Burning Man, page 15
This was the body-electric that Lawrence described in Women in Love, where Hermione feels ‘shocks of electricity’ running up and down her arm when she attacks Birkin, and Gerald – who electrifies, and thus destroys, the mines – gives off ‘a sort of electric power’ which Gudrun finds ‘turgid and voluptuously rich … He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge.’190 This same body dominated Lawrence’s reading of classic American literature; electricity was everywhere but especially in Whitman. ‘I sing the body electric,’ Whitman sang in ‘Song of Myself’.
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Whitman’s body is the surging afflatus through which the ‘threads … connect the stars’.
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
Edgar Allan Poe was similarly, Lawrence wrote, ‘a lodestone’ and his women ‘the soft metal’, while love, in Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, ‘acts as an electric attraction rather than a communion between self and self’.191 Lawrence’s American was ‘a virtuous Frankenstein monster’ animated by lightning bolts; this was the term he used to describe Benjamin Franklin, that other experimenter with lightning. Franklin, Lawrence argued, ‘autonomised himself’ when he took the goal of moral perfection to its extreme.192 The startling connection between Benjamin Franklin and Victor Frankenstein was, as Lawrence saw it, entirely logical: Franklin and Mary Shelley were simply tuning into the same electrical waves.
The abstractions of Shelley feature heavily in Lawrence’s American essays. If Shelley and Franklin, he argued, who ‘conceive of themselves in terms of pure abstraction, pure spirit, pure mathematical reality’, compose one half of an American, then Rousseau and Crèvecoeur, who ‘exist in terms of emotion and sensation’, compose the other half.193 Lawrence prefers Crèvecoeur’s child of nature to Franklin’s virtuous monster because Crèvecoeur, like Lawrence, sees the ‘wild otherness’ of animals, ‘the pride, the recoil, the jewel-like isolation of the vivid self’. Crèvecoeur’s birds are not like Shelley’s ‘little singing angel’ but creatures possessed of ‘dark, primitive, weapon-like souls’.194 They are creatures like Melville, whom Lawrence sees as less sailor than seabird. Melville ‘does not pit himself against the sea, he is of it. And he has that inscrutable magic and mystery of pure sea-creatures.’ Lawrence’s encounter with Melville, ‘The greatest seer and poet of the sea, perhaps in all the world’, is the most exciting moment in modern criticism. Moby Dick, derided and forgotten, was for him one of the world’s ‘strangest, and most wonderful books’. Beneath the tale of the whale hunt lay the ‘tormented symbolism’: the sea was a symbol, whiteness was a symbol, the Pequod was a symbol.195
Lawrence’s ten-barrelled pistol of essays was loaded by Madame Blavatsky and pointed firmly at Murry, whose Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study was published in August 1916. ‘The Russians’, Murry announced, were a new ‘phenomenon which has lately burst upon our astonished minds’. Lawrence responded by saying that Dostoevsky could ‘stick his head between the feet of Christ, and waggle his behind in the air’.196 In his foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence was in better temper: ‘Two bodies of modern literature,’ he argued, ‘seem to me to have come to a real verge, the Russian and the American.’ Murry represented the Russian body, and Lawrence represented the American. Dostoevsky, explained Lawrence, ‘burrowed underground, into the decomposing psyche’, while ‘Whitman has gone further, in actual living expression, than any man.’197 Whitman’s verse is ‘like the song of a bird. For a bird doesn’t rhyme and scan.’ He loosened the poetic line and his ‘whole soul’ thus ‘speaks at once, in a naked spontaneity … unutterably lovely’.198 So while Constance Garnett translated Dostoevsky’s words for an English readership and Murry translated Dostoevsky’s thought for the same public, Lawrence proposed himself as the interpreter of America’s ‘untranslatable otherness’.199
* * *
Up in Bosigran Castle in the summer of 1917, Cecil Gray, working on his opera, was discovering that Cornwall was a ‘magical country’ where the magic was ‘black’. He loved the wild flowers and the evening frogs and the swallows dipping and skimming through the towers of the derelict engine houses next to his house, but when autumn came the beauty gave way to what he could only describe as ‘a growing malaise’. What distinguished the Cornish spirit of place, Gray recalled in Musical Chairs, was the way in which ‘the boundary line between the subjective and the objective’ became ‘vague and indecisive’, so that you began to distrust the evidence of your senses.200 Lawrence agreed, describing Cornwall in Kangaroo as ‘a country that makes a man psychic’.201 Gray was troubled by noise from the tin mines which were haunted by malevolent sprites known as ‘knockers’, and the constant hammering – like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth or the ‘tapping at my chamber door’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ – found its way into Lawrence’s wind-poems. ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’ ends with the dreaded sound:
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
‘Knock, knock, ’tis no more than a red rose rapping,’ wrote Lawrence in ‘Love Storm’, it is the ‘west wind rapping’. He returns to the image in ‘The Wind, the Rascal’:
The wind, the rascal, knocked at my door, and I said:
My love is come!
The wind that autumn lifted the sea on to the land, wrecking the Hockings’ turnip fields and smashing Lawrence’s pea-rows. In early October Lawrence and Frieda went to Bosigran Castle for supper. They were singing German folk songs around the piano when there came a knocking at the door. Six armed officers burst in to inform them that a candle flickering through an upstairs window was, they believed, signalling to a German submarine. There were strict rules about blackout times in coastal regions and Gray was fined £20, but the episode had more severe repercussions for the Lawrences. On 12 October Lawrence returned with William Henry from Penzance to find Frieda in distress: their cottage had been searched; his papers were disturbed, letters from Baroness von Richthofen had been removed and Frieda’s sewing was all over the floor. Later that afternoon four officers appeared with a formal expulsion order: the Lawrences, supposed leaders of an espionage circle, had three days in which to leave the county.
‘I cannot even conceive how I have incurred suspicion,’ Lawrence blustered to Lady Cynthia Asquith, ‘have not the faintest notion,’202 but he had been as contentious as it was possible to be since his arrival eighteen months ago, raging against the war, the Resurrection, the Government, the English and the world in general to anyone who was prepared to listen and to many who were not. So with no money and nowhere to go the couple were chased out of Cornwall by a pitchfork-wielding mob. Taking only their essentials – including Ottoline’s lump of lapis lazuli – they caught the night train to Paddington where Lawrence sat among the soldiers ‘perfectly still, and pale, in a kind of after death’.203 Once they arrived in London, Lawrence told Cecil Gray that ‘the people are not people any more. They are factors, really ghastly, like lemures, evil spirits of the dead. What shall we do, how shall we get out of this Inferno?’204
* * *
As they approached the City of Dis, Dante and Virgil discovered that the devils in the watchtowers had been alerted to their presence through a complex signalling system:
I say, continuing, that long before
we two had reached the foot of that tall tower,
our eyes had risen upward, toward its summit,
because of two small flames that flickered there,
while still another flame returned their signal,
so far off it was scarcely visible.
(Inferno, Canto 8, 1–6)
‘Now you are caught, foul soul!’ shouted the boatman who rowed them across the River Styx.
PART THREE
Exiled from his country of exile, Lawrence returned to the exact spot in which he had made the decision, in November 1915, to go to Cornwall in the first place. In October 1917, the Lawrences found themselves back on Well Walk, the road linking Hampstead Underground to the Vale of Health, as the guests of Dollie Radford, who lived four doors down from the house in which Ernest Weekley had been raised and where Frieda had left her children with their grandparents on the morning of 3 May 1912. Frieda’s response to the proximity of her new life to her old life has not been recorded, but when Lawrence walked on the Heath, he recalled not the Zeppelin nights of 1915, but Lower Tregerthen. ‘In his eyes he saw the farm below,’ he said of Somers in Kangaroo, ‘– grey, naked, stony, with the big, pale-roofed new barn – and the network of dark green fields with the pale-grey walls – and the gorse and the sea. Torture of nostalgia. He craved to be back, his soul was there.’1 They lasted in Hampstead a week and then accepted an invitation to stay with Hilda Aldington, who was now living in Mecklenburgh Square, a handsome block of Georgian houses on the edge of Bloomsbury between Coram’s Fields and Gray’s Inn Road. Lawrence got out of the Inferno by trading it for the underworld of Hades and Persephone.
Since last seeing one another in 1915, Lawrence and H.D. had exchanged letters and manuscripts. She sent him poems which he commented upon, and he sent her drafts of Women in Love and Look! We Have Come Through!, both of which ‘revulsed’ her: she thought the former too ‘frenzied’ while the latter contained ‘too much body and emotions’.2 She and Lawrence were crucially divided on the subject of bodies. Why, H.D. wondered, ‘in your interminable novels, do you not write – to someone, anyone – as you write me in your letters?’3 Lawrence’s ‘flaming letters’, as H.D. called them, which she kept in a special box together with the miniature of her mother, were later destroyed by Aldington which is why they are not included in his Collected Letters, but H.D. knew them by heart and described their content in her roman-à-clef, Bid Me to Live:
Hilda Doolittle
He had written about love, about her frozen altars; ‘Kick over your tiresome house of life,’ he had said, he had jeered, ‘frozen lily of virtue,’ he had said, ‘our languid lily of virtue nods perilously near the pit,’ he had written, ‘come away where the angels come down to earth.’4
The suggestion that she ‘come away’ with him was seen by H.D. as a ‘flare’ in the darkness. Lawrence had written this particular letter in the summer of 1916, after the Murrys had fled Higher Tregerthen and at a time when Aldington was having one of his affairs. H.D. returned to it repeatedly, obsessively; it was a turning point in her life. ‘You said I was a living spirit,’ she explains in Bid Me to Live, ‘but I wasn’t living until you wrote to me, “We will go away together.”’5 In reply to his suggestion, H.D. sent Lawrence what she called her ‘Orpheus sequence’ in which she explored the afterlife of her marriage. When Eurydice dies from a snake bite, Orpheus descends to the underworld to retrieve her and charms Hades with the music of his lyre. He can have his wife back, Hades says, on condition that she walk behind him through the caves into the upperworld; should he turn round to look at her she will be lost to him for ever. Unable to hear her footsteps, Orpheus turns round to look, and consigns Eurydice to perpetual night.
The sequence was originally written as a dialogue between husband and wife, but Lawrence told H.D. to stay with the ‘woman vibration’ and so it became Eurydice’s own lament.
So you have swept me back,
I who could have walked with the live souls
above the earth,
I who could have slept among the live flowers
at last;
so for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I am swept back
where dead lichens drip
dead cinders upon moss of ash;
so for your arrogance
I am broken at last,
I who had lived unconscious,
who was almost forgot;
if you had let me wait
I had grown from listlessness
into peace,
if you had let me rest with the dead,
I had forgot you
and the past.
H.D. was a poet Lawrence ‘feared and wondered over’, and she offered him and Frieda her rooms, he said, ‘with a wild free hand’.6 The rooms consisted of a large first-floor bedsit with three French windows opening on to a balcony overlooking the square, and the temporary use of a top-floor bedroom with a dormer window which belonged to her friend John Cournos, a Ukrainian Jew known for his grey fedora hat, polka-dot ties, spats, gloves and walking stick. While Cournos was in Petrograd decoding Marconigrams for the British, he lent his bed to an American beauty called Dorothy Yorke with whom he had been in love for the last six years. His relationship with Dorothy, Cournos believed, was on the verge of becoming something, and he asked H.D. to look after her until his return. But when Aldington, away at Officers’ Training Camp, came home for leave, he too fell for Dorothy Yorke, and so he and she now slept together on the top floor while H.D. slept alone downstairs. H.D. saw shapes and patterns everywhere, and this current rearrangement she compared to the ‘concentric, geometric, exactly patterned circles of hell’.7
Cournos’s rage at losing Dorothy Yorke was levelled not at Aldington but at H.D. herself who, he believed, had encouraged the situation because she thrived on situations. She later conceded his point. Terrified of again becoming pregnant, H.D. had stopped sleeping with her ‘great, over-sexed officer’ of a husband who in turn complained that his wife had, as he put it, ‘no body’.8 H.D.’s bodilessness, however, was part of her art. When Amy Lowell published, without permission, H.D.’s photograph in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, H.D. was furious: ‘It’s not that picture, but any picture! The initials, “H.D.”, had no identity attached; they could have been pure spirit. But with this I’m embodied.’9
Richard Aldington was back at camp when the Lawrences, Cornish mud still caked on their boots, arrived at Mecklenburgh Square. Lawrence now slept on the top floor, Dorothy Yorke shared the couch with Frieda, and H.D. had the campbed behind the Chinese screen. ‘One seems to be, in some queer way, vitally active here,’ Lawrence told Gray. ‘And then, people, one or two, seem to give a strange new response.’10 This new response came in the realisation that he, Frieda and H.D. could form what H.D. described as ‘a perfect triangle’.11 No sooner had Lawrence arrived than he announced that ‘Frieda was there forever on his right hand, I was there for ever – on his left.’ He duly passed on to H.D. the lapis lazuli paperweight given to him by Ottoline: ‘I’m sick of the Ott,’ he explained. ‘She bores me.’ Lawrence and Ottoline would not speak to one another again.12
The Lawrences brought their own situation to bear on H.D.’s situation. ‘Frieda and I were alone together in the big room,’ H.D. recalled of their first night together, when Frieda said ‘that she had a friend, an older man who had told her that “if love is free, everything is free”’. Frieda went on to confide that ‘Lawrence does not really care for women. He only cares for men. Hilda, you have no idea what he is like.’13 It is all so believable: Frieda quoting Otto Gross, clearly still her guide and master, Lawrence’s fantasy of having both women bathe his feet, Frieda’s warning Hilda off with her sotto voce ‘confidence’ about her husband’s sexuality. But H.D., her self-absorption having long perverted her judgement, understood Frieda to be encouraging rather than discouraging an affair between herself and Lawrence, on the grounds that Frieda herself would then, as she apparently explained, be ‘free’ for Cecil Gray: the Lawrences, H.D. insisted, had it ‘all fixed up between them’. In which case the concentric circles which had become a triangle would turn into a square.14
This was a radical misreading of the Lawrences’ game. Frieda, who considered herself free for Cecil Gray anyway, would never allow her husband to be similarly free and would certainly not pave the way for his relationship with a woman he had compared to Isis. But H.D. assumed that Lawrence was in love with her – why else would he tell her to ‘kick over’ her ‘tiresome house of life’ and accompany him to ‘where the angels come down to earth’? The woman who interpreted her world through symbols was blind to Lawrence’s own runes: he was suggesting by his imagery not that she leave the tiresome house of Aldington but that she reinvigorate her Shelleyan verse; her figures were as lifeless as the bird that never wert. When Lawrence talked about her ‘frozen lily of virtue’, it was not a reference to her marriage bed but a criticism of her symbolism: no living thing, least of all a lily, should be frozen. ‘A waterlily’, as Lawrence put it in ‘The Poetry of the Present’, ‘heaves herself from the flood, looks around, gleams, and is gone.’15
