He’s back in Britain and the weather is sending him nuts…
Living remotely occasionally led Lawrence to lament, ‘one’s land has a sort of hopeless attraction’ but this longing for the familiar quickly dissipates once Lawrence touches back on home turf. He feels ‘queer and foreign’ comparing city life to ‘being inside an aquarium, the people all fishes swimming on end.’
There are two factors that appear to affect his ability to make home – the weather and friends – both of which are lacking. London is ‘foggy, with feeble attempts at sun’, ‘like a long funeral’ and ‘dark as death.’ New Mexico it is not. As for his friends, ‘there’s no life in anybody.’ Matters are made worse by the cost of living, with London being ‘so expensive, it makes one’s hair stand on end.’
In addition to Britain’s dismal weather, the benefits systems of the 1920s were as dysfunctional as they are today. This evident in a letter to Alfred Decker and Lucy Hawk in which Lawrence explains how difficult it is for a farmer to get casual labour because ‘if the unemployed work for a week, they go off the list of the dole, and they find it so hard to get on again, it’s safer not to work.’
How little things have changed…
These video essays are based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence one hundred years ago and are published monthly as part of the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre project.
To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1925, click here, from 1923, click here, from 1924, click here, from 1925, click here.
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