On August 25th 1944, Martha Gellhorn was sitting on a beach overlooking the Adriatic reading D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love, drinking rum and watching a young Allied airman float down to Earth (dead or alive she did not know) hanging from the very life tentacles of his parachute. She wondered how many more young men must die before this bloody war was over.

As Martha flicked over the page, unable to concentrate as the airman came ever closer to earth, she came across this passage:

” Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.”

Martha was struck dumb by this passage, by the very correctness of it, by the way it went right to her very soul, and illuminated all she had been feeling ever since she knew she had to break away from Ernest, even though she also knew that would leave a huge hole in her life, in her very body, in her very heart. But there was nothing she could do, not any more. If she didn’t move on, move away, he’d kill her, oh, not physically, as if he’d put a knife into her throat, but bit by steady bit, as if he were to cut a portion away from her each day until she was gone. Lawrence knew a thing or two, she reasoned. The only writer who was both a giver of freedom, and a taker away, as Frieda soon realised when he gave her the freedom to love as she wished to be loved – by him of course – and not in the stuffy, Nottingham way of her stuffy, Nottingham university lecturer husband. But then, having given Frieda her freedom, her sexual freedom to be loved by a young man so bound up with himself as to be almost inhuman in his demands, he also, once they had run away from Nottingham to her relatives in Germany, forbade her ever to communicate with her children. That was the price of Lawrence’s love, a complete and utter commitment to him. Frieda didn’t obey of course – as Martha had not obeyed Ernest, not ever, not once – but kept in touch with her children – as any mother would – the odd half an hour here, a brief embrace there; and had Lawrence known he might, in his tubercular frenzy, have killed her. Then again he might not either, but Martha felt, as she read that passage again and again, that he probably would have, that the anger within him, the anger put there by the bitterness his coal mining father breathed every day of his bitter black coal dust life, a bitterness aimed at his wife, who, as a teacher,
thought herself better than her husband, and something she instilled into her son, David Herbert Lawrence, namely a hatred of his own father that stayed with him all his life, culminating also in a hatred – and a blood stained daily handkerchief – and bitterness toward all women – although he tried to suppress it, but could not – that showed itself in a dreadful outrageous anger, and a dreadful outrageous sexual energy that was almost unbearable and evident in virtually all his fictional characters, which made him so compelling, especially to women readers (seldom ever to men, many of whom were afraid of their sexuality) who had never, ever, come across such empathy in a writer before, without realising it was an empathy built out of hatred, and fear, and bitterness, and the denial of love, and the accumulation of an unconsummated van load of love that his father had denied him, and his mother constantly reminded him was there, but only from her.