Priest of Love 1981

At the start of the Great War in 1914, D.H. Lawrence and his new wife Frieda Lawrence are living a bohemian life in rural Cornwall. There is great hostility toward Frieda because she is German, and Lawrence feels persecuted by the authorities, who claim his books are obscene. A year later, on 13 November 1915, 1,011 copies of his book The Rainbow were seized for obscenity by the censor Herbert G. Muskett and burnt in front of the Royal Exchange in London. At the same time, following the invitation of the wealthy American art patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lawrence, Frieda, and their loyal friend, the Hon. Dorothy Brett, leave for New Mexico. There, Lawrence reluctantly accepts an old ranch from Mabel in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers, while Brett continues to work on her painting and typing out Lawrence’s novels.

Frieda tells Mabel Dodge Luhan the story of her romance with Lawrence. Although Frieda is from an old German aristocratic family and has left her husband and children behind in England in order to elope with Lawrence, she firmly believes she is the right woman for the man she affectionately calls “Lorenzo” and considers a literary giant. Lawrence bluntly tells her before the start of their life as a couple: > There will be no fear, but there will be pain.

Always looking for new material, the Lawrences and Brett head further south to Oaxaca in Mexico, where Lawrence’s fascination for the ancient Mayan “Dark Gods” cannot hide his health problems from Frieda, who insists on taking him to Mexico City to see a good doctor. The prognosis is bad: he has tuberculosis and is given a year or two at the most. Frieda crumbles at this terrible news, and they return to England.

Back in Lawrence’s native Nottingham, the couple revisit the places of his childhood, which had so influenced his early writing; Lawrence exclaims: > Twenty-eight books and still no peace…

The restless search for peace and inspiration, and for sunnier lands to ease his tuberculosis, drives them to take up their travels once more and return to Italy, where they had lived before. The couple move to Tuscany and rent the top floors of an old villa. Lawrence, who had been suffering from a long and tormented fallow period as a writer, finds inspiration once more. He resumes his work to write again what is to become his most controversial novel, Lady Chattersley’s Lover. Lawrence confides in Frieda that the description of the protagonist’s feelings was based on Frieda’s: > Since I met you, every woman I’ve ever written about has been you. And a little bit about me.

The years in Tuscany become Lawrence’s final period of great creativity, and in between writing he also finds time to paint using the canvasses Aldous Huxley and Maria Huxley left behind. Lawrence finds an Italian printer for Lady Chattersley’s Lover who lives nearby in Florence and, predictably, when the published book arrives in London it’s quickly labeled as obscene, and subsequently banned by the authorities. An exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings is later mounted in a London gallery, and Frieda travels to England “to protect them” as she explains to Lawrence. The exhibition draws huge crowds, but Lawrence’s old nemesis Herbert G. Muskett steps in and has the gallery raided by the police. Frieda telegraphs the news to Lawrence, who suffers a debilitating fit of coughing and is moved to a sanitarium near Nice.

On Frieda’s return to France, she is upset to find Lawrence so weak. He begs her to move him from the sanitarium and “find a house” for his final days. This she does, along with friends and family who nurse and implicitly say goodbye to Lawrence. As the end approaches, it is Frieda who urges Lawrence to let go and find in death the peace that so eluded him in life.

After his death and burial, Lawrence appears in a flashback, writing in a letter: > I shall always be a priest of love. And a glad one.