Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1005
Yet, U. S. A., you do put a strain on the nerves. Mexico puts a strain on the temper. Choose which you prefer. Mine’s the latter. I’d rather be in a temper than be pulled taut. Which is what the U. S. A. did to me. Tight as a fiddle string, tense over the bridge of the solar plexus. Anyhow the solar plexus goes a bit loose and has a bit of play down here.
I still don’t know why the U. S. A. pulls one so tight and makes one feel like a chicken that is being drawn. The people on the whole are quite as amenable as people anywhere else. They don’t pick your pocket, or even your personality. They’re not unfriendly. It’s not the people. Something in the air tightens one’s nerves like fiddle strings, screws them up, squeak-squeak! . . . till one’s nerves will give out nothing but a shrill fine shriek of overwroughtness. Why, in the name of heaven? Nobody knows. It’s just the spirit of place.
You cross the Rio Grande and change from tension into exasperation. You feel like hitting the impudent Pullman waiter with a beer- bottle. In the U. S. A. you don’t even think of such a thing.
Of course, one might get used to a state of tension. And then one would pine for the United States. Meanwhile one merely snarls back at the dragons of San Juan Teotihuacan.
It’s a queer continent — as much as I’ve seen of it. It’s a fanged continent. It’s got a rattlesnake coiled in its heart, has this democracy of the New World. It’s a dangerous animal, once it lifts its head again. Meanwhile, the dove still nests in the coils of the rattle-snake, the stone coiled rattlesnake of Aztec eternity. The dove lavs her eggs on his flat head.
The old people had a marvellous feeling for snakes and fangs, down here in Mexico. And after all, Mexico is only the sort of solar plexus of North America. The great paleface overlay hasn’t gone into the soil half an inch. The Spanish churches and palaces stagger, the most rickety things imaginable, always just on the point of falling down. And the peon still grins his Indian grin behind the Cross. And there’s quite a lively light in his eyes, much more so than in the eyes of the northern Indian. He knows his gods.
These old civilizations down here, they never got any higher than Quetzalcoatl. And he’s just a sort of feathered snake. Who needed the smoke of a little heart’s-blood now and then, even he.
“Only the ugly is aesthetic now,” said the young Mexican artist. Personally, he seems as gentle and self-effacing as the nicest of lambs. Yet his caricatures are hideous, hideous without mirth or whimsicality. Blood-hideous. Grim, earnest hideousness.
Like the Aztec things, the Aztec carvings. They all twist and bite. That’s all they do. Twist and writhe and bite, or crouch in lumps. And coiled rattlesnakes, many, like dark heaps of excrement. And out at San Juan Teotihuacan where are the great pyramids of a vanished, pre-Aztec people, as we are told — and the so-called Temple of Quetzalcoatl — there, behold you, huge gnashing heads jut out jagged from the wall-face of the low pyramid, and a huge snake stretches along the base, and one grasps at a carved fish, that swims in old stone and for once seems harmless. Actually a harmless fish!
But look out! The great stone heads snarl at you from the wall, trying to bite you: and one great dark, green blob of an obsidian eye, you never saw anything so blindly malevolent: and then white fangs. Great white fangs, smooth today, the white fangs, with tiny cracks in them. Enamelled. These bygone pyramid-building Americans, who were a dead-and-gone mystery even to the Aztecs, when the Spaniards arrived, they applied their highest art to the enamelling of the great fangs of these venomous stone heads, and there is the enamel today, white and smooth. You can stroke the great fang with your finger and see. And the blob of an obsidian eye looks down at you.
It’s a queer continent. The anthropologists may make what pretti- ness they like out of myths. But come here, and you’ll see that the gods bit. There is none of the phallic preoccupation of the old Mediterranean. Here they hadn’t got even as far as hot-blooded sex.
Fangs, and cold serpent folds, and bird-snakes with fierce cold blood and claws.
I admit that I feel bewildered. There is always something a bit amiably comic about Chinese dragons and contortions. There’s nothing amiably comic in these ancient monsters. They’re dead in earnest about biting and writhing, snake-blooded birds.
And the Spanish white superimposition, with rococo church- towers among pepper-trees and column cactuses, seems so rickety and temporary, the pyramids seem so indigenous, rising like hills out of the earth itself. The one goes down with a clatter, the other remains.
And this is what seems to me the difference between Mexico and the United States. And this is why, it seems to me, Mexico exasperates, whereas the U. S. A. puts an unbearable tension on one. Because here in Mexico the fangs are still obvious. Everybody knows the gods are going to bite within the next five minutes. While in the United States, the gods have had their teeth pulled, and their claws cut, and their tails docked, till they seem real mild lambs. Yet all the time, inside, it’s the same old dragon’s blood. The same old American dragon’s blood.
And that discrepancy of course is a strain on the human psyche.
A LETTER FROM GERMANY
We are going back to Paris tomorrow, so this is the last moment to write a letter from Germany. Only from the fringe of Germany, too.
It is a miserable journey from Paris to Nancy, through that Marne country, where the country still seems to have had the soul blasted out of it, though the dreary fields are ploughed and level, and the pale wire trees stand up. But it is all void and null. And in the villages, the smashed houses in the street rows, like rotten teeth between good teeth.
You come to Strasburg, and the people still talk Alsatian German, as ever, in spite of French shop-signs. The place feels dead. And full of cotton goods, white goods, from Miilhausen, from the factories that once were German. Such cheap white cotton goods, in a glut.
The cathedral front rearing up high and flat and fanciful, a sort of darkness in the dark, with round rose windows and long, long prisons of stone. Queer, that men should have ever wanted to put stone upon fanciful stone to such a height, without having it fall down. The Gothic! I was always glad when my card-castle fell. But these Goths and Alemans seemed to have a craze for peaky heights.
The Rhine is still the Rhine, the great divider. You feel it as you cross. The flat, frozen, watery places. Then the cold and curving river. Then the other side, seeming so cold, so empty, so frozen, so forsaken. The train stands and steams fiercely. Then it draws through the flat Rhine plain, past frozen pools of flood-water, and frozen fields, in the emptiness of this bit of occupied territory.
Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed. There is no more attempt at the bluff of geniality. The marshy places are frozen. The fields are vacant. There seems nobody in the world.
It is as if the life had retreated eastwards. As if the Germanic life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east. And there stand the heavy, ponderous, round hills of the Black Forest, black with an inky blackness of Germanic trees, and patched with a whiteness of snow. They are like a series of huge, involved black mounds, obstructing the vision eastwards. You look at them from the Rhine plain, and know that you stand on an actual border, up against something.
The moment you are in Germany, you know. It feels empty, and, somehow, menacing. So must the Roman soldiers have watched those black, massive round hills: with a certain fear, and with the knowledge that they were at their own limit. A fear of the invisible natives. A fear of the invisible life lurking among the woods. A fear of their own opposite.
So it is with the French: this almost mystic fear. But one should not insult even one’s fears.
Germany, this bit of Germany, is very different from what it was two-and-a-half years ago, when I was here. Then it was still open to Europe. Then it still looked to western Europe for a reunion, for a sort of reconciliation. Now that is over. The inevitable, mysterious barrier has fallen again, and the great leaning of the Germanic spirit is once more eastwards, towards Russia, towards Tartary. The strange vortex of Tartary has become the positive centre again, the positivity of western Europe is broken. The positivity of our civilization has broken. The influences that come, come invisibly out of Tartary. So that all Germany reads Beasts, Men and Gods with a kind of fascination. Returning again to the fascination of the destructive East, that produced Attila.
So it is at night. Baden-Baden is a little quiet place, all its guests gone. No more Turgenievs or Dostoievskys or Grand Dukes or King Edwards coming to drink the waters. All the outward effect of a world-famous watering-place. But empty now, a mere Black Forest village with the wagon-loads of timber going through, to the French.
The Rentenmark, the new gold mark of Germany, is abominably dear. Prices are high in England, but English money buys less in Baden than it buys in London, by a long chalk. And there is no work — consequently no money. Nobody buys anything, except absolute necessities. The shop-keepers are in despair. And there is less and less work.
Everybody gives up the telephone — can’t afford it. The tram-cars don’t run, except about three times a day to the station. Up to the Annaberg, the suburb, the lines are rusty, no trams ever go. The people can’t afford the ten pfennigs for the fare. Ten pfennigs is an important sum now: one penny. It is really a hundred milliards of marks.
Money becomes insane, and people with it.
At night :he place is almost dark, economizing light. Economy, economy, economy — that too becomes an insanity. Luckily the government keeps bread fairly cheap.
But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of this still-unconquered Black Forest. You stiffen your backbone and you listen to the night. There is a sense of danger. It is not the people. They don’t seem dangerous. Out of the very air comes a sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger.
Something has happened. Something has happened which has not yet eventuated. The old spell of the old world has broken, and the old, bristling, savage spirit has set in. The war did not break the old peace-and-production hope of the world, though it gave it a severe wrench. Yet the old peace-and-production hope still governs, at least the consciousness. Even in Germany it has not quite gone.
But it feels as if, virtually, it were gone. The last two years have done it. The hope in peace-and-production is broken. The old flow, the old adherence is ruptured. And a still older flow has set in. Back, back to the savage polarity of Tartary, and away from the polarity of civilized Christian Europe. This, it seems to me, has already happened. And it is a happening of far more profound import than any actual event. It is the father of the next phase of events.
And the feeling never relaxes. As you travel up the Rhine valley, still the same latent sense of danger, of silence, of suspension. Not that the people are actually planning or plotting or preparing. I don’t believe it for a minute. But something has happened to the human soul, beyond all help. The human soul recoiling now from unison, and making itself strong elsewhere. The ancient spirit of pre-historic Germany coming back, at the end of history.
The same in Heidelberg. Heidelberg full, full, full of people. Students the same, youths with rucksacks the same, boys and maidens in gangs come down from the hills. The same, and not the same. These queer gangs of Young Socialists, youths and girls, with their non-materialistic professions, their half-mystic assertions, they strike one as strange. Something primitive, like loose, roving gangs of broken, scattered tribes, so they affect one. And the swarms of people somehow produce an impression of silence, of secrecy, of stealth. It is as if everything and everybody recoiled away from the old unison, as barbarians lurking in a wood recoil out of sight. The old habits remain. But the bulk of the people have no money. And the whole stream of feeling is reversed.
So you stand in the woods above the town and see the Neckar flowing green and swift and slippery out of the gulf of Germany, to the Rhine. And the sun sets slow and scarlet into the haze of the Rhine valley. And the old, pinkish stone of the ruined castle across looks sultry, the marshalry is in shadow below, the peaked roofs of old, tight Heidelberg compressed in its river gateway glimmer and glimmer out. There is a blue haze.
And it all looks as if the years were wheeling swiftly backwards, no more onwards. Like a spring that is broken, and whirls swiftly back, so time seems to be whirling with mysterious swiftness to a sort of death. Whirling to the ghost of the old Middle Ages of Germany, then to the Roman days, then to the days of the silent forest and the dangerous, lurking barbarians.
Something about the Germanic races is unalterable. White- skinned, elemental, and dangerous. Our civilization has come from the fusion of the dark-eyes with the blue. The meeting and mixing and mingling of the two races has been the joy of our ages. And the Celt has been there, alien, but necessary as some chemical reagent to the fusion. So the civilization of Europe rose up. So these cathedrals and these thoughts.
But now the Celt is the disintegrating agent. And the Latin and southern races are falling out of association with the northern races, the northern Germanic impulse is recoiling towards Tartary, the destructive vortex of Tartary.
It is a fate; nobody now can alter it. It is a fate. The very blood changes. Within the last three years, the very constituency of the blood has changed, in European veins. But particularly in Germanic veins.
At the same time, we have brought it about ourselves — by a Ruhr occupation, by an English nullity, and by a German false will. We have done it ourselves. But apparently it was not to be helped.
Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius.
SEE MEXICO AFTER, BY LUIS Q.
My home’s in Mexico, That’s where you want to go. Life’s one long cine show. . . .
As a matter of fact, I am a hard-worked, lean individual poked in the corner of a would-be important building in Mexico D. F.
That’s that.
I am — married, so this is not a matrimonial ad. But I am, as I said, lean, pale, hard-worked, with indiscriminate fair hair and, I hope, nice blue eyes. Anyhow they aren’t black. And I am young. And I am Mexican: oh, don’t doubt it for a second. Mejicano soy. La-la-la-la! I’ll jabber your head off in Spanish. But where is my gun and red sash?
Ay de mi! That’s how one sighs in Spanish. I am sighing because I am Mexican, for who would be a Mexican? Where would he be if he was one? I am an official — without doubt important, since every four-farthing sparrow, etc. And being an important official, I am always having to receive people. Receive. Deceive. Believe. Rather, they’re not usually people. They’re almost always commissions.
“Please to meet you, Mister,” they say. “Not American, are you?”
I seize my chin in trepidation. “Good God! Am I?” There is a Monroe doctrine, and there is a continent, or two continents. Am I American? by any chance?
“Pardon me one moment!” I say, with true Mexican courtesy.
And I dash upstairs to the top floor — the fourth — no elevators — to my little corner office that looks out over the flat roofs and bubbly church-domes and streaks of wire of Mexico D. F. I rush to the window, I look out, and ah! — Yes! Que tal? Amigo! How lucky you’re there! Say, boy, will you tell me whether you’re American or not? Because if you are, I am.
This interesting announcement is addressed to my old friend Popo, who is lounging his heavy shoulders under the sky, smoking a cigarette end, a la Mexicaine. Further, since I’m paid to give information, Popo is the imperturbable volcano, known at length as Popocatepetl, with the accent on the tay, so I beg you not to put it on the cat, who is usually loitering in the vicinity of Mexico D. F.
No, I shan’t tell you what the D. F. is: or who it is. Take it for yourself if you like. I never come pulling the tail of your D. C. — Washington.
Popo gives another puff to his eternal cigarette, and replies, as every Mexican should:
“Quien sabe?”
“Who knows? — Ask me another, boy!”
Ca!~as a matter of fact, we don’t say Caramba! very much. But I’ll say it to please. I say it. I tear my hair. I dash downstairs to the Committee, or rather Commission, which is waiting with bated breath (mint) to know whether I’m American or not. I smile ingratiatingly.
“Do pardon me for the interruption, gentlemen. (One of them is usually a lady, but she’s best interpreted by gentlemen.) You ask me, am I American? — Quien sabe?”
“Then you’re not.”
“Am I not, gentlemen? Ay de mi!”
“Ever been in America?”
Good God! Again? Ah, my chin, let me seize thee!
Once more I flee upstairs and poke myself out of that window and say Oiga! Viejo! Oiga is a very important word. And I am in the Bureau of Information.
“Oiga! Viejo! Are you in America?”
“Quien sabe?” He bumps the other white shoulder at me. Snow!
“Oh, gentlemen!” I pant. “Quien sabe?”
“Then you haven’t.”
“But I’ve been to New York.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Have I been to America?”
“Hey! Who’s running this Information Bureau?”
“I am. Let me run it.”
So I dart upstairs again, and address myself to Popo.
“Popo! I have been to America, via New York, and you haven’t.”
Down I dart, to my Commission. On the way I remember how everything — I mean the loud walls — in New York, said SEE AMERICA FIRST. Thank God! I say to myself, wiping my wet face before entering to the Commission: On American evidence, I’ve seen him, her, or it. But whether en todo or en parte, quien sabe?
I open the door, and I give a supercilious sniff. Such are my American manners.
I am just smelling my Commission. — As usual! I say to myself, snobbishly: Oil!
