Burning man, p.16
Burning Man, page 16
H.D. later said that she envied the women who wrote memoirs of Lawrence as though they had found him ‘some sort of guide or master’, but this is what she did too.16 Bid Me to Live, which she began in 1921 and worked over for the next forty years before it was published in 1960, is precisely about how Lawrence became her own ‘guide’. She described Bid Me to Live as ‘word for word’ true, and when we consider her version of the truth we should remember that the novel was written on the advice of Freud, with whom H.D. had a three-month analysis in 1932. In order to ‘break the clutch’ on her memory, Freud suggested that she tell the tale of Lawrence ‘straight, as history, no frills’.17 Her story therefore reads like a session of psychoanalysis: the significance of gestures and phrases are returned to, anatomised, held up to the light; incidental events are considered in relation to the grand and eternal narratives, pattern is given precedence, the surface gives way to the symbols beneath. But, despite the Freudian overdetermination, Frieda and Lawrence sound exactly like Frieda and Lawrence (‘shut-up, shut-up, shut-up, you damn Prussian, I don’t want to hear anything you can tell me’), and H.D. herself blows around in the wind, her refusal of agency, like that of Frieda, creating the chaos in which she thrives – which is what John Cournos held against her. ‘Homeless, they had found each other,’ H.D. says of Lawrence’s arrival at Mecklenburgh Square, and his ‘cerebral contact’ now ‘renewed her’. She elevates and mystifies her relationship with Lawrence not, as one of H.D.’s biographers has suggested, because she was veiling the truth of their affair, but because she elevated and mystified people.
The central scene of Bid Me to Live positions all the players on the stage. It is the day after Lawrence’s announcement that Frieda and H.D. will be for all eternity on his right and left sides; Frieda has gone shopping for ‘old-time fags’ with Dorothy Yorke, leaving Lawrence, unwell with a cold, alone with H.D. The writers start to write, Lawrence in the armchair with a notebook and pencil and H.D. on the other side of the room. She soon becomes aware of his gaze, and a magnetic track forms across the dim afternoon light. When she replayed the sequence of events, which she did for the rest of her life, she believed that she had been looking through the window at the branches of the plane tree, thinking about a poem, when he ‘turned to look at her’. As though responding to ‘a certain signal’, H.D. rose and:
moved toward him; she edged the small chair toward his chair. She sat at his elbow, a child waiting for instruction. Now was the moment to answer his amazing proposal of last night, his ‘for all eternity’. She put out her hand. Her hand touched his sleeve. He shivered, he seemed to move back, move away, like a hurt animal, there was something untamed, even the slight touch of her hand on his sleeve seemed to have annoyed him.
Last night he had ‘blazed at her’, but today ‘only a touch on his arm made him shiver away, hurt, like a hurt jaguar’. Lawrence hated to be touched. Seconds later there were voices at the door as Frieda and Dorothy returned; H.D., her offending hand back on her lap, attended to their arrival and Lawrence, without looking up, continued to push his pencil along the pages of his notebook. ‘She did not know, would she ever know, whether his gesture had been personal repugnance, some sort of noli me tangere (his own expression) or whether his over-subtle awareness had sensed this interruption.’ Frieda came in laughing and now that she was back in the room, talking about ‘this damn war’ and puffing away on her smokes, Lawrence was once again moored. H.D. suddenly saw – ‘she was astonished by the clarity of her perception’ – a mask where his face had been: ‘the eyes were wrinkled with his laughter, the eyes were drawn slant-wise up toward the ears’. Lawrence had turned from a pale man in an armchair to a satyr, and it was Frieda, H.D. understood, with her ‘pre-war German distinction’, who made the ‘aura’ around him.18
Having thought that he would save her from the death of her marriage, H.D. had been returned to Hades when Lawrence turned to look at her. She was back in her role of Eurydice, but she had also reconstructed the scene in Women in Love where Hermione and Birkin are similarly alone in a room and Hermione, pulled by some magnetic force, puts down her pen, picks up the lapis lazuli and makes her way over to Birkin.
* * *
Hilda Doolittle was born in 1886 in the Pennsylvanian town of Bethlehem; the name of her birthplace was one of the reasons why Lawrence was drawn to her. Her father was an astronomer, and she was fifteen when she met the sixteen-year-old Ezra Pound at a Halloween party. Pound was what William Carlos Williams described as a ‘physical phenomenon’ while Hilda, Williams said, had the impatience of ‘a wild animal’.19 She was a strikingly beautiful creature, six feet tall and slender as a reed with a high forehead and cheekbones. When she was nineteen, Hilda and Pound became engaged; three years later he went to England and by the time she joined him in 1911, he had fallen in love with Dorothy Shakespear. Losing her men to women called Dorothy became one of Hilda’s patterns. In 1912 she and Pound were having tea in the British Museum when she showed him three of her poems, ‘Epigram’, ‘Hermes of the Ways’ and ‘Priapus’. ‘But’, he told her, ‘this is poetry,’ and he wrote ‘H.D. Imagiste’ at the bottom of the page. Thus was born her nom de plume. H.D.’s voice, Pound told Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine (for which he was the British agent), had ‘the laconic speech of the Imagistes … Objective – no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!’20
Pound was a troubadour in a purple hat, green shirt and black velvet jacket but Aldington, whom H.D. married in 1913, was as conventionally English, she said, as a side of roast beef. Their union mirrored that of Katherine Mansfield and Murry. In each case a brilliant and bisexual expatriate woman attached herself to a handsome and priapic intellectual opportunist who would make a career out of knowing Lawrence. Murry and Lawrence had at least been friends, but Aldington, who met Lawrence on no more than a handful of occasions and never liked him, became the self-appointed guide to his life and work. While Lawrence had nothing much to say about Aldington, Aldington was incontinent on the subject of Lawrence. In addition to his two memoirs, D. H. Lawrence: An Indiscretion and D. H. Lawrence: An Appreciation, he produced an off-hand biography subtitled Portrait of a Genius, But … edited his personal selections of Lawrence’s poetry and essays, compiled an edition of Lawrence’s letters, an anthology of his travel writing and a bibliography of his works, wrote essays on Lawrence in journals and provided opinionated introductions to fourteen of his paperback editions. He also destroyed Lawrence’s letters to his wife, H.D., and says nothing, in Portrait of a Genius, But…, about the subject’s six-week stay in his own home, a stay that would alter the direction of H.D.’s life. It is in the biographer’s remit to edit those facts that don’t fit, but what are we to make of this sudden silence in the unstoppable flow of Aldington’s authority? He clearly agreed with H.D. that Lawrence was in love with her. After all, why would Lawrence want a fat German Christmas pudding who was always mocking him when he could have a thin American goddess who took him entirely seriously?
H.D. and Lawrence were, as Katherine Mansfield might have said, ‘unthinkably alike’ and he was right to fear her poetry. H.D. was a great poet with a strong and spectral voice, but … the self-fascination of her prose suggests something of what it was like to know her. Her determination to turn everyone into a classical type was irritating, and Lawrence found it excessively so. She wrote not to explore herself but to come into that self through symbols and situations, every situation symbolic of another, so while there was no other woman like H.D., H.D. was also every woman who had ever been wounded. Aldington, with his ‘Roman head’, was sometimes the Marble Faun and sometimes Dionysus, and Lawrence had ‘an Orpheus head, severed from its body’. ‘You jeered at my making abstractions of people,’ she says to Lawrence in Bid Me to Live, ‘– graven images, you called them. You are right. [Aldington] is not the Marble Faun, not even a second-rate Dionysus … you are right. He is not Dionysus, you are not Orpheus. You are human people, Englishmen, madmen.’21
Obsessed with connections and coincidences, H.D. found in Lawrence plenty to keep her occupied: the mirroring of their initials, for one thing, and for another the accident of their birthdays – he was born on 11 September 1885 and she was born on 10 September 1886, which meant that for one day of the year they were ‘twinned’. She later accidentally ‘substituted’ her father’s birthday for the day on which Lawrence died, and when she first met Freud, his smile and his beard reminded her of Lawrence. Because her mother was Moravian, Aldington thought that H.D. and Lawrence recognised in one another their Puritan stock. ‘Of course, behind both is the ancient Norse-Teuton-Saxon strain, hating big cities, and crazy about ideal little “communities”.’22 One of their schemes was to form a community in the Andes together with the unlikely combination of Cecil Gray, William Henry Hocking and Dorothy Yorke.
But Cecil Gray, who hated the idea of being stuck on a snowy mountain with Lawrence and Frieda, had now read Look! We Have Come Through! – which was published in November 1917 – and accused Lawrence of lying about the state of his marriage. ‘Look,’ Lawrence defensively replied, ‘we have come through – whether you can see it or not.’23 Warming to his subject, Gray, having also heard from Frieda about H.D.’s hero-worship, reprimanded Lawrence for surrounding himself with ‘unproud, subservient, cringing’ women, to which Lawrence responded that such women represent ‘a new world, or underworld, of knowledge and being’. This ‘ecstatic subtly-intellectual underworld’, which was ‘like the Greeks – Orphicism – like Magdalene at her feet-washing’, stood in contrast to what Lawrence now described as the ‘emotional sensuous underworld’ of Frieda and Gray, which was ‘an underworld which is forever an underworld, never to be made whole or open’.24
The suspicion with which Lawrence and Frieda were treated by the authorities continued in London, where they were required to report to the local constabulary and bothered by policemen lurking in the stairwell and outside the building. Much of Lawrence’s time in Mecklenburgh Square was spent on a scheme to get Women in Love published in a private edition, but he also began here another novel with the symbolic title of Aaron’s Rod. He had no grand vision for this book – all grand visions had been wasted on The Rainbow and Women in Love – and so what he wrote was simply a summing-up of present circumstances. The hero, Aaron Sissons, works at a Midlands colliery but is also a musician (his flute is his ‘rod’). He sees the world in terms of music: the sloping street, with its pattern of lighted windows and dark outhouses, looks like a piano keyboard, or a ‘succession of musical notes’.25 When he sits in the pub he reflects on his ‘secret malady’, which is a ‘strained, unacknowledged opposition to his surroundings, a hard core of irrational, exhausting withholding of himself’.26 Aldington, H.D. and Dorothy Yorke appear in the form of a party of upper-class revellers in the local big house: Aldington is Robert Cunningham, ‘a fresh, stoutish young Englishman in khaki’, H.D. is his wife Julia, ‘a tall stag of a thing … hunched up like a witch’, and Dorothy is ‘a cameo-like girl’ who is called Josephine Hay on page 37 and Josephine Ford on page 38. Cecil Gray – who visited Mecklenburgh Square that autumn – is cast as Cyril Scott, ‘a fair, pale, fattish young fellow in pince-nez and dark clothes’.27 Cunningham drinks red wine by the throatful, Cyril Scott silently absorbs gin and water, and Julia, sucking on cigarettes, monitors the sexual tension between her husband and Josephine while keeping Cyril Scott in tow.
Lawrence’s celebration of marriage being over, Aaron’s adventure begins when he leaves his wife and children and takes his flute to London. Here he meets a man called Lilly who comes from the same district and the same class: ‘Each might have been born into the other’s circumstance.’ Like the biblical Jonathan and David, Aaron and Lilly have ‘an almost uncanny understanding of one another’28 and form a bifurcated version of Lawrence himself, the kind of fractured self who appears in a dream. When Lawrence reached this point, the novel ground to a halt. He said it was because he found people boring and you can’t have fiction without people, but it was also because he found plot boring and he couldn’t have fiction without forward movement. Having no idea what Aaron would do next, he left him with Lilly in London and put the novel aside.
Aldington was coming home for Christmas and so on 30 November, the Lawrences moved again, this time perching for two weeks in ‘a bourgeois little flat’ in Earl’s Court owned by Cecil Gray’s mother. They returned to Mecklenburgh Square for a party where Lawrence now cast them all in a reconstruction of The Fall. Aldington and Dorothy were Adam and Eve, H.D. was the dancing Tree of Life, Gray was the Angel at the Gate, Frieda, slithering along the carpet, was the serpent, and Lawrence, leaning against the fireplace, was ‘Gawd Almighty’. She and Gray, Lawrence now told H.D., were ‘made for one another’, which H.D. of course took as divine intervention, and so she created another pattern.
She later understood what Lawrence had meant by throwing her into Gray’s arms: Gray ‘was conditioned, like herself, to some special way of feeling. He felt as she did, more like a bird or a fish.’29 H.D. and Gray now slept on the downstairs couch while Aldington and Dorothy slept together upstairs, and when Gray returned to Cornwall in the new year, he invited H.D. to visit him. Lawrence, hearing the news, came back to Mecklenburgh Square in February 1918 to explain that he was ‘not happy’ about this development. Rather than staying in Bosigran Castle, he suggested that H.D. use Higher Tregerthen instead, from where she and Gray might visit one another. Assuming that he was jealous, H.D. saw Lawrence as ‘Dis of the under-world, the husband of Persephone. Yes, he was her husband.’30 But Lawrence was continually pressing Higher Tregerthen on people, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, in order to cover the rent which had been paid for a year in advance.
As for Cecil Gray, he had become another bug sucking at Lawrence’s life. ‘I don’t know why you and I don’t get on very well when we are together,’ Lawrence now told him.
But it seems we don’t. It seems we are best apart. You seem to go winding on in some kind sort of process which just winds me in the other direction. You might just tell me when you think your process is ended, and we’ll look at each other again. Meanwhile you dance on in some sort of sensuous dervish dance that winds my brain up like a ticking bomb. God save us, what a business it is even to be acquainted with another creature.31
The Lawrences were again wanderers, taking refuge where it was offered, and for the first six months of 1918 they stayed in Dollie Radford’s cottage in the village of Hermitage, near Newbury in Berkshire. Here, between a wood and a railway, they reached the fag-end of their poverty. Lawrence, in shoes without socks, was down to one set of clothes – a green- and red-striped blazer and a pair of grey flannel trousers. Because he washed them every night, the sleeves of his blazer and the hems of his trousers had shrunk so that his wrists and ankles protruded.
On the Western Front, 70,000 American troops had now been hospitalised with the Spanish flu, a third of whom lost their lives. The virus had spread to Germany, killing 400,000 civilians, and then to Britain where it would eventually kill 228,000. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was infected; so too were the American President, the German Kaiser, Kemal Atatürk, the King of Spain and Mahatma Gandhi. The worst epidemic since the outbreak of cholera in 1849, people were dropping in the streets gasping for air, cities were sprayed with chemicals, and the white anti-germ mouth mask became as familiar a garment as a hat or coat. Because porridge was thought to protect you, Lawrence and Frieda lived on porridge; because cigarette fumes were thought to kill the virus, Frieda increased her smoking.
Meanwhile, in March, H.D. arrived in Cornwall, where she had followed Lawrence. The final section of Bid Me to Live, written in the pages of a notebook bought from the Zennor post office, is addressed to Lawrence directly as though he had cast a spell on her. ‘This notebook is a replica of the one you were writing in that day’ – that day being the one when he turned to look at her in Mecklenburgh Square.32 Cornwall was just as he had said: ‘It was not England’, it was ‘out of the world, a country of rock and steep cliff and sea-gulls’.33 She walked the path that he had walked, which had also been walked by Phoenician traders, and she wondered if the Druid sun circle that she had admired was the same Druid sun circle Lawrence had told her about. To the right of Bosigran Castle, down the ‘crest of the stony hill’, was Higher Tregerthen. H.D. went there too but the door was locked; she saw through the windows Lawrence’s bookshelves and blue and orange cushions: ‘Perhaps you would say I was trespassing,’ she wrote.34 She discovered on the moor a leaf that looked like parsley and decided to send it to Lawrence to identify, because Cecil didn’t know his plants. The room in which she now sat with her notebook had been painted by Lawrence, who had also chosen the lamp and the chairs. He had once told her that Bosigran Castle was haunted, but the knockers ‘were not’, she said, ‘ghostly presences’ because ‘they knocked forcibly, almost violently, and often’.35 Once the wind flicked aside the curtain so that the candle flashed a code to the ships; Gray fixed the curtain in place with a pile of books. ‘We don’t want to be kicked out,’ he said. So H.D. and Lawrence had after all ‘gone away together. I realise your genius, in this place.’ Possessed as she was by Lawrence, it is small wonder that Gray felt unappreciated: ‘You do not pretend to love me any more than you do,’ he wrote to H.D. that March. ‘… Why are you so elusive, so unapproachable?’36
‘Somewhere, somehow,’ H.D. insisted, ‘a pattern repeated itself … All this was meant to happen.’37 Lawrence, the medium between herself and Gray, had sent her ‘a flare’; ‘they cannot stop you signalling’, she wrote.38 He had drawn her to this country where everything had a meaning: the path was ‘a hieroglyph. It spelt something,’ the damp sleeve of her coat ‘was another story of a fleece’; Lawrence had called her Isis and there, on the mantelpiece, were statues of Osiris, the murdered Egyptian king, and Isis, his sister-bride; Freud would have similar statues in his study in Vienna. Whenever the self-absorption of H.D.’s pattern-finding threatens to suck the life from her prose, the sharpness of an image – such as the wind lifting ‘a very visible dark wing from the sea’ – slaps the sentence awake.39
