Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [7]
One theory about why The Rainbow was banned is that it was done for political reasons and had little or nothing to do with obscenity. This is possible, given the lack of graphic obscenity in the novel. According to this point of view, Lawrence with his candor and irritability angered people who were in a position to do him harm. For instance, in 1915 the Lawrences took a cottage lent them by Viola Meynell, daughter of the poet Alice Meynell, which brought him into contact with Lady Ottoline Morrell, a patron of the arts, Bertrand Russell, and other members of the Cambridge-Bloomsbury group. Lawrence soon wore out his welcome by mercilessly satirizing Lady Morrell (as Hermione in Women in Love) and lecturing her and Russell on their moral shortcomings. No one in this group may have directly been responsible for aiding in the banning of The Rainbow. On the other hand, no one lifted a finger to stop it either.
A clear and more present hostility presented itself in 1916 when Lawrence moved to Cornwall. He invited John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield to join him and Frieda. Lawrence romanticized the locals, to whom he talked freely, airing his antiwar philosophy. Presently, his home was searched by the locals and the authorities, and he and Frieda were treated like spies. It did not help that Frieda’s cousin was the German ace, Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron. The Lawrences were given three days to clear out of Cornwall and for the rest of the war were subject to surveillance and persecution. It is, therefore, not surprising that at the end of the war, the Lawrences left England to live in a virtually permanent exile.
In 1919, as soon as they could get visas, the Lawrences immediately returned to Italy, eventually settling in Taormina, Sicily. Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl was published in 1920 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Edinburgh, which brought with it a sum of one hundred pounds. Lawrence was still productive, but he never regained that brilliance of the early days in Italy and the war years in England. 1921 saw Lawrence shifting his talents to nonfiction. He published Sea and Sardinia, a travel book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, his answer to Freud, and Movements in History, a high school text. At the urging of his friend Earl H. Brewster and his wife, in 1922 Lawrence and Frieda sailed for Ceylon. The Brewsters, both Buddhists, were versed in Eastern philosophy. For years Lawrence had talked about leading a spiritual utopia of enlightened souls, which he called Rananim, so one would think that his landing in the east would have been manna to his soul. Instead, it was poison. Lawrence did not take well to either Ceylon or Buddhism. After a short stay, the Lawrences went for six weeks to Australia, which provided the setting for his novel Kangaroo. Aarons Rod, begun in 1918 and put aside, was published in 1922, along with England, My England, a collection of stories, and Fantasia of the Unconscious, a sequel to Lawrence’s book on psychoanalysis published the previous year.
One unexpected event occurred during the Lawrence’s trip east: A rich American woman looking to establish her own utopia in New Mexico read a serialized version of Sea and Sardinia in The Dial magazine; she decided that the spiritually inclined Lawrence would be the glue to make her community adhere. The woman’s name was Mabel Dodge Sterne (she was later known as Mabel Dodge Luhan). She had noble and sincere ideas, not only about forming a spiritual community, but about protecting Native Americans. After much negotiating, Lawrence sailed to America and settled in New Mexico on Mabel Dodge