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| DH Lawrence (from  |
| Frieda Weekley Lawrence |
According to Writers Between The Covers: The Scandalous Romantic Lives of Legendary Literary Casanovas, Coquettes, and Cads, by Joni Rendon and (our friend) Shannon McKenna Schmidt, Freida–no stranger to extramarital activity–had seduced Lawrence. The writer was no doubt enamored with the buxom blond’s libido, so much so that he permitted her ongoing infidelity throughout their relationship. She was quite likely the real-life model for many of his female characters, including Lady Chatterley herself. The years and their travels indicate the arrangement seemed to work for them, but as Rendon and Schmidt also point out, their public displays of violence (versus affection) were legendary: he was known to beat her and in one instance he threw a glass of wine at her in a restaurant. She retaliated by hurling dishes at his head. Their hot-headedness extended to the bedroom as well, making for quite the interesting couple. To each their own.
During World War I, the couple lived in various towns of England, and his associations with anti-military, anti-industrial figures, coupled with Freida’s German ancestry, earned them some persecution by suspicious and war-weary authorities, including an accusation that they were spying for the Germans. The salaciousness of some of his writing, including frequent themes of homosexuality (Lawrence, who wrote of a love affair with another boy when he was 16, was quite likely bisexual), understandably put off many of those authorities.
After the war, likely fed up with the persecutions and accusations, Lawrence and Freida embarked upon what he called his “savage pilgrimage”, a self-imposed exile that took them around the world to Australia, Italy, Sri Lanka, the United States, Mexico, and Southern France. They would, ultimately, attempt to immigrate to the United States to establish a “utopian society” near Taos, New Mexico with socialite Mabel Dodge Lohan. However, in 1925 after a trip to Mexico he suffered a near fatal attack of Malaria and decided to return to Europe. They traveled to Italy where they had friends, including writer Aldous Huxley. Struggling with Tuberculosis in 1930, he traveled to Vence, France, where he would die.
Freida returned to Taos and married a man named Angelo Ravagli. When Freida died in 1935, Ravagli had Lawrence’s body exhumed, cremated, and for Lawrence’s final travels, his ashes were brought to and scattered at Taos.
Our Famous Traveler Series: We’ve found it fascinating how travel–wanderlust–has been a common human affliction throughout history, even long before it was as comparatively easy and cheap as it is now. When DH Lawrence and Freida left on his savage pilgrimage, they were nearly broke. Their trek from Germany, across the Alps, to Italy can only be described as a backpacker’s trip. It’s obvious they weren’t traveling because they needed to.
Accordingly, we’ve accumulated a list of famous people generally known for something else but for whom travel was an integral part of what made them who they were. With others, like DH Lawrence, we discovered their wanderlust only in the conduct of our own travels. With this series we hope to follow in their footsteps and expose a side of them to you, namely their wanderings, intentional or incidental, that you might not have known about.
