.
Literary San Antonio

D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence Photo
IMAGE CREDIT: Nigel Harrison

In 1925 D. H. Lawrence published a short novel titled St. Mawr. The novella concerns an American girl named Lou Witt, who has lived many of her twenty-five years in Europe, and her magnificent stallion, whose name provides the novella's title. Eventually, the pair find themselves in Texas, accompanied by Lou's mother, Mrs. Witt. They apparently make the journey by train from the Galveston-Houston area to San Antonio, as Oscar Wilde had done back in 1882, for the narrator abruptly reports that his characters, after leaving Havana, Cuba, "were in a Pullman, off towards San Antonio" (119).
Soon they take up residence at a nearby ranch, although the exact location is not revealed, where St. Mawr exhibits interest in the ranch foreman's "long-legged, arched-necked, glossy-maned Texan mare" (120). Of greater interest to most readers is the opportunity this section provides Lawrence to give his impressions of Texas and Texans, including those, presumably, of the San Antonio vicinity, considering that Lou and her Mrs. Witt have to motor into San Antonio a few pages later to board the train for El Paso (122). Larry McMurtry, in an updated foreword (1989) to his earlier collection of essays, In a Narrow Grave (1968), made an interesting ironic comment about Lawrence and Texas:
Lawrence Photo with autograph
Image Credit: AccuNet/AP

Lawrence Shrine in New Mexico
Tomb-like memorial, which Frieda Lawrence had built in memory of Lawrence on their ranch in New Mexico

Interior of Lawrence Shrine
Interior of Lawrence Memorial
Image Credit: AccuNet/AP

 If I could summon up two writers from the Shades and set them the task of writing about this state, I think I would summon D. H. Lawrence and Machado de Assis. I would want Lawrence as he was in the early twenties, at about the time of England My England or the Studies in Classic American Literature. . . . With Lawrence at his keenest and Machado at his driest and most deft, Texas would be had. (xvii)

Something of that sort seems to have occurred with Lawrence in St. Mawr, for his narrator describes these people as being remarkably transparent and uncomplicated, even superficial, which perhaps isn't altogether bad:

The Texans were there, tall blond people, ingenuously cheerful, childishly intimate, as if the fact that you had never seen them before was as nothing compared to the fact that you'd all been living in one room together all your lives, so that nothing was hidden from either of you. The one room being the mere shanty of the world in which we all live. Strange, uninspired cheerfulness, as it were, the blank complete incomprehension. (119)

The effect is to leave Lou feeling "blank with wonder. And in the face of this strange cheerful living in a mirror--a rather cheap mirror--England began to seem real to her again," although only poisonously, the narrator hastens to add (121), for neither Lou nor Lawrence had been happy in that country. Perhaps for this reason an element of ambivalence appears in the narrator's--and Lou's--attitude toward this strange place and its oddly fatuous inhabitants, detectable in Lou's reflection that

the Texan intimacy weighed no more on her than a postage stamp, even if, for the moment, it stuck as close. And there was a certain underneath recklessness, even a stoicism, in all the apparently childish people, which left one free. They might appear childish: but they stoically depended on themselves alone, in reality. Not as in England, where every man waited to pour the burden of himself upon you. (119)

Shortly after this left-handed compliment, Lou comes to the conclusion that "at least this Texan life, if it had no bowels, no vitals, at least it could not prey on one's own vitals. It was this much better than Europe" (120).

These ambivalent reflections on the glaring contrast between British-European culture and the Texas ranch life in the environs of San Antonio reveal the disillusionment which developed in Lawrence toward his own British roots, owing in part, no doubt, to his controversial relationship with Frieda Weekley. Of course, St. Mawr is a relatively minor work in the Lawrence canon; this fact becomes undeniably clear, for example, when one compares the horse-heroine motif of this novella to the magnificent conclusion of Lawrence's earlier masterpiece, The Rainbow (1915), with its "Freudian horses" stampeding through the troubled psyche of Ursula Brangwen. Still, St. Mawr provided Lawrence with a transition to the North American scene and his more important novel, this time set in Mexico, The Plumed Serpent (1926). Both of these works represented the later years of Lawrence's life, when he and Frieda spent some time on their own small ranch near scenic Taos, New Mexico.
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