D.H. Lawrence (1885 -1930) was a prolific writer who left Britain in 1919 and travelled the globe, describing his self-imposed exile as a ‘savage pilgrimage.’ This resulted in him never living in the same place for more than two years, leading Geoff Dyer to observe that Lawrence was ‘nomadic to the point of frenzy.’

Lawrence’s wanderlust meant he was a prolific letter writer as this was the main way he was able to maintain relationships with friends, family, and business associates. I love reading his letters one hundred years from when they were written and produce a monthly video essay about them.

For a brief spell, one of his pen pals was Amy Dawson Scott. In 1917, she formed The Tomorrow Club, a kind of mentoring salon that connected aspiring writers with established writers. Iterations of this continue today. On witnessing the benefits of connecting writers up in one city, Dawson Scott came up with a more ambitious plan. Why not create a global support network for writers? On 5 October 1921, ‘The International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists’ was formed. Or P.E.N International as it’s known today.            

Lawrence joined in August 1924, for one guinea, believing that writers ‘are perhaps the only people who may be capable of imaginative international understanding.’ In some respects, joining an organisation was uncharacteristic as he tended to live life on the margins due to his peripatetic lifestyle and the controversial views he espoused in his novels. But perhaps he saw in P.E.N ‘fellow travellers’ who may help his work be better understood and received.     

Lawrence described his most famous book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), as a ‘bomb’ that he hoped would destroy the old ways of thinking that produced industrialism, consumerism, and war, and instead usher in more tender means of living. For this reason, he experienced censorship throughout his career. In 1915, The Rainbow was suppressed under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and dismissed as ‘a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action throughout.’ It was described as unpatriotic for daring to question the role of family, work, and relationships – while soldiers were fighting to defend these values at the time during WWI.

In this sense, P.E.N was a perfect match, particularly the principle that ‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.’ Lawrence hated war and the servile ‘mechanical’ thinking it produced in people. Sadly, his battle continues today as the theme of the 90^th PEN International Congress, held at Oxford on 24 September, is ‘Writers in a World of War’.  

On 13 September 1924, Lawrence wrote to Amy Dawson Scott advising that he was leaving his cabin in the mountains above Taos County and heading down into Mexico for his next adventure and that he was happy to do ‘P.E.N activities down there: though dinners I don’t care for.’ He arranges to meet the writer and diplomat Genaro Estrada who was the president of the Mexican branch of P.E.N.

But Lawrence was no diplomat and generally felt uncomfortable in literary gatherings. His uncompromising views and appetite for arguments meant he eventually fell out with most people. For Lawrence, what mattered was intellectual conflict. The role of the writer was ‘intimate warfare’ where writers are tasked with ‘smashing the face of what they know is rotten.’ And there is much that is rotten in the world today, so get writing… 

This blog was originally published on Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature on Sept 2024. You can see other Locating Lawrence video essays on YouTube. These are part of a larger project called the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre, co-produced with Paul Fillingham.

In Spring, I visited Royal Leamington Spa to give a talk to the Leamington Literary Society on you know who. The Society was formed in 1912 to encourage philosophical and literary debate among men but is now open to anyone with an interest in reading. The talk was a success as only one person fell asleep, though he had the grace not to snore.

I took literary heritage as my theme and from this, explored different elements of Lawrence’s life. We started off with a map of Eastwood and a potted history of his childhood via key locations and buildings – most of which have either been flattened, sold off, or left to rot. From this I put forward arguments as to how we should celebrate Lawrence’s life and introduced the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre project. We finished off with a close reading of his endlessly quotable letters.

Lawrence’s popularity has waxed and waned over the decades, for a variety of reasons. But he is enjoying a resurgence at the moment, inspiring novels by Alison MacLeod and Rachel Cusk, as well as a poetry collection by Isobel Dixon. Leamington had also been on a long period of decline, thanks in part of John Betjeman’s “Death in Leamington,” but over the last twenty years has had a bit of a renaissance, due to the opening of the M40, the proximity of Warwick University and Jaguar Landrover.

I’d never been to Leamington before, so on arrival headed straight to the church. Not to absolve sins, of which there are – I am pleased to report – many, but to grab food from the Ukrainian café inside and help support the young people who run it. This immediately got me thinking about exile.

Lawrence lived in self-imposed exile from 1919. Sick of censorship and modernity, he travelled the globe in search of Rananim whereas the Ukrainians are here out of necessity. Later on I picked up a copy The New European, and the Great Lives section featured Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) who during the 1920s and 30s was one of the most popular and widely translated authors in the world. Zweig was an Austrian Jew who fled his home in the 1930s after the rise of fascism and lived in various countries and continents. Unlike Lawrence, who compared returning to Britain in 1923 as ‘like a dog returning to its vomit,’ Zweig was desperate to get home. He committed suicide in Petropolis, a Brazilian town in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, on 22 February 1942. His suicide note read, ‘it would require immense strength to reconstruct my life, and my energy is exhausted by long years of peregrination as one without a country.’

These three stories of travel – Ukrainians trying to make a living from cooking which in turn helps rekindle memories of home, Zweig’s enforced exile on ideological grounds, and Lawrence’s search for Rananim, left me feeling less angry at the train service for the various strikes that day that made getting back to Nottingham quite the endurance test.   

I’ve agreed to come back next year and do a talk on Sillitoe’s great anti-heroes of literature, Arthur Seaton and Colin Smith.