Burning Man, page 12
Before the chariot had begun to climb
The opposing steep of that mysterious dell,
Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme
Of him whom from the lowest depths of Hell
Through every Paradise & through all glory
Love led serene, & who returned to tell
In words of hate & awe the wondrous story
How all things are transfigured, except Love.
With The Triumph of Life, Shelley’s assimilation of Dante was complete. The streams of wailing people in Inferno (‘I should never have believed / that death could have undone so many’) trail behind a banner rather than a chariot, while their faces are stung by horseflies and wasps. Lawrence employed the same imagery in the closing pages of The Rainbow, where Ursula watches from her window the streams of colliers, women and children all walking, like husks, in another ‘insentient triumph’ of life.
Two months after the Shelleys moved to the Gulf of Spezia, Leigh Hunt arrived in Italy with the aim of starting, with Byron and Shelley, a journal called The Liberal. On 1 July Shelley sailed around the coast from Lerici to Livorno to be reunited with his friend, bringing with him a letter from Mary begging the Hunts not to move to Lerici: ‘I wish I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.’120 Six days later, having helped them to settle into their new home on the ground floor of Byron’s palazzo, Shelley set sail for home, but his boat was caught in a storm. His drowned body, identified from the copy of Keats in his pocket, washed ashore at Viareggio and was cremated on the beach where he was found. In Fournier’s 1889 painting, The Funeral of Shelley, Hunt stands by the martyr’s pyre flanked by Byron and his ‘bulldog’, Edward John Trelawny, who described in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron how Shelley, doused in frankincense, salt and wine, ‘made the yellow flames glisten and quiver’. His brains, Trelawny gleefully reported, ‘literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time’ after which the ‘corpse fell open and the heart … laid bare’. Shelley’s ashes were put in a box and Hunt gave the burning heart to Mary, who kept it with her for the rest of her life.121
Lawrence realised Shelley’s genius in this place. He was writing his novel but thinking about poetic metre, which for his own purposes he compared to ‘a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air’.122 Consolidating his theory of lyric poetry, he told Henry Savage (a critic who briefly became a friend after writing a nice review of The White Peacock) that:
It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself round … till he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die. It is no accident that Shelley got drowned – he was always trying to drown himself – it was his last mood.123
And Shelley’s last mood was recorded in his last lyric, ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’.
At the same time as he was channelling Shelley in the Gulf of Spezia, Lawrence was also ‘going for Whitman’ who, he told Henry Savage in January 1914, ‘is quite great’. Whitman was Shelley’s opposite, and by pitching the poets against one another, Lawrence wrestled with his own oppositions. Shelley was bodiless but Whitman’s body was central to his poetry: ‘I am the poet of the body, / And I am the poet of the soul,’ Whitman sang in ‘Song of Myself’. A former printer and newspaper editor, Whitman loved bodies, especially if they were young, working-class and male, and in Leaves of Grass, which he called ‘the new Bible’, he ‘resolved to sing’ of ‘manly attachment’. These twelve untitled poems of indeterminate length were born in what Whitman called ‘the gush, the throb, the flood of the moment’, an immediacy he emphasised by writing in free verse and employing ellipses rather than formal punctuation. The never-ending lines rolled onward, the body of the poet and the body of his work flowing freely as one.124 ‘I celebrate myself,’ Whitman began, ‘I lean and loaf at my ease.’ When Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, it was accompanied by a lithograph of the loafing messiah himself, a wide-brimmed hat pushed to the side of his handsome head, a loose white shirt open at the neck, one strong hand on his hip, the other in his trouser pocket. In ‘I Sing the Body Electric’, Whitman provided his image with a commentary:
The expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also … it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk … the carriage of his neck … the flex of his waist and knees … dress does not hide them.
There has never been an author-photo to compare with the power of Whitman’s lithograph, which was not only a new image of a poet but a new image of a man: modern, sensual, independent, cocksure. For Lawrence, still encased inside collars as stiff as clerical dog collars, such physical flexibility was a revelation. So too was Whitman’s joy in male comradery:
The wrestle of wrestlers … two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, goodnatured,
nativeborn, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work,
The coats vests and caps thrown down … the embrace of love and resistance,
The upperhold and underhold – the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes […]
Whitman wanted to ‘loosen’ himself enough to ‘swim with the swimmer, and wrestle with wrestlers, and march in line with the firemen’. Lawrence was also, he now confessed to Savage, ‘just learning – thanks to Frieda – to let go a bit’. Whitman was synonymous with spontaneity, comradeship and the ‘one identity’; democracy was his great subject and what he meant by the word ‘manly friendship’. Whenever Lawrence changed his mind about democracy, he changed his mind about Whitman. ‘The fault about Whitman,’ Lawrence suggested to Henry Savage,
is, strictly, that he is too self-conscious to be what he says he is: he’s not Walt Whitman, I, the joyous American, he is Walt Whitman, the Cosmos, trying to fit a cosmos inside his own skin … Whitman is like a human document, or a wonderful treatise in human self revelation. It is neither art nor religion nor truth: Just a self-revelation of a man who could not live, and so had to write himself. But writing should come from a strong root of life: like a battle song after a battle. – And Whitman did this, more or less. But his battle was not a real battle … he was like a wrestler who only wrestles with his own shadow – he never came to grips. He chucked his body into the fight, & stood apart saying, ‘Look how I am living.’ He is really false as hell.125
Lawrence, that other self-wrestling human document, was – as ever – talking about Lawrence, and never more so than when he criticised Whitman’s habit of turning individuals into types: ‘Whitman did not take a person: he took that generalised thing, a Woman, an Athlete, a Youth. And this is wrong, wrong, wrong.’126
The Wedding Ring, meanwhile, kept on missing ‘being itself’ and Lawrence discarded the book eleven times. When Edward Garnett described the manuscript as ‘shaky’, Lawrence laid out, in a now famous letter, his project: Garnett was not to ‘look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states.’ His characters, Lawrence explained, were not ‘defined’ in the traditional way but fell into ‘some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown’.127 Lawrence’s thoughts on character in the novel recall Keats’s suggestion that ‘the poetical Character … has no self – it is every thing and nothing – it has no character’.128 In this same letter to Garnett – the last Lawrence sent from Fiascherino – he employed his most Shelleyan metaphor. Shelley had described, in A Defence of Poetry, ‘the mind in creation’ as ‘a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness’.129 Lawrence now explained that ‘diamond and coal are the same single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond – but I say, “Diamond, what! This is carbon.” And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.’130
On 8 June 1914, Lawrence and Frieda packed their bags and left their villino; Frieda went to visit her mother in Baden-Baden and Lawrence ‘wandered’ back ‘over Switzerland – ’mid snow and ice like Excelsior – finishing up with Exhibitions in Bern’. He was always casual about his walking marathons, which on this occasion covered twenty-eight miles a day. From Bern he caught the train to Heidelberg where on 18 June he can be found with Alfred Weber, ‘hearing the latest things in German philosophy … all very interesting’.131 By 24 June he and Frieda were back in England, and on 13 July they got married in South Kensington registry office, with Murry and Katherine Mansfield as witnesses. ‘Heaven, how happy we all were!’ recalled Murry. ‘The time of being jolly together had really begun.’132
Two weeks later Lawrence was invited to a dinner hosted by the American poet Amy Lowell, in her suite in the Berkeley overlooking Green Park. The occasion brought together the poets described by Ezra Pound as ‘Imagist’: Pound himself, Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, his wife Hilda, who wrote as H.D., and, for the moment, Lawrence. ‘They discussed him before he came in,’ H.D. recalled.
Someone heard he was tubercular, was that true? He had run away with someone’s wife, a baroness, was that true? His novel was already being spoken of as over-sexed (sex-mania), was that true? A damn shame if they suppress it. Then the little man came in, looking slender and frail in evening dress that … made him look like a private soldier of the already pre-war days, in mufti.133
Lawrence and Frieda on their wedding day, with Murry, 13 July 1914
The meeting was of great importance to H.D., and Lawrence now joined her cast of mythological characters.
He then honeymooned alone with three male friends on yet another walking tour, this time in the Lake District. Coming down to Barrow-in-Furness on 4 August, they heard that war had been declared and ‘it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes’. Five days later, the news from Methuen was that The Wedding Ring had been turned down.134
The newlyweds had wanted to return to Spezia, but the war put an end to their plans. So they rented an ‘ugly’ red-brick house in the village of Chesham in the Chiltern Hills, where Lawrence became ill with a ‘long, slow, pernicious cold’ that lingered for months.135 During his illness he grew a fox-red beard, and when he rose from his deathbed, ‘very sick and corpse-cold’,136 he decided not to shave: soldiers were clean-shaven and gentlemen wore moustaches, but Lawrence was no gentleman. His beard marked him out as a satyr, a martyr, a prophet and an enemy of the people; Christ had a beard and so did Walt Whitman, but Lawrence looked, so H.D. thought, like Vincent van Gogh.
Frieda wanted to be in London where her children now lived with their grandparents, who had moved from Hampstead to Chiswick in order to be near good schools, and she considered moving to the city by herself, precisely as Weekley had suggested. Being remarried, she hoped she might be granted formal visitation rights. Lawrence, tired of her complaints, told her to live in London if that was what she wanted, but Ottoline realised that this could never happen because he was ‘too timid and sensitive to face life alone’.137 In June 1915 Frieda found, for £3 a month, 1 Byron Villas, the small unfurnished flat in the Vale of Health where the Lawrences were living when The Rainbow was published. Richard Aldington and H.D. lived further down the hill in Christchurch Place where H.D. was mourning her stillborn daughter – the result, she believed, of the shock she suffered when Aldington told her that the Lusitania had sunk. Lawrence, who likened H.D. to Persephone, was, she thought, ‘the only one who seemed remotely to understand what I felt when I was so ill’.138 Then two weeks before The Rainbow was prosecuted news came to Byron Villas of another lost child: Peter Jaffe, Else’s six-year-old son by Otto Gross, had died.
* * *
In Higher Tregerthen, on 6 May 1916, Lawrence and Frieda had one of their fights and Mansfield, who witnessed it, described the event in two separate letters. In the first, sent to Kot, she wrote the following, which is worth quoting in full because she was such a good storyteller.
Let me tell you what happened on Friday, I went across to them for tea. Frieda said Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark was false. Lawrence said: ‘You are showing off; you don’t know anything about it.’ Then she began. ‘Now I have had enough. Out of my house – you little God Almighty you. I’ve had enough of you. Are you going to keep your mouth shut or aren’t you.’ Said Lawrence: ‘I’ll give you a dab on the cheek to quiet you, you dirty hussy.’ Etc Etc. So I left the house. At dinner time Frieda appeared. ‘I have finally done with him. It is all over for ever.’ She then went out of the kitchen & began to walk round and round the house in the dark. Suddenly Lawrence appeared and made a kind of horrible blind rush at her and they began to scream and scuffle. He beat her – he beat her to death – her head and face and breast and pulled out her hair. All the while she screamed for Murry to help her. Finally they dashed into the kitchen and round and round the table. I shall never forget how L. looked. He was so white – almost green and he just hit – thumped the big soft woman. Then he fell into one chair and she into another. No one said a word … Suddenly, after a long time – about a quarter of an hour – L. looked up and asked Murry a question about French literature.
Frieda and Lawrence then began to reminisce about a particularly rich and delicious macaroni cheese they had enjoyed.139
In the second letter, sent to entertain Ottoline, Katherine described having tea with the Lawrences when ‘for some unfortunate reason I mentioned Percy Shelley’. Frieda said ‘his skylark is awful Footle’ and Lawrence came back with ‘You only say that to show off. It’s the only thing of Shelley’s that you know.’ The fight then began, with Mansfield positioned like Alice between the Cook and the Duchess as saucepans and flatirons were ‘hurtled through the air’. She and Murry felt sorry for Lawrence but had not ‘one atom of sympathy for Frieda’. Murry, wrote Katherine, ‘just didn’t feel that a woman was being beaten’, and Katherine herself ‘never did imagine anyone so thrive upon a beating as Frieda’.140
What was increasingly apparent about the Lawrences’ marriage is that it was a piece of theatre, performed before an audience. Lawrence had proved his talent for dramatising domestic life in his plays, and for these scenes with Frieda, which we might call ‘The Collier’s Son’s Friday Night’, he even slipped into dialect. While other men might beat their wives in private and perform their affection in public, Lawrence beat his wife in public and was affectionate when he thought no one was looking. Mansfield thought that Frieda provoked Lawrence, but on this occasion Frieda had every reason to believe that Lawrence would agree with her assessment of ‘Ode to a Skylark’ because his rage about Shelley’s bodiless bird had become as much a set piece as his fights with Frieda. In Point Counter Point, his novel of literary London, Aldous Huxley gives Mark Rampion, the prophet based on Lawrence, the same diatribe: ‘Don’t talk to me of Shelley. No, no,’ says Rampion during a party. ‘There’s something very dreadful about Shelley. Not a human, not a man. A mixture between a fairy and a white slug.’ Shelley, Rampion goes on, had ‘no blood, no real bones and bowels’, and his treatment of women was ‘shocking, really shocking’. He made them feel wonderfully ‘spiritual’ until he ‘made them feel like committing suicide’, and he went around ‘persuading himself and other people that he was Dante and Beatrice rolled into one, only much more so’. Rampion then recites ‘Ode to a Skylark’ with the full ‘elocutionist’s “expression”’ after which he picks up the thread of his monologue. ‘The lark couldn’t be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars. Oh no!’ Round and round Rampion goes, until he ends up where he began. ‘If you are a slug, you must write about slugs, even though your subject is meant to be a skylark.’141 In the poem ‘I am in a Novel’, Lawrence responded to Huxley’s portrait of him: ‘If this is what Archibald thinks I am / he sure thinks a lot of lies.’ But Lawrence’s same skylark-rant had already appeared in print in 1914, in his Study of Thomas Hardy.
Why should Shelley say of the skylark:
‘Hail to thee, Blithe spirit! – bird thou never wert’
Why should he insist on the bodilessness of beauty, when we cannot know of any save embodied beauty? Who would wish that the skylark were not a bird, but a spirit? If the whistling skylark were a spirit, then we should all wish to be spirits. Which were impious and flippant.
Like his bodiless bird, Lawrence continued, Shelley ‘never lived. He transcended life. But we do not want to transcend life, since we are of life.’142
Lawrence’s own skylark is described in his manifesto for free verse, ‘The Poetry of the Present’, with its magnificent opening line: ‘It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future.’143 In Lawrence’s new interpretation of Shelley, the poet gives us the frozen past and for ‘the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit’, we must, he says, turn to Whitman.
Whitman’s is the best poetry of this kind. Without beginning and without end, without any base and pediment, it sweeps past forever, like a wind that is forever in passage, and unchainable. Whitman truly looked before and after. But he did not sigh for what is not. The clue to all his utterance lies in the sheer appreciation of the instant moment, life surging itself into utterance at its very well-head … Because Whitman put this into his poetry, we fear him and respect him so profoundly … He is so near the quick.144
