One Hundred Years of D.H. Lawrence
On the eleven-hour and five-minute flight from Los Angeles to Lisbon, I finished reading a collection of D.H. Lawrence’s letters1, and I admit I shed a tear or two. You might know him as the infamous author of several novels, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which were banned in England for their “erotic” content and even put on trial. He would be laughing to see the kinds of novels written under the misleading term ‘romantasy’ that now plague the book industry.
But what you might not know about D.H. Lawrence can be gleaned from his letters: that he had an affair with an aristocratic, married German woman, Frieda, that he was mistakenly suspected of being a German spy during the First World War, that he wrote novels and short stories as well as poems, plays, essays, and painted quite well too, and that he traveled not only to Italy (of which he wrote many travel books) but also to parts of the Middle East, Asia, Australia, South America, and the USA and Mexico, even buying a ranch in New Mexico and living there for some time, and lastly, that he died at 44 years old of tuberculosis having published a total of 12 novels, along with around 76 short stories and novellas, as well as countless poems, essays, plays, travel books, and even translations of Italian and Russian works.
Lawrence was born in 1885 and died in 1930, so his collection of letters, along with his other writings, has fermented for one hundred years, and its age, like a rare bottle of wine, shows in the most delightful ways. First of all, he wrote letters. This slow-paced form of communication, which died out with the invention of email, is my favorite way to learn about a time period or historical figure. Letters are intimate and lengthy, relaying gossip, detailed life updates, work feuds, apologies, declarations of love, and recent political news, sometimes all in the same letter. Each recipient (and in some collections, sender) is like a character of a story coming to life between the lines. In Lawrence’s case, many of the friends he wrote to ended up as actual characters in his novels, with one Lady Ottoline Morrell even ceasing to speak with him for ten years because of it. Letters remind us that human nature has not really changed a smudge compared with technological innovations, though some of our customs certainly have (again, cf. the genre of romantasy).
The second tell of his time is that Lawrence traveled by ship and train, made even more obvious while reading his letters on my direct, trans-Atlantic flight. Despite the ease of planes today, Lawrence managed to travel to at least three times as many countries and cities as I have, documenting rural and urban scenes with an attention to detail that either suggests the slow, steady pace of life during that time or my modern, distracted gaze always being pulled to a smartphone screen instead of wandering to the nearest tree or building, even if only out of boredom—or a bit of both, perhaps. By the last letter, written a month before his sudden death, I was flying over the Atlantic Ocean with only a few hours left before landing, and I felt strangely ashamed, knowing I had wasted so much of my time already. I thought that I would be lucky to travel and write half as much as D.H. Lawrence had, even if I live to see twice as many years.
Staying with my grandparents in Portugal reminds me that I can choose to live a slower life. I don’t need to revert to letter writing (although I have tried to keep a letter correspondence with a long-distance friend and found it a much harder task than expected, a skill to be cultivated and admired when done well), but I can put my phone away while on public transit or a walk and look around me instead (you will then notice just how many people are glued to their phone), taking note of the different kinds of trees lining the sidewalk, the color of the sky, the variety of people surrounding me.
My grandparents, who traveled by ship between Portugal and Angola in their younger years, have the patience of a mountain weathering the wind, and on a stroll, they can identify a tree or flower instantly and explain if it can be brewed for tea, or used medicinally, or the fruit it grows. And beyond the local flora and fauna, they have a keen eye when it comes to picking people to keep in their lives and have a broad network of colleagues, friendships, and distant family that were formed in a time without emails, let alone phone calls or text messages. My life would feel very full indeed if I had but a slice of their social life at that age—no, at my age!
So, although I am grateful for the ease and speed of an airplane, I lament the loss of slow living, even letter writing, for it reflects a time when basic communication could be considered an art form, not flat, emotionless phrases that leave us farther apart than ever. Jet lag is the physical reminder that traveling fast is, in many ways, unnatural, but the distance we cover with our bodies does not always translate to how far our minds and souls have traveled, especially if we are always sucked into the void of our handheld screens. For in the time we gain with our modern technology, it seems we lose something vital about living, that human instinct and sensuality which D.H. Lawrence always encouraged to the day he died, which can be found even in the most mundane and earthly. So get out, take a walk, and look around you, lest life, real life, pass you by as quickly as the airplanes in the sky.
Vale!
-Zoë
A view from the Parque dos Poetas in Oeiras, PortugalFrom the Writer’s DeskStill working on the last book of my fantasy series, The Realm of Emmeson, though it goes in fits and starts instead of smooth and steady while I travel and spend time with family abroad. It fits the feel of the story anyhow, which switches perspective every other chapter, and includes traveling scenes as well, if only to the Netherworld…
I’m a bit sad that I don’t have enough time at the moment for the illustrations of my poetry book, since it’s nearly ready to publish otherwise, cover and formatting and all. At some point I’ll do a cover release, maybe once I have the drawings done. I fear this is a harbinger of the future, though, when I will have to juggle school, writing, and my personal life again—and writing is often the first to go. Still, I hope to have the book published early next year at the very latest!
NEW RELEASES:
LEARN MORE
LEARN MORECURRENT PROJECTS:BOOK 3 REALM OF EMMESON - First draft
SOFIA BEFORE LOVE (a book of poetry) - Illustrations
Iliad by Homer (in Ancient Greek!)
The Gnostic by Jacques Lacarrière
Lyra Mystica by Charles Albertson
Here’s a photo of my Portuguese grandmother, Maria dos Anjos, and me!
My other Substack, The Fellowship of the Readers, will start slow-reading The Silmarillion on July 29th. Check it out if you are interested in reading or just following along with the occasional quote excerpts I’ll send out to mark our journey!
A QUOTE:MY BOOKS“I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor.”
—D.H. Lawrence to A.W. McLeod, 17 January 1913.
The Sun of God — an epic historical novel set in Ancient Rome
(Amazon, discount paperback, discount special edition hardcover, audiobook)
Imagining the Roman Empire: Essays on Travel & Antiquity in the Mediterranean
(Amazon paperback)
The Song of Gaia (Book #1)
(Amazon, discount paperback, discount hardcover, special dust jacket hardcover)
The Pillars of the Sea (Book #2)
(Amazon, discount paperback, discount hardcover)
My Sister’s Best Friend (Book #1)
(Amazon, discount paperback, audiobook)
Best Friends & Their Exes (Book #2)
(Amazon, discount paperback, audiobook)
Hot takes on the ancient world by two Classics students and dead language fanatics!
Listen to our new episode:“WORD You Rather: Germanic vs Romance Descendants in English”
Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and most other podcast streaming services!
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1Thank you to my friend, fellow Classicist, and co-author Grace DeAngelis for this lovely gift!
