Burning Man, page 11
Lawrence was addressing Weekley not as Frieda’s husband but as his former professor, a man who understood nothing about women. Weekley must no longer think of Lawrence as his most promising pupil, he implies, because the power balance has shifted. Dante was shocked to discover his own former tutor, Brunetto Latini, in the seventh circle of hell, and the encounter between the two men, generally celebrated for its tenderness, is in fact a moment of astounding violence. Latini, outed by Dante as a sodomite and condemned to run for ever on burning sands, thinks only to praise the genius of his charge: ‘If you pursue your star,’ Latini tells Dante, ‘you cannot fail to reach a splendid harbour.’ Lawrence, who made Weekley’s life a daily hell, now cast him into the circle of the Inferno reserved for those former friends to whom he owed a debt.
In Munich, where he was able to go to the ubiquitous Café Stephanie himself, Lawrence met Frieda’s sister Else, who was now living with Alfred Weber, brother of the more famous Max. Else and Edgar Jaffe had achieved an amicable separation which included shared custody of their three children – one of them sired by Gross – and Frieda, in her innocence, assumed that Weekley would be similarly flexible. With no money of her own or home to go back to, Frieda was now bound to Lawrence, and the ‘storms of letters’, as Lawrence called Weekley’s correspondence, began.
Every time another letter arrived the lovers were, as Frieda put it, ‘thrown out of our paradisial state’.92 ‘The children are miserable,’ Lawrence told Garnett, ‘missing her so much. She lies on the floor in misery – and then is fearfully angry with me because I won’t say “stay for my sake”. I say “decide what you want most, to live with me and share my rotten chances, or go back to security, and your children”.’93 Mothers, Lawrence argued, must relinquish their spawn, and the sooner the better. ‘If my mother had lived,’ he told Frieda, ‘I could never have loved you, she wouldn’t have let me go.’94 In a letter to Else, of December 1912, Lawrence explained that he was preventing Frieda’s children from a future debt crisis.
Whatever the children may miss now, they will preserve their inner liberty, and their independent pride will be strong when they come of age. But if Frieda gave up all to go and live with them, that would sap their strength because they would have to support her life as they grew up. They would not be free to live of themselves – they would first have to live for her, to pay back. The worst of sacrifice is that we have to pay back. It is like somebody giving a present that was never asked for, and putting the recipient under the obligation of making restitution, often more than he could afford.95
He controlled his jealousy of Frieda’s lovers but not of her children. In the poem ‘She Looks Back’, Lawrence described:
The mother in you, fierce as a murderess, glaring to England,
Yearning towards England, towards your young children,
Insisting upon your motherhood, devastating.
Thus their long fight began. While Frieda wanted credit for Lawrence’s rebirth, Lawrence worked to destroy the mother in her and reduce the self-image that had been inflated by Gross. He recorded their arguments in his play The Fight for Barbara, written in October 1912, which was, Lawrence said, ‘word for word true’.96 ‘It’s I who’ve given you your self-respect,’ says Barbara/Frieda. ‘Think of the despairing, hating figure that came into Mrs Kelly’s drawing room – and now look at yourself.’ ‘It’s time someone taught you you’re not as great as you think,’ responds Wesson/Lawrence. ‘You’re not the one and only phoenix.’ Barbara’s father, Sir William, then offers – as Baron von Richthofen also did – his own opinion: ‘Touch a married woman, and you’re a scoundrel … It destroys the whole family system, and strikes at the whole of society. A man who does it is as much a criminal as a thief, a burglar, or even a murderer.’97 Dante, who put Paolo into hell, agreed.
The Trespasser – Lawrence’s novel of adultery – was published on 23 May 1912, and on 9 June he posted the manuscript of Paul Morel to Heinemann: ‘I know it’s a good thing, even a bit great.’98 But Heinemann rejected it on the grounds that he had ‘no sympathy for any character in the book’. Lawrence’s response was to ‘curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today’. Christ on the cross, he continued, must have similarly hated his countrymen: ‘“Crucify me, you swine,” he must have said through his teeth … “Put in your nails and spear, you bloody nasal sour-blooded swine, I laugh last.”’99
There was now no going back for either Lawrence or Frieda, and so they went forward, walking south to Italy through the valley of the Isar, sleeping in haylofts. Following the road at the foot of the Tyrol mountains, they passed avenues of crucifixes. In his essay ‘Christs in the Tyrol’, included in his unguarded and loose-limbed travel book Twilight in Italy, Lawrence saw himself in all of them: ‘So many Christs there seem to be: one in rebellion against his cross, to which he was nailed; one bitter with the agony of knowing he must die, his heart-beatings all futile; one who felt sentimental, one who gave in to his misery.’100 Staying the night in Bad Tölz, they continued up through Lenggries and crossed the Brenner Pass.
They were joined en route by David Garnett and his handsome friend Harold Hobson, both of whom had spent their childhoods the Fabian way, swinging from trees, camping in the woods, staging theatrical productions and diving naked into ponds. There was a glamour for Garnett and Hobson in being with the lovers, and their evening entertainment involved Lawrence reading aloud Weekley’s storm of letters, with their ‘bowel-twisting’ displays of suffering. ‘I do not live any longer, except as a broken, meaningless automaton, which works for the sake of my children, whom I must save out of the inferno of their mother’s infamy.’101 How, Weekley wailed, could Frieda demean herself by absconding with ‘a man who was not a gentleman?’ Weekley, Frieda scoffed, was ‘not so very grand himself’.102 But there was a grandness to Weekley, who offered Frieda a flat in London if she would only give up Lawrence. His suggestion would have allowed his wife her independence as well as her children, but by now she could not give up Lawrence. She had become, Frieda announced, ‘an anarchist’, and Lawrence, like Gross and Frick before him, was ‘the only revolutionary worthy of the name’.103
The party of walkers rose through the wet Alpine forests to the rocky plateau beyond Ginzling, into the southern Tyrol and onwards towards the sun. They reached the Dominicus Hütte at the end of August, and David and Lawrence climbed the rock to the snowline. Ahead of them lay ‘a vast precipice, like a wall, and beyond that a cluster of mountain peaks, in heaven alone, snow and sky-rock. That was the end.’104 The next day all four climbed the Pfitscher Joch – Harold Hobson a little quiet – and here they parted, the young men returning home and Lawrence and Frieda heading on to Sterzing, to take the high road on to Italy. Alone again, Frieda told Lawrence that, at the Dominicus Hütte, Harold ‘had’ her in a hay hut. This was the second time that summer Lawrence had been forced to recognise that Frieda must live largely and abundantly; back in May she had slept with an officer in Metz and Lawrence, taking his cue from Gross, responded with a shrug. She could do what she liked – who was he to stunt her growth? His own sex drive, meanwhile, had become ‘a steady sort of force, instead of a storm’.105
Lawrence and Frieda crossed into Italy and took the train to Trento, a ‘pure Italian ancient decrepit town’. Here, on the steps beneath the monument to Dante, Frieda sat down and wept. She had, she said, ‘walked barefoot over icey stubble’, suffered rain and hunger and cold, her clothes were tattered and drab, and now there was a cockroach in the bedroom of their hotel.106 Following what she called a ‘dantesque sunrise’, they caught the train to Lake Garda and then the steamer to Villa di Gargnano, another decrepit town – this one stretching up against the rocks – where they rented cheap rooms for the winter.107 Their bedroom, ‘clean as a flower’, faced the lake which lay ‘dim and milky’ every dawn, the mountains dark blue behind. Lawrence, who never moved into a new house without scrubbing the floors, taught Frieda to cook and clean and she was soon an enthusiastic washerwoman. He now, for the fourth time, rewrote Paul Morel, renaming it Sons and Lovers. The first draft had been overseen by Louie Burrows, the second and third drafts guided and corrected by Jessie Chambers, and for the final draft it was Frieda who advised Lawrence about the emotional lives of Miriam and Mrs Morel, even writing, she said, the ‘female’ bits because only she understood the hot love between mother and child. ‘“Well, I don’t love her, mother,”’ Paul now says of Miriam, ‘bowing his head and hiding his eyes on her shoulder in misery. His mother kissed him a long, fervent kiss. “My boy!” she said, in a voice trembling with passionate love.’108 Frieda also understood the kind of woman that Lawrence needed, and so was able to explain Paul’s problem with Miriam:
‘I wish you could laugh at me just for one minute – just for one minute. I feel as if it would set something free.’
‘But’ – and she looked up at him with eyes frightened and struggling – ‘I do laugh at you – I do.’
‘Never! There’s always a kind of intensity. When you laugh I could always cry; it seems as if it shows up your suffering. Oh, you make me knit the brows of my very soul and cogitate.’
Slowly she shook her head despairingly.
‘I’m sure I don’t want to,’ she said.109
‘I lived and suffered that book,’ Frieda proudly recalled in ‘Not I, But the Wind…’, but she did not live it or suffer it as much as Jessie Chambers. ‘It’s one of the creepiest episodes in Lawrence’s history,’ says Diana Trilling, ‘the two of them, Lawrence and Frieda, sitting there poring over Jessie’s detailed revisions of Lawrence’s earlier love affair while back in England, alone, Jessie dug and dug, dredging up every last memory as she cherished it, insisting that Lawrence do her the justice in fiction that she felt he had denied her in real life.’110 The result was the first English modern novel, and the book in which Lawrence discarded his former self.
Lorenzo, as his wife now called him, loved the healthy, proud Italian peasants and the cheap red wine, but by April 1913 they were back in Edgar Jaffe’s Bavarian mountain cabin in Irschenhausen, with its clear view of the Alps. ‘The deer feed sometimes in the corner among the flowers,’ Lorenzo wrote, and ‘fly with great bounds when I go out’.111 In contrast to Lake Garda, Germany had that same ‘beastly, tight, Sunday feeling which is so blighting in England’, and in June, after thirteen months away, the renegades returned to England for a six-week visit.112 Lawrence went to his sister’s wedding in the Midlands, and Frieda hung around her son’s school in London in the hope of seeing him, which she did. Enraged by her underhand behaviour, Weekley began divorce proceedings. Lawrence and Frieda stayed with Edward and Constance Garnett in their Kentish home, The Cearne, where the Garnetts noted Lawrence’s jealousy and Frieda’s misery; David Garnett, visiting his parents, forgave Lawrence his treatment of Frieda only when he saw spots of blood on the writer’s handkerchief. It was during this visit home that Lawrence and Frieda met Murry and Katherine Mansfield and discovered a rapport.
By August the Lawrences were once again in the Irschenhausen cabin, and in mid-September, when Frieda went to Baden-Baden to see her mother, Lawrence set out on a second pilgrimage, this time walking through Switzerland to Italy where he and Frieda planned to rendezvous in Milan. Wordsworth describes in The Prelude his own crossing of the Simplon Pass, and Shelley’s Alpine experience is recorded in ‘Mont Blanc’. Lawrence was completing a well-worn Romantic rite of passage.
Alpine air was considered good for consumptives and, while Lawrence walked, Thomas Mann was beginning The Magic Mountain, set in the fictional Berghof sanatorium in Davos. Lawrence followed the Rhine to Schaffhausen and headed south, thirty miles, to Zurich. Here he surveyed from a hilltop the expanse of Lake Zurich spreading beneath him ‘like a relief map’. He was always moved by lakes and also by views, which he saw as a form of extended consciousness and a representation of something lost. But something in this view disturbed him: he ‘could not bear to look’ at it: ‘It seemed to intervene between me and some reality.’ Crossing to another hill, he looked down on the lake again: ‘I hated it.’ His boots rubbed and it started to rain; he followed the shore of the lake and stopped for tea in a villa where he chatted to two elderly ladies. Was he Austrian, they asked? Lawrence then said something extraordinary, which seemed to intervene between himself and reality. He replied that yes, he was Austrian; he came from Graz where his father was a doctor. ‘I said this because I knew a doctor from Graz who was always wandering about, and because I did not want to be myself … I wanted to be something else.’113 The wandering doctor from Graz was Otto Gross, who five years earlier had been treated in the Zurich hospital by Jung. Meanwhile, Gross’s disciple Ernst Frick was also in Zurich, serving his jail sentence for blowing up the town’s police station, and hoping that Frieda Weekley would one day visit him.
Lawrence’s decision to come alone to this loaded place was testament to the power of Frieda’s past but also to his desire to be something else. He was rehearsing the role of Otto Gross, but mad Gross – who epitomised the Romantic idea of genius – was the mirror image of Mad Shelley. Both men were vegetarian sexual anarchists, suicide-inducing hell-raisers, lethal to women and at war with the fathers who disowned them. Shelley’s notes to the utopian allegory Queen Mab describe the world as Gross also understood it:
Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear … A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other; any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny … Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.114
Frieda, Lawrence said, was aiming ‘in the Shelley direction, at the mid-heaven spiritual, which is still sexual but quite spiritually so. Sex as open and as common and as simple as any other human conversation.’115 Lawrence was heading in the Shelley direction himself because in late September 1913, on the advice of Edgar Jaffe, he and Frieda took a house in the Gulf of Spezia, ‘an hours walk’, Lawrence said, from ‘Shelley’s place’.116
* * *
In the spring of 1822, when they had been married for five years, the Shelleys, with their friends Jane and Edward Williams, settled on the Gulf of Spezia in a former boathouse called Casa Magni where the sea came up to the portico. Here Shelley fell in love with Jane Williams, and Mary nearly bled to death following a miscarriage. She had already lost two children who had been born full term. ‘No words can tell you how I hated our house & the country about it,’ Mary recalled, having lost count of the number of houses they had now moved into and out of. ‘Shelley reproached me for this – his health was good, and the place was quite after his own heart.’ The Gulf of Spezia, two miles along the shore from Lerici, on the eastern tip of Liguria, is a wide bay subdivided into smaller bays shadowed by what Mary described as ‘wood covered promontories crowned with castles’. Mary hated the ‘desolation’ of it all; ‘the beauty of the woods’, she said, ‘made me weep and shudder – so vehement was my feeling of dislike that I used to rejoice when the winds & waves permitted me to go out in the boat so that I was not obliged to take my usual walk among the tree shaded paths’.117 Dante likened the landscape around Lerici to the ledges of Purgatory:
By this time we had reached the mountain’s base,
discovering a wall of rock so sheer
that even agile legs are useless there.
The loneliest, most jagged promontory
that lies between Turbia and Lerici,
compared with it, provides stairs wide and easy.
(Purgatory, Canto 3, 46–51)
The village of Fiascherino, where the Lawrences now settled, was above a ‘little tiny bay half shut-in by rocks, and smothered by olive woods that slope down swiftly’. There were no roads to the village – not even a mule track. ‘One gets by rail from Genoa or from Parma to Spezia, by steamer across the gulf to Lerici, and by rowing boat round the headlands to Fiascherino, where is the villino which is to be mine,’ Lawrence told Edward Garnett. The villino was a ‘flat, pink, fisherman’s house’ and the garden was ‘all vines and fig trees, and great woods on the hills all around’, beneath which levels of terraces led down to the sea.118 Lawrence, a weak swimmer, liked to go out in his boat and look for shellfish. ‘If you can’t be a real poet,’ Frieda warned him from the shore, ‘then you’ll drown like one, anyhow.’ Her divorce was now finalised, with Weekley gaining custody of the children, and so Frieda was of course miserable, but Lawrence, she told Garnett, ‘hated me for being miserable, not a moment of misery did he put up with … In revenge I did not care about his writing.’119
Leaning on the rocks of the bay along from Casa Magni, Lawrence worked on his new novel which was originally called ‘The Sisters’, currently titled ‘The Wedding Ring’ and later split into the sister novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. Looking on to the same sea, Shelley had written The Triumph of Life, his response to Inferno. Composed, like the Divine Comedy, in terza rima, Shelley’s last major work was the unrolling of a ‘waking dream’ in which a ‘great stream of people’ were ‘hurrying to and fro’. He compares ‘this perpetual flow’ to ‘gnats upon the evening air’, and the swarm is charged by a chariot driven by a blindfolded, four-faced figure leading a pageant of historical characters including Kant, Napoleon, Voltaire and Catherine the Great. The shade of Rousseau, looking like ‘an old root which grew / To strange distortion out of the hill side’, serves as the dreamer-poet’s Virgilian guide. This parade, Rousseau explains, is ‘Life’s hellish triumph’. The poet asks Rousseau where he comes from and where he is going, and Rousseau tells his strange story, at the end of which Dante himself makes an appearance:
