leave things at particular

thresholds like other writers do. He goes all the way,

he follows people into the most intimate moments of their lives.

I mean, there's a lovely scene in The Rainbow where Anna,

heavily pregnant Anna, fed up with her husband and wanting to annoy

him and rebel against him

takes off all her clothes and dances.

She knows he's going to come in

and he does, and he's horrified, horrified.

He's disgusted by this spectacle of a pregnant woman with no shame.

And Lawrence is right behind her, he's absolutely

approving of her decision to annoy people by loving herself.

Lawrence was both enraged and deeply hurt by the censorship

and rejection of his work,

not least because in many ways the model for those modern,

liberated heroines of The Rainbow and Women In Love was his own

spirited, unconventional and proudly independent wife Frieda...

..an independence of which he was made powerfully

aware up in the Alps, back in 1912.

After their great climb, Lawrence

and Frieda descended to the town below where their English

walking companions took a train back home.

After a couple of days' rest, Lawrence

and Frieda were keen to get to Italy and they headed on south

with another steep hike up a mountain called a Jaufen.

-Slippy here.

-I think I am keeping up with you rather well, Geoff.

-You are but, of course, I am slowing down to make it easy for you.

-I see.

-You look to me like...

-I can give you an assisting hand if you like.

..you're about to faint.

Late in the evening, as once again they found themselves cold,

in fading light and uncertain of their location,

Frieda chose her moment to reveal to Lawrence that a couple of days

earlier, while he was off hunting for wild flower specimens, she had

had sex with their walking companion Harold Hobson in a hay barn.

I mean, it's really an extraordinary moment to choose.

They are in some distress, they have had a very bad day,

they are actually in quite considerable physical danger

and this is the moment Frieda chooses to say this.

But, yeah, it was quite a shock and he describes it.

-He writes about it later on in about 1920...

-In Mr Noon.

Yeah, and writes about it in that incredible way, locating

exactly what happens by saying, "Everything vague.

"He turned vaguely away," so he just enters this kind of weird,

stunned state, which Lawrence fixes with great precision by using

that word "vaguely".

"He turned vaguely and went clambering up the path

"while she followed in silence behind

"and so they climbed for some time."

One of the things he liked about Frieda is that he couldn't

walk all over her.

This was a sort of early manifestation of this thing

that he put such store by, that they should both be independent.

You know, it made clear that she was no pushover,

which is what he wanted.

"Suddenly he turned to her. She was close behind him.

"He dropped her knapsack and threw his arms around her.

"'Never mind, my love,' he said. 'Never mind, never mind.

"'We do things we don't know we're doing.'

"And he kissed her and clung to her passionately

"in a sudden passion of self-annihilation."

Lawrence was so convinced of the importance of Frieda

that he was willing to self-annihilate -

he needed her, whatever she did.

He felt their relationship was essential to his existence

and central to his writing.

The journey to Italy turned out to be the beginning of a life together,

a life of continual movement.

After the First World War,

they began a peripatetic existence in Italy, Sicily and Sardinia.

Before embarking on a voyage that Lawrence referred to

as a savage pilgrimage,

first to what was then Ceylon, modern day Sri Lanka,

then Australia, where they stayed for nearly four months

and where he wrote a novel called Kangaroo.

After sailing the Pacific to San Francisco, they finally drew

to a halt in the high desert and mountains of New Mexico,

where they stayed on and off for three years

and from where they made forays into Mexico.

Some of Lawrence's later writing from the period

when he was travelling the globe has landed him

with the grim label of being both a racist and a fascist -

a fascist mostly because he wrote about fascist leaders in Kangaroo

and in a Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent.

He is fascinated by the idea, as many people were in the '20s,

of the powerful leader - the authority that really will solve

these awful problems we got into with the First World War.

If someone can show us a way forward that's not like that,

then that's interesting, and Lawrence explores the subject -

to explore something is not to be a fascist.

In 1925, when he was in a bit of a corner to say

what he believed in politically, he said, "If I believe in anything,

"I believe in a good form of socialism."

And that puts it straight.

Lawrence is not a fascist.

It's easier to understand why Lawrence has been labelled a racist.

He made rude comments about pretty much every race

with which he came into contact,

none more so than the English.

However, these outbursts are mitigated by the openness

and seriousness with which he engaged with the people

and places to which he travelled.

In the early 1920s, Lawrence developed a growing interest

in learning from ancient, pre-Christian civilisations,

in particular the Native Indians of America.

Lawrence and Frieda came to the small town of Taos in New Mexico,

at the invitation of a wealthy American heiress, Mabel Dodge,

who lived here with her soon-to-be husband, Tommy Luhan -

a Native American from the nearby Taos Pueblo tribe of Indians.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, who was a wealthy heiress,

who had settled in Taos,

whose mission was to save the Indians,

had read some of his writing about nature

and thought only HE could capture the Indians,

and so they had never met, had no contact with each other,

and he said yes, he would come to Taos.

He arrived here on the day of his 37th birthday in 1922

and, immediately, Mabel had him ride off

to one of the Indian reservations, and so he was immediately immersed

in the Native American culture and immediately began writing about it.

CHANTING

He would go to the formal dances that the Indians held

at their various villages, and he was transfixed by it.

And, in the evenings, they would go to Mabel's house

and her husband would bring in his friends.

Lawrence would dance with the Indians.

He wanted to live and show people an authentic experience with nature,

an authentic experience with sexuality,

an authentic experience with spirituality.

And it was particularly the spirituality that he hoped

to get from the Taos natives.

On 17th May 1924, Mabel Dodge Luhan took Lawrence

and Frieda on an expedition up into the mountains

to visit an historic Indian site - the Arroyo Seco Cave.

This impressive, gaping cavern, gave Lawrence the idea

for one of his most controversial short stories.

One of his most important

and most misunderstood stories is The Woman Who Rode Away.

The story is set here in this cave in northern Mexico,

which, for thousands of years,

had been a ceremonial site for the Native Americans.

Earlier times, they had practised rituals,

possibly even of human sacrifice.

The Woman Who Rode Away is the story of the white American wife

of a mine owner who gives herself to be sacrificed

by a tribe of Indians.

Lawrence used the exact geography here at Arroyo Seco in his story

and the ritualised killing takes place on the small ledge

at the back of the cave.

She's living a dead life - pursuing silver - pursuing money.

And her spirit is dead and she decides to ride away from that life.

And she, willingly, without fighting, goes to her own sacrifice,

just as Lawrence dreamed of riding away from his own life.

He wrote about riding off in the desert and never coming back.

He also wrote about sacrificing his heart to the sun.

He could understand why somebody would want to sacrifice

themselves to the sun.

CHANTING

"The throng below gave the low, wild cry.

"Then the priests turned her round, so she stood with her back

"to the open world, her long blonde hair to the people below."

Lawrence's story has enraged feminist critics,

who interpreted the work as an act of hatred towards women.

Many people have called it a misogynistic story

because a woman is sacrificed.

It's clear in the story that the woman represents Western culture,

and that she is being sacrificed in order for a renewal of life

for all the people,

and that was Lawrence's goal from the beginning,

and it was the goal of all the modernists.

They sought out primitives because they felt they still had a connection

with the earth that modern people had lost,

and that needed to be renewed.

In fact, much of Lawrence's writing about New Mexico,

and indeed much of his later writing in general

with its interest in the environment,

anthropology and spirituality, has been dismissed or mocked.

I think academia is getting its revenge on Lawrence, the wild man,

Lawrence, the hairy man, Lawrence, the green man,

Lawrence, the scorner of civilisation.

It's hard to say what Lawrence hated most. Did he hate class the most?

Did he hate the wealthy the most?

Did he hate civilisation the most?

I think you could say that he hated most sophistication.

He believed that humans could recover

and that's the education of the soul in nature

and in gender and sexuality that you see in his books.

Lawrence and Frieda stayed in Taos for three months

before moving up into the mountains,

eventually taking up the offer of a small ranch from Mabel Dodge.

The Lawrences lived here during the spring and summer of 1924 and 1925.

In those days, it took a whole day on horseback

to ride to and from town.

So, Frieda and Lawrence would stay here more or less permanently

and have people come in and out of town for their supplies,

but they lived here frugally

and they'd made what they could of what animals they had around here.

It offered that sense of nature that was every bit a part of Lawrence.

His mind was free here and he didn't have the problems

with his everyday life that he might have elsewhere in the world,

so that's why he enjoyed living here at the ranch.

Lawrence often talked of the spirit of the place

and it's very much indeed present here.

"Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me

"from the present era of civilisation,

"the great era of material and mechanical development.

"In the magnificent, fierce morning of New Mexico, one sprang awake

"a new part of the soul woke up suddenly

"and the old world gave way to the new."

In many ways, the wandering,

the expedition that Lawrence embarked on

with Frieda that summer back in 1912, found its climax

and a kind of conclusion here among the ponderosa pine trees

at Kiowa Ranch.

It's really easy to comprehend why Lawrence would have come to Mexico.

When you come west, when you are in this big landscape, you're humbled -

it's just so big and so magical.

All the elements are visible -

the wind, air, fire and earth -

just when you look out across some kind of vista,

and so that must have been something he would have welcomed

and that he obviously responded to in a deep, deep way.

In the end, he found the sincere spirituality

that he had been seeking all his life since his early youth -

a true religious connection with life - with the life forces.

He felt he found it here in New Mexico.

From New Mexico, Lawrence travelled back to Europe,

where he spent most of the remaining five years of his life in Italy -

the country where he completed his last novel,

Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The appeal of Italy - the climate - the cost of living,

it's un-Englishness, was much what it had been 14 years earlier

when he arrived here with Frieda in September 1912,

desperate to complete that novel in his rucksack, Sons and Lovers.

# Oh, ho-ha-ha... #

MAN SINGS IN ITALIAN

So, here we are in Gargnano, with this indispensable,

if not entirely reliable, guidebook to help us,

not only have you got the book but I see you've got a new dress on.

-I have scrubbed up.

-You had that in your rucksack.

It's self ironing, I take it.

It was carefully packed.

This is done in honour of Frieda who, when they arrived in the first

Italian town, she was looking like a tramp.

She was in the dress she'd had on for all those nights in haystacks

and she had a dark green Burberry coat, Panama hat with a red ribbon

around it, of which the colour had bled into the hat itself.

-Very fetching.

-But they weren't roughing it to the extent

of actually carrying their luggage with them.

They had great trunks that were being sent from Bavaria.

Once they arrived, then she was able to get into her party frocks

-and start feeling like a woman again.

-Aha!

-And I'm sure Lawrence was delighted.

-Yeah.

# Oh, ho-ha-ha

# Ha-ha, ho-ho... #

So that's a street where Lawrence and Frieda would walk.

Professor Stefania Michelucci is a leading expert on Lawrence's time

in Italy, and she's arranged a visit to the Villa Igea,

the apartment where Lawrence and Frieda stayed in Gargnano -

the apartment where Sons and Lovers was finally completed.

In here - this is the first floor of the Villa Igea,

where Lawrence and Frieda lived.

They were here for about six months, before going back to England.

There is the kitchen, the original kitchen,

although many things have changed now,

where one of his plays was written

and set - The Fight For Barbara.

Of course, many things have changed since then.

Yes, difficult to imagine it, isn't it?

With all the modern furniture.

-Difficult.

-The windows in the bedroom were these ones.

-Oh, my gosh!

-Yeah.

So that's where he spent so many months.

That's the view they had.

-Wow! That is so lovely.

-God!

-This is where he got Sons And Lovers polished off.

-Exactly.

He completed Sons And Lovers, his first masterpiece.

I couldn't imagine a place more different to where

he was writing about.

You don't get much further

from a Nottinghamshire coal village than this.

-Yeah, it's the opposite pole.

-Exactly, exactly.

As far as colours are concerned - light and everything.

Sitting here in the Villa Igea, looking out across Lake Garda,

Lawrence took his mind back to Eastwood...

the world of miners, the narrow streets of terraced houses

and the memories of his upbringing.

Today, Sons And Lovers still feels surprisingly modern.

100 years ago, it was ground-breaking writing.

I mean, the two things that must strike anybody

who picks up Sons And Lovers

are, firstly, the remarkably intimate portrayal

of a certain form of life that the novel gives us,

and it gives us it in a documentary way.

So it describes not only a way of life of the mining community,

it describes the language they use and it explains it to us.

It actually glosses that life,

and the second part of the novel

that's very striking is that it tries

to get inside the characters' experiences,

particularly at moments when they're feeling passion, feeling desire,

feeling most uncomfortable and uncertain about their experiences.

One of the most striking features of Sons And Lovers is its powerful

insight into the minds of its female characters,

an authenticity that was achieved in part thanks to Frieda.

From the beginning of their relationship, Frieda read

and became involved with Lawrence's work,

just as his first girlfriend, Jessie Chambers, had done.

During the final reworking of Sons And Lovers, Frieda helped him

find a new dimension to the women in the book, and also encouraged him

to take a more objective view of his story and his relationship

with his mother, whose death provides the end point of the novel.

The fourth and final version of Sons And Lovers

was posted off to David Garnett,

Lawrence's editor back in England in November 1912,

where it was finally published in May the following year.

The book was no great commercial success

but this unusual opportunity to look in on the lives of working people

was widely reviewed and put Lawrence on the literary map.

Lawrence said about Sons And Lovers, I write

because I want folk - English folk - to alter and have more sense,

to have them change their view, not only of the working class,

but also of what passion might be, of what sexuality is,

all of those things he wanted to expose people to,

and that was a very startling thing, I think, for them,

and very challenging as well.

This is a book which divides its readers.

Some people are saying,

"This really understands women and children and marriages

"better than anything else we ever read.

"Where has this writer been hiding?"

The other side is saying, "This is all rather distasteful.

"It's all about sex. We're getting far too close to the bone.

"We don't want this kind of writing, do we now?

But Sons And Lovers went on to become arguably Lawrence's

most successful novel in the 20th century -

modern, democratic, highly readable and especially popular

with generations of teenagers and students.

Sons And Lovers has a subdued ending.

In the final pages, Paul Morel, an isolated figure,

is deep in mourning for his mother,

but the novel concludes with a powerful sense of a young man

heading towards the light, about to embark on a new life.

Looking out of their new bedroom window, Lawrence and Frieda

undoubtedly shared the same optimistic sense of a new beginning.

Lawrence finished Sons And Lovers

and then begins to move on to the next phase of his life.

There's something really beautiful and moving

and inspiring about the life he makes with Frieda -

living incredibly cheaply, always travelling third class,

often in very, very bad health,

but leading a life of incredible adventure.

In 1930, 18 years after he walked up the Weekleys' garden path

in Mapperley, DH Lawrence died in France of tuberculosis

at the age of only 44,

Frieda was at his side.

Appropriately, Frieda interred the remains of her wandering,

nature-loving husband, up here at their ranch in New Mexico -

the place where she herself was buried 26 years later.

Lawrence's own symbol of the phoenix perches

optimistically on top of the small chapel.

But the remoteness and inaccessibility

of Lawrence's memorial up at the Kiowa Ranch can't help

but seem symbolic of his continued status as an outsider.

Today, many universities no longer teach the apparently

politically incorrect DH Lawrence.

And Sons And Lovers has long ceased to be

a must-read book for every teenager.

The thing that saddens me about Lawrence is that he suffered

so much abuse when he was alive and the fact that he continues

to suffer it seems very harsh, that justice hasn't been done.

He, to my mind,

is probably the greatest writer of English prose.

The academy has gotten its revenge on Lawrence.

They have peripheralised him.

If you peripheralise even a major artist long enough,

they will vanish into the mists,

they will be dropped from the collective memory,

and it could happen to Lawrence - it's hard to tell.

Lawrence has always been divisive.

It's hard to think of a writer who has been loved

and loathed in such equal measure,

but, today, perhaps the balance is shifting against him,

and his bad reputation - much of which seems undeserved -

is in danger of obscuring one of the most original, vital,

and provocative voices in the language.

He'd written his books in the way he intended to.

He'd seen it through.

It had cost him dear. You know, he was exiled,

he was ridiculed, he was persecuted.

Even at the time of his death,

he was still seen by some as a meddling pornographer, really.

But he was true to himself. I think that's what Lawrence is about.

He was true to himself. How many of us can say that as writers?

It's very easy to dismiss any of his statements -

any of his ideas on politics, on men, on women, on the human body -

or the relationship between love and lust.

And he would say, "Fine, disagree.

"You just do some searching for yourself.

"You work out what's actually going on."

This is what I find really inspiring in him.

It's not the case that I agree with any one of his statements

but I do think that, whilst we're alive,

during our years on earth, you might as well do some living

and actually make a spiritual effort to work out what's going on,

and that's what Lawrence is an example of.

That's what he inspires me to do. He was so, so alive.

I would say he was pro-life.

Not in the political sense, but in the sense

that he...he loved life.

He made you want to be alive.

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