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I have been sent two books about Lawrence by C.J. Stevens. Both cover the period March 1916 - October 1917 when Lawrence and Frieda were in Cornwall.
Stevens visited the Tregerthen area in the 1960s on a quest for his own family roots and found out much about Lawrence too. He met there an elderly Stanley Hocking - younger brother of the "famous" William Henry of whom Lawrence was apparently so fond - and Hocking, with the keen memory for days gone-by of many older people, happily recounted those days of world war and marital war.
The Cornish Nightmare is a slim (100 page) book which takes the format of mostly questions and anwers: the actual transcript of the recordings made by Stevens on his visits with Hocking. These chapters of dialogue are linked by an examination of the other evidence (letters, other interviewees etc.) and the whole turns out to be a delightful walk down memory lane, not merely for Stanley Hocking and C.J. Stevens, but for the reader too.
Hocking describing his first sight of the Lawrences as they searched for somewhere to stay in Cornwall:
At first sight, they seemed to be a rather odd-looking pair, if you will. Lawrence had a ginger-coloured beard, and he was dressed in a brown corduroy suit. He was wearing a slouch hat. Frieda was a very good-looking lady, fair and blonde, and above all things, she was wearing bright-red stockings. They said good evening very nicely and stopped to chat. They asked me if I lived at the farm.
And here's "Lawrence the immediate":
If he was helping us in the fields and something occurred to him, he would drop what he was doing immediately, and go in and write for the next two or three hours. He had a typewriter, and after he had left a nearby field, we would sometimes hear the typewriter tapping away.
[this evidently after Amy Lowell's gift had arrived! HC]
Lawrence seems to have been a bit of a "fair-weather farmer".
Q: Would he sometimes stay all day in the fields?HOCKING: Yes, providing the weather was suitable. But he always knew what to do if he got tired. He would make some excuse, pack up, and go up the lane. And if it was pouring rain, you wouldn't see him for a week.
This is a lovely book! The reader gets a unique view of Lawrence - so many of the published views of Lawrence have been from people with refined literary styles, themselves. This one is primarily in the words of a working man and it comes over as being totally honest. The cover photograph is of a tapestry of a Phoenix, worked by Lawrence and given to the Hockings as a keepsake.
The second book is called, Lawrence at Tregerthen and covers the same period. It is, however, presented in the words of the author and draws on many other memoirs besides Hocking's.
The Lawrences had lots of visitors to their Cornish cottage and we see them, in this book, through the eyes of Catherine Carswell, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence himself in letters and others - as well as many of the "natives". The contrast between the two types of witness is enlightening:
Mabel Dodge Luhan introduced an anonymous memoir in her Lorenzo in Taos, a description of Lawrence and Frieda at Tregerthen.... "The peasants around where he lived in Cornwall adored him, blindly. They looked upon him as the new Messiah come to lead the world out of the dark into a light that they couldn't understand, but which they had infinite faith in, simply because he was he." ("My God!" said Stanley Hocking. "I should think that is cutting things very thick indeed! We never looked upon Lawrence as a messiah. All this is damned nonsense!"
Stevens is very good at this contrasting of the literary/practical view.
Stanley Hocking explained. " [to fetch water for L's cottage] One had to go to the little spring, about a hundred yards up the hillside above Lawrence's cottage. There was a beaten path to the spring. One day Lawrence told me that he had had quite an experience while going for his water..... He told me there was an adder coiled up and lying in the spring. He said he stopped to look at her, and his first impulse was to kill her. 'But on second thought,' he said, 'could I kill her? Oh no! She looked so bequtiful there....[she] slid away into the grass with the grace and poise of a beautiful princess!' I had to laugh," said Hocking. "We don't admire adders that much. I remember my mother telling me that when she was a little girl of twelve and going to school, one of her schoolmates was bitten by an adder, and before they could get any medical help the child died. When I told Lawrence this, he didn't say anymore about the adder."
[He may not have said any more about it to Hocking, but it may be assumed that this "princess" was remembered some years later when Lawrence wrote his poem, "Snake" about "one of the lords of life" - now a poisonous Sicilian snake.]
This book has several photographs of Tregerthen and the surrounding area, Bosigran Castle (where Cecil Gray stayed and he and the Lawrences aroused suspicion by showing a light) and Zennor village.
Both of these books may be ordered direct from the publisher
