Chapter 7: Ranch life and the return to Mexico 1. Part IWork on repairing and rebuilding the ranch went on for five weeks, throughout May and into June; the big three- room cabin had to be repaired, its chimney rebuilt with adobe bricks, and all three cabins restored and re- roofed. Lawrence worked with three Indian laborers and a Mexican carpenter; he made no difference between the amount of heavy or difficult work he expected them to do and what he did himself. When it came to someone having to crawl along inside the main cabin's tin roof on a hot day, with a wet handkerchief over mouth and nose, to clear out the old rats' nests, then he did it. Mabel and Tony stayed up at the ranch for some of the time, sleeping in a big tepee up on the hillside, as the Indians did; at night, they would eat together, the Indians would sing, plans for the next day's work would be made. Lawrence did almost no writing, though he does seem to have finished his essay . The old tensions between Lawrence, Frieda and Mabel seem to have continued, with (now) the added complication of Brett; but for a good deal of May there was no time for quarrelling: just the day to day work. They took just a couple of trips away: in the course of a journey back to Taos on horseback, for example, Mabel and Tony took them to the cave at Arroyo Seco which Lawrence would use as the setting for his story . But what was Lawrence doing, spending five weeks rebuilding a run- down ranch on which he would (in the end) only spend five months, in the summer of 1. Although he was a professional writer, his books never sold in very large numbers, so that he depended upon publishing a great deal - and so on writing a great deal too. The place was punishingly remote and (what is more) could never be inhabited in winter; and, as he told Witter Bynner when the latter was about to visit, . You won't be particularly comfortable. But there was, to begin with, the huge pleasure for Lawrence and Frieda of having their own place at last. Frieda had been pining for a farm, or something equivalent, since Australia in May 1. Lawrence's mind was the memory of his days at the Haggs farm between 1. The ranch (first called Lobo, later Kiowa) was the first place they had ever inhabited where they could really do what they wanted: which they were not beholden to others for, or paying rent for, or looking after for someone else. Lawrence had always strongly resisted owning property (which was why he now insisted that it was Frieda's ranch, not his.) But now they had acquired it, in the most extraordinary of all the places which he and Frieda had visited since 1. Lawrence threw himself into the work of it; it offered him a new challenge, a wholly new field to explore and master. And it was the most beautiful, and also the most soul- destroyingly difficult and destructive place, too, where they had ever lived. But I do like having the big unbroken spaces round me. But he told Murry very early on how . Furniture had to be slung up to the ceiling on ropes when they went away, for example; rats bounced on the roofs at nights . Mawr 1. 48), black ants swarmed into the kitchen. Everyday life was always hard, with water having to be carried from the spring (they only got the water flowing through pipes the following year), horses which needed to be fed and cared for, wood which had to be chopped; and every evening there was milk and mail (and sometimes butter and eggs) to be ridden for, two miles down to the Del Monte Ranch, where the Hawke family lived and worked, and back just before dark. And always, unremitting hard physical work, even when the main work of restoration was done: . There was always wood to be chopped, water to be carried, fences to mend: animals would fall ill: there was . The nearest shop for provisions or supplies was half a day's journey away, 1.
Mulehead Ranch Feb 16, 2009. Magazine reader Dennis Sieler sent us a collection of photos from the Mulehead Ranch by Bonesteel. Sieler also typed up a history of the. One Man Ranch (1925) Release Info. Jump to: Release Dates (1) . USA: 12 December 1925. Taos. And yet the place was quite extraordinary. The great circling landscape lived its own life, sumptuous and uncaring. They could see down to the desert 1. Pueblo looking like crystals, and away for 3. Rio Grande canyon wound its way; and then beyond that to the distant mountains, . But not the America of the whites.(Letters V: 6. Unlike Mexico, which had offered him a human world that was different, the Kiowa ranch gave him a life with nature almost untrammelled: . It was not just beautiful: . And that brought out for him, always, a strong sense of what human beings really needed in their lives. It was this very special quality of the ranch which Lawrence celebrated in his short novel St. Mawr, which starts in England, but ends up in a recreation of the ranch itself. He wrote this over the summer, between June and August: it was his second novel of North America. Over and over again we can see how it conveyed something of his own feeling for the place; as when, for example, the fictional . In an instant, her heart sprang to it. The instant the car stopped, and she saw the two cabins inside the rickety fence, the rather broken corral beyond, and behind all, tall, blue balsam pines, the round hills, the solid uprise of the mountain flank: and getting down, she looked across the purple and gold of the clearing .. Mawr 1. 40) More than anything else, the Kiowa ranch offered the chance to . It was the ideal ordinariness of the place, as a context for human lives, which mattered as much as its spectacular views. Human beings could struggle, work, get tired, live simply, do what they wanted: and always in the eye of nature. We worked hard, and spent very little money. And we had the place all to ourselves, and our horses the same. It was good to be alone and responsible. But also it is very hard living up against these savage Rockies. Mawr with another north American story which he had perhaps been thinking about during the three weeks since Arroyo Seco, . These were his first two North American fictions: both, strikingly, about the danger, the destructiveness for twentieth century white consciousness, of America; both attempts to suggest that the challenge of another kind of consciousness is what can and should confront modern men and women. But whereas Tony was something of an outcast from the Pueblo for what he had done, the woman of Lawrence's story is seized upon as a sacrifice by the Indians; the story reveals just how opposed to white civilization Lawrence felt Indians were, how much they hated it and would do it down if they could. And yet they reminded him of what the white races lack, too; it is a story (like St. Mawr) which is thoroughly ambivalent about the opposition of cultures it reveals. Being sent a copy of A Passage to India by E. Forster in July must have added to his sense of the efforts which other writers, too, were making to confront their European characters with alien worlds: . But it was now possible to live quietly from day to day - and the writing of St. Mawr flowed through the summer, though . He finally ended it around the middle of August: . It's much better if I'm not popular. A disturbing moment had come, however, early in August. Lawrence had been remarkably well for months; but the ranch was at 8,6. August, going down with a cold, he began to spit blood. He was actually (as he admitted eighteen months later) suffering a bronchial haemorrhage. To his rage, Frieda had a doctor come up to the ranch to see him; but the doctor declared that it was simply a bit of bronchial trouble, to be dealt with by mustard plasters. This treatment seems to have worked, in the short run; but the attack may also have marked the first real onset of the tuberculosis which would in some ways dominate the last five years of his life. For the moment he was well enough to be up and about in a few days, to finish St. Mawr and to prepare for a visit with Mabel and Tony (but without Brett) to Santa Fe and thence to Hotevilla to see the Hopi Indians' Snake Dance. His reactions are beautifully set out in the two quite different pieces he wrote about it. One, which thoroughly annoyed Mabel Luhan - . The jeering, satirical and the philosophical sides of his nature could hardly be better illustrated than by these essays. They only had a month left at the ranch before leaving for the winter: Lawrence had long planned to go back to Mexico to write the final version of his Quetzalcoatl novel. And then, out of the blue, came news from England he had not expected: his father had died, very suddenly, at the age of seventy- eight. He wrote more elegiacally in a letter to Murry three weeks later, linking the death with the coming of autumn. The country here is very lovely at the moment, aspens high on the mountains like a fleece of gold. The scrub oak is dark red, and the wild birds are coming down to the desert. It is time to go south. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow- leopard waiting to pounce.(Letters V: 1. The autumn breaking into colors doubtless also linked in his mind with the autumn of his mother dying, back in 1. He wrote just one more highly significant piece, to complete his major writings of this summer: the short story . He would not have written it, perhaps, without knowing Brett, though in no sense is the central character a portrait of her: but the essential experience described in it is also his own. He looked back at the summer as one when he had written relatively little: but it had been extraordinarily creative in many ways, if a little ominous too. He had, however, successfully answered the question he had been asking since 1. But now it was time to go. On 1. 1th October, Brett, Frieda and he went to Taos; by 2. October they were in Mexico City. Part IIIt is significant that Lawrence felt he wanted to be in Mexico in order to rewrite Quetzalcoatl. He had not felt he had needed to be in Australia to write a new last chapter for Kangaroo or to write any of The Boy in the Bush: he had written Sons and Lovers, The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod and Mr Noon while out of England.
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