Burning man, p.34
Burning Man, page 34
His last two weeks in Sicily were taken up with Magnus. He asked Mountsier to send a copy of the Memoir to Monte Cassino, thus ensuring that Magnus’s name was defiled in the place he loved best, and wrote to Mazzaiba to say that Magnus was an even worse rat than he had described: ‘Poor Magnus. I heard of another nasty bit of swindling which he did a few days before he left for Malta.’36 By 12 February, Lawrence was smirking like a schoolboy who had put a frog in his teacher’s desk. ‘I did such a “Memoir” of Maurice Magnus,’ he told Mary Cannan, ‘to go in front of his horrid Legion book.’37
Lawrence and Frieda left Fontana Vecchia on 19 February, taking four trunks, two suitcases, a hatbox and a piece of Sicilian memorabilia in the form of the side of a cart, five foot by two foot, with a joust painted on one panel and St Genevieve on the other. ‘Oh painted carts of Sicily’, Lawrence wrote in Sea and Sardinia, ‘with all history on your panels!’38 From Sicily they sailed to Naples where they had booked second-class berths on the RMS Osterley, a large passenger vessel that ran between Europe and Australia. Having imagined himself as a pilgrim on a cargo boat, Lawrence ended up in what he described as a luxurious hotel, equipped with a smoking lounge, library, lift, Marconi room and laundry.
Waving goodbye to Etna, they headed towards Crete and then Egypt, crossing to the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, an eighteen-hour journey whose proximity to the desert Lawrence found thrilling. ‘Slowly came the evening,’ he wrote to his mother-in-law, ‘and we so still, one would have thought we no longer moved. A thousand gulls flew about, like a snowstorm, and a great black bird of prey, alone and cruel, so large, among thousands of white, screaming, fast-moving sea-birds.’ The sun was sinking when they came to the Great Bitter Lake, and there was ‘such a sky, like a sword burning green and blue’. The beauty was ‘superhuman. One felt oneself near the gates of old Paradise … Yes, it is a borderland.’ And there, on the other side, was Mount Sinai, the mountain of Moses, ‘red as old dried blood, naked as a knife’, poised like a poniard ‘between man and his lost Paradise’.39
The ship was ‘so comfortable’, he complained, ‘nothing but comfort’,40 but his two weeks on board were happy. He spent the days on deck translating Giovanni Verga’s magnificent novel Mastro-Don Gesualdo, thus absorbing himself in the country he had just abandoned. After their winter of rain they sailed into ‘lovely lovely weather’, with the sea ‘steady as a road’. Lawrence enjoyed the suspended unreality of marine life: ‘I feel,’ he told Rosalind Baynes, ‘like a sea-bird must feel.’41 ‘Time passes like a sleep,’ he told Kot, ‘– nothing exists except just this ship.’42 He liked watching the passengers idle away the days and the workers getting on with their work. He felt the relief that we do when a decision is made and we are back in the hands of fate.
He was always inspired by the manliness of ships and their paraphernalia – ropes, tugboats, ladders, funnels. And he loved the movement of vessels through water; what he described, in Sea and Sardinia, as ‘the motion of freedom … the long, slow lift of the ship, and her long, slow slide forwards’.43 Because Conrad was the English literary sea-captain, Lawrence’s seas have never been granted the status they deserve. But he gravitated all his life towards sea-power and sea-crossings, and Melville was much on Lawrence’s mind as they headed into the Indian Ocean. The final letter he sent from Fontana Vecchia had been to ask Curtis Brown, his new English agent, to send Robert Mountsier, his American agent, the essay on Moby Dick he had written in Cornwall, thus ensuring that Mountsier was able to present the American publishers with a complete manuscript for Studies in Classic American Literature.
Conrad’s sea was a merciless void, James Joyce’s sea was a ‘great sweet mother’, but Lawrence’s sea was a man much like Lawrence himself, ‘solitary and single’, as he wrote in his poem ‘The Sea’, ‘fruitless, phosphorescent, cold and callous’, playing his ‘great game around the world’. Lawrence always preferred the journey to the destination. ‘I wished in my soul the voyage might last forever,’ he said of the passage from Sicily to Sardinia, ‘that the sea had no end, that one might float in this wavering, tremulous, yet long and surging pulsation while ever time lasted: space never exhausted, and no turning back, no looking back, even.’44 He wished in his soul the same thing now. ‘I do wonder how we shall feel when we get off and are in Ceylon,’ he confided to Kot.45
When they reached Ceylon the horror set in. Kandy, 100 miles from the port at Colombo, would be Lawrence’s Heart of Darkness. The Brewsters lived in a large old bungalow on a hill surrounded by jungle; from the verandahs he watched chameleons, lizards and tropical birds go about their business. Earl Brewster was studying at the sacred Temple of the Tooth, named for its possession of the left eye-tooth of the Buddha, and Lawrence, before he got to Ceylon, had played with the idea of also studying at the ‘molar monastery’. But within a week he had decided not to enter into the Eastern experience, but to continue his absorption in Sicilian peasant life by translating the twelve stories of Giovanni Verga’s Little Novels of Sicily.
‘I love trying things and discovering how I hate them,’ Lawrence later told Earl Brewster. ‘How I hated a great deal of my time in Ceylon.’46 He hated the four ayahs who were (he thought) planning to murder him, he hated the swamp-like humidity, the family of rats who nested in his hat, the wounded snake who dragged his length across the floor leaving a trail of blood, and the wildcats who fought on the skylight of his room at night. He hated, so he told Mabel Dodge, the hellish quality of the jungle, ‘the thick, choky feel of tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrid noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night’.47 He remembered these noises for the rest of his life. Richard Aldington recalled that Lawrence ‘once asked me if I had heard the night noises of the tropical jungle, and then instantly emitted a frightening series of yells, squawks, trills, howls and animal “help murder” shrieks’.48
He hated Buddhism and it’s ‘rat-hole temples’ which looked like ‘decked up pigsties’.49 Lawrence, who also hated the cinema, hated Ceylon more: he would prefer, so he told Mary Cannan, to see Ceylon ‘on the cinema: you get there the whole effect, without the effort and the sense of nausea’.50 When Frieda and the Brewsters removed their shoes and sun-hats to pay homage to the Buddhas in the old rock caves, Lawrence, Achsah Brewster recalled, remained outside in the swamp heat, boiling in hatred, ‘hat tight on his head, declaring that there was no use, he did not belong there and could not join in’.51
But he liked the elephants and the midnight ‘devil dancing’ at the torchlit festival of Pera-hera, held to celebrate the visit of the young Prince of Wales. And Lawrence liked the Prince of Wales, whose shade-like presence he described in every letter home. The ‘pale, shattered’ Prince, he felt, was being mocked: ‘They secretly hate him for being a Prince, and make a Princely butt of him – and he knows it.’ Lawrence too felt mocked: ‘I find all dark people have a fixed idea to jeer at us … They jeer behind your back.’52 But it was Lawrence who jeered: most recently he had jeered at Freud. Fantasia of the Unconscious opens with ‘a little apology to Psychoanalysis: it wasn’t fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious’.53
The only writing, apart from his Verga translations and letters home, that came out of Lawrence’s time in Ceylon was his superb poem ‘Elephant’, in which he contrasts the frenzied ‘fire-laughing’ motion of the dancers at the Pera-hera with the ‘pale and dejected’ Prince ‘up aloft’, ‘his chin on his hands’, looking down on the ‘huge homage of shadowy beasts’. Lawrence’s spatial sense comes into full play here, with the drama of the ‘nervous pale lad / up there’ in the Temple of the Tooth, and the stepping homage ‘down below’.
More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up,
Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new
cocoa-nut cressets
High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east;
And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets
among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in
the dark.
And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the
shudder of drums.
Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the
jungle singing;
Endless, under the Prince.
Possessing no natural majesty, the Prince was weary and diffident, doing the rounds of his tiresome duty. He was, Lawrence thought, less a person than a fragment.
‘I still am not quite sure where I am,’ Lawrence said when he had been two weeks in Ceylon: ‘sort of look round for myself among all this different world.’54 Knowing where he was and knowing who he was were bound up for Lawrence, and his crisis in Ceylon – as opposed to his crisis in Monte Cassino or his crisis in Cornwall – was to do with doubting his calling. Was he really the master that Mabel believed him to be? Was he really a prince among men? When he looked around for himself in this different world, Lawrence was also in fragments. Part of him was in the frenzied devil-dancers, whose vitality he internalised. Rolf Gardiner, the English rural revivalist, described Lawrence’s ‘terrifying’ impersonations of the dancers at the Pera-hera, ‘his piercing blue eyes popping right out of his pale face as he twisted like a cobra, shuffling in his carpet slippers like one possessed by demons’.55
On 10 April 1922 Lawrence wrote to Mabel to say that he would come to Taos, but only after going to Australia. The problem, he told Mabel, was that ‘the East doesn’t get me at all’. The East no more believed in Lawrence than it believed in the wretched Prince of Wales. Lawrence hated, he said, the ‘boneless suavity’ of the place, ‘the sort of tropical sweetness’ which suggests ‘an undertang of blood’. He would ‘still of course distrust Taos very much, chiefly on account of the artists’, but he was prepared to trust ‘the Indians, yes: if one is sure that they are not jeering at one’. He would prefer, in all honesty, to come to America without having to encounter at all ‘the awful “cultured” Americans’ – the ‘steaming shits’ referred to in his earlier letter to Mabel – ‘with their limited self-righteous ideals and their mechanical love-motion and their bullying, detestable negative creed of liberty and democracy’. He believed in neither liberty nor democracy, Lawrence revealed. Obliged to be at war with every country he was in, Lawrence now pitched himself in advance against the ideals on which America was built. What he believed in, Lawrence told Mabel, was the emergence of an unelected natural leader, the ‘divine right of natural Kings’. In this sense he found himself ‘in diametric opposition to every American – and everybody else, besides Americans – whom I come across’ – which is the position that Lawrence liked best.56 Meanwhile the primitive authenticity he had come to Ceylon in order to find was what now appalled him the most: by the time Lawrence left, his letters had degenerated into rants about being ‘in the heat among the black people’.57
Ceylon brought out the worst in Lawrence and it is hard, on the surface of things, to understand why he hated it so much. The problem, as he saw it, was one of magnetism: ‘The magnetism is all negative,’ he explained, ‘everything seems magnetically to be repelling one.’58 The magnetism that had shoved him away from the West, now shoved him away from the East. But he was with people he liked – Lawrence would always like the Brewsters, and they him – and on a beautiful island filled with new and astonishing birds, beasts and flowers. Imaginatively, Ceylon was well within his reach but it was not his imagination that failed him. What is underestimated in accounts of his time in Ceylon, mainly because Lawrence himself refused to discuss it, is the dire state of his body. His health, having improved on the sea passage, worsened again in Kandy. As ever, he gave no details of his symptoms but he reported afterwards that ‘I had never felt so sick in my life.’59 Biographers have put his accounts of night sweats (‘Even at night you sweat if you walk a few yards’),60 weight loss (‘One sweats and sweats, and gets thinner and thinner’),61 inability to breathe (‘the feeling that there is a lid down on everything’, that the sun makes ‘a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you’),62 enervation (‘the east seems to bleed one’s energy and make one indifferent to everything’) and decomposition (‘It isn’t so much the heat as the chemical decomposition of one’s blood by the ultra violet rays of the sun’)63 down to the weather. But as the father of the playwright John Mortimer put it, ‘I’m always angry when I’m dying.’ We cannot know how ill Lawrence became during these weeks, but we can at least imagine how it felt to be in a country the effect of whose climate so perfectly impersonated the symptoms of the illness from which he was trying to escape, making it impossible for him to tell if he was dying of consumption or dying of Ceylon.
Illness prevented Lawrence from moving, and lack of movement led to claustrophobia and paranoia. He recalled Ceylon in ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’: Cathcart’s first island was not ‘Paradise regained’, as he had hoped, but Limbo, where the ‘moment begins to heave and expand in great circles’.64 In a frenzy of panic and fear, Cathcart fled to another island and, on 26 April 1922, armed with their trunks and hatbox and painted Sicilian panel, Frieda and Lawrence set sail for the great penitentiary which is located at the same point of the southern hemisphere where Dante placed Purgatory. By astonishing coincidence, also on board, heading to a theosophical convention in Sydney, was Brewer’s telepathic guide Annie Besant, who was now looking out for Lawrence.
From the deck, where he finished his translation of The Little Novels of Sicily, Lawrence watched flying fish sprint through the waves like ‘winged drops’, while an albatross, with its ‘long, long wings’, followed the ship. The southern waters, Lawrence wrote, make ‘one feel that our day is only a day. That in the dark of the night ahead other days stir fecund, when we have lapsed from existence.’65 At sea, his balance was restored. ‘No more of my tirades,’ he told Cynthia Asquith, ‘the sea seems so big.’66 His Purgatory would be three months, he continued. ‘Three months’ penalty for having forsworn Europe’.67 He was perfectly aware of the symbolism of his pilgrimage: ‘It is strange and fascinating’, Lawrence reflected as his ship smashed through the Timor Sea, ‘to wander like Virgil in the Shades.’68
It was midwinter when the Lawrences docked in Perth, and the sky was ‘high and blue and new, as if no one had ever taken a breath from it’, which suggests that Lawrence could breathe again.69 His panic now subsided. In Ceylon he had felt as though he were dying, but in Australia he felt ‘unborn’. Because he liked Australia, he also resented it. It was, he complained, ‘the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.’70
Between 6 and 18 May, Frieda and Lawrence stayed in a guest house in Darlington, near Perth, co-run by a woman called Molly Skinner who described Lawrence as a ‘little man’ with ‘strange scarlet lips’ and a ‘fragile body’.71 He was shrinking: Lawrence, at 5 foot 9 inches, had once been seen as a tallish man with a stoop, but since his last winter illness even he had begun to describe himself, and his fictional representatives, as little. From Perth, the Lawrences sailed to New South Wales where they rented a three-bedroomed bungalow in a mining township called Thirroul – an Aboriginal word meaning ‘in a basin’ – forty miles south of Sydney. The men here were mostly coalminers, Lawrence wrote, ‘so I feel quite at home’.72 Thirroul was ‘haphazard and new’ with unpaved streets, a wooden church and myriads of bungalows with roofs of corrugated iron. As with any colony, Englishness was everywhere, but ‘crumbled out into formlessness and chaos’. The great ‘loose vacancy’ of Australia was, Lawrence found, ‘almost terrifying’ while the sense of ‘do-as-you-please’ liberty felt ‘utterly uninteresting’.73
Their house, called Wyewurk (‘an Australian humorism’, Lawrence explained’),74 was – of course – ‘on the brink’. The garden stopped short at a twenty-foot cliff which dropped down to miles of coastline; the Lawrences felt like they were living in the sea, with foam lapping their ankles. Bread and meat were delivered to the door and so there was no need to engage with the outside world; they made no friends at all in Thirroul where, for the last time in their married life, they lived alone.
The improvement in the air was reflected in Lawrence’s productivity. On 25 May, he reported to Mountsier that ‘one could never make a novel out of these people, they haven’t got any insides to them, to write about’. A week later – after he and Frieda had finished scrubbing the floors and killing the mice – he had immersed himself in Kangaroo. He began writing on 1 June and sent Mountsier the finished book on 17 July, which means that Lawrence’s dreamtime in Australia was spent writing a novel about his dreamtime in Australia.
‘The business of the novel’, Lawrence wrote in ‘Morality and the Novel’, ‘is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment’, and Kangaroo reveals Lawrence’s relation to the universe at the ‘living moment’ of June 1922.75 As ever, he ran at it like a man possessed and produced roughly 3,500 words a day. He wrote and wrote and wrote, except that he did not write for the whole day because he also did the housework, cooked the meals, swam at lunchtime, collected shells from the beach, supervised Frieda over the laundry requirements (reminding her to rinse in cold water with bluing in it, to bring out the whiteness), read the newspaper cover to cover, rode into the bush in a pony cart, walked in woods of golden mimosa, sent dozens and dozens of letters and consumed a book on the sympathetic power of the glands that Mabel had sent to Ceylon. So Lawrence produced his 3,500 immaculately handwritten words in the few hours of the morning he put aside to sit on the ground beneath a tree, resting his notebook on his drawn-up knees.
