Burning Man, page 14
After John Middleton Murry had abandoned him in Zennor, in June 1916, Lawrence began a Whitmanesque romance with William Henry, the dark-haired eldest of the Hocking sons. It was Frieda who was now abandoned as her husband spent more and more time at the farm, bringing in the harvest, riding the horse, sitting up late with his new friend. Lawrence had turned against her, she said – without a trace of irony – because of ‘the bit of German in me’. Lawrence must have been aware, at least on some level, that he was putting his wife in the position occupied by his mother when he transferred his affection to the Haggites. In Kangaroo, where William Henry Hocking is renamed – also without a trace of irony – John Thomas, Lawrence described the pleasure of ‘drifting back to the common people’. Biographers have suggested that the two men made love among the haystacks, for which there is no evidence. We know nothing about William Henry’s sexuality other than that he was currently courting the woman he married in 1919, but we do know that Lawrence, for all his investment in the life of the instincts, repressed his desire for male intimacy. It was Frieda who started the rumour about their affair because, whenever she and Lawrence had a fight, he would make his way down to the farm and talk to William Henry ‘about the sun, and the moon, the mysterious powers of the moon at night, and the mysterious change in man with the change of season, and the mysterious effects of sex on a man’.172 The Cornish farmers, Lawrence told Murry, talked ‘freely of the end of the world’, and he was thus able to play the part of the man who would lead them out of the darkness.173 ‘One stormy night,’ Stanley Hocking recalled, when the ‘wind was blowing’ around the black rocks of Zennor and Lawrence and William Henry were sitting by the fire, Frieda, terrified by a ‘band of thunder’, ran down the field and hammered on the door to be let in.174 Whenever Lawrence’s grand German wife arrived at the farm, the talk and laughter always stopped.
The winter of 1916–17 was severe and Lawrence began to complain that he could no longer breathe in this country, which we can take as both literal and metaphorical. He and Frieda were joined for Christmas by an American couple they had met in Hampstead during The Rainbow debacle. Robert Mountsier was writing articles about the war for the American press and Esther Andrews was a former actress who now worked on Women’s Wear Daily. While Mountsier, who would play an important role in Lawrence’s life, is one of those figures who appears, as it were, in parenthesis, all we know about Esther is that Frieda was convinced that she seduced Lawrence.
In London, Ottoline heard that she had been cast as the ‘villainess’ in Women in Love and demanded to see the manuscript, a copy of which Lawrence duly delivered. ‘Lawrence has sent me his awful book,’ she reported to Russell in January 1917. ‘It is so loathsome one cannot get clean after it – and a most insulting chapter with a minute photograph of Garsington and a horrible disgusting portrait of me making me out as if filled with cruel devilish lust.’175 Even Virginia Woolf, always willing to cock a snook at Ottoline, thought the parody tasteless. ‘My word,’ Woolf said of Lawrence, ‘what a cheap little bounder he was, taking her money, books, food, lodging and then writing that book.’176 Ottoline threatened to sue the publisher for libel, but Women in Love did not yet have a publisher and was unlikely to get one while she was ostentatiously waiting, rock in hand. So, with his novel effectively suppressed in England, Lawrence decided to pitch it to America instead: ‘And poor vindictive old Ottoline can be left to her vanity of identifying herself with Hermione.’177
Lawrence, his relationship with Frieda at its lowest ebb, now collected together his poems about her – most dating from their happy days in Lake Garda – and turned them into a poetic novel with the explanatory title Look! We Have Come Through! His foreword explained that the poems were to be seen not as ‘so many single pieces’ but as ‘an essential story, or history or confession … revealing the intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself’.178 The foreword is followed by an ‘Argument’ in which Lawrence proposes his subject:
After much struggling and loss in love, and in the world of man, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness.179
The idea of the poetic ‘Argument’ was lifted from Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (a prose prophecy with an Argument in verse). Lawrence’s journey, similarly epic, is represented as undertaken alone; the struggle and the loss have been on his side only; it is not ‘we’ but he who has come through; it is Lawrence we are asked to look at.
Despite its textual armour, Look! We Have Come Through! is a remarkably naked collection. Not all the poems are good – there are too many for that – and Lawrence is right that they cannot stand alone. But as a cycle exploring the poet’s experience of love, they belong to the tradition of Dante’s Vita Nuova, Shelley’s Epipsychidion, Meredith’s Modern Love and, later, Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters. Lawrence’s dead mother is commemorated in a ghoulish lyric called ‘Hymn to Priapus’:
My love lies underground
With her face upturned to mine,
And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss
That ended her life and mine.
Frieda makes her appearance, in the allegorical ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’, as the Madonna on a ‘plodding palfrey’. Leaving her suckling child with Joseph, the wilful woman goes off with ‘a dark-faced stranger’ down to the ‘flashing shore’.
She follows his restless wanderings
Till night when, by the fire’s red stain,
Her face is bent in the bitter stream
That comes from the flowers of pain.
Lawrence records, in ‘First Morning’, the first time that he and Frieda made love – ‘The night was a failure / but why not –?’ – and in ‘She Looks Back’, a play on the Orpheus myth, he describes Frieda ‘straining with a wild heart, back, back again, / Back to those children you had left behind’. In ‘Frohnleichnam’ Lawrence makes a claim which would have surprised both Frieda and Jessie Chambers:
You have come your way, I have come my way;
You have stepped across your people, carelessly, hurting them all;
I have stepped across my people, and hurt them in spite of my care.
The centrepiece, ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’, is Lawrence’s revision of ‘Ode to the West Wind’. ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me’, the poet begins, having given us now two senses of ‘through’, currently his favourite preposition. The man has come through the storm, but the wind is also coming through the man as though, like Gerald Crich, he were a lyre.
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course
through the chaos of the world …
Shelley’s west wind is the prophetic force of change, and his ‘Ode’ closes on a note of hope:
O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
In ‘Craving for Spring’, the final poem in Look! We Have Come Through!, Lawrence echoes, in his own penultimate line, Shelley’s optimism. ‘Ah, do not let me die on the brink of such anticipation!’
* * *
The spring of 1917 brought a lethal virus to France. Soldiers in the trenches found themselves with headaches, fever and loss of appetite; this developed into bronchial pneumonia or septicaemic blood poisoning. In the final stages of the illness, which became known as the Spanish flu, the worst afflicted would succumb to cyanosis, when their lips and faces turned purple as their lungs filled with choking fluid.
Spring in Cornwall brought the composer Philip Heseltine, on the run from conscription. He and his pregnant girlfriend Puma, who had lived with the Lawrences in their first Cornish home, had found their way into Women in Love as the combative bohemian Halliday and his pregnant, and faithless, girlfriend Possum. When he discovered the libel, Heseltine sued Lawrence’s publisher. Since last seeing Lawrence, Heseltine had adopted, for his compositions, the nom de plume of Peter Warlock, and his current reading included Eliphas Levi’s History of Transcendental Magic, from which he was learning how to conjure demons. The occultist Aleister Crowley, when he too came to Zennor, raised the devil on a path after performing a black mass in the church. There were other occultists here as well; Meredith Starr and his aristocratic, biracial wife Lady Mary used the mine shafts for naked meditation, filling the air with omens and what Lawrence described as ‘destructive electricity’. One night the Starrs performed a lengthy concert of their own composition called ‘East and West’ in which Starr, dressed in ‘a long nightgown’, played his violin and ‘intoned’ spectrally from behind a curtain. It was, said Lawrence, ‘the greatest event in Zennor for some time’.180 Philip Heseltine rented a house on top of the moors with views of the sea to both the east and west, allowing him to follow the sun over the course of the day, but when his military exemption came under review, he fled to Ireland where he met W. B. Yeats and became interested, as everyone then was, in theosophy.
Heseltine would doubtless have left his own memoir of Lawrence had he lived long enough to do so, but he died of coal-gas poisoning – probably by his own hand – in December 1930. Hailed at the time of his funeral as the greatest of English songwriters, his name came up again when the art critic Brian Sewell, born seven months after Heseltine’s death, claimed to be his natural son. The importance of Philip Heseltine to Lawrence is that he brought to Cornwall his twenty-one-year-old friend Cecil Gray. Another musician on the run from conscription, Gray rented an old house grandly called Bosigran Castle, which stood on the cliffs near Pendeen, four miles from Higher Tregerthen. Here, describing himself as an anchorite monk, he worked on setting Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine to music. Plump, fair and bespectacled with a taste for cocaine, Cecil Gray fits into Lawrence’s Cornish life like the second generation of children in Wuthering Heights, whose narrative begins when the turbulence caused by Cathy and Heathcliff is over. And just as the second half of Wuthering Heights is erased by the power of the first half, Gray’s role in Lawrence’s Inferno tends to be overlooked. But it was he who would bring the story of Lawrence’s time in the underworld to its grand finale.
Lawrence threw himself into the task of cheering up Bosigran Castle, scrubbing the floors and painting the furniture, which tasks revealed, Gray thought, a ‘Dostoevskyan’ abjection. In his memoir Musical Chairs, Gray says that he saw the Lawrences every day and they become a single household. But, according to Lawrence, Gray came over only ‘fairly often’. During one of Gray’s visits it seems likely that he and Frieda went to bed together; Lawrence was always down at Lower Tregerthen farm and Frieda wanted to avenge herself on his supposed affairs. The wives of admired men are catnip to their acolytes and Gray, like all those who spent time with Frieda, became an authority on Lawrence’s sexual appeal, potency and performance. Lawrence, explained Gray, ‘was definitely not attractive to women in himself, as apart from the seductive magic of his pen. His physical personality was puny and insignificant, his vitality low, and his sexual potentialities exclusively cerebral.’181
It was in wartime Cornwall, when he and Frieda were living like pioneers, that Lawrence became interested in nineteenth-century American literature. Earlier in the year he had read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and he followed this up with Typee and Omoo, which described island societies peopled by unspoiled savages. He then read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, The Prairie, The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder, Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. ‘It surprises me,’ Lawrence told Amy Lowell, now acting as his American patron, ‘how much older, over-ripe and withering into abstraction, this American classic literature is, than English literature of the same time … But how good these books are!’ Like Columbus, Lawrence had discovered a long-inhabited land.182
Robert Mountsier had suggested that he act as Lawrence’s American agent, thus igniting Lawrence’s desire to ‘transfer’ all his life, as he put it, to America, but the war made this transfer impossible and so he turned himself into a critic of American literature instead. Studies in Classic American Literature, the greatest work of literary criticism of the age, began life as a series of proposed lectures to be delivered in New York called ‘The Transcendent Element in American (Classic) Literature’ before swiftly evolving into a ‘ten-barrelled pistol’ of eight essays, a ‘thrilling blood-and-thunder, your money-or-your-life kind of thing: hands-up America!’183 No one before Lawrence had suggested that American literature was anything other than a roughly textured collection of adventure stories, let alone that these tales might contain their own classics, and Lawrence – with the supreme confidence later shown by F. R. Leavis and Harold Bloom – drew up his own canon. Passing over Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, he selected Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and all of Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Melville and Whitman. What these writers revealed, he argued in the first of his essays, ‘The Spirit of Place’, is that America was not the fresh-faced child of Europe but its untranslatable ‘other’. Lawrence was the first to employ the word ‘other’ in the sense of radical alterity, but then otherness – sexual otherness, the otherness of plants, birds and animals – was his subject as much as ‘oneness’ was Whitman’s. We tend to think, Lawrence wrote, in terms of ‘likeness and oneness’ but ‘must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness’.
There is a stranger on the face of the earth, and it is no use our trying any further to gull ourselves that he is one of us, and just as we are. There is an unthinkable gulf between us and America, and across the space we see, not our own folk signalling to us, but strangers, incomprehensible beings, simulacra perhaps of ourselves, but other, creatures of an other-world.184
Lawrence discovered in American ‘classics’ a version of his own duality: what distinguishes these texts, he argued, is their unconscious duplicity: in each case a simple tale disguises a complex symbolic meaning. Lawrence’s essays on American literature similarly operate on two levels: to reach the lower level, we have to work through what he called his ‘personal philosophy’ which he now described, in a metaphor he returned to, as having ‘got off my chest’.
Those areas of Lawrence’s thinking which are most derided, from his dismissal of evolution to his faith in the ganglia at the pit of the stomach, come from theosophy and because his personal philosophy was deeply rooted in this pseudo-religion, it is necessary to introduce the theory and its founder, Madame Helena Blavatsky. For all his sense of himself as an outsider, Lawrence often swam with rather than against the tide; everyone he knew believed in the importance of free sexual expression, for example, and everyone he knew was interested in theosophy. A medley of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, Mesmerism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Neoplatonism, Occultism, Darwinism, Orientalism, Egyptian mythology, Paracelsus, anthropology and cosmology, theosophy sounds to us like mumbo-jumbo, but it served an important purpose to the late Victorians by suggesting a belief system with more wonder than Christianity and a theory of progress less depressing than Darwin’s. ‘All the best part of knowledge,’ Lawrence said in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ‘is inconceivable’,185 and by returning the inconceivable to an over-explained world, theosophy laid the groundwork for the alternative lifestyles and therapies of the later part of the century. Blavatsky’s aim was to condense the Victorian smorgasbord of spiritual and scientific movements to a single source that could serve as the ultimate authority, and this she found in an ancient Tibetan ‘Master’ called Morya whose teachings she disseminated through two divinely dictated theosophical bibles, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888).
Lawrence thought The Secret Doctrine, which he read in Zennor, ‘in many ways a bore, and not quite real. Yet one can glean a marvellous lot from it, enlarge the understanding immensely.’186 One of the things he now better understood was the earth’s ‘circuit of vital magnetism’, and he discovered in classic American literature a power-plant of untapped energy of precisely the kind Blavatsky had described. Europe and America, he explained in ‘The Spirit of Place’, represent the poles of positive and negative vitalism, which is why European men were compelled to sail in the direction of the New World. Like migrating birds, ‘without knowing or willing’, these mariners were borne ‘down the great magnetic wind’.187 Everything and everyone in the universe was connected to a vast electrical grid and to understand this connectivity, Lawrence wrote in his essay on Hawthorne, ‘it is necessary again to consider the bases of the human consciousness’.188
The reason why Lawrence’s understanding of human anatomy bears no relation to that of his doctors is again down to Madame Blavatsky, although his theories recall those of the popular scientists of the Enlightenment who argued that bodies contained waves of invisible fluid known as humours. According to theosophy, consciousness itself is housed in the body, and the body is a magnet whose front is the ‘live end’ and whose back ‘the closed opposition’. The unconscious mind is located in the great nerve centres of the solar and cardiac plexus and composed of ‘seven planes’, each one charged with positive or negative energy. This body-electric plugs into a universal transmission network of high-voltage power lines; the current of physical attraction is the same as the circuit that sets Marconi wires vibrating, and the bond between mother and child is also the product of animal magnetism: the newly born baby moves, Lawrence would argue, with ‘magnetic propulsion’ to the breast; the ‘first consciousness’ of the child is a ‘great magnetic or dynamic centre’ which pushes ‘in its circuits between two beings: love and wrath, cleaving and repulsion’, the child’s screams send out ‘violent waves’ as though ‘the air were surcharged with electricity’ and the mother’s subsequent anger, like ‘an outburst of lightning’, allows the ‘storm’ to subside.189
