D.H. Lawrence

Sitterback to top

• David Herbert ('D.H.') Lawrence (1885-1930), Novelist and poet. Sitter in 18 portraits.

Artistback to top

• Nickolas Muray (1892-1965), Photographer. Artist or producer of 3 portraits.

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• 100 Writers, p. 87
• Clerk, Honor, The Sitwells, 1994 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 14 October - 22 January 1995), p. 174 Read entry

  Even at the end of her life, when D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) had been dead for more than thirty years, Edith was still spitting her impotent venom at him: 'a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden’¹; hardly the intellectual appraisal of a major novelist by a serious literary critic.

  Edith had met Lawrence in the early 1920s and admired his poetry. The fact that he and his wife Frieda had rented a villa at Scandicci near: Florence seemed propitious for further meetings. The Lawrences called at Montegufoni to see the young Sitwells in 1926, but found only Sir George and Lady Ida, who gave them tea and showed them round the castle, Frieda bouncing on the mattresses to see if they were soft. Lawrence missed the Sitwells again at Renishaw later in the year and it was not until the spring of 1927 that Osbert and Edith went to visit him at the Villa Mirenda. Lawrence was working at the time on the third version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and certain characteristics of Sir Clifford Chatterley are unmistakably based on Osbert. The association of Osbert, indeed of the whole Sitwell family (Sir Clifford is one of three children of an obstinate and ridiculed father) with what Edith called 'a very dirty and completely worthless book',² was the root cause of her unforgiving rage against Lawrence. It was an emotion that Osbert may have shared, but he confined its expression to the portrayal of Lawrence as T. L. Enfanlon, a sickly, bearded ascetic who loved to pose as the son of a collier', in his novel Miracle on Sinai. The ironic upshot of this particular feud was that it ranged the Sitwells on the side of the philistine in literature's most notorious legal battle of the century.

  Lawrence had lived a nomadic existence since 1919 and was photographed by the Hungarian Muray in New York in 1920. His cosmopolitanism, however, was no proof against a world overlapping with the Sitwells. The Florentine bookseller Pino Orioli, an old friend of the Sitwells and interpreter for Osbert and Sacheverell during their historic visit in 1920 to Gabriele d'Annunzio at Fiume, was also the publisher in 1928 of a private edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  ¹ Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of, an autobiography, 1965, p 108.

  ² Ibid.

• Motion, Andrew (edited), Interrupted Lives: In Literature, 2004, p. 57
• Rogers, Malcolm, Camera Portraits, 1989 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 October 1989 - 21 January 1990), p. 189 Read entry

  Towards the end of 1919 the novelist D. H. Lawrence scraped together enough money for him and his wife to leave England. He was by nature hyper-sensitive, and though his early novels such as The White Peacock (1911) and Sons and Lovers (1913) had won him a certain acclaim, he felt acutely the charges of indecency against The Rainbow (1915). The rest of his life he spent in wandering. In 1920 he was in New York, where Women in Love was privately printed that year, and was photographed by the Hungarian-born Muray at his fashionable studio on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, for Vanity Fair. He was taken there 'bodily' by Mabel Dodge, heiress and eccentric, and a well-known patroness of the arts. Muray found him

  unkempt; his hair was disheveled [sic], as was his attire. The shirt he wore was three sizes larger than he needed, and he looked as if he had borrowed it from a poor uncle. Nor have I ever seen a person more shy … There wasn't a single smiling picture, but he wasn't the smiling type.

  Muray studied photography and lithography in Budapest, and came to the United States in 1913, where he worked at first as a colour-printer and colour-print processor. He soon however made a name for himself as a leading fashion photographer, and in the 1920s was noted for his portraits of literary personalities. He was one of the great party-givers of the period, a fencing champion and an officer in the Civil Air Patrol, and he must have found Lawrence's brooding presence a shade disconcerting.

• Saywell, David; Simon, Jacob, Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 2004, p. 368

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