Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, But The Wind…’  William Heinemann, hb, 1935; first published in America in 1934. 276 pp.

This is the second of two books lent to me recently by my friend C. It’s an account by Frieda, née von Richtofen (1879-1956), of her stormy, passionate life with the man who became her second husband: DH Lawrence (1885-1930).

Like the woman herself, it’s a highly unconventional, deeply felt and not entirely reliable account. I could quote the entire four-page Foreword to illustrate its lively, often self-deprecating tone, but here’s a lengthy but I hope revealing sample:

I did not want to write this book. I wanted to give Lawrence my silence. Would he have wanted me to write it? Would he have jeered at me as one of those intellectual females whom he disliked so much? [There’s a lot of insight like this into his not very sympathetic, aggressive criticism of what he perceived as her shortcomings.]…Is it any use, my writing?…Can I hear the real song of our life, the motifs gay, bold, sad, terrible, or can’t I?…I will try to write as honestly as I can…

She then writes the first of many descriptions of the fiery, tempestuous nature of their relationship:

It was a long fight for Lawrence and me to get at some truth between us.; it was a hard life with him, but a wonderful one. Stark and bare, without trimmings and frills…[there was an] unalterable bond between us…

There are several echoes of the language of DHL himself here and throughout this account, and she clearly took on board some of his ideas and beliefs, that are now often seen as misogynistic and excessively authoritarian. She goes on:

We had many battles to fight out, so much to get rid of, so much to surpass. We were both good fighters. There was the ordinary man-and-woman fight between us, to keep the balance, not to trespass, not to topple over. The balance in a human relationship was one of Lawrence’s chief themes.

Then she points out the ‘class war’ between them: they came from ‘different worlds’ – she an aristocrat, he a collier’s son. They had to transcend this gulf, ‘to be reborn into the essence of our individual beings, the essence that is so much deeper than any class distinction.’

There’s that Lawrentian language again.

Then there’s the ‘race’ difference: he was an ‘Englishman, Puritan, stern and uncompromising, so highly conscious and responsible; I, the German, with my vagueness and uncertainty, drifting along. Only the fierce common desire to create a new kind of life, this was all that could make us truly meet.’

Frieda isn’t averse to giving a warts-and-all account. She doesn’t claim to have understood him. ‘I only know that I felt the wonder of him always’:

Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather.

She learned from him what true genius was. But she clearly didn’t always like him very much, as when he cruelly mocked her for showing she didn’t know how to turn on a gas hob. Nevertheless, she concludes, ‘His love wiped out all my shames and inhibitions, the failures and miseries of my past [including her marriage to her first husband, the Nottingham University academic, Ernest Weekley?]…He fought for the liberty of my being, and won.’

Frieda and Lawrence met in 1912, when she was still living with Weekley. She was, she says on p.3, 31 (but she was born in 1879, so I make it 33), and had three children. Lawrence was 26. Within weeks they had eloped to Europe, and she left behind, to her shame and grief, her children; as Weekley filed for divorce on the grounds of her infidelity, she had no legal right to claim custody of them. Lawrence initially consoled her, but then turned characteristically harsh about her sorrow:

…he was furious when I went on [grieving, having received letters from them at home]. “You don’t care a damn about those brats really, and they don’t care about you!” I cried, and we quarrelled.

She adds that he, ‘who had loved his own mother so much, felt, somewhere, it was almost impossible for a mother to leave her children.’ She doesn’t pursue this, but that sounds pretty brutal to me.

She wrote this, whatever this book is, memoir, (auto)biography, poetic reminiscence, at the New Mexico ranch where the couple, who married in 1914, lived on and off for several years in the 1920s, and to which she returned to live most of the rest of her life when Lawrence died in 1930. This book poignantly portrays Lawrence’s always fragile ‘consumptive’ condition: ‘I know now how completely he trusted his life to me, he in whom death was always so near’. This partly explains their constant wanderings in search of more congenial climates for his tubercular lungs.

Her description of that first meeting in 1912 is charming: in the opening sentence of the first chapter she writes:

…it surprises me that Lawrence could have loved me at first sight as he did. I hardly think I could have been a very lovable woman at the time…[But] I was living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life and he awakened the consciousness of my own proper self.

What follows is a vivid, always engaging account of their wanderings all over the world. There are over 90 of Lawrence’s letters included, to Frieda, her mother and sister. Some of his poems are reproduced, including (I’m pretty sure I’m not misremembering this) ‘Song of a man who has come through’, with its opening line from which Frieda takes her title: ‘Not I, not I but the wind that blows through me.’

There’s only a short section on their time near Zennor in Cornwall, about which I’ve posted here several times before (link HERE). ‘The war seemed to drive Lawrence to utter despair’, she writes; one consequence of this was the beginning of a souring in their always volatile relationship: ‘In those days Lawrence seemed to turn against me, perhaps on account of the bit of German in me.’ It was hardly ‘a bit’! She was a (very distant) cousin of the famous ‘Red Baron’ von Richthofen, the German WWI flying ace.

I enjoyed this as a book to dip into, find weird delights in unexpected places. I can’t recommend it as a full and accurate profile of the married life of the Lawrences (there have been plenty more academic and sober versions published), but it’s a spirited, partial, passionate love letter to a man she clearly adored, and he adored her back – but it was clearly, even from Frieda’s highly subjective perspective, a love-hate thing.