Grouse shooting is ‘an event for those that shoot, and a still bigger one for those that get shot’... Here's what DH Lawrence was up to 100 years ago this month.
Lawrence lasts a week in London, conceding ‘it’s not unpleasant, but I don’t really care for it.’ After visiting Richard Addlington in Padworth, home of ‘small, green fields with big hedges’, he concludes it’s ‘the same old England, but as if it were asleep, or not alive.’
He heads to Scotland in search of a dramatic landscape but is irritated that ‘there are motor cars everywhere’. To make matters worse, shooting season has started which Lawrence mocks with his customary wit, declaring Grouse shooting is ‘an event for those that shoot, and a still bigger one for those that get shot’. Quite.
He decides the ‘dumpy hills’ of Scotland are not for him so heads for the flatness of Lincolnshire and rents a bungalow in Mablethorpe for two weeks, concluding the locals ‘have a funny sort of purity and gentleness, and at the same time, unbreakableness, that attracts one.’
Earl Brewster, the American painter, writer, and scholar, receives curt advice about his love of Buddhism when he is warned not to lose himself in the ‘universal lotus pool’ as ‘the mud is too awful.’ Instead, he must rely on himself and discover his ‘own single destiny.’
And with that it’s back to London to see rehearsals of his latest play David.
These video essays are based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence one hundred years ago and are published monthly. To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1926, click here, from 1923, click here, from 1924, click here, from 1925, click here.
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