Burning man, p.7
Burning Man, page 7
But there was another bride in Lawrence’s life as well, because six days before his mother’s death he became engaged again, this time to a teacher called Louie Burrows. He needed Louie to advise him on the women in Paul Morel; could she explain, for example, how Miriam would respond to Mrs Morel’s jealousy and how Mrs Morel would feel about Miriam’s love for her son? When his new fiancée proved unable to help, Lawrence made the audacious decision to pass the manuscript on to Jessie herself for comment. Jessie, reading with her usual care, thought it ‘tired’, ‘second hand’ and ‘story-bookish’ and told Lawrence to ‘write the whole story again, and keep it true to the life’,141 which meant including an account of his brother’s death. So Lawrence rewrote Paul Morel, this time in virtual collaboration with Jessie Chambers.
In February 1912, after another critical bout of pneumonia, he resigned from his teaching post (the last salaried job he would ever have), broke off his engagement to Louie Burrows and sent his rewritten novel to Jessie. ‘As the sheets of manuscript came rapidly to me,’ Jessie recalled, ‘I was bewildered and dismayed … I began to perceive that I had set Lawrence a task far beyond his strength.’ She had hoped her suggestions would allow him to exorcise his mother but he had exorcised Jessie instead. ‘His mother had to be supreme,’ Jessie at last understood, ‘and for the sake of that supremacy every disloyalty was permissible.’142 Jessie called Paul Morel a lie and Lawrence called it a novel. ‘Of course it isn’t the truth,’ he explained. ‘It isn’t meant for the truth. It’s an adaptation from life, as all art must be.’143 Jessie was the first of Lawrence’s friends to be consigned to the circle of the hell reserved for those who showed what she called ‘devotion to his genius’.144
There are many accounts of the cost of stirring Lawrence’s daemon into action, but none so raw as the tale told by Jessie Chambers in A Personal Record. Their differing viewpoints are caught in the textual annotations to Paul Morel, where Jessie corrects his memory. Lawrence described the struggle between Mrs Morel and Miriam for the possession of Paul’s soul as taking place when he was seventeen rather than twenty, thus robbing Jessie of three precious years. ‘Not yet, please!’ she exclaimed in the margin; it was of vital importance that Lawrence’s division did not appear until his twentieth year. He also attributed thoughts to Miriam that Jessie did not consider her younger self ready to have: ‘She knew she and Paul were woven together unconsciously’, Lawrence wrote of Miriam aged sixteen, to which Jessie responded: ‘Miriam never knew this until Paul insisted on it’ during the Easter Monday episode. Lawrence’s account of that episode was so wrong that Jessie sent him a revised version ‘nearer to the actual spirit of the time’, which he ignored.145
Jessie, who knew Lawrence in his pupal stage and watched his transformation, made an observation in A Personal Record which takes us to the core of his biographical mystery. ‘What was it that Keats said,’ she asked, ‘about a great man’s life being an allegory and his works a comment on it? Something of that belongs to DHL.’146 What Keats said was this: ‘A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative – which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure – but he is not figurative – Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.’147
Jessie alone saw that Lawrence, too, lived a life of allegory.
PART TWO
The Divine Comedy, whose events begin on the Good Friday of 1300 and continue through Holy Week, opens with the most famous landscape, or rather dreamscape, in Western literature. Midway through the journey of his life, Dante discovers himself in a dark wood. His exact phrase is ‘midway through the journey of our life’ (nostra vita), meaning that this is a collective as well as a personal journey, and that the reader is equally lost. Is he asleep or awake, and does he even know?
I cannot clearly say how I had entered
the wood; I was so full of sleep just at
the point where I abandoned the true path.
(Inferno, Canto 1, 10–12)
He emerges from the wood to find himself at the foot of a hill which we assume to be Purgatory because at the summit, bathed in divine light, is Paradise. Dante starts to climb, but his path is barred by wild animals. Afraid, he turns back and meets the shade of Virgil, who has been summoned here by Beatrice, who was herself sent by St Lucia and the Virgin Mary. On behalf of ‘the three such blessed women’, Beatrice instructs Virgil to guide Dante to Paradise via a different route; he will be able to ascend the mountain of Purgatory only after descending the pit of the Inferno.
Therefore, I think and judge it best for you
to follow me, and I shall guide you, taking
you from this place through an eternal place,
where you shall hear the howls of desperation
and see the ancient spirits in their pain,
as each of them laments his second death …
(Inferno, Canto 1, 112–17)
Virgil is not a randomly chosen guide; he is Dante’s favourite poet and the man who knows his way around hell – in Book 6 of The Aeneid, Aeneas, led by the Cumaean Sibyl, goes down to the underworld where he is ferried by Charon across the River Acheron. Dante has in fact been following Virgil for years, studying his wisdom and imitating his style.
‘O light and honour of all other poets,
may my long study and the intense love
that made me search your volume serve me now.
You are my master and my author, you –
the only one from whom my writing drew
the noble style for which I have been honoured.’
(Inferno, Canto 1, 82–7)
So the Christian and the Pagan begin their journey down through the nine circles of the Inferno and up the seven terraces of Purgatory, at the top of which Virgil leaves Dante in the care of Beatrice, who takes him into Paradise where he sees the face of God. Dante crosses banks and bridges, ramparts and rivers, waterfalls and ravines, ditches and deserts; he climbs up and he climbs down; he is rained upon by fire; he moves into and out of consciousness; he is carried in the arms Virgil and on the back of Geryon, lowered by giants to the lowest circle of hell and lifted by Beatrice through the nine spheres of Paradise. His topography, like that of Lawrence, is nothing if not precise.
The Inferno is the part of the Comedy that Dante’s readers have most enjoyed, not least because of his hierarchical ordering of punishment and the combination of people – historical, biblical, mythical and those known to him personally – that he consigns to hell. The first circle is reserved for pre-Christians like Virgil who were not baptised and must therefore live in limbo; the second circle is a wind tunnel in which lustful and adulterous lovers are blown about on the storms of their own passion; in the third gluttons mired in sludge are rained upon by ice; in the fourth, hoarders and squanderers push boulders with their chests; the wrathful and sullen in the fifth circle choke in the River Styx; the heretics in the sixth circle are consigned to flaming tombs; the seventh circle is a vast Piranesi-style penitentiary in which murderers are sunk in boiling blood and fire, suicides are turned into trees, profligates are savaged by hounds, and sodomites run on burning sand beneath a rain of fire. In the eighth circle fraudulent counsellors are held in tongue-shaped flames, falsifiers are plagued with scabs, flatterers are buried in excrement, Simoniacs are turned upside down in baptismal fonts while fire burns their feet, false prophets walk with their heads facing backwards, hypocrites wear robes lined with lead, and thieves and falsifiers are turned into snakes. In the ninth circle, presided over by a silent, three-headed Lucifer, the treacherous, including Cain and Judas Iscariot, are frozen in an icy lake.
Dante Alighieri, the son of a burgher, was born in Florence in 1265 and educated by monks. He married, had three children, became a member of the Guild of Doctors and wrote an emotional autobiography called La Vita Nuova in which, through a sequence of lyric poems with prose commentaries, he described his love for Beatrice and his grief following her early death. The Florentines were a combative people and, caught in the feud between two houses, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Dante was exiled from the city on pain of death. Aged thirty-five – midway through the journey of his life – he became a wanderer, crossing the Apennines by night and pacing the forests of Ravenna. He no longer had a home, wrote Lawrence H. Davison in Movements in European History, a school textbook published in 1921, but Dante was ‘never homeless. He was a learned, cultured man, and such a man was at home everywhere in Europe.’ He was sheltered in the homes of nobles who ‘gave him simple little rooms within the thick walls of their great castles’, and in these rooms, looking from his ‘loop-hole window at the wild hills or at the river’, he plotted his revenge on his enemies. Dante’s Comedy is the great epic of Schadenfreude, and the writing of it was an act of therapeutic vengence.
Lawrence H. Davison imagined the poet’s exile as a form of freedom:
From his writing in his lonely rooms he would go down the cold, massive stone stairway to the hall where the family dined, and there he would sit in conversation with the lords and the clergy, an honoured if penniless guest. He knew the bitterness of dependence, but still we must believe he was happy, composing his work and having converse with generous men.
According to Davison, the Divine Comedy is an allegory of history. In the medieval world, however, where visions were taken seriously, Dante’s experience was read as both allegorical and autobiographical: he saw what he said he saw, and it was his audacity that gave the Comedy its supreme strength. Dante alone, the poet told his readers, had been singled out to make this pilgrimage through the levels of the afterlife; his fortitude in exile had been rewarded with the highest possible honour. Written not in Latin but in a Tuscan dialect, the poem was composed in terza rima, a three-line rhyme scheme Dante invented himself and called concatenatio, or ‘beautiful linkage’, because the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and last lines of the next, thus joining the verses together like a chain. The effect of terza rima is propulsive: we are driven onwards, downwards, upwards, through forests, up cliff faces, over rivers, lakes, ledges and ravines.
There are two Dantes in the poem: Dante-the-poet and Dante-the-pilgrim, and it is important to distinguish between them. Lawrence would share the poet’s temerity and dual vision: he too would be the author and the hero of his works, he too considered himself human and divine, his Inferno was also both symbolic and horribly real, and he too wrote his friends and enemies into his books. He would also share the pilgrim’s social discomfort. ‘One has to be a blind mole’, wrote Osip Mandelstam in his sublime essay Conversation about Dante,
not to notice that throughout the Commedia Dante does not know how to behave, does not know how to act, what to say, how to make a bow … The inner anxiety and the heavy, troubled awkwardness which attend every step of the unselfconfident mind, the man whose upbringing is inadequate, who does not know what application to make of his inner experience or how to objectify it in etiquette, the tortured and outcast man – it is these qualities which give the poem all its charm … and they create its background, its psychological drama.1
Lawrence structured his life – ‘that piece of supreme art’, as he called it – around Dante’s great poem in the way that James Joyce shaped Ulysses around The Odyssey.2 This was his primal plan, the complex figure in the Persian carpet that Lawrence’s biographers – because they have been looking from a flat perspective – have failed to see. Followed horizontally on a map, Lawrence’s movements look like a mad flight: the journey that began with a detour when he went to Cornwall rather than Florida in the winter of 1915 goes haywire as he then ricochets around the globe, but if we unfold his journey in terms of descent and ascent, then the apparent chaos reshapes itself. Follow his footsteps and you see that every house Lawrence lived in, from birth to burial, was positioned at a higher spot than the last; he rose from underworld to empyrean.
It was not an especially erudite or eccentric move on Lawrence’s part, to use Dante as his guiding principle; he was always led by poets rather than by novelists and saw himself as a figure of allegory. Knowledge of Dante was not then confined to the few and Lawrence knew the Divine Comedy as well as he knew Shakespeare, Homer and the Bible, which he described as ‘the supreme old novels’.3 He discussed the Divine Comedy as though it too were a novel, this being his term of praise for a book that contained everything, and it was as a creative artist that he approached the allegory whose movements he probably internalised aged seventeen, when he and Jessie hurled themselves upon the corpus of literature available in the Eastwood local library. Sections of Inferno, translated into blank verse by H. F. Cary, could be found in the twenty-two volumes of the International Library of Famous Literature on the Lawrence family shelves, but Dante was everywhere in Lawrence’s world. Blake, Gustave Doré and the Pre-Raphaelites all illustrated scenes from Dante’s life and poetry that sold as popular prints, and Rodin’s The Kiss was modelled on Paolo and Francesca. Dante dominated the imaginations of Lawrence’s contemporaries T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joyce and Yeats. ‘I love Dante almost as much as the Bible,’ said Joyce; ‘he is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.’4 His own aim, said Pound, was to write ‘an epic poem which begins “In the Dark Forest”, crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light’.5 By 1921, the 600th anniversary of his death, Dante was hard to avoid, especially in Italy where Lawrence was then living and the national poet was commemorated in parades, readings, festivals and screenings. In 1922, when Nancy Mitford visited Florence she saw the film of L’Inferno which was, she said, ‘most bloodthirsty and exciting. Eleven murders close to with details, a man’s hands chopped off very close to and full of detail, a man dying of starvation and eating another man very very close to.’6
‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in his essay ‘Dante’. ‘There is no third.’7 If Shakespeare measured our moral girth, Dante scaled our heights and depths. References to the Divine Comedy are embedded in Eliot’s poetry, most famously in the Italian epigraph to ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and in The Waste Land, where a line from Canto 3 of Inferno is used to describe the London rush hour:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
The purpose of this passage, Eliot explained in another essay, ‘What Dante Means to Me’, was to ‘establish a relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life’;8 seven years earlier Lawrence had established the same relationship when he described the London traffic to Ottoline Morrell, as ‘flow[ing] through the rigid grey streets like the rivers of Hell through their banks of dry, rocky ash’.9 But his own debt to Dante, Eliot concluded, lay not in the number of allusions to his work but in the understanding that the poet was servant rather than master of his language. Lawrence, whose debt to Dante has barely been recognised, saw Dante not as a poet at all but as a cartographer who plotted the route to Paradise, and he chose Shelley as his guide through hell because Shelley had been there before. ‘Hell’, as Shelley put it in ‘Peter Bell the Third’, ‘is a city much like London,’ where ‘all sorts of people’ are ‘undone’.
The Romantics, who invented Dante in English, found in him a spokesman for their own turbulent times. Dante, said Byron, was ‘the poet of liberty’, and none of the events in Dante’s life – ‘Persecution, exile, the dread of a foreign grave’ – could shake his principles.10 For Leigh Hunt, Dante’s ‘discordant’ sort of ‘greatness’ lay in ‘his being the offspring of two persons of diametrically opposed natures, – a fierce, saturnine father’ and ‘a gentle mother’.11 Eliot expanded on Dante’s bifurcation: if you were to combine, he said, ‘the massive quality of Milton, the sense that every word is being held in place by a gigantic pressure’, with the ‘air and fire of Shelley … then you will know what Dante is like’.12 And it was Shelley on whom the Divine Comedy made the deepest impression; no body of poetry contains more adaptations from, allusions to and imitations of Dante than that of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley, said Eliot, was ‘the one English poet of the nineteenth century who could even have begun to follow those footsteps’.13
Shelley’s years in Italy were dominated by Dante, whom he now read in Italian. His ‘Ode to the West Wind’, which meant so much to Lawrence, was written in terza rima, and his translation of the opening section of Purgatory, Canto 28, posthumously published as ‘Matilda gathering flowers’, was the first attempt at rhymed terza rima in English. For Byron, Hunt and Keats, Inferno was the Comedy’s central book and the adulterers, Paolo and Francesca, the book’s central figures. In Canto 5, Dante enters the storm in the second circle of hell where he finds, blowing about like autumn leaves, ‘now here, now there, now down, now up’, Paolo and his sister-in-law Francesca di Rimini, who were known to Dante personally before they were murdered by her jealous husband (Paolo’s brother). The wind blows the couple towards the pilgrim, and Francesca explains that their lips first met when she and Paolo read ‘Launcelot du Lac’ together and learned of the love between the knight and the queen that destroyed King Arthur’s kingdom. Here lies the difference between Dante-the-pilgrim and Dante-the-poet: the pilgrim is so moved by Francesca’s tale that he falls into a faint, while the poet punishes her actions by hurling her into hell.
The Story of Rimini is Hunt’s defence of liberty: his own Paolo and Francesca are guilty of nothing more than acting on what he calls ‘one genuine impulse of the affections’.14 A pro-love, anti-marriage treatise, The Story of Rimini was dedicated to Byron at the time that Byron’s marriage collapsed amid rumours of his relations with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Writing to Augusta from Venice in 1819, Byron compared their punishment to that of Paolo and Francesca, whose ‘case fell a good deal short of ours – though sufficiently naughty’. Dante, he said, at least allowed his lovers to suffer together.15 Byron, who made his own translation titled ‘Fanny of Rimini’, used Francesca’s speech as epigraphs to the cantos of The Corsair, and Keats dreamed that he too found himself ‘whirling’ in the second circle of hell, his lips joined to those of a beautiful woman. It was one of ‘the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life’,16 and Keats’s sonnet to ‘Paolo and Francesca’ was duly composed on the pages of his copy of Cary’s translation of Inferno.
