LAST
YEAR, 2012, was not only the 90th anniversary of Lawrence's
visit to Australia, but the 40th anniversary of the start
of our search for the truth about Kangaroo (as
well as the 20th anniversary of the founding of our DH
Lawrence Society of Australia).
It is also happened to be the 100th anniversary of the
most important year in Lawrence's life - 1912.
That year began with Lawrence recovering in Croydon, London
- where he had been employed as a teacher - from a bout
of pneumonia (or perhaps the first indications of tuberculosis
- the disease that eventually killed him).
It is an illness that changes his life. He is 26.
Shortly after this he breaks off his engagement to his
first adult "love", Louie Burrows, and returns
to Eastwood. There he begins a tertiary course at Nottingham
University College. He
meets Frieda nee Richthofen, the wife of his French professor
Ernest Weekley, and falls in love. The attraction is mutual.
Shortly after, Frieda abandons her marriage and her children,
and the couple "elope" to Germany. After
a period of indecision on Frieda's part, they decide to
live together. They embark on a "honeymoon",
travelling south through Austria and Switzerland to Italy,
where they set up house on the shores of Lake Garda.
There Lawrence completes an initial version of perhaps
his most accessible novel, Sons and Lovers, which
launches him on a precarious literary career.
(He had had a number of literary works published prior
to 1912, but then he was only a "part-time"
writer. From now on he would devote his life and future
career to letters and literature.)
This momentous year in Lawrence's life could have an echo
in Kangaroo, and one which might lend extra credence
to the identification of Charles Rosenthal as the novel's
secret army leader, Benjamin Cooley.
In Kangaroo there is a curious incident involving
a red wooden heart.
The heart,
according to the text, belongs to Somers's wife, Harriett.
But Somers decides to send it to Cooley, as a token of
his manliness and suitability for secret-army work. For
on the red wooden heart is a motto, Dem Mutigen gehort
die Welt, which Lawrence translates as "The World
Belongs to the Manly Brave".
I myself thought little of this incident until we employed
in our Sydney office a young techo who spoke German. When
I mentioned my research and the name Rosenthal, he told
me the name meant "the valley of the roses".
That implied it was a place-name, so I looked it up. It
turned out to be the name of a village in the Black Forest
in Germany.
