News from the World (7 page)

Robin, a painter from England, and his wife, Peggy, came to stay in one of Mrs. Holmes's cabins. He was visiting the United States with the intention of painting portraits of literary people and those connected with them. Inevitably, we met the couple. He told us he was working on a painting of D. H. Lawrence's widow, Frieda, who lived a few miles from Taos.

I would never have guessed she was still alive, much less that I would find myself so near to her. I recalled my father's astonishment when I quoted Witter Bynner's words to him, and I wondered if my astonishment at Robin's words were not the same as his had been at the poet's.

The painter told us that Frieda was a German baronness who had married a Nottingham literature professor, Ernest Weekly. She had had three children with him, and when she had run off with Lawrence, she had, in Robin's words, “abandoned her family.”

Several days later, as I sat staring down at my typewriter, a voice asked, “Vot are you doing in dere?”

“Trying to write,” I answered.

“Gut!” she said strongly, nodding at me before she disappeared from view. Later that day, Robin told me the woman was Frieda Lawrence. Of course I had already guessed it.

The next morning when I went to take a shower, I discovered a tiny snake coiled around the drain, asleep. I dressed hastily in the shirt and jeans I had just dropped on the floor and went to get Richard.

He picked up a withered tree limb from the ground, went into the shower room and killed the little snake with three blows. I noted tiny amber-colored rattles at the end of its tail. Richard said, “Its bite is as bad as the big ones.”

In the afternoon I sat on a folding chair in a horse stall watching Robin set up his easel and prepare his palette. For an hour or so he used me as a practice model. As I sat there breathing in the lingering smells of horse and dung mixed with linseed oil, I dreamed of ghost horses. I sat for him again, and later on, again, and the oil sketch became a portrait.

Later that week, Robin invited us to join him and Peg for tea at Frieda's house. We drove out of Taos in their rented car. There was no traffic, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains loomed over us, the land seemed to move along with the car on low billows, and the sun bore down fiercely, a brilliant yellow dazzle that did away with the past and the future, leaving only the present. We came to two adobe ranch houses facing each other across the road. They looked as if they'd been drawn by a child.

As we drew closer, I saw an elderly woman moving clumsily about the veranda of one of the houses. An ear trumpet stuck out from beneath her Harpo Marx–like yellow hair. A graceful young man joined her, took her arm, and led her to a chair. Robin told us she was Dorothy Brett, a longtime friend of the writer's. Actually, he added, she had been Lawrence's acolyte.

I was the first up the path to Frieda's house, passing a wooden out-building halfway there. Breathlessly, I pushed open the front door and felt a soft resistance, as though pillows were piled up behind it.

But it was Frieda Lawrence's ample behind as she was bending at that same moment to open the stove door. I glimpsed burned crackers covered with melted cheese in a pan.

“At least,” she said to me as she straightened up holding the pan with a kitchen towel, “Lawrence isn't here to scold me for my clumsiness with these—” and she nodded toward the cheese and crackers. She laughed then, a husky, amiable sound.

The others had caught up with me, and we followed her into the living room, where she set the pan down on a roughly carpentered table. I was startled by the large paintings that crowded the white plaster walls. “Lawrence's,” she said.

I found them repellent. The subjects were naked women crawling on a stone floor, their breasts and buttocks enormous, their faces angry or as blank as balloons. The work was done in raw, brutal colors, full of energy and hysteria.

I sat down beside her on a serape-covered sofa while Richard spoke across the room with Robin and Peg. Frieda told me that a week earlier a young man from Boston had visited her to talk about Lawrence. She was hardly able to get a word in. The young man had overflowed with his worshipful paean to the novelist.

“And he had rented a horse in Albuquerque and ridden here, over seventy-five miles,” she said smiling. “For the effect, you see, to get my attention to his heroic effort in the cause of Lawrence.”

The burned crackers had a good taste despite their charred edges. Frieda rose at some point to fetch glasses of water. The conversation, widening like a stream, grew more general. Peg twittered away, nourishing herself, no doubt, with her own Englishness. We stayed for an hour.

As we walked silently down the slope—I was too bemused by Frieda's reality, the power of her mystery for me, to speak—I saw a short, heavy man standing in the path with his back toward us. He turned when we reached him. Robin had whispered to me that he was Angelo Ravagli, brought from Italy by Lawrence. His expression was sad, defeated. When he spoke, his Italian accent was strong, as though he'd just debarked on Ellis Island. Later I heard that he had been the model for Mellors, the gamekeeper in Lawrence's novel
Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Robin told us more about Angelo when we were in the car. He kept a potter's wheel inside the shed, and when he wasn't gambling in the barn casino he would throw pots. I never saw one, though we visited Frieda often.

At some point, I learned that Frieda and Angelo had been denied American citizenship because they were living together illicitly. In 1950 they married, and soon after were forgiven by the government and allowed to become American citizens.

After Robin and Peg left Taos, we heard about Dorothy Brett from Frieda. She had sailed to Australia with the Lawrences, and Frieda said, “One morning on the voyage, she began to follow Lawrence into the toilet. That's when I had to put my foot down.” She laughed unrestrainedly, as she was apt to do about many things.

After the first few visits to her, I guessed why she had me sit next to her always, and why she stared at me so intensely. I resembled her daughter Barbara, she said.

I wondered whether she missed her children all the time, or only at intense moments. But Lawrence had taken up all her attention, she told us, smiling as though at someone who stood just behind us. I shivered.

Angelo was bitter, I felt, because he was lonely and wanted to live the rest of his life in his own country. He went often to the barn to gamble away Frieda's money.

It was there at the gambling hell that I learned that a rich easterner had bought an old ranch to use as a second home. It was the first time I had heard those two fateful words, “second home.” It was the start of a community of second homes in New Mexico.

Richard and I frequently drove to a ranch where we would rent desert ponies for an afternoon ride. We would sit on a corral fence watching them move around, some boisterously kicking up their hind legs, most plumply calm.

After we'd chosen our mounts, we would ride into the trackless desert. Tumbleweed would blow suddenly across the sand. The wind would drop. Then it would start up again as though it had yet another word to say.

One time I caught sight of a sidewinder rattlesnake zig-zagging swiftly toward my pony. Richard had seen it at the same moment and rode to my side. These ponies, he told me, were used to snakes and knew how to dance out of their way. When I glanced back to where we had been, I saw no snake, only a corkscrew ridge in the sand.

Toward the end of our second month, I picked up our mail at the Taos post office. So far, there hadn't been much mail for us. But today there was a long business envelope addressed to Richard. I opened it. It was from one of the heads of the agency where we had both worked in New York. I read the short paragraph.

A company vice-president had written it, saying that he hoped that Richard was enjoying his long vacation. He was looking forward to his return. There were a number of new accounts to be dealt with.

I returned to the tack room and silently held out the letter to Richard. After he had read it, I recall saying, “You told me you had quit for good.” He answered no, he had always expected to return to the agency. Where had I gotten the idea that he had left it permanently? When I think back to that moment, I still feel my wretched bewilderment.

Years later, after Richard and I had been parted for many years, I went to a dinner party in Manhattan. I heard Diana Trilling, whom I had just met that evening, claim that when it came to writing about nature, Norman Mailer had it all over D. H. Lawrence.

I groaned, I imagined, quietly. But Mrs. Trilling heard me. She rose from the dinner table and marched directly out of the apartment, the door slamming behind her.

The violence of her departure was mortifying. I blushed. The poet Stanley Kunitz, sitting next to me at the table, said, “That's the second dinner party in ten days that I've seen her leave in a tantrum.” I knew he wanted to comfort me. But that humiliating explosion was the occasion for Stanley to tell a Lawrence story.

Years before, he had spent a summer on the outskirts of a small French village, Vence, with a group of other young people. Stanley, along with a few others, would walk to a post office a mile or so away to collect the group's mail. One morning they passed a house on whose upper balcony sat a blanketed figure in a wheelchair, an attendant close by. Someone said, “That's D. H. Lawrence.”

The next morning as they passed the house, Stanley threw a note he had written up onto the balcony. In it, he expressed his love and admiration for Lawrence's work.

The attendant reached down, picked up the note and read it to Lawrence as Stanley and the others could see and hear.

When they returned with their mail and passed the house again, Stanley glanced up at the blanketed figure on the balcony. As he did so, the figure rose to its feet and bowed toward the poet.

Several weeks later when Stanley walked by the house, the man seated in the wheelchair was no longer there.

It was 1930. D. H. Lawrence died that summer of tuberculosis. He was forty-five years old.

He had left behind brilliant work, poems, translations of Italian writers (among them novels by Giovanni Verga), essays, short stories, and the luminous “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” a story that can stand, along with three of his novels—
Sons and Lovers, Women in Love,
and
The Rainbow—
among the most radiant and memorable writing of the past two hundred years.

But now his name is barely recognizable to most North American readers, and his reputation has suffered from attacks by groups who quarrel with this or that idea (some of them mad), which he always expressed with the provocation of a coal-miner's son intruding upon the English literary world. An early prudery kept
Lady Chatterley's Lover
out of print until 1959, not so very different an impulse in the government forces that would not permit American citizenship to be granted to Angelo Ravagli and Frieda Lawrence until they had married each other.