For a brief spell, one of his pen pals was Amy Dawson Scott. In 1917, she formed The Tomorrow Club, a kind of mentoring salon that connected aspiring writers with established writers. Iterations of this continue today. On witnessing the benefits of connecting writers up in one city, Dawson Scott came up with a more ambitious plan. Why not create a global support network for writers? On 5 October 1921, ‘The International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists’ was formed. Or P.E.N International as it’s known today.
Lawrence joined in August 1924, for one guinea, believing that writers ‘are perhaps the only people who may be capable of imaginative international understanding.’ In some respects, joining an organisation was uncharacteristic as he tended to live life on the margins due to his peripatetic lifestyle and the controversial views he espoused in his novels. But perhaps he saw in P.E.N ‘fellow travellers’ who may help his work be better understood and received. Lawrence described his most famous book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), as a ‘bomb’ that he hoped would destroy the old ways of thinking that produced industrialism, consumerism, and war, and instead usher in more tender means of living. For this reason, he experienced censorship throughout his career. In 1915, The Rainbow was suppressed under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and dismissed as ‘a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action throughout.’ It was described as unpatriotic for daring to question the role of family, work, and relationships – while soldiers were fighting to defend these values at the time during WWI.
In this sense, P.E.N was a perfect match, particularly the principle that ‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.’ Lawrence hated war and the servile ‘mechanical’ thinking it produced in people. Sadly, his battle continues today as the theme of the 90th PEN International Congress, held at Oxford 24-27 September, was ‘Writers in a World of War’. On 13 September 1924, Lawrence wrote to Amy Dawson Scott advising that he was leaving his cabin in the mountains above Taos County and heading down into Mexico for his next adventure and that he was happy to do ‘P.E.N activities down there: though dinners I don’t care for.’ He arranged to meet the writer and diplomat Genaro Estrada who was the president of the Mexican branch of P.E.N.
But Lawrence was no diplomat and generally felt uncomfortable in literary gatherings. His uncompromising views and appetite for arguments meant he eventually fell out with most people. For Lawrence, what mattered was intellectual conflict. The role of the writer was ‘intimate warfare’ where writers are tasked with ‘smashing the face of what they know is rotten.’ And there is much that is rotten in the world today, so get writing…
James writes and produces the monthly Locating Lawrence video essay on YouTube. This is part of a larger project called the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre, co-produced with Paul Fillingham.