Burning man, p.21
Burning Man, page 21
This, Lydia Lawrence had explained to her son’s first girlfriend, Jessie Chambers, was why Lawrence hated his father: ‘It happened before he was born. One night he put me out of the house … he’s bound to hate his father.’ When she said this, Jessie noted, Mrs Lawrence ‘bent her head with a strange smile’.85 When Mrs Morel went into labour, her husband was down the mine ‘hewing at a piece of rock that was in the way for the next day’s work’. He would not leave until the job was finished, and so worked himself into a ‘frenzy’. Finally, ‘wet with sweat’, he threw down his tool, pulled on his coat, blew out his candle and began the ‘long, heavy tramp underground’, beneath the plashing of ‘great drops of water’. He was a great, naked man in the rain. It was raining in the upperworld as well, and he walked home with his ‘old umbrella, which he loved’. At home, Mrs Morel, who had just given birth, lay in bed listening to the rain.
‘What is it?’ she asked, feeling sick to death.
‘A boy.’
And she took consolation in that. The thought of being the mother of men was warming to her heart. She looked at the child. It had blue eyes, and a lot of fair hair, and was bonny. Her love came up hot, in spite of everything.86
So it was a dark, wet, wintry evening that Paul Morel was born.
* * *
Having spent his days working, Lawrence dined with Douglas either at Betti’s or Paszkowski’s Café or the other trattoria on the Via Tornabuoni, frequented by the expatriate colony, which is when he would have asked him about Magnus.
‘Oh, you never know what he’s at,’ Douglas replied. ‘He was manager for Isadora Duncan for a long time – knows all the capitals of Europe: St Petersburg, Moscow, Tiflis, Constantinople, Berlin, Paris – knows them as you and I know Florence. He’s been mostly in that line – theatrical. Then a journalist. He edited the Roman Review until the war killed it. Oh, a many-sided sort of fellow.’87 In the Memoir, Lawrence passes over without comment the news that Magnus had managed Isadora Duncan, high priestess of naked liberty and representative of spontaneous movement. Isadora Duncan believed, as Lawrence did, that the body was the true self, source of all knowledge. Her solo performances, in which she enacted the shaking-off of chains, were impersonated by Julia’s tree-dance in Aaron’s Rod and Gudrun’s cattle-worship in Women in Love. Dancing in front of the herd of oxen, ‘her arms, her wrists, her hands stretching and heaving and falling and reaching and reaching and falling, her breasts lifted and shaken towards the cattle’, Gudrun stamped her feet ‘as if she were trying to throw off some bond, flinging her hands suddenly and stamping again, then rushing with face uplifted and throat full and beautiful, and eyes half closed, sightless’.88 The pregnant Anna Brangwen, swaying ‘backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn’ when she danced like David, also captured the spirit of Isadora Duncan. ‘That isn’t dancing,’ sneered Will Brangwen, which is what the early critics of Duncan said as well.89
Magnus had also managed Duncan’s lover, the set designer Edward Gordon Craig, and it was Isadora Duncan, Magnus said in his ‘Memoirs of Golden Russia’, who encouraged Craig to consider the origins of the theatre as ‘movement’. Lawrence had come across Craig before because the editor at Oxford University Press who had commissioned Movements in European History was married to Craig’s music manager, and John Cournos, in whose bed Lawrence had slept in Mecklenburgh Square, was a friend of Craig and had written a book called Gordon Craig and the Theatre of the Future. But Lawrence says nothing in the Memoir about Magnus’s connections to modern dance and theatre.
How, Lawrence asked, did Douglas come to know Magnus? ‘I met him in Capri years and years ago,’ Douglas explained, ‘– oh, sixteen years ago – and clean forgot all about him until somebody came to me one day in Rome and said: “You’re Norman Douglas.” – I didn’t know who he was. But he’d never forgotten me. Seems to be smitten by me, somehow or other. All the better for me, ha-ha – if he likes to run round for me. My dear fellow, I wouldn’t prevent him, if it amuses him. Not for worlds.’90
In A Plea for Better Manners, Douglas gave a fuller version of his first acquaintance with Magnus, and he too promised an exact account of the experience. Douglas met Magnus, he said, on Sunday 22 August 1909 – ‘I know it because I had fixed to leave, and did leave, that same evening for the mountains of the Abruzzi’ (where Lawrence also travelled after meeting Magnus). Magnus approached him in the street – Douglas being the emperor of Capri – and asked to borrow money; Douglas replied that lending money ‘makes enemies’ but he was happy to give the stranger thirty-seven francs. ‘I’ll never forget your kindness,’ said Magnus catching the ferry to Naples, and he kept his word. For the rest of his life Magnus was in Douglas’s debt.91
They did not meet again until August 1917, when Magnus once more stopped Douglas in the street, this time on the Via Corso in Rome. Magnus had recently escaped from the French Foreign Legion and was enjoying a precarious freedom, while Douglas was on the run from the London police following the incident in the South Kensington Underground station. ‘And now,’ Magnus said, having reminded Douglas who he was, ‘you must let me do something for you in return, if I can; you really must.’ ‘I wouldn’t prevent you for worlds,’ Douglas replied.92 So Magnus installed Douglas in his apartment at 33 Via Margutta, giving up his bed and providing his guest with a suit, a shave and round-the-clock room service. Magnus’s rooms, which he borrowed from a friend called Nathan Cobb, were a stone’s throw from the Egyptian needles, Roman gateways, Renaissance churches, the Spanish Steps and the house in which Keats had died from consumption in 1821.
Magnus became Douglas’s orderly. After rising at 4.30 a.m., he would work until 7.30 on Dregs before turning his attention to his house guest. ‘Here’s your shirt on the window-sill,’ Magnus would tut, having brought him his breakfast. ‘And your trousers hanging to the top of the wardrobe. Don’t you know that trousers ought to be folded up every evening? Why have you turned them inside out?’93 The two fugitives lived in this manner, with Magnus quoting from Lives of the Saints and Douglas quoting from Nietzsche, until October when Douglas once again, as he put it, ‘got into some kind of trouble’ and was obliged ‘to hop over the frontier’ (he was charged with offences against two brothers aged ten and twelve). By the time he hopped back again, Magnus himself was in trouble, almost certainly financial, and had hopped off to Monte Cassino until things cooled down. ‘Don’t want anyone to know where I am,’ he wrote to Douglas on 5 October, in a letter signed ‘the worried one’.
Monte Cassino, Magnus wrote to Douglas, was ‘Paradise’. It ‘is the only place in which one lives in unchanging time’, and the life of the monk is ‘the only life. I only pray that I may be able to settle all my affairs soon and be permitted to stay always.’ Magnus was given a large, ‘beautiful’ room overlooking the valley and mountains, and his days were organised around work, mass and meals (‘soup, good soup, meat, vegetables, fruit and wine’). Having itemised his routine, Magnus responded to Douglas’s complaints: ‘Sorry – so sorry you are lonely – you know I am sorry,’ and suggested that he join him in the monastery. Before signing off, Magnus told Douglas to ‘look for your slippers under bed … under table in studio where you put your shoes on, in corner next to sofa – under book cases’.94
When it was safe to return to Rome, Magnus threw his energies into arranging a tour for Isadora Duncan, which failed to come off and lost them £60,000. Then, together with a man called Augusto Bazinno, he formed a company dealing in the exchange of motion pictures between Italy and America, and on 18 May 1918, Magnus set sail for New York. Nothing more is known about his foray in the movie business, which clearly failed, but Lawrence made light of it in his portrait of the entrepreneurial Mr May in The Lost Girl.
By Easter 1919, Magnus was back in Italy with an exclusive invitation to the Holy Week services in Monte Cassino. Here he was joined by scions of the ancient royal houses such as Prince Massimo (now ninety years old), Prince Alexandr Volkonsky and Prince Ruffo-Scaletta, and various bishops, counts, cardinals and dukes from around the world. Magnus described the experience in an article, ‘Holy Week in Monte Cassino’, which begins:
‘Cassino – Cassino – Cassino!’ yells the conductor of the train, with the accent on the ‘O’, after four hours of purgatory in a packed train from Rome.
For Magnus, spending Holy Week ‘on that lonely mountain-top gave me much to think about … I wondered as I left whether the monasteries will not become the centres of intellectual life again, during and after the great social upheaval which seems to be shaking our Occidental life now.’ The ‘better elements’, he grandly observed, ‘will always seek refuge’ in the religious houses, ‘where law and order exist’.95
The next time Douglas saw him, Magnus was leaning over a Roman bridge gazing into the Tiber. ‘He was in pensive mood,’ Douglas recalled, ‘his face all puckered into wrinkles as he glanced upon the tawny flood rolling beneath that old bridge.’
There he stood, leaning over the parapet, all by himself. He turned his countenance aside on seeing me, to escape detection, but I drew nigh none the less.
‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Don’t disturb me just now. I am watching the little fishes. Life is so complicated! Let us pray. I have begun a new novel and a new love affair.’
‘God prosper both!’ I replied, and began to move off.
‘Thanks. But supposing the publisher always objects to your choicest paragraphs?… It is with publishers as with wives: one always wants someone else’s. And when you have them, where’s the difference? Ah, let us pray. These little fishes have none of our troubles.’
I enquired about the new romance. At first he refused to disclose anything. Then he told me it was to be titled ‘With Christ at Harvard’, and that it promised some rather novel situations. I shall look forward to its appearance.
Douglas’s parody was published first in the Anglo-Italian Review and then, in 1921, in Alone. ‘What good things one could relate of Maurice Magnus, but for the risk of incurring his wrath!’ Douglas continued.
It is a thousand pities, I often tell him, that he is still alive; I am yearning to write his biography, and cannot afford to wait for his dissolution.
‘When I am dead,’ he always says.
‘By that time, my dear Magnus, I shall be in the same fix myself.’
‘Try to survive. You may find it worth your while, when you come to look into my papers. You don’t know half. And I may be taking that little sleeping draught of mine any one of these days…’
Magnus, Douglas said, was ‘a connoisseur of earthquakes, social and financial’. His life was ‘punctuated by them to such an extent that he no longer counts events from dates in the ordinary calendar, from birthdays or Christmas or Easter, but from such and such a disaster affecting himself’. The problem with earthquake connoisseurs is that they have too many illusions and not enough interest in ‘things terrestrial’. In addition to which, they positively need to feel pursued by cataclysms. ‘Far from being damaged by such convulsions,’ Douglas believed, they ‘distil’ from them a ‘subtle’ value.96
From his Jewish-American father, Douglas explained to Lawrence, Magnus ‘inherited that all too common taint of psychasthenia (miscalled neurasthenia)’. His domestic ‘refinements’, on the other hand, were the result of being the only son of his indulgent mother, Hedwig Rosamunde Liebetrau, whose death in April 1912 – the same month that Lawrence met Frieda – ‘was the tragedy of his life’. So Magnus, like Lawrence, had a Mother with a capital M; the Madonna and child were ‘sacred’ to one another and it had been Hedwig who sowed ‘the seeds of that habit of reckless expenditure which proved to be [her son’s] undoing’. His mother’s death, thought Douglas, ‘must have given him a twist that never passed off: a twist reflected in his very face which, in unguarded moments, took on as sad an expression as I have seen on any human countenance’.97
Magnus rarely spoke about his mother, and when he did so his voice took on ‘such tremulously tender accents’ that Douglas was forced to change the topic of conversation.98 But we know, Douglas revealed to Lawrence, that Hedwig believed herself the illegitimate daughter of Wilhelm I, King of Prussia and first German Kaiser. She was therefore half-sister to Frederick III, who married the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, making Magnus first cousin to the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, whose support for Austro-Hungry in the crisis of July 1914 led immediately to the Great War. Illegitimate lines are hard to trace and there is no surviving evidence to show that Hedwig Liebetrau was a Hohenzollern, but Magnus had ‘Filia Regis’ engraved on her headstone in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Lawrence, whose mother also felt she belonged to a superior class and whose wife had her own connections to German aristocracy, was in no doubt about Hedwig’s heritage when Douglas told him. It all made sense: possessed by what Lawrence called ‘the cruel illusion of importance manqué’,99 Magnus resembled the Kaiser himself, another earthquake connoisseur who was now exiled in Holland. Wilhelm II, Lawrence wrote in Movements in European History, had reduced the German aristocracy to something ‘so hollow’ and ‘snobbish’ and ‘bluff’ that it ‘has to be swept away’.100 Magnus was also, Lawrence later observed, treated like royalty at Monte Cassino where the monks made it their business to know the people who mattered, and he certainly, Lawrence concluded in the Memoir of Maurice Magnus, had ‘royal nerves’.101
But Magnus said nothing to Lawrence about his bloodline: illegitimacy was a matter of shame, and the honour of his mother was at stake.
Maurice Magnus was born in New York City on 7 November 1876. His father, a scientist called Charles Ferdinand Magnus, emigrated from Poland in the 1860s and married Hedwig Liebetrau in 1867, when she was twenty-two. Magnus’s mother was born in Berlin and possibly raised at court, where some injustice caused her to fall from high society. Had she become an embarrassment? Was she banished by her nephew, the Kaiser?
Hedwig’s father is officially recorded as Paul Liebetrau, husband of Mary Liebetrau. Was Mary pregnant with the child of Wilhelm I when she met Paul Liebetrau, or did the affair take place later? Nothing is known about the life of Mary Liebetrau, or the life of her daughter, other than the fact that Hedwig was raised to be a strict Lutheran. Wherever he was educated – and he grew up to know every bend in every road on the French Riviera – Magnus learned to speak several languages badly, to produce indifferent prose, to mismanage money, to appreciate good food and to keep up appearances. He wanted to be known as a ‘littérateur’ (‘littérateur!’ mocked Lawrence, ‘– the impossible little pigeon!’),102 and his adventures in the world of letters can be traced through the curious trail of publications he left behind. In his early twenties Magnus wrote a play called Eldyle about a visionary who turns his back on the world and builds a monastery to which young and beautiful men can retreat. Two of the monks, Hyantha and Clavel, fall in love, as a result of which Hyantha dies. The life Magnus sought in Monte Cassino had clearly been a long-term fantasy.
Eldyle was published in 1898. In the same year Magnus is credited as a ‘translator and compiler’ in the American Colonial Handbook, volumes one and two. In 1901 he worked – probably as manager – for a new literary magazine called the Smart Set, which would later publish a number of Lawrence’s poems and stories. In 1902 he abandoned the Lutheran church and converted to Catholicism, and by 1903 he had left America for good and was to be found in Berlin, writing articles for the Berlin Times and Florence Herald. For a brief period, Maurice Magnus was Berlin correspondent for the New York Independent. He disliked Germany because, he felt, its history lacked culture and its people were thugs, but his antipathy was probably a response to the Kaiser’s humiliation of his mother. He expressed his feelings in a manuscript called ‘The Unspeakable Prussian’, which he dedicated ‘to all my fellow sufferers who have come into contact with Prussian officialdom and thereby suffered indignities and outrage’.103
In 1904, Magnus introduced himself to Edward Gordon Craig who, fifty years later, recorded the event in his memoirs. Craig was exhibiting his stage and costume designs at a gallery on the Königgrätzer Strasse in Berlin when in walked a dapper little man who ‘carefully … told me what a great artist I was’. The ‘little’ stranger:
pretended to look at each drawing carefully – eagerly – his little face with its tight snappy mouth peering with apparent understanding at what he could not for the life of him comprehend. He wasn’t an artist – nor a connoisseur – nor an art critic. Nor did he know anything about the workings of a theatre …104
Craig was the illegitimate son of Ellen Terry and the architect Edward Godwin, and his childhood was spent in the theatre where his mother was leading lady to the actor-manager Henry Irving (the model for Bram Stoker’s Dracula). By the time he met Magnus, Craig had sired eight children; the following year he celebrated the appearance of a ninth, born to Isadora Duncan. Magnus appeared just as Craig was looking for someone to take care of his business arrangements, which included setting up a school, starting a magazine, building a theatre and seeing to fruition various plans for books, exhibitions and productions including designing the sets for Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. Magnus recommended himself as the best person. ‘A concert or a lecture to arrange? Oh, yes. A book to be published? Oh, yes – he could see to that.’ When Magnus reported to Craig at the end of his first day, he ‘had seen a dozen people – pulled two dozen strings – drunk three Martinis’. On his second day, Magnus handed Craig a cheque for £40. He quickly made himself indispensable, writing reports, arranging introductions and providing all the flattery Craig’s ego required. ‘Enthusiasm,’ Craig recalled, ‘was his stumbling block’, while the flaw in his character was ‘pepperiness’, particularly around women. But when his flattery was allowed ‘full swing’ Magnus was ‘goodness itself’.
