- The writer D.H. Lawrence only lived in New Mexico for about
a year, less than a year. But it's possible that the city of Taos
celebrates his legacy more than the English mining
town where he's actually from. When I last visited
the central Taos Plaza, in addition to the usual adobe buildings and historic plaques
describing the Pueblo Revolt, you can waltz into the Hotel La Fonda and view their collection of
Lawrence's erotic paintings. It's always fun when
an unexpected celebrity is also an erotic painter. Lucy Liu for example. Did you know she makes erotic paintings? I love it. Why not? There are nine of Lawrence's
oil paintings at the hotel, paintings that began from canvases provided by Maria Huxley, wife of Aldous Huxley of
"Brave New World" fame. Considering Lawrence's most famous novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover," was brought to trial on obscenity charges, you'd expect the erotic paintings to be full of naughty smut. Instead, think more gloriously thick women and the men who love to grab them. The poet Stephen Spender
described the collection as having lots of "Swinging,
pendulous love-dancing. Lawrence obviously loved
painting the sexual organs, of men as well as women,
complete with pubic hair. The paintings were exhibited
in a London gallery in the late 1920s, but
the police barreled in and literally pulled them off the walls, describing them as
"Gross, coarse, hideous." The collection of erotic paintings ended up in Taos, New Mexico because Lawrence himself ended up in Taos. Driving deep into the green
mountains outside the city, you can visit the Lawrence cabin, as well as the small white chapel that houses Lawrence's remains. Here's where I shall describe
how I walked up to that chapel and pulled open the door, and what actually happened
is that the ranch, which is now owned by the
University of New Mexico was closed to the public
for an undisclosed reason and we were chased by some workers off the property, rightly so. Well, fine, see if I care. D.H. Lawrence's remains
probably aren't there anyway. (dinging)
Foreshadowing. But I'm getting ahead of myself. D.H. Lawrence, the D.H.
is for David Herbert, or Bert to his family, was born in a mining village outside of Nottingham, England in 1885. He was the son of a miner
and a lace factory worker, but young Lawrence himself wasn't much of a manual labor kinda guy. He grew up sickly, uninterested in sports, and uninterested in becoming a miner. All traits that made him very unpopular with other boys his age. "Hey, bros, y'all like poetry? (chuckles) Tennyson, Browning? Any takers?" He tried to work in a
factory when he was 16, but came down with pneumonia and had to be nursed back
to health by his mother. This detail will become important, but Lawrence and his mother had a bizarre and overly dependent relationship. "We have loved each other," he wrote, "almost with a husband and wife love." That almost is doing a
lot of work there, D.H. Lawrence's greatest desire
was to escape the mines and his hard labor background. He didn't wanna be a
miner like his father, who was a rough around
the edges alcoholic. Quote, "I was born hating my father." He thought his mother
married far beneath her, which by the class standards
of the time, she had. But as he started to enter
English literary circles, he found that a scrappy miner's son was exactly what editors wanted him to be, and working class stories and poems were exactly what they
wanted him to write. After years of being what one might call a
ladies man, (chuckles) a (beep) boy, Lawrence decided to travel
to Germany to write, but before he left, he stopped in to visit an old professor of his, Ernest Weekley. Arriving at the Weekley home, he met Ernest's three young children and his German wife, Frieda. Frieda found herself attracted to the much younger Lawrence, but for Heaven sakes, she had
a husband and three children. She wasn't interested in pursuing something more than an affair, but was definitely open to an affair. Frieda loved affairs. She had already had several of them. But Lawrence wanted more
than a brief affair. He felt he had finally
found someone he could love the way he had loved his mother. Yes, he really thought that, and yes, he really told Frieda that. Not the line I would use
on a potential paramour, but it worked, and
Frieda ran away with him. I wish I could tell you they
lived happily ever after. Spoiler, they did manage
the ever after part, but they happiness was sporadic. Frieda and Lawrence had a volatile relationship from day one. When the pair traveled to Italy
early in their relationship, the unsuspecting Lawrence went off searching for alpine plants, and the 33-year-old Frieda had sex with a 21-year-old friend
of a friend in a hay hut. For the jealous Lawrence,
Frieda also had a pesky habit of missing her abandoned
children terribly. I'm not a psychologist, folks, but Lawrence seemed to feel that he had taken Frieda
as his replacement mother, and she should be moving right along, away from her former life. David Herbert is your child now. Frieda, on the other hand, believed she would get
custody of her children. Her ex-husband, Professor Weekley, did everything he could to prevent it, including legal maneuvers and sending her letters saying, "You're dead to your children, and they see you as a verfaulte leiche," or a decomposing corpse. Frieda tried again and
again throughout the years, but she was successfully
kept apart from her children until they reached their 20s. Frieda and Lawrence were known
among colleagues and friends for their Sid and Nancy style blowouts. They enjoyed performing
their vicious fights when an audience was around to watch. - So, that's what you're after, is it? What are we gonna have? Blue games for the guests, huh? - Lawrence was violent, pulling Frieda's hair
and smacking her face. Frieda, in turn, would
smash plates over his head. "I didn't care very much," she said. "I hit back or waited till
the storm in him subsided. We fought our battles
outright to the bitter end." Not everyone understood Frieda, as Lawrence biographer
John Worthen explained, because she refused to do the
female things required of her. She had an aristocratic contempt for the bourgeois world. She did very little housework, she sat with her legs apart, she smoked, she said what she thought, and she expected to be waited on. I can't help it, folks,
I kinda like Frieda. She's a problematic fave. By his mid-30s, Lawrence still didn't have the kind of success he wanted as a writer. He felt English literary society never understood his work. The Lawrences lived by
meager book earnings and moving between various cottages and properties owned by friends. Then a letter arrived. It was from a wealthy woman named Mabel Dodge of Taos, New Mexico. She was a patron of the arts who wanted Lawrence to come and write about the soul of New Mexico, and she would give him a house to do so. A white woman, she was
shortly to be married to Tony Lujan, a Native American
man and her fourth husband. Lawrence and Frieda
arrived in Taos in 1922, but Mabel Luhan was to
prove a needy patron. She lived a mere 200 yards away and wanted Lawrence's
conversation, gratitude, and willing performance as
a brilliant foreign writer for all her friends. Lawrence felt like a kept man, and wrote, in a not-well
concealed dig at Mabel, "White Americans do try hard
to intellectualize themselves. Especially white women Americans." D.H., uncalled for. He also felt a deep connection to Mabel, but also fantasized about
murdering her with a knife. Mabel Luhan saw Frieda
Lawrence as an enemy, and competition for D.H.'s affection. Both women wanted to be
Lawrence's spiritual muse, and he did use both women as
characters in his fiction. Mabel even said that it was high time for Lawrence to have "A
new mother," for his books. Oh good, more mommy
issues for David Herbert. Lawrence and Frieda had to
get out from under Mabel, so they moved 18 miles away to the remote and rugged
ranch owned by her son. They named it Kiowa Ranch, after the Pueblo tribe's
name for the land. "Basta, we are still
'friends' with Mabel," Lawrence would say, "but do not take this snake to our bosom." The Lawrences would return
to America to live in Taos, but for the moment, the couple
had to return to Europe. While living in Italy, Frieda fell in love with the
husband of their land lady. The soldier, named Angelo Ravagli, was said to be a non-intellectual, with no literary interests. Frieda was obsessed with him, and would succeed in convincing him to leave his family for her, much as Lawrence had convinced
her to leave her family. Angelo and Frieda's affair would last until Lawrence's death. After the release of
"Lady Chatterley's Lover," Lawrence finally had
some financial success for the first time in his life. Unfortunately, this was exactly when his health began to fail. After years of suffering
from tuberculosis, he said he felt like there was
always a demon in his chest, yet he refused to go live at a sanatorium. He visited the Huxleys in Paris, and they were shocked
how terribly sick he was and how he refused to
admit it or seek any help. He finally agreed to enter a sanatorium in the mountains of Vence, France. Lawrence died in 1930 at age 44. So ravaged by disease, he
weighed just 85 pounds. Frieda, the Huxleys, and a few other friends gathered in Vence. "We buried him," wrote Frieda, "very simply, like a
bird we put him away." Five years have passed
since Lawrence's death. Frieda still lived at
the ranch in Taos with, you guessed it, the
Italian soldier, Angelo. Frieda decided it was time to have Lawrence exhumed
from his grave in France, cremated, and brought back to America. So, she tasks Angelo with two things: one, building an elegant
white chapel on the ranch to house the remains, and two, go do the whole thing. Go to France, have him
exhumed, transferred, cremated, and carry him back to the U.S. It takes time and
planning, but it happens. Angelo arrived back in New Mexico with D.H. Lawrence's ashes in an urn, and Frieda greeted him
at the train station. She even noticed how impacted
he still was by the death, quiet and withdrawn. The couple promptly forgot Lawrence's urn at the train station, but fortunately were able to retrieve it and bring it home to the ranch. Frieda's vision was to stage a second memorial ceremony at sunset. There would be Native drumming, and the urn would be
placed into the chapel. But the local Native Americans she wanted to drum never showed because Mabel Luhan, remember her? Had told them there was
a curse on the ashes. Frieda also learned that
Mabel had been plotting to steal the ashes and
scatter them through the ranch because she believed
scattering was the freedom that Lawrence would've wanted, at home in nature, in his utopia. And perhaps Mabel was correct and Lawrence would've wanted that, but Frieda was not about to let Mabel get final
control over the remains. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. So, Frieda orders Angelo to remove the cremated remains from the urn, mix them in with concrete and sand, and construct a large, solid ash and concrete
altar inside the chapel. Lawrence is not going anywhere, Mabel. Angelo completes the altar, then the ranch and the chapel were donated by Frieda to the University
of New Mexico in 1955. They still stand today. And that's the wild story
of the remains of... Come on. That's not the end of the story. In 1980, a journalist
received a strange letter from a relative of
Aldous and Maria Huxley. This man, Baron Prosper de Haulleville, apologized for not coming forward with this story earlier, but quote, "As a matter of fact, I am
a lazy man, that's all." Relatable. De Haulleville reveals that after Frieda
Lawrence's death in 1956, he had briefly lived in Taos with Angelo. One night, after some bourbon, Angelo starts weeping and confesses to him that "My worst lie is the
D.H. Lawrence's cinders lie." Cinders, in this case,
referred to the ashes, the ashes from the incineration of Lawrence's exhumed body. Um, do you have something to
share with the class, Angelo? I through away the D.H. cinders. (gasps) Oh! Angelo's confession continues. He had indeed gone to France to have Lawrence's body
exhumed and cremated and brought back to
Taos in a beautiful urn. The exhumed part went well. The cremated part went well. The bringing him back to
Taos part did not go well. D.H. Lawrence's corpse was exhumed from its
grave in Vence, France sometime between March
7th and March 12th, 1935, with government documents to back it up. There's even a story from
the exhumation itself. It was attended by a British woman named Mrs. Gordon-Crotch,
an acquaintance of Frieda's, who photographed the
coffin and the body inside after it was exhumed. Others have seen these photographs, though they now seem to
have been lost to time. According to Lawrence
scholar, Emile Delavenay, the first photo was of a
perfectly preserved body. Lawrence lay peacefully with his arms crossed over his chest. Sudden exposure to air then made the body collapse into dust, and the second photo
showed only a skeleton. While I have doubts the
difference was quite so dramatic, given how emaciated Lawrence
was before his death, it's possible for the
quick exposure of air to cause a version of
this corpse collapse. Lawrence's skeleton was transferred into a zinc-lined coffin to be transported the 125 miles to Marseille for his cremation. D.H. Lawrence was cremated starting at 9:00 a.m. on March 13th, that's my dad's birthday, with the ashes collected at 10:30 a.m. His ashes were put into a zinc urn and marked for transport
to New Mexico, America. Crematories love their records. That's not surprising to me that the one thing we
know for absolute sure is when that man was cremated. The time the bones were swept out. This is where it gets complicated. Angelo, in his weeping confession, insisted he was a victim of the bureaucracy of local French laws preventing him from bringing
Lawrence's urn back. It would've cost an
enormous amount of money. And as someone who has shipped many an urn to many an international destination, I side with Angelo when he says the rules can be arbitrary and impossible. For this reason, Angelo was
forced to dump the ashes of D.H. Lawrence somewhere
into the harbor at Marseille, mail the empty urn to New York, declaring it a valueless sample, and discreetly fill it up with wood ashes, like from a campfire, once he got there. It's no wonder he was so quiet when meeting Frieda at the train station. He was overwhelmed less by thoughtful and discreet mourning
than he was by guilt. However, scholars insist
that Angelo had no reason to make the dump and dash. He had all the proper
permits, he was ready to go, box of Lawrence tucked up under his arm headed back to Taos. The more likely explanation may be money. Frieda and Angelo fought about money, especially his desire to send money back to Italy to the
family he had abandoned. It's possible that
Frieda reimbursed Angelo for all manner of transit fees. But since he never actually
transferred the urn, he was able to pocket
all that money instead. Even Baron de Haulleville in his letter described Angelo as "A miser
to an incredible degree." This mystery may never be solved. Even if Angelo had dutifully
brought the ashes to Taos, which his tearful
confession makes unlikely, pouring them into
concrete meant identifying the presence of human ashes
would probably be impossible. Given how cremations were
performed at the time, an urn of Lawrence would
likely have contained chunks and shards of human bone. Even though the human ashes
no longer have the DNA of the human they once belonged to, if Lawrence had remained in his urn, the ashes would be easily
identifiable as human. If they were indeed human and not wood. This whole thing would've
been solved years ago by just popping open the
urn and taking a peek. But because they are in concrete in that lovely white chapel,
there's no way to know. One wonders if Angelo was delighted to hide the evidence of his crime. "Oh no, Frieda, you believe
Mabel wishes to steal the ashes? You would like for me to mix them up and put them into concrete? Well, as you wish, Frieda my love." (soft electronic music) This video was made
with generous donations from death enthusiasts just like you. All right. Here we go. ♪ Hello ♪ And hello. One, two, three. And then I have to wait. One, two, three. Oops. Dropped it. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Back it up. Back it up. Dump truck. It's no wonder when he was meeting Frieda at the train station he was overwhelmed (mumbling) with guilt. Stop. Stop. Stop right there. What happened to D. H. Lawrence? Blah. Hi, hut. The couple had to return to... To Ieurope. I knew they went to Italy, so I tried to say Italy and Europe, so it came our Europtaly. Ieurope. She had three klids. Klids, that's children and kids. Frieda still lived at the ranc in... The Ranc in Taos. I can't do degree. Degree, incredible degree. Degree. I just sound so American
when I say degree. To an incredible degree. That's bad French. Bad French. There's no pronunciation. What the hell? That's a very popular word. Sorry, we're just gonna keep going. How about that? Haulleville. Haulleville. Prosper de Haulleville. Excuse me, what's going on? Excuse me? Exsqueeze me, baking powder? (imitates gun shooting) It's just getting hot is the thing. ♪ It's getting hot in here ♪ ♪ Better finish this video ♪ (exhales) Almost there,
we're almost there, almost there, almost there, almost there. That was a little awkward. Really gotta hit that line. You know, when you got a great line about sex in a hay hut, you gotta make sure you
do it till you hit it. All right. (claps) That's it.
