Having brought Studies in Classic American Literature to a point of completion in the autumn of 1919, Lawrence was anxious to leave England. So was Frieda. She would leave first, departing for Germany less than a week after he sent his manuscript to Benjamin Huebsch. Lawrence remained in England through October tying up loose ends before leaving for Italy. Never beholden to possessions, he divested himself of worldly goods to lighten his load and generate some quick cash for the trip. He sold some books and gave away others. Not even longtime favorites were sacrosanct. Books that had been with him since Higher Tregerthen now went by the wayside.

Lawrence gave Donald and Catherine Carswell a tattered set of Thomas De Quincey's works. A passion for De Quincey marks another point of contact between Melville and Lawrence. Melville first read Confessions of an Opium Eater when he was in London. He recorded his impressions of the book in his travel journal, calling it “wonderful … marvellous.” Before giving up his edition of De Quincey, Lawrence dipped into it one final time to reread an essay titled “Goethe as Reflected in His Novel of Wilhelm Meister.”

The reason why Lawrence liked De Quincey parallels the reason why he liked Melville: he saw both authors as kindred spirits. As he told Catherine Carswell, “I like him, De Quincey, because he also dislikes such people as Plato and Goethe, whom I dislike.” Recalling something Lawrence told him about Goethe, Aldous Huxley provided corroboration: “How bitterly he loathed the Wilhelm Meisterish view of love as an education, as a means to culture, a Sandow-exerciser for the soul!”

Precisely which books Lawrence brought with him to Italy remain unknown. He would continue to revise Studies in Classic American Literature over the next few years, but since he had finished the latest version of the book before leaving England, he might not have kept his entire collection of “Americans.” The extensive revisions he would make to his Melville chapters suggest that he may have kept Moby-Dick close at hand. Over the next few years he would read other books pertinent to Melville. Pieced together from Lawrence's letters and his friends’ reminiscences, the story of his reading life in Italy reflects Melville's enduring impact on his thought.

Stage directions are windows to the soul. The opening stage directions to A Collier's Friday Night, D. H. Lawrence's first play, are a case in point. Describing the interior of the Lambert home, Lawrence modeled it on his family home in Eastwood, the small coalmining town in the English Midlands where he was born. Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, who thought A Collier's Friday Night proved that Lawrence had the makings of a dramatist, called his description “a fine and lively idea of an English miner's home.” Lawrence's close friend and confidante Jessie Chambers, who had often visited his home, found the stage set disturbingly close to the original.

The power of Lawrence's description stems from its naturalistic quality. One recent commentator has called the set “the real star of this play.” Although the Lambert home in A Collier's Friday Night resembles other working-class homes in the Midlands, it differs in one crucial aspect—that is, in the prominence that books hold. Understanding the role of books in the play offers the chance to understand the role of books in Lawrence's family. This approach is the starting point for learning how D. H. Lawrence read Herman Melville.

On the left side of the kitchen fireplace in A Collier's Friday Night stands a set of four bookshelves mostly filled with schoolbooks. On the right side a two-shelf faux-mahogany bookcase with a glass front stands atop a chest of drawers. In addition to some foreign language dictionaries and poetry anthologies, the lower shelf holds several “prize books”: handsomely bound and gilt volumes presented to students as rewards for scholastic achievement. The upper shelf holds “a large set of the ‘World's Famous Literature’ in dark green.” Taken together, the books suggest the cultural pretensions that will allow the new generation to aspire beyond the coal pits.

Besides the shelved books described in the stage directions, A Collier's Friday Night contains several other literary references. The play's title echoes the title of a Robert Burns poem, “The Cotter's Saturday Night.” The echo is ironic. Whereas Burns depicts the harmony of a farm laborer's family during its Saturday night meal, Lawrence portrays the conflicts within a coalminer's family on Friday night.

In deciding not to publish Lawrence's Melville essay, Austin Harrison may have made his single worst decision as editor of English Review. Since he truncated the serial version of “Studies in Classic American Literature” after “The Two Principles,” contemporary readers never got to read the first version of Lawrence's Melville essay. Had it been published in English Review, the essay could have accelerated the interest in Melville's work that was slowly building.

Readers in 1919 were ready to learn more about Melville. A notice of the June English Review in the Aberdeen Daily Journal, for example, briefly discusses “The Two Principles”: “Mr. D. H. Lawrence continues his study of ‘Classic American Literature,’ taking the books of the sea as his theme, but instead of analysing the novels of such writers as Dana and Herman Melville, he evolves a somewhat belaboured philosophy of the relation between the sea and the human psyche.” Reading the names Dana and Melville in the article's opening sentence, this commentator looked forward to learning more about these two American authors and was consequently disappointed with the remainder of the essay. Clearly, this Aberdonian reader would have much preferred an analysis of Melville's fiction over the convoluted cosmology of “The Two Principles.”

This notice of English Review in the Aberdeen Daily Journal is not the only indication that its editors and readers wished to know more about Melville. Two months earlier, the paper had published an article titled “Lure of the Tropical Island in Literature.” Its author remarked: “I ask myself for the hundredth time, why it is that the idea of a tropic island set in the Southern seas should appeal to so many people and to so many different temperaments.” Without analyzing the tropical impulse, the author admitted: “The magic is there, explain it how you will. Herman Melville endeavoured to elucidate it in the eloquent lines on the Pacific.” This admission leads into an excerpt from Moby-Dick in which more than half of “The Pacific,” a soul-stirring chapter, is quoted.

The Aberdonian interest in Melville was not unique. Across Great Britain readers anticipated the Melville revival. Once the Great War ended in November 1918, conditions were ripe for the revival. Understandably, people felt a huge sense of relief with the war's end.

“Now I am not doing any work, we need books to read,” Lawrence wrote in a letter to Kot in late November 1916. He listed the authors and titles of several books he wanted Kot to purchase for him and enclosed ten shillings to cover their cost. The list included two Melville works: “Omoo or Typee (preferably Typee).” The timing of Lawrence's letter is significant. A few days earlier he had sent J. B. Pinker the manuscript of Women in Love, the version that would become known as The First “Women in Love.” Having brought his manuscript to a point of completion, Lawrence now had the time to start writing a new book, but he needed to read more before he could tackle another major project.

His attention to Moby-Dick earlier that year had reinforced his curiosity about American literature. Richard Aldington explains: “The book stimulated his interest in America, and set him reading or re-reading American books. Melville moved Lawrence deeply and seemed to reveal him to himself.” After finishing Moby-Dick, Lawrence had been wanting to read more Melville, but his attention to Women in Love over the summer had delayed him in that pursuit. With that book off his hands, at least for the time being, he could now return to Melville and deepen his study.

Another factor influenced Lawrence's desire to read more Melville. He had recently had the chance to discuss the life and literature of the United States with an American couple, Robert Mountsier and Esther Andrews, who had been visiting Cornwall. While staying in Penzance and St. Ives in early November, the couple frequently visited Higher Tregerthen and saw the Lawrences several times. Lawrence enjoyed their company and cultivated a friendship with them.

Mountsier was a kindred spirit. A graduate of the University of Michigan with a master's degree in English literature from Columbia, Mountsier left Columbia before completing his doctorate and subsequently made a career for himself in journalism. Like Lawrence, he felt hostile toward higher education. Discussing those who determined the canon of great writers, Mountsier snidely mentioned the “professional and amateur body-snatchers [who come] in the guise of professors and candidates for the degree of Ph.D. in English literature.”

Writing to Lady Ottoline Morrell a few weeks after he and Frieda had settled into J. D. Beresford's vacation home in Portcothan, Lawrence informed her about his latest literary obsession: “I am reading Moby Dick. It is [a] very odd, interesting book: to me interesting, the others can't bear it.” As his words suggest, Lawrence reacted to the book in much the same way as other readers who had discovered Melville for themselves. Samuel Arthur Jones may have put it best when he described how he felt on reading Moby-Dick: “I too felt as if a new planet had swam into my ken.” H. M. Tomlinson had a friend who fell in love with the book but hesitated to share it. He would recommend Moby-Dick only to those whom he considered worthy.

Lawrence was less discriminating. After reading Moby-Dick, he introduced many friends to the book. The “others” he mentions in the letter to Lady Ottoline were the people staying with him and Frieda in North Cornwall in early 1916. The second week of January both Philip Heseltine and Dikran Kouyoumdjian (who would write bestselling novels under the penname “Michael Arlen”) joined them for an extended visit. Heseltine's correspondence from Portcothan confirms Lawrence's unsuccessful efforts to impose his literary tastes on his guests. In a letter to Delius, Heseltine calls Lawrence's artistic canons “utterly and entirely unsympathetic to my nature.”

Heseltine ultimately gained respect for at least one author in Lawrence's artistic canon. He would return to Melville after Lawrence introduced him to Moby-Dick. And once a new edition of Pierre appeared in the early twenties, Heseltine read it and began quoting from it. He used a passage from Pierre to characterize Delius, who

The letter to Lady Ottoline does not identify which edition of Moby-Dick Lawrence read, but references in his writings provide clarification.

Thomas Seltzer published Studies in Classic American Literature the last week of August 1923, and reviews appeared in newspapers and magazines across the United States. The reviews were mixed, but remarkably, some leading American critics quite liked the book. Robert Spiller, whose name would be synonymous with well researched, finely nuanced literary history, enjoyed Lawrence's critical study very much, calling it “one of the most stimulating things that has come into literary criticism for a long time,” praising the “brilliancy of its incomparable wit and keen judgment” and finding the “display of verbal fireworks … breathtaking.”

Raymond Weaver reviewed Studies in Classic American Literature alongside Stanley T. Williams's similarly titled Studies in Victorian Literature. Contrasting the two, Weaver remarked: “While Mr. Lawrence has gone beating about in the dark forest of his mind scaring up the inmates of that jungle, Professor Williams has been cultivating his quiet little garden.” Uneven, idiosyncratic, almost out of control, Lawrence's volume, in Weaver's opinion, displays an ambition that Williams's elegantly crafted little work lacks. Williams, who would become an influential figure in the study of American literature himself, later commented on Lawrence's Melville chapters, finding them absurd but thought-provoking, oversimplistic but delightful, perceptive but passionate, apocalyptic but humorous.

In November, the month Spiller and Weaver published their reviews, Lawrence was in Mexico. The third week of the month he reached Vera Cruz and, on the twenty-second, embarked on a voyage home aboard the Toledo, a steamship bound for Plymouth, England. The Toledo took him home. But Lawrence would move so many times during the last decade of his life that keeping track of his whereabouts can be difficult. Only a few places are pertinent to the story of his continuing interest in the life and work of Herman Melville.

After reaching England in December, Lawrence came to Hampstead to stay at the home of Donald and Catherine Carswell; there he joined Frieda, who had returned to England earlier after a vicious argument. The return visit did not brighten Lawrence's outlook on the land of his birth, especially after sunny Mexico. Writing Mountsier around the time of the winter solstice, Lawrence announced: “Here I am back in London. It seems very dark, and one seems to creep under a pavingstone of a sky, like some insect in the damp.”

In turning The First “Women in Love” into the final Women in Love, Lawrence made hundreds of changes to his text. He greatly expanded the work but also cut many passages. Some cuts seem similarly motivated. For example, he canceled several obvious literary references as part of an overall scheme to mask his debt to earlier authors. The two references to Oliver Twist disappeared in the revision. Lawrence also cut what Rupert says to Ursula about Moby-Dick. Rewriting their conversation, he tinkered with its tone. Whereas Rupert asks Ursula about Moby-Dick to break the angry silence in The First “Women in Love,” he uses his boyfriend voice with Ursula in the final text, placating her with levity. No longer does Rupert need recourse to literature to surmount an awkward pause in their conversation.

Beyond its effect in this one scene, Moby-Dick had an overall impact on Women in Love that remained after Lawrence's revisions. The explicit reference to Moby-Dick in The First “Women in Love” amounts to an homage to a literary predecessor. Lawrence canceled the reference not only because the scene with Rupert and Ursula no longer needed it but also because the book as a whole did not need it: Moby-Dick had already helped shape Women in Love significantly. With the omission Lawrence downplayed Melville's influence; however, elsewhere in the novel he does not muffle his Melvillean echoes. Overall, Moby-Dick influenced the structure, characters, and imagery of Women in Love.

The contrasting relationships between the novel's two couples—Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen, Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen—established its basic structure. Lawrence alternates between their stories, taking one to a fevered pitch before switching to the other. Although his organizational scheme owes its greatest debt to Anna Karenina, he took some structural cues from Melville. Like Moby-Dick, Women in Love has a poetic quality. Both works use repeating patterns of imagery, allusion, and symbolism to bind their stories together.

Lawrence borrowed a key structural device from Moby-Dick as he revised Women in Love. His first complete version of the novel contains thirteen untitled chapters. For the final version, he split his material into thirty-two chapters.

Studies in Classic American Literature would remain at a standstill for months to come. Plucked from his cozy Higher Tregerthen cottage and forced to relocate to London on three days’ notice, Lawrence, understandably, had trouble concentrating on his work. Like Somers in “The Nightmare,” he “pined for his cottage, the granite strewn, gorsegrown slope from the moors to the sea.” Tortured by nostalgia for the Cornish coast, he “craved to be back, his soul was there.”

Deprived of the closest thing to home he and Frieda had enjoyed since their marriage, they now relied on the charity of friends to keep a roof over their heads. Hoping to return to Cornwall soon, the Lawrences had left behind most of their belongings—and most of his books. Still holding the lease on Higher Tregerthen, they hesitated to lease any other place now, even if they could have afforded one.

The third week of October 1917 Lawrence and Frieda moved into the Aldingtons’ flat at 44 Mecklenburgh Square in the Bloomsbury district of London. Richard Aldington, having served in the trenches from January to July, was now at officer training camp in Lichfield. Hilda was shuttling back and forth between London and Lichfield, but she made room for them. Lawrence was grateful, but gratitude did not necessarily motivate his work. A few weeks after moving to Mecklenburgh Square, he wrote to Cecil Gray: “I get irritated here, because I cannot read, not anything at all—nor write.” His remarks are somewhat disingenuous. While he was struggling to resume his study of American literature, he did begin a new novel, Aaron's Rod.

Although he would not finish Aaron's Rod for a few years, it too reflects the influence of Moby-Dick on his development of plot and character. Like Ishmael, Aaron Sisson grows weary of the everyday world and runs away from home to escape its tedium. Ishmael leaves aboard the Pequod on Christmas, the same day Aaron abandons his family. Having Aaron leave his wife and children on Christmas without saying goodbye, Lawrence risked losing his reader's sympathy, but he took the risk because he recognized the day's symbolic importance. Like Melville, Lawrence set his hero on a new course on a day that symbolizes the start of a new era.

Herman Melville left the consciousness of the reading public long before he left the planet. From a decade before his death in 1891 to the centenary of his birth in 1919, Melville was remembered, when he was remembered at all, for his first two books, Typee and Omoo. Outside a small number of devotees scattered around the globe, Moby-Dick had been forgotten. Happily, those devotees were so passionate about Melville that many of them wrote reminiscences chronicling their personal discovery of Moby-Dick and other works. Some recalled a close friend who introduced them to Moby-Dick; others stumbled across the book accidentally—serendipity in blubber. Archibald MacMechan, for one, discovered a copy in a Canadian village library around 1879. He read it and loved it and decided to become an English professor. MacMechan left Ontario for Baltimore to attend graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where a tiny group of devotees came together.

To repeat: sometimes the best parts of grad school take place outside the classroom. MacMechan befriended Edward Lucas White, a fellow student who would become a popular historical novelist and an author of fantastic tales with a cult following. One day in 1889, MacMechan visited a secondhand bookstore in Baltimore, where he found a copy of Moby-Dick. He shared it with White and made him a convert. White obtained his own copy of Moby-Dick—“a stout, stubby, cloth-bound book”—which he, in turn, shared with another Baltimore friend, Frank Jewett Mather Jr., who also caught the Melville bug. As a Melville enthusiast, Mather felt like he belonged to an intimate little clique: “Gradually I learned that to love Melville was to join a very small circle. It was like eating hasheesh.”

Mather assembled a personal collection of Melville first editions and also began researching his life. He pitched a Melville biography to Houghton Mifflin. Ferris Greenslet, the publisher's literary advisor, liked the idea of a Melville biography. Greenslet had excellent taste: he would be one of D. H. Lawrence's earliest American admirers. His bosses at Houghton Mifflin were less enthused about a Melville biography. They turned Mather down, arguing that there would be insufficient public interest in a life of the forgotten author.

After successfully completing his coursework and passing the teacher certificate exams at University College in Nottingham, Lawrence obtained a teaching position in Croydon. Sometimes derided as London's punchline, Croydon was not without literary appeal. The public library helped broaden Lawrence's reading, and he could also visit bookshops and attend book auctions. Jesse Chambers recalled: “He was a diligent searcher of the second-hand bookstalls and barrows in Surrey Street, Croydon.” The books Lawrence bought reveal literary tastes he shared with Melville. Learning that his local bookseller did not stock Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, Lawrence special ordered a copy for himself. He enjoyed shopping for books so much he volunteered to help build the collections of his school's library. At one auction he obtained a copy of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici for it.

Croydon's proximity to London created more opportunities. Lawrence now lived only ten miles from the city center, close enough to let him join its literary scene. Although he was poised to meet editors, publishers, and writers who could advance his writing career, the demands of the classroom left him little time to write. But slowly he approached his dream: to leave the teaching profession and make his living as a writer.

Many of the litterateurs Lawrence encountered in person or in print during the 1911–15 period were instrumental to the Melville revival. Some—Edward Garnett, W. H. Hudson, E. V. Lucas, John Masefield—published forward-thinking essays that anticipated the revival, which would not begin in earnest until the Melville centenary in 1919. Others—Viola Meynell, John Middleton Murry, J C. Squire, Grant Watson—would become significant figures in the revival. Once it was underway, more writers—Richard Aldington, E. M. Forster, Catherine Carswell, Donald Carswell—would identify similarities between Lawrence and Melville. Although the 1911–15 period antedates Lawrence's writings about Melville, a biographical survey of the period can help explain the attraction.

The short stories Lawrence contributed to English Review caught the attention of Richard Garnett's younger son Edward. As the British representative for Century, a leading American magazine, Edward Garnett was seeking potential contributors. In 1911, he asked Lawrence about any unpublished short fiction that would be appropriate for Century. His request triggered the start of the single most important professional relationship in Lawrence's literary development.

One late December evening I exited my hotel in midtown Manhattan with an eye toward Greenwich Village. I was planning to visit Café Melville, a bar and grill where Penguin Books was hosting a gala reception to celebrate the release of its new edition of Moby-Dick. I had been hoping to catch a cab from the hotel, but as soon as I stepped outside, I noticed a long line of college professors snaking around the corner cabstand. I knew they were professors mainly because my hotel was crawling with them. They had come to New York for the same reason I had. Having recently completed my doctorate and taken a position at a small teacher's college in rural Oklahoma, I was one of several thousand English professors in town to attend the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

As I stood outside the hotel wondering whether to add myself to the tail of the taxi queue, Bill, a grizzled professor from a small liberal arts college in rural New Hampshire, spun out of the revolving doors and ended up standing right next to me. Since we had met at Leo Lemay's annual MLA party two nights earlier, Bill recognized me and said hello. He asked if I was going to Greenwich Village for the Melville celebration. When I said yes, he suggested we walk a block or two from the hotel and catch a cab on the adjoining avenue. Yielding to his suggestion, I joined him, and together we left the shelter of our hotel awning and ventured into the rain, a cold misty rain that could not quite make up its mind whether it should turn to snow.

When the nearest traffic light changed, a flotilla of cabs approached. I put my hand up like a crossing guard and Bill flailed his arms windmillfashion, but we had difficulty getting a cab to stop. Eventually a courteous taxi driver turned toward us, no doubt pitying the out-of-town professors who had no idea how to hail a cab. We slid into its springy back seat, and Bill directed the driver to Café Melville, located on the corner of Barrow and Washington.

During the last week of May 1922, Lawrence and Frieda reached Sydney, Australia. He still disliked big cities, no matter how new or exciting, so they left Sydney as soon as they found Wyewurk, a seaside bungalow in Thirroul, a coastal village located about forty miles south in what is now a suburb of Wollongong. Built as a vacation home the previous decade and patterned on California-style bungalows, Wyewurk represents an important development in Australian architecture. This aptly named bungalow epitomizes the early development of recreational culture in Australia. Shortly after Lawrence and Frieda moved in, Frieda explained their house's name to a correspondent: “It's an ‘Australian’ joke, we believe, on Why Work!”

Although Lawrence appreciated the joke, he did not buy into the leisure the house represented. Like their cottage at Higher Tregerthen—another isolated house on a rugged coast—Wyewurk inspired him to work, something he had hardly done during their journey from Italy to Australia, which included a lengthy stay in Ceylon with Earl and Achsah Brewster, who had relocated there to study Buddhism more fully. While living at Wyewurk, Lawrence drafted Kangaroo, a novel set in Australia that uses the local political scene as its backdrop.

Kangaroo takes English poet and essayist Richard Lovatt Somers and his German wife Harriet—the closest Lawrence ever came to a literary portrait of himself and Frieda—to Sydney, where they hope to start life afresh. Their neighbor Jack Callcott draws Somers into a secret right-wing political movement of returned soldiers who want to seize power and overtake the Australian government. Somers shows little interest in the movement until he meets its leader, an attorney named Benjamin Cooley, whose odd personal appearance—long nose, close set eyes, and rotund belly—has earned him the nickname “Kangaroo.”

Kangaroo's personal magnetism allures Somers, who, like his creator, longs for a blood brother. Although he is attracted to him, Somers hesitates to commit himself to Kangaroo's political movement. He and Harriet leave Sydney and settle into Coo-ee, a seaside bungalow patterned on Wyewurk. Late in the story a riot erupts between Kangaroo's followers and members of the Labor movement, and Kangaroo is mortally wounded. Repulsed by the violence, Somers and Harriet soon leave Australia for the United States.

The First World War or the Great War, as it was called before anyone knew there would be a second, is best known to history as the war fought from the trenches. Trench warfare, an arduous method of combat, took months of fighting to gain inches of ground, every gain coming with a terrible loss of life. Though renowned for this painstaking form of warfare, World War I began at a breathless pace. On 28 July 1914, a month after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. On 1 August Germany, Austria-Hungary's ally, declared war on Russia and, two days later, on France. On 4 August Germany invaded Belgium with the intent to outflank the French army. That same day Great Britain declared war on Germany and, a week later, on Austria-Hungary.

The opening events of World War I happened so quickly that people found themselves scrambling to understand what the war meant. Four days after Britain declared war on Germany J. C. Squire, who wrote under the pen name Solomon Eagle, told the readers of New Statesman, “I suppose people will soon be reading books about war.” Solomon Eagle's sardonic tone reflects Squire's equivocal attitude, which his recommended books reinforce. They include Tolstoy's War and Peace, Zola's La Débâcle and Crane's Red Badge of Courage. Solomon Eagle concludes, “This is not a systematic list, but it gives enough to cure anybody of a taste for war.”

The following week a regular correspondent of the Aberdeen Daily Journal made similar recommendations in “London Letter”: “War is a great ‘popular educator,’ and books on war and allied subjects are booming just now. Several generations ago this literature would have been mostly of the very technical order. The present tendency is to ‘sink the pill in jam,’ and, accordingly, it is the fashion to assimilate hard facts in a ‘coating’ of fiction. People want to ‘realise’ the war.” The current fashion for war fiction gave people another excuse to read or, in many cases, reread The Red Badge of Courage. Listing several books that would interest wartime readers, this newspaper correspondent included both La Débâcle and Red Badge. With the onset of war a new generation found relevance in Crane's novel.