Burning man, p.46
Burning Man, page 46
Lawrence’s ranch on Lobo mountain
Lawrence’s next story, the novella St Mawr, was about a woman who ‘had had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she didn’t know where she was’. Lou Witt, as the heroine is called, is a wilful American with a European background and a sexually available mother (modelled on Sara Ganson). St Mawr is the name of the stallion that Lou buys for her husband Rico, but Rico prefers cars to horses and is anyway scared of St Mawr who attends to his surroundings ‘as if he were some lightning-conductor’. The groom is a small and wily Welshman called Lewis, who considers his beard a part of his body; a second groom called Phoenix has a Mexican father and a Navajo mother. Fragments of Lawrence can be found in every character, including St Mawr himself, who is the latest incarnation of Pan. Leaving Rico in England, Lou returns with Phoenix, her mother and her horse to the ‘absolute silence’ of America. New Mexico feels to her ‘like a cinematograph’; it is peopled by ‘flat shapes, exactly like men, but without any substance of reality’. Self-conscious cowboys herd their cattle in black Ford motorcars: ‘It was all film-psychology.’ To get away from the movie set, Lou buys, for $1,200, a ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains identical to the one in which Lawrence was now living. Lou has reached the beyond, a place of ‘pure, absolute beauty’, where the desert spread its ‘eternal circles’ beneath and below, the ‘long mountain-side of pure blue shadow closed in the near corner’. Here the thought of sex becomes repellent to her and she decides to give herself ‘only to the unseen presences’. Another female sacrifice, Lou Witt forsook the life of her body in order to become ‘one of the eternal Virgins, serving the eternal fire’.30
The relation between the dynamo and the virgin had been noted before, in a book so Lawrentian that Lawrence himself might have written it. Sixteen years earlier, Henry Adams – grandson of John Quincy Adams – had described, in The Education of Henry Adams, his own struggle with the scientific and technological revolutions of the age. In the chapter called ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’, Adams visits the 1900 Paris Exposition where ‘the forty-foot dynamos’ represent ‘a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross’.31 He now understands the ‘absolute fiat in electricity as a faith’; the energy of the dynamo has become ‘divine’, the dynamo is the new ‘symbol of infinity’. The Virgin – by which Adams means the eternal goddess, symbol of female fecundity – was once ‘the greatest force the Western world had ever felt’, but modern America has never feared her. She is admired as an image of ‘reflected emotion, beauty, purity’ and ‘taste’, but not as the power that built Chartres Cathedral. The purpose of American art, said Henry Adams, was to return to the Virgin her former stature.32
On 3 August, halfway through writing St Mawr, Lawrence spat blood into a handkerchief. When Frieda called the local doctor, Lawrence hurled an iron eggcup at her head. The doctor’s diagnosis, Frieda was happy to report, was that this was not at all a death sentence: the patient’s lungs were ‘strong’ – he had nothing but a ‘touch of bronchial trouble!’33 But from now on it was Lawrence and not Mabel who got weaker and sicker, and Mabel wondered if he was bent on ‘destroying himself instead of me’.34
After a week in bed, Lawrence told Mabel that his throat ‘hurt like billy-o’ but he wanted to go to the Hopi Snake Dance in Arizona. Mabel wanted this too, because he would write about it afterwards. While Lawrence wrote about the Snake Dance itself, which took place on 17 August 1924, Mabel described, in Lorenzo in Taos, the 400-mile drive there, which was dominated by Lawrence’s hostility towards Tony. The journey contained other dangers too: cars had been swallowed by quicksand on the roads through Navajo country, and Mabel realised, as Tony sang in the front of the Ford and Lawrence fired verbal missiles at Frieda in the back, that she was ‘thrice alone’ with her three companions; nothing but ‘a smiling, embalmed mummy’. Mulling over Lawrence’s intention of destroying her, she wondered if the Sybil Mond novel might itself have been a weapon, and was sorry that Frieda had put a stop to it, ‘because it would have been an easier and a quicker end’ had Lawrence ‘done it with the magic pen rather than by the reiterated blows he gave me with the strange power of his presence’.35
The Hopi Snake Dance, a petition for lightning, is the apotheosis of snake-power. In preparation for the ceremony, twelve officiating men of the tribe catch the rattlesnakes in the rocks; they wash, soothe and ‘exchange spirits with them’ before keeping them in the kivas for nine days. On the day of the dance the snake priests, with the snakes in their mouths, circle around one another before letting the creatures slither back down to the underground to give the gods the prayers ‘which had been breathed upon them’.36
Lawrence had described Sybil Mond as a ‘seductive serpent’, but as far as Tony Lujan was concerned Lawrence was the snake, and it is hard to tell, in their own particular snake dance, whether Lawrence is dangling Mabel from his mouth, or Mabel dangling Lawrence. Lawrence’s first account of the Snake Dance, ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance – Tired Out’, was written in the back of the car as Tony drove them home from the ceremony. Later published in Laughing Horse, the piece was a fresh attack on Mabel. ‘One wonders what one went for,’ Lawrence began. ‘The Hopi country is hideous’, with ‘death grey mesas sticking up like broken pieces of ancient, dry, grey bread’. The dance itself was a ‘tiny little show’ laid on for white Americans, involving eight ‘so-called’ antelope priests and a dozen ‘so-called’ snake priests, while the so-called snakes themselves looked like ‘wet, pale silk stockings’.37 Reading Lawrence’s description, Mabel was duly disappointed – she had not taken him to the Snake Dance to have him mock and belittle it. He then agreed to do the piece again, and this time ‘not for the Horse to laugh at’.38
In his second account, ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, we see exactly what Lawrence went for and how intensely he had absorbed the ceremony and its meanings. He begins with their arrival at the ‘ragged ghost’ of a mesa where they join a line of black automobiles which, having ‘lurched and crawled’ across the desert, now moves slowly up the slope, drawing its slow length over the burned earth. While the crowd – Lawrence thinks there are 3,000 people – have come to see men hold rattlesnakes in their mouths, his own interest is in the animism of a religion in which ‘all is alive’. For the Native Americans, the sun and the moon and the wind are ‘the great living source of life’, to which ‘you can no more pray than you can pray to Electricity’. Which brings Lawrence to his central theme: today we capture electricity in ‘reservoirs and irrigation ditches and artesian wells. We make lightning conductors, and build vast electric plants’, but the Native Americans approach lightning ‘livingly’ and ‘from the mystic will within’. Herein lies the gulf between the white Americans and the Native Americans: ‘We dam the Nile and take the railway across America. The Hopi smooths the rattlesnake and carries him in his mouth.’ To us, ‘God was the beginning and Paradise is lost’, and to the Hopi, ‘God is not yet’ and Paradise is yet to come.39
The snake priests, ‘heavily built, rather short’, with ‘bobbed hair’ and an ‘anarchic squareness’, look like Mabel. But they also, with their faces smeared in black clay, look like miners. They are ‘the hot, living men of the darkness, lords of the earth’s inner vital rays’. The ceremony over, the tourists ‘hurry back to the motor-cars, and soon the air buzzes with starting engines, like the biggest of rattlessnakes buzzing’. The long line of black steel uncoils itself back down the slope.40
In April 1923, a German art historian called Aby Warburg, founder of the Warburg Institute, gave a slide lecture at Ludwig Binswanger’s Kreuzlingen sanatorium in Switzerland. Five years earlier Warburg had suffered a psychotic breakdown and his Kreuzlingen Lecture, as it became known, was the result of a deal he made with his doctors. If he proved able to deliver a rational and sustained talk for one hour, drawing on material he had cellared since his journey to the American Southwest in 1897, he would be deemed sane enough to return to Hamburg. Warburg chose as his topic the Snake Dance, and he described his own performance as ‘the gruesome convulsion of a decapitated frog’. The event was extraordinary in many ways, not least because Warburg, despite his extensive knowledge of Native American life and culture, had never actually seen the Snake Dance, which puts his lecture in the same category as those essays on classic American literature that Lawrence had written in Cornwall, before he had actually seen America.
Warburg went to the Southwest in order to experience life ‘in its polar tension between pagan, instinctual forces of nature and organised intelligence’. The culture and religion of the Native Americans, he believed, was built on the same ‘synchrony’ of higher civilisation and magical causation as the Renaissance; in addition, both cultures were orientated around the symbol and ‘symbolic connection’. In the Snake Dance, said Warburg, the serpent serves as the agent of lightning but also as lightning itself: one of his slides showed an image taken from the altar floor of a kiva, in which lightning is represented by serpents rather than zigzags descending from the clouds. Now that we have scientific explanations, Warburg argued, we no longer fear the snake or feel its force.
Warburg’s talk, illustrated throughout with his remarkable photographs – the lightning altar in the kiva at Sia, the antelope dance at San Ildefonso – ends with an image he had captured on the streets of San Francisco. It represents, he said, ‘the conqueror of the serpent cult and of the fear of lightning, the inheritor of the indigenous peoples and of the gold seeker who ousted them’. In centre frame is ‘Uncle Sam in a stovepipe hat, strolling in his pride past a neoclassical rotunda. Above his top hat runs an electric wire. In this copper serpent of Edison’s, he has wrested lightning from nature.’41
Uncle Sam
So eighteen months before Lawrence wrote about the Snake Dance and electricity, a German in a Swiss sanatorium also wrote about the Snake Dance and electricity. Warburg’s lecture was equally concerned with synchronicity, and his thoughts synchronised entirely with those of Lawrence, as he reached the empyrean.
* * *
September was a time of frenzied composition. Lawrence finished ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, revised the proofs of the Memoir of Maurice Magnus and wrote a story which he saw as the third part of the triptych which contained ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and St Mawr. ‘The Princess’ was Lawrence’s story for Brett, in which he showed that he knew (probably through Frieda) she had lost her virginity to Murry. The daughter of a Scottish aristocrat, Dollie Urquhart – ‘the princess’ – comes to New Mexico and is attracted to a Mexican guide called Romero who takes her on a long ride into the mountains. In a hunting lodge where they rest for the night, Dollie gives herself to Romero. The next day she tells him that she did not enjoy the experience – ‘I don’t care for that kind of thing’ – which provokes Romero to throw her boots and breeches into a pond. He holds her captive in the hut until he is shot dead by two men from the forest service. The princess, who tells no one what happened on her excursion, remains, for all the world, ‘a virgin intact’. But now ‘her bobbed hair was grey at the temples, and her eyes were a little mad’.42
Having vented his anger with Brett, Lawrence returned to the image of Pisgah. Looking down today from the mountain, Lawrence wrote in ‘Climbing Down from Pisgah’, all that can be seen is a scrawny image of the globe – ‘the graveyard of humanity’.43
‘You are so near the final blessedness,’ Beatrice told Dante when they had passed through the seventh sphere of Paradise, ‘that you have need / of vision clear and keen.’ Now that he was ending his journey, Beatrice commanded Dante to look down, for ‘much of the world is there’. This was the first time that he had taken in the view, and he smiled at the ‘scrawny image’ of the globe.
* * *
After her crisis on the way to the Snake Dance, the life went out of Mabel. She lost touch ‘with all that is human’, had ‘no recognition of the interests of others’, was ‘outside, inhuman, unloving, insentient, an exile from the earth’.44 She went to New York for two weeks to consult Dr Brill; his repeated advice, which she always ignored, was that the cure for her melancholia was to find herself something – anything – to do. Mabel needed a project.
Her letters to Lawrence from New York are searching and desperate. She treats him as Brill’s equal, and places herself entirely in their joint hands: ‘Both you and Brill feel I have to do all the work this winter. With guidance I have to do the thing, whatever it is. Can you tell me what this thing literally is?’ Lawrence replied that Mabel should ‘try, try, try to discipline and control yourself’.45 In another letter, Mabel noted that the only times she felt alive and ‘flowing’ were when she was in love and when she was ‘writing’. ‘If I can once get started and know I want to say something – it comes. Then I am off – in a good running pace.’ But she had to write ‘for someone’ and Lawrence was ‘positively the only audience I care to say anything to’. Lawrence, however, had dismissed her as a writer: ‘I always remember your words: “I shall never consider you a writer or even a knower.” And these words paralyze me…’ So Mabel tentatively asked his permission: ‘Shall I start a life-history or something?’46
When she returned to Taos, everyone was leaving: Lawrence, Frieda and Brett were wintering in Mexico (Lawrence’s chest was feeling ‘raw’ at this altitude), and Mabel herself was returning to New York for a longer spell of analysis. In early October – when the Memoir of Maurice Magnus was finally being published in England – Tony took them all for a last drive through the valley. The cottonwood trees stood yellow against the windless autumnal sky, the purple mountains hung quietly around, and the world was at peace. ‘Perhaps we shall look back on this afternoon,’ said Mabel, breaking the silence, ‘and think how happy we were.’ The Lawrences left the next day. ‘We’ll write,’ said Lawrence, leaning from the window of the motorcar.47
Breaking their drive in Santa Fe, Lawrence told Mabel’s friends that she was ‘dangerous’ and ‘destructive’. When this was duly reported back, Mabel finally ‘gave up Lawrence’.48 They continued to exchange letters but she no longer asked him to be her genius loci. That ‘frail failure of a man,’ she said in Lorenzo in Taos, had ‘overcome’ her.49 She and Lawrence would never meet again, and Mabel now began, without his help, to tell the story of her life.
* * *
After a month in Mexico City, the Lawrence party travelled south to Oaxaca, the land of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs. Lawrence and Frieda took a house at 43 Avenida Pino Suárez, and Brett, with whom relations were becoming strained, booked into a hotel. ‘The little town of Oaxaca is lonely,’ Lawrence told Secker, ‘away in the south and miles from anywhere except the Indian villages of the hills. I like it, it gives me something.’50 Oaxaca was a place of crumbling colonial churches, bloodied Christs, walled gardens, narrow streets, dusty plazas and processions with Virgins. Lawrence, haggard and emaciated, was of course mistaken for the resurrected Jesus. In December, at the same time that Norman Douglas, holed up in his Sicilian hotel, was penning his Plea for Better Manners, Lawrence returned to ‘Quetzalcoatl’, which had been sleeping now for over a year. Writing with his usual rapidity, he doubled its length and spoiled its beauty.
Lawrence didn’t simply revise ‘Quetzalcoatl’. He did as he always did and started the novel again, because what he now wanted to say was no longer what he had originally wanted to say. The Plumed Serpent, as it was renamed (because, as Lawrence’s publisher said, no one could pronounce Quetzalcoatl), has the same structure as ‘Quetzalcoatl’ but a sourer flavour. Lawrence changed some names – Kate Burns becomes Kate Leslie, Lake Chapala is Lake Sayula – but, most importantly, he changed the ending: Kate now marries the ‘savage’ rather than returning to her home and mother. Cipriano’s proposal is presented as a form of therapy – she needs a project and he needs a woman: ‘You marry me. You complain you have nothing to do.’ Socialism in Mexico, Lawrence wrote, ‘is nothing but an infectious disease, like syphilis’, and the implication is that Kate’s marriage is syphilitic too: ‘how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to this death?’ Kate, like Alvina Houghton, is held captive by her husband: ‘You won’t let me go!’ she says to Cipriano in the final words of the novel.51
When Kate sits on her throne as Cipriano’s goddess, the dynamo has once again become a virgin: ‘How else, she said to herself, is one to begin again, save by re-finding one’s virginity?’ A way of ensuring that Kate re-finds her virginity is to prevent her from reaching orgasm, and this is Cipriano’s great achievement. He ‘drew away from her as soon as this desire rose in her’ and Kate realised, ‘almost with wonder, the death in her of the Aphrodite of the foam’.52
The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive and hard to forget. It is also boring, at times brutally so. Especially tiresome are the ‘Quetzalcoatl hymns’, a variation on the interminable pledges of tribe loyalty made by the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras: ‘Who sleeps – shall wake! Who sleeps – shall wake! Who treads down the path of the snake shall arrive at the place…’ Witter Bynner thought it was the influence of Mabel that ruined The Plumed Serpent, which is true although not in the sense that he meant. Bynner was referring to the novel’s burden of theosophy, but Mabel alone saw that the book was about her. ‘I hear that Mabel thinks she is the heroine in The Plumed Serpent!!’ Frieda wrote mockingly to Bynner.53 Lawrence, Mabel rightly said, had ‘simply transposed’ New Mexico for Old Mexico. ‘What I wanted him to do for Taos, he did do, but he gave it away to the mother country of Montezuma.’54 Kate Burns had been warmly inhabited by Lawrence, but Kate Leslie is his enemy and Lawrence compares her to a ‘great cat, with its spasms of voluptuousness and its life-long lustful enjoyment of its own isolated individuality’.55
