Burning man, p.43
Burning Man, page 43
When they parted on the pier in Manhattan, Lawrence and Frieda had a fight which was so severe that Frieda assumed, as her ship sailed away, that their marriage was finished. And in a sense it was: ‘He can go to blazes,’ she wrote in a letter from her cabin, ‘I’ve had enough.’103 Neither says what the fight was about, but Lawrence presumably behaved outrageously and something broke in Frieda. Meanwhile, Lawrence wrote blithely to Murry, now a widower, asking him to look after his wife. Murry performed his duty with such assiduity that Frieda suggested they go to bed together, the thought of which, Murry wrote in his journal, ‘was heaven on earth’, but out of consideration for Lawrence he turned her down. ‘It drove me crazy – really crazy, I think,’ Murry later told Frieda, ‘– wanting you so badly.’104
His desire for Frieda coincided for Murry with his renewed regard for Lawrence. Having panned Women in Love in his review of the novel, Murry liked where Lawrence was going in Aaron’s Rod and Fantasia of the Unconscious. ‘Fantasia was more than a book,’ he wrote in Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence, ‘it was a message to me.’ Murry was now, as he put it, ‘Lawrence’s man: he should lead and I would follow’. Reading Fantasia had been a mystical experience: it ‘explained’ Murry’s own ‘strange life’ and it ‘explained’ Lawrence himself.105 It also explained why Murry now wanted, and resisted, Lawrence’s wife: Frieda was the conduit between the two men.
To serve Lawrence’s cause, Murry had recently established a new journal called the Adelphi whose purpose was to spread ‘the faith’ that Lawrence proclaimed: ‘life is important’. What Murry understood by ‘life’ was the reintegration of mind and body: this is what the Adelphi would preach in order to regenerate post-war England. ‘I would prepare the place for him,’ Murry said of Lawrence. ‘I waited eagerly for his coming.’106 The first issue of the Adelphi, in June 1923, contained a central chapter from Fantasia; two further excerpts from the book appeared in the July and September issues. If Lawrence was serious about saving mankind, Murry would argue, his work lay not in chopping wood in the Rocky Mountains but in editing the Adelphi. He was luring Lawrence back from Paradise so that the crops might once more grow and the birds sing.
Lawrence’s own plan was to return to Mexico. Before crossing the border, however, he did something which seems on the surface to be utterly bizarre but on closer inspection to make perfect sense: he went to Mabel’s home and met her white-haired mother.
* * *
Immediately after the fight on the pier, Lawrence received a letter from Mabel’s friend Bessie Freeman – whom he had met in Taos – inviting him to Buffalo. As with all things relating to Mabel, the timing could not have been more serendipitous. ‘I should like to stay a night in your Buffalo,’ Lawrence replied, adding that it was ‘the Buffalo also of Mabel’. He ended up spending four nights.107
Mabel’s Buffalo was known as the Electric City of the Future because it was illuminated by hydroelectricity generated by the Niagara Falls. Lawrence liked this bourgeois, industrial town: Buffalo, he said, was like Manchester or Nottingham ‘sixty years ago’ and he found here ‘a genuine nice feeling’.108 Mabel’s mother, Sara Ganson, had moved out of town to a place called Lewiston on the Niagara River, where Lawrence was invited for lunch. If Sara was cold and evil, Lawrence didn’t notice; what he saw was a blue-blooded hostess, tolerant and sensible in her old age, enjoying devilled kidneys for breakfast. This was the real old America.
Back in Taos, Mabel knew that Lawrence and Frieda were on different sides of the Atlantic: she knew it because of the gossip, and she ‘knew it out of the air’. She also knew that Lawrence had gone to the trouble of meeting her mother. No sooner was he free of Frieda, Mabel wrote triumphantly in Lorenzo in Taos, than ‘Lawrence turned and went to Buffalo!’ She saw it as a victory, and rightly so: Lawrence later told Mabel that having stepped into her past he now knew who she really was: ‘Life made you what you are: I understood so much when I was in Buffalo and saw your mother.’109
When Studies in Classic American Literature was published on 27 August 1923, Lawrence was back in Los Angeles with the Danes. He then returned to Mexico with Kai Gøtzsche: Merrild, sated by Lawrence, stayed behind. Lawrence retraced his former journey, taking Gøtzsche back to Guadalajara, Lake Chapala and Mexico City. In Taos, Mabel – rumoured to be divorcing Tony – was now spreading it about that Lawrence had a vendetta against her. As for the ‘vendetta’, Lawrence wrote to Bessie Freeman on 16 September, ‘I’m ready.’ But then Mabel herself wrote to Lawrence, begging his forgiveness. He called it her ‘Peccavi, peccavi, c’est ma faute letter’110 and replied that he hoped the gossip about her divorce was unfounded. Her marriage to Tony, he now believed, ‘may even yet be the rounding of a great curve’, which shows how his thoughts had progressed since ‘Quetzalcoatl’.111 Mabel then, in an act of penitential abjection, offered Lawrence her soul if he would only return to Taos. ‘I submitted my will to him,’ she wrote, recalling the time she asked John Parmenter to give her his gonorrhoea. ‘I luxuriated in submission, for a change.’112 And Lawrence, accepting without question their new dynamic, replied that he would ‘take your submission: when you are ready’.113
Lawrence’s letters to Mabel in the autumn of 1923 are power-crazed and sexually suggestive. He asks her to give up the messianic mission she shares with John Collier in order to join his own messianic mission. ‘Don’t trouble about the Indians,’ he wrote from Guadalajara on 8 November.
You can’t ‘save’ them: and politics, no matter what politics, will only destroy them. I have said many times that you would destroy the Indians. In your lust even for a Saviour’s power, you would just destroy them. The same with Collier. He will destroy them. It is his saviour’s will to set the claws of his own White egoistic benevolent volition into them. Somewhere, the Indians know that you and Collier would, with your salvationist but poisonous white consciousness, destroy them.114
Without Frieda to keep him in check, Lawrence’s megalomania and paranoia took hold. Later that month, Frieda – instructed by Murry – sent a telegram instructing her husband to ‘come’, and Lawrence informed Mabel on 20 November that he was sailing to England in the morning. Whatever happened between himself and Frieda – and neither yet knew if they had any kind of future – he and Mabel, Lawrence said, were ‘to keep an invisible thread’ between them. She was to be his handmaiden as he went forth, the ‘serpent of the sun’.115
He boarded a ship at Veracruz which drew into the Plymouth Sound on 11 December: thus began what Murry called ‘the whole strange episode of Lawrence’s return to England in 1923–1924’.116 It had been four years since he had left Dover on that bleak November morning, and watched from the deck ‘the death-grey coast of Kent go out’. His first impression on returning to his native land, Lawrence wrote in an incendiary little essay called ‘On Coming Home’, was of ‘a dead muffled sense of stillness’ as though everything were ‘sand-bagged’. He was once again locked inside English tightness: tight manners, tight snobbery, tight wet sunshine, tight fields inside tight hedges, tight train carriages, tight faces too tightly close to his own: ‘one would like to smash something’. England was a civilisation of small things: kippers, bacon, porridge, spoonfuls of sugar; the self-deprecating manners of the dining car where each man pretends to be ‘grander’ than he is. There was ‘not a man left in all the millions of pairs of trousers. Not a man left.’117
His reception party at Waterloo consisted of Murry, Kot and Frieda. Murry said that Lawrence looked ‘greenish’, but this will be because Lawrence suspected, from the ‘chumminess’ between them, that his friend was now sleeping with his wife.118 Plus he knew that he had made a mistake in coming back for Frieda: the mountain should have come to Mohammed. ‘I can’t bear it,’ Lawrence said five minutes after seeing her again.
Frieda had taken rooms in Hampstead, and in the cab across London Lawrence explained his vision of the Adelphi, which Murry wanted him to edit. The point of the journal, he insisted, was not to regenerate the country but to ‘attack everything, everything; and explode in one blaze of denunciation’.119 Accordingly, Lawrence submitted ‘On Coming Home’ which Murry refused to publish because it would ‘only make enemies’. ‘As if that weren’t what I want,’ Lawrence replied.120 The visionary voice of Fantasia had vanished: Lawrence had returned to England as the God of War.
He and Frieda stayed in a flat in 110 Heath Street, a vertical climb further up the hill from Well Walk and upstairs from Catherine and Donald Carswell. Hampstead was preparing for Christmas; holly wreaths hung on door knockers and pyramids of oranges glimmered in greengrocers’ windows. The days, so bright in New Mexico, were now reduced to the ‘dull, heavy, mortified half-light’ of an English winter.121 Down the hill, on Pond Street, Murry was living in a flat above the Russian mosaicist Boris Anrep, with his friend Dorothy Brett in the little Queen Anne house next door. Although Brett barely knew Lawrence – they had met briefly during the war – she was excited by his return. And because she now attached her life to his, we need to see Brett as Lawrence saw her.
Brett, Lawrence told Mabel, is ‘deaf, forty, very nice, and daughter of Viscount Esher’.122 As with Frieda, he never tired of rehearsing Brett’s family connections, but equally important to Lawrence was her virginity, and Dorothy Brett was to D. H. Lawrence as Dorothy Wordsworth was to her brother, William. On the one hand, she can be seen as a female sacrifice, part of the worshipful company of women who now made his writing possible, and the other hand, Brett was liberated by Lawrence, who airlifted her out of a dead-end existence. A shy spinster with rabbity teeth, eyes round as marbles, a shocked expression and a weak chin, Brett had, in Lawrence’s imagination, no notion of sexual pleasure. Her glamorous and powerful father had been in Queen Victoria’s inner circle, and Brett was raised in a newly built mock-Tudor mansion near Windsor Castle where she and her sister Sylvia had shared dancing classes with Princess Beatrice’s children, watched over by the Queen. Brett later attended the funeral of Victoria and the coronation of Edward VII, but her formative experience of the mystique of power was when she was taken, aged four, to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at Earl’s Court and felt a connection between herself and Chief Sitting Bull. She was later allowed to learn the drums, which suggests a degree of unconventionality on her parents’ part. With their brothers away at Eton, Brett and Sylvia shared a lonely childhood in the nurseries of several enormous houses where they were beaten by their drunken nanny, kept in ignorance of the wider world and paraded on the marriage market without yet knowing why their pet rats had babies.
As a debutante Brett went to the state balls where it was assumed, being the daughter of the intelligent, witty and brilliant Viscount Esher, that she too would be ‘intelligent, witty and brilliant’, but ‘I was shy, dumb and shrinking’.123 Aged eighteen she nearly died after her appendix burst and during a long convalescence fell in love with her kind young doctor. She later wondered if her increasing deafness was a way of not hearing the cruel jibes of her father and brothers, but if she willed it on as a means of escape, Brett’s silent world soon became what she called her prison sentence. As well as her ear-trumpet she had a Marconi listening machine that she carried in a suitcase, for which she wore headphones like a radio operator. This cumbersome equipment, plus the need for snippets of conversation to be repeatedly yelled back to her, made Brett an object of condescension and comedy. In whatever circle she moved – Windsor or Garsington – she was considered the bore. Because deafness is regarded as a social inconvenience to those who have full hearing, no one among Brett’s family or friends, apart from Ottoline Morrell, is known to have shown anything other than irritation with her disability. ‘If it were not for my painting,’ Brett wrote to Bertrand Russell in 1918, ‘I would end it all … I am just the shadow of a human being.’124 According to her mother, Brett failed on the marriage market, but Brett’s version would be that she managed to get out in one piece. She responded with ferocity to any man who came near her, and found a retreat from small talk, we can imagine, in fiddling with the dials of her Marconi.
‘On or about December 1910,’ Virginia Woolf calculated, ‘human character changed.’125 This was the year that Roger Fry introduced the English to Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne in his ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, and also the year that Brett, aged twenty-seven, left home to study at London’s Slade School of Art. She now met Augustus John and Mark Gertler, renamed herself Brett (her friend Dora Carrington was similarly known as Carrington), cut her hair, embarked on her lifelong habit of wearing corduroy breeches and began a chaste romance with her professor. The following year her brother Maurice married the musical comedy actress Zena Dare, and her sister, Sylvia, married Sir Charles Vyner de Windt Brooke, the last of the White Rajahs who had ruled the Kingdom of Sarawak, in north-western Borneo, since 1846. Sarawak, the size of England, had its own currency, flag and postage stamps and from now on ‘Ranee’ Sylvia wore a sarong. Because she revelled in the savagery and romance of her subjects, which included the head-hunting Dayak people, Sylvia was known as ‘Queen of the Head-hunters’.
This much Lawrence knew. What he will have discovered later, when Brett became his disciple, are those things she confided to her unpublished memoirs, My Long and Beautiful Journey. As a sheltered fourteen-year-old, still playing with dolls and making up imaginary worlds, a friend of her father’s called Lord Harcourt placed her hand on his ‘burning’ penis; she tried to run but ‘was not quick enough. He was on me, he caught hold of me from behind and held me in a grip of iron, and began kissing the back of my neck.’126 The experience left Brett terrified of men: aged twenty-eight, she repeatedly kicked a man who tried to kiss her under the mistletoe. Her sister Sylvia, aged twelve, had been assaulted by their father’s secretary, which experience made her horrified of the male sex too. Viscount Esher, meanwhile, was attractive to women but attracted to men: Brett described her father as ‘ambidextrous’. He filled his household staff with boys and explained to his daughters that ‘the only thing in life is not to be found out’.127 Brett was similarly ambidextrous: following the crush on her doctor, she fell in love with Sylvia’s mother-in-law and then transferred her swain-like devotion to Ottoline Morrell, to whom she wrote daily letters: ‘I love you so much that I turn to stone or else babble weakly.’128 Ottoline described Brett as squirrel-like and highly nervous, with, she believed, that peculiar capacity that deaf people have for knowing exactly what you are thinking.
A father with an unspeakable secret, a distant mother, a mystical experience with a Native American, a childhood trauma leading to a horror of sex, an infatuation with her doctor, an early desire for women, a tendency to love obsessively, suicidal depressions, the need to inhabit a radically different world from that of her family – it is striking how similar Brett’s formative experiences were to those of Mabel, as if there were only one story available for upper-class Edwardian girls.
* * *
It was winter and so Lawrence’s lungs were suffering: Catherine Carswell accepted his self-diagnosis as ‘a mild attack of malaria’.129 His London life, he told the Danes, was ‘gloom – yellow air – bad cold – bed – old house – Morris wall-paper – visitors – English voices – tea in old cups – poor D.H.L., perfectly miserable, as if he was in his tomb’.130 Writing to Mabel he said that ‘I don’t belong over here any more. It’s like being among the dead of one’s previous existence’,131 which description recalls the short story by Henry James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, in which Spencer Brydon returns to New York after thirty years in London and confronts the ghost of the man he would have been had he not left.
The Café Royal on Regent Street was the headquarters of ‘literairy’ London, and in this sense a surprising location for Lawrence to host his first and only party, a post-war reunion in a plush, private room with a round table and a crew of silent, jeering waiters. But the Café Royal is also where history happens. It was where Frank Harris advised Oscar Wilde to drop his libel charge against the Marquess of Queensberry and where Max Beerbohm encountered Enoch Soames. The following reconstruction of Lawrence’s party is taken from the conflicting accounts in the memoirs of Dorothy Brett, Catherine Carswell and John Middleton Murry. The host arrived late and looking ‘like a God’, recalled Brett, ‘the light streaming down on your dark, gold hair’ (Brett addresses her memoir directly to Lawrence).132 Catherine Carswell thought Lawrence arrived looking out of his depth and ‘schoolboyish: “You’ll see I’m quite up to this,” he seemed to be saying.’133 Brett sat on Lawrence’s right-hand side, her Marconi on the table between them. ‘I am not a man,’ Lawrence told her, ‘I am MAN.’134 On his left sat Mary Cannan. The order of seating then went: Kot, Donald Carswell, Mark Gertler, Catherine Carswell, Frieda and Murry. Murry was still sexually obsessed with Frieda, and Brett had been in love with Murry for the last three years. Kot, who loathed Frieda, also had a ‘murderous dislike’ for Donald Carswell and was on the cusp of falling out for ever with Brett over her love for Murry.135 Gertler, whom Lawrence cast as the ‘insect’ artist Loerke in Women in Love, had recently been diagnosed with TB; Catherine Carswell hadn’t wanted to come at all, and Frieda, looking on in disdain, reminded Catherine Carswell of King David’s wife.
