By Stuart Mitchner

On the bed beside Lawrence was a yellow and white kitten….

—from D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography

“The world is certainly mad: and worse than ever,” D.H. Lawrence wrote in a December 19, 1929 letter to a friend three months before his death on March 2, 1930. The occasion was the suicide of his publisher Harry Crosby who “shot himself in New York, and shot a young woman along with him.” I came across the letter on Lawrence’s 140th birthday, September 11, 2025, when the social media/news cycle was digesting the assassination of “conservative firebrand” Charlie Kirk.

Britannica’s “This Day in History September 11” opens with an image of the World Trade Center in flames side by side with a photograph of Lawrence as the featured birthdate biography. The same photo is on This Day in History March 2, the day he died in 1930. With 2025 the 95th anniversary of his death, I’ve been paying special attention to his last letters and poems.

“Sunderers and Dividers”

“Walk warily, walk warily, be careful what you say because now the Sunderers are hovering round, the Dividers are close upon us.” So begins one of Lawrence’s last writings, from Volume Two of his Complete Poems. “Lo, we are in the midst of the Sunderers the Cleavers, that cleave us forever apart from one another and separate heart from heart, and cut away all caresses.” Meanwhile, “The angels are standing back, the angels of the Kiss.” As the poem closes, “It is the day of the Sunderers and the angels are standing back.” The poem is called “Walk Warily.”

Typically, even with death near at hand, Lawrence amuses himself, improvising on the Lord’s Prayer. “Give me, oh give me, besides my daily bread, my kingdom, my power, and my glory.” For “all things that turn to thee have their kingdom, their power, and their glory.” Like “the kingdom of the nightingale at twilight,” like “the kingdom of the fox in the dark yapping in his power and glory, which is death to the goose.” But the next stanza is about “the power and the glory of the goose in the mist honking over the lake.” And at the end, “I, a naked man, calling to thee for my mana, my kingdom my power, and my glory.”

Of all the last poems, Lawrence takes special care building his “Ship of Death”: “Oh build your little ark and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.” During those last months, he has company, “a young yellow ‘marmalade’ with a white breast, who simply forced himself on us. He is very nice…. I like him very much, but I don’t love him — which is perhaps as it should be.” A friend described seeing the two side by side on the bed, “both red-gold and white.” The cat “would put his paw on Lawrence’s hand as he wrote, or he lay curled under the down coverlet, peering out, while Lawrence said, ‘Yes, you’re a cave-man.’ The kitten had adopted him, refusing to depart and paying little attention to others.”

The Shipboard Cat

My wife and I had a cat sighting the other night while streaming the first Alien (1979). Of course there had to be a ship’s cat on the Nostromo. If I’d known as much, I might have watched it before now. And even more, if I’d known Harry Dean Stanton was on board, a year before he trekked red-capped across the Mexican desert in Wim Wenders’s Paris Texas, my choice for the best film of the last 50 years. The pleasure of seeing that familiar face was immediately clouded by knowing he’s doomed, a fate visited upon him even as he was searching for Jonesey the cat. Never mind his fate, sucked into the monstrous machinery of the unknown, he’s going to live again as Travis, the role of a lifetime, and again in 2017 in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks The Return.

The Robot

Lawrence ponders evil in the last poems: “Evil Is Homeless,” “What Then Is Evil?,” “The Evil World-Soul,” and “Death Is Not Evil, Evil Is Mechanical.” A day later, the grotesque machinery of Alien comes to mind when reading of “men that sit in machines among spinning wheels in an apotheosis of wheels” in “the grey mist of movement which moves not … grey evil, which has no path, and shows neither light not dark, and has no home, no home anywhere.” Then “we see evil, pure evil and we see it only in man and his machines.” And “Do not think that a machine is without a soul. Every wheel on its hub as a soul, evil … part of the evil world-soul spinning.” In the last stanza of “The Evil World Soul,” every man “who has become a detached and self-activated ego is evil, evil, part of the evil world-soul which wishes to blaspheme the world into greyness, into evil neutrality, into mechanism.” The last two lines: “The Robot is the unit of evil. And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving.”

And when the cosmic dust of Alien clears, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is cuddling Jonesey the cat and stepping free of the uniform she’s been struggling and surviving the voyage of the Nostromo in. Some have complained about that moment, Weaver got angry messages. Lawrence would cheer.

An Eventful Day

Lawrence’s “world is mad” comment, which fully resonated on his 140th birthday, September 11, 2025, comes from one of several letters to friends he wrote on December 19, 1929, an eventful day. Another letter with that date refers to the fact that his “pamphlet on Obscenity has made the old ones hate me still more in England, but it has sold very well…Toujours la guerre.”

Later the same day, “the cat made an attack on the goldfish” and “a few small brilliant gold scales are floating loose. I spanked him, and he looked like a Chinese demon. Now he’s trying to make up to me, but I’m cold.”

According to Frieda Lawrence’s statement in Volume Three (1925-1930) of D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (Univ. of Wisconsin Press), Lawrence chased the cat away the first time it came in (“We don’t want it. If we go away, it’ll be miserable”), but the cat stayed, and it grew more and more beautiful and never a cat played more intelligently than Micky … he played hide and go seek with me and Lawrence played mouse with him. . . . Lawrence was such a convincing mouse.” However, he insisted that the cat be put out at night (“or it will become a bourgeois, unbeautiful cat”). “But in the morning at dawn Micky and I appeared in Lawrence’s room,” and “Micky took a flying leap on to Lawrence’s bed and began playing with his toes.”

Frieda gives a fuller account of the gold fish debacle. “The one revived, a little sadder and less golden for his experience, but the other was dead.” Lawrence was furious (“We feed him, we take care of him, he had no right to do it”). When Frieda argued that it was “the nature of cats and they must follow their instincts,” Lawrence said, “It’s your fault, you spoil him, if he’d wanted to eat me you would let him.”

The Gaze

Looking at Lawrence’s face on the cover of the composite biography, I feel uneasy. Of all the Lawrence photos I’ve ever seen, this one rattles me, makes me wonder if I’ve gone on too long about Micky the cat, perhaps only because I’m still missing our last tuxedo, who died five years ago. The face on the cover belongs to the man who wrote about “The Evil World-Soul,” and who lived these lines from “The Ship of Death”: “There is no port, there is nowhere to go only the deepening blackness darkening still blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood darkness at one with darkness, up and down and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more, and the little ship is there; yet she is gone! gone! and yet somewhere she is there. Nowhere!”

Frieda Lawrence ends her account in the third volume of Edward Nehls’s composite biography: “Then we buried him, very simply, like a bird we put him away, a few of us who loved him. We put flowers into his grave and all I said was, ‘Goodbye, Lorenzo,’ as his friends and I put lots and lots of mimosa on his coffin. Then he was covered over with earth while the sun came out on to his small grave in the little cemetery of Vence.”