They’re eating the song thrushes. They’re eating the robins!
January kicks off with a rare, albeit brief, dose of optimism. ‘Well, here’s the New Year! - and a brilliant sunny day, with the sea bright.’ Part of the reason for Lawrence’s burst of positivity is he’s spent Christmas painting pictures with Frieda’s daughter Barby, though he later remarks ‘I am not the paternal sort. Am always glad I have no children.’ More remarkably, he’s managed not to fall out with his publisher Martin Secker during his winter stay.
Secker’s calming demeanour has certainly rubbed off on Lawrence as all he wants ‘is to live and be well alive.’ But there’s still a bit of fight left in him. ‘I am forty years old now, but the world is still an unopened oyster, probably will always remain so. Nevertheless, one can go on trying to prise it open.’
Although he feels much better and ‘solider’ living on the Mediterranean he still hankers for ‘a little ship to sail the sea’ and pesters friends to indulge him in this fantasy, suggesting a cruise around the Balearics or central Sicily.
His mood begins to regain its more familiar bile mid-January, which coincides with two days of snow which was ‘vilely cold’. But the weather isn’t bad enough to stop ‘beastly Italian louts’ hunting birds. ‘I don’t exaggerate when I say one hears five or six shots a minute, all day long. You hear a huge man say he’s just shot a robin. Oh world of men!’ and then more comically ‘the robins and finches fly about in perfect bewilderment – and occasionally in bits.’
These monthly video essays are based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence, written a century ago. To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1922, click here, from 1923, click here, from 1924, click here, from 1925, click here.
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