Burning Man, page 17
‘I have not seen Hilda for some time,’ Lawrence shrugged in June, ‘but believe she is happy in Cornwall – as far as it is possible to be happy, with the world as it is.’40 The Lawrences had now moved to Mountain Cottage, near Wirksworth in Derbyshire. He was back home in the navel of England, the land of iron and coal, and feeling ‘very lost … and exiled’. The house, paid for by Lawrence’s sister Ada, stood on ‘the rim of a steep deep valley, looking over darkish, folded hills’, and he felt as though he were ‘on a sort of ledge half-way down a precipice, and didn’t know how to get up or down’.41 He accepted an offer of £50 from Oxford University Press to write a history textbook because so long as his novels were untouchable, textbooks would have to do. The original title was Landmarks in European History but he changed Landmarks to Movements because movement, at this moment in European history, was impossible. And because of the scandal still attached to his name, he agreed with his editor that he should publish the book – not least because it was for children – under a pseudonym, and he chose Lawrence H. Davison. The voice, however, is unmistakably D. H. Lawrence. Movements in European History bears scant relation to the usual dry feed supplied to classrooms. It might be said to bear scant relation to European history in general, resembling more a covert autobiography or a collection of vivid short stories called ‘Rome’, ‘Christianity’, ‘The Germans’ and so forth. The past, Lawrence told the schoolchildren, was the warring of opposites: ‘the passion of fighting and violence, and the passion for blissful holiness’.42 Looking down from his own window on to the wild hills, he now gave, for the first and final time, his interpretation of the Divine Comedy: the poem was Dante’s version of the passing of the old, familiar, cruel world into an abstract future in which he had no place. In the book’s epilogue Lawrence universalised his own psychology:
Every man has two selves, among his manifold Self. He has a herd-self, which is vulgar, common, ugly, like the voice of the man in the crowd. And he has a better self, which is quiet and slow, and which is most of the time puzzled. From his better self, he is almost dumb. From his herd-self, he shouts and yells and rants.43
The final horror of Lawrence’s war occurred on his thirty-third birthday, the ‘sacred’ age when Christ had died. He was told to attend another medical examination, this time in a schoolhouse in Derby where, with ‘an indescribable tone of jeering, gibing shamelessness’, he and the other men, including a large, shy collier, were told to strip naked and wait on benches until it came their turn to be weighed and measured. While the officials traded jokes across the room, a young medic put his hand between Lawrence’s legs to cup his genitals, and Lawrence felt his ‘eyes going black’. He bent over while the medic inspected his anus, jesting all the while. Lawrence vowed that day that he would never be touched again, and never again be at ‘the disposal of society’.44
An armistice was declared on 11 November, and Lawrence – briefly in London – spent the night singing German songs. David Garnett described him as ‘ill and unhappy, with no trace of that gay sparkling love of life in his eyes which had been his most attractive feature six years before’. There was nothing to celebrate, Lawrence prophesied, because ‘the war was not over, since hate and evil had become stronger than ever; so it would soon break out once more’.45 Eight million soldiers had died in combat; six million civilians had died through war-related privations. That same month the English Review ran the first of five of his essays on classic American literature, and Lawrence saw Aldington, who was ‘very fit’. He also saw Hilda who was, Lawrence now learned, six months pregnant. The father of the child was not Aldington but Cecil Gray, who had since abandoned her, as Lawrence now did too. ‘I hope never to see you again,’ he wrote in the last of the burning letters that H.D. would ever receive from him.46
It is tempting to apply her own levels of scrutiny to Lawrence’s final words. Had he indeed been in love with H.D., and was he jealous of Gray? Did he still expect her to be there on his left-hand side and Frieda on his right? ‘Poor Hilda,’ he said in December. ‘Feeling sorry for her, one almost melts. But I don’t trust her.’47 If Lawrence felt betrayed, was that betrayal spiritual, sexual, emotional or artistic? Biographers have found various hidden meanings to this tale; Janice Robinson boldly suggests that the child was Lawrence’s and that H.D. and Aldington covered the tracks. But this is wide of the mark, not least because H.D. became pregnant in Cornwall when Lawrence was hundreds of miles away and forbidden from entering the county, but also because Lawrence, if not completely impotent, was almost certainly infertile, which realisation must have added to his sexual anxieties. His violent reaction to H.D.’s pregnancy was entirely in keeping with his character. Lawrence was jealous not of Gray but of the baby: nothing was guaranteed more to inspire his jealousy than the love between mother and child. His reaction was also in keeping with his naivety: Cecil Gray was supposed to be an anchorite monk and H.D. a blithe spirit. Despite Lawrence’s marriage, the whole question of sex still had for him ‘the fascination of horror’, and the only conception allowed for a woman from Bethlehem was the immaculate sort. Lawrence had believed in the bodilessness of Hilda Aldington, but she was now all too evidently embodied.
By the end of November he was safely back in his fortress on the ledge, but this time alone because Frieda had gone to Hermitage after one of their fights. ‘The wind is getting-up,’ Lawrence wrote to Katherine Mansfield, who was in bed with TB. ‘This place is a wind-centre, I warn you.’48 He offered to send her his latest story, ‘The Fox’, set in post-war, influenza-ravaged Cornwall. A fox has been raiding the hen-roost of an isolated farm run by two women called Banford and March. One day March sees him and he sees her. ‘He knew her. She was spellbound.’ Soon afterwards a young man with blue eyes called Henry also appears at the farm and March is again spellbound: Henry was the fox ‘and she could not see him otherwise’.
Between Christmas 1918 and April 1919, Lawrence was ill with the flu. ‘A putrid disease,’ he told his Scottish friend Catherine Carswell on the last day of February; ‘I have never been so down in the mud in all my life.’49 He was bed-bound for much of the time, occasionally taking walks which only weakened him more. Between fifty and a hundred million people died of the same virus, and so Lawrence’s survival – which Frieda put down to sheer willpower – is something of a miracle. H.D.’s daughter was born on the last day of March. She called the baby Perdita – the lost one – after the child in The Winter’s Tale who is born in prison because her father, King Leontes, wrongly believed that the queen had betrayed him. When, in late April, Lawrence was well enough to move, he and Frieda left Mountain Cottage. Black clouds sank over the Derbyshire hills, blotting out the dawn; he watched from the window as the thunderstorm broke and ‘hail lashed down with a noise like insanity … “Come hail, come rain”’. He would leave this country, he decided, ‘forever’.50
Six months later we find him alone in London, Frieda having gone to Germany to visit her mother and sisters. Aldington, who saw him in Kot’s flat, thought he seemed ‘not to care’ if he never saw Frieda again. Hunched up in a chair by the gas fire, a convenience he particularly despised, Lawrence ‘was in a peculiar mood’, Aldington recalled, ‘which I thought at first was due to the indecency of a gas fire. But no, it went much deeper than that … He was literally “satirical”, like a wild half-trapped creature, a satyr desperately fighting to get free.’ The two men walked together through the West End as the theatres were emptying, Lawrence’s red beard creating a ‘sudden little whirlpool of mob hostility’. Aldington thought he cut a pitiful figure: ‘There was no place for him in that rather sinister, post-war world. Either he must escape from it or it would crush him. He had to go into the wilderness or perish, cease to be the unique thing he was.’51
Lawrence finally left England on 13 November 1919, the fourth anniversary of the destruction of The Rainbow and the year that saw the births of the German Nazi Party, the Italian Fascist Party and the Irish Free State. The air was bitterly cold when he said goodbye to his country, and Catherine Carswell, who saw him off at Charing Cross, gave him a present of a camel-hair coat-lining. Through the window of the train the snow on the Downs hung like a shroud, and from the stern of the boat from Folkestone to Boulogne, England looked like ‘a grey, dreary grey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with her dead grey cliffs, and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above’.52
He was flying south for winter. Like Aristotle, Lawrence believed that moving south was moving up, nearer to the sun.
ITALY, 1919–1922
Purgatory
The Divine Comedy, fresco by Domenico di Michelino
PART ONE
On a dark, wet, wintry evening in November 1919 I arrived in Florence, having just got back to Italy for the first time since 1914.
D. H. Lawrence, Memoir of Maurice Magnus
His boat docked in Boulogne on the evening of 13 November and Lawrence crawled by train across France, arriving in Italy two days later. Before the war, border crossings had been liberating but since 1915, when the passport photo became a fixture on the travel scene, the innocence of movement was lost. Passport photos, in which everyone looks like a criminal, turned frontiers into places of ritual trepidation and Lawrence’s newly endorsed mugshot was a reminder that he was a creature of the state.
The station forecourt at Turin was filled with soldiers and a familiar, pre-war swagger. Lawrence took a cab and headed towards Val Salice, ten minutes outside the city, where he had arranged to stay with a philanthropical shipbuilder called Sir Walter Becker, a friend of a friend, who owned a villa inside a gated park. Knighted only three weeks earlier, Sir Walter, Lawrence told Cynthia Asquith, was a ‘C.B – O.B.M or O.B something – parvenu, etc’. Dinner having begun, he waited in the well-appointed hall. ‘It was spacious, comfortable and warm; but somewhat pretentious; rather like the imposing hall into which the heroine suddenly enters on the film.’1 Lawrence would often compare his experience of Italy to scenes in a film, a medium he was fascinated by but claimed to dislike because, he felt, the camera turned bodies into an abstraction. An extra place was laid at the table for the guest – the only man not in a dinner jacket – who then goaded his host in ‘a sincere half-mocking argument’ where Sir Walter stood up ‘for security and bank-balance and power, I for naked liberty. In the end, he rested safe on his bank balance, I in my nakedness. We hated each other – but with respect.’2
After two nights he left Turin, and to thank the Beckers he sent them a gift of Twilight in Italy, the product of his pre-war Italian excursion, which Sir Walter thought ‘a very good book, although I do not see why he named it thus’, and Sons and Lovers, ‘which’, Sir Walter confessed, ‘left as it were a bad taste in my mouth’.3 Lawrence then returned to Lerici, but it was no longer the same so he kept going south. ‘The South! The South, The South! Let me go south – I must go south,’ he wrote to Cynthia Asquith.4 In the south, he reasoned, ‘the past is so much stronger than the present, that one seems remote like the immortals, looking back at the world from their otherworld’.5
Florence was ‘strange to me’, Lawrence recalled, ‘seemed grim and dark and rather awful on the cold November evening’.6 He arrived on Wednesday 19 November, and headed from the station to the heart of the city. The Arno was rushing like ‘a mass of café au lait’7 and hooded carriages clattered over the bridges, the drivers crouching on their box seats beneath shiny umbrellas. It was a city of umbrellas. A pair of bullocks beneath a green umbrella shambled into a trot as the whip-thong flickered between their shanks and, further on, two men, arm in arm beneath another umbrella, made their nimble way. Even the bats, he wrote in his poem ‘Bat’, had wings ‘like bits of umbrella’.
Lawrence had written in advance to Norman Douglas to find him a cheap room, and sure enough there was a note from Douglas waiting at Thomas Cook’s in the Via Tornabuoni, giving the name of a pensione. Douglas ‘has never’, said Lawrence, ‘left me in the lurch’.8 They knew one another from the English Review where Douglas had been assistant editor and he had invited the Lawrences to a luncheon to celebrate their marriage. Frieda liked Douglas because he spoke to her in German, but the two men were natural enemies, which pleased them both. Douglas, according to Lawrence, was a sybarite with a ‘wicked red face and tufted eyebrows’,9 and Lawrence, according to Douglas, was ‘peevish and frothy’,10 an ‘inspired provincial’ with a ‘shuddering horror’ of nakedness. ‘I don’t like it! I don’t like it! I don’t like it!’ he recalled Lawrence squealing when he saw Florentine boys in shorts. ‘Why can’t they wear trousers?’11 Lawrence and Douglas also had a good deal in common: each was in search of a lost civilisation, each at his best around birds, beasts and flowers, and each a capricious and dangerous friend.
Norman Douglas
Maurice Magnus
Muffled in his coat, the beard now bushier and even more ragged, Lawrence made his way down the Lungarno, Douglas’s note in his pocket. It was the hour when, under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio, the swallows and bats change guard. He had passed the bridge and was watching the night fall on the swollen river when he saw two men approaching, one tall and portly, the other short and strutting, with ‘a touch of down-on-his-luck’ about them both.12 They might have been Mephistopheles and Faust or Laurel and Hardy: both were ‘buttoned up in their overcoats’, Lawrence noted, and wearing ‘curly little hats’. For every one of the tall man’s strides, the short man took five little struts. ‘Isn’t that Lawrence?’ boomed Douglas – for it was he – the voice florid and grandiose. ‘Why of course it is, of course it is, beard and all! Well how are you, eh? You got my note? Well now, my dear boy, you just go to the [Balestri] – straight ahead, straight ahead – you’ve got the number. There’s a room there for you. We shall be there in half an hour. Oh, let me introduce you to Magnus –’13
So it was at the spot where Dante first spoke to Beatrice that Lawrence first spoke to Maurice Magnus, and the irony was not lost on him. Dante had loved Beatrice from afar for nine years when, walking with her companions on a May morning in 1283, she greeted him by the Ponte Vecchio. Nor would the other legends of the Ponte Vecchio have escaped Lawrence’s notice. A stone inscription at the entrance to the bridge, one of thirty plaques in Florence quoting lines from the Divine Comedy, records the spot where on Easter morning 1216, Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti was murdered on his way to his wedding, thus initiating the feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines which led to Dante’s exile. Florence was the cradle of European banking, and it was on the Ponte Vecchio that the concept of bankruptcy was said to have originated, after soldiers broke (‘rotto’) the benches (‘banco)’ of those merchants unable to pay their debts.
* * *
‘First let me give an exact account of my experience with Magnus.’ The opening line of his Memoir of Maurice Magnus had the terse efficiency of an affidavit, so Lawrence cancelled it and began again. ‘One dark, wet, wintry evening in November 1919 I arrived in Florence, coming from Spezia.’ Nor would this do. He crossed through the first word and the last three: ‘On a dark, wet, wintry evening in November, 1919,’ he now wrote, ‘I arrived in Florence, having just got back to Italy for the first time since 1914.’ Lawrence’s final draft catches him on the wing, landing in Dante’s birthplace as if from nowhere. It has been five years since he was last in this country: now it is a dark, wet, wintry evening; then it was twilight in Italy.
When he reworked the beginning of the Memoir of Maurice Magnus, it became a piece of writing, and the ‘best single piece of writing, as writing’, he believed, that he had ever done.14 But it is still an ‘exact account’ of the facts. The Memoir contained, Lawrence explained to his American agent, Robert Mountsier, ‘just literal truth, so when you’ve read it you’ll know all there is to know’.15 At the same time, however, as providing an exact account of his encounter with Magnus – in the form of a breakdown of meals consumed, monies exchanged and islands visited – the Memoir reveals almost nothing about the peculiar nature of their relationship or why, as Frieda put it, Maurice Magnus left Lawrence feeling so ‘deeply disturbed’.16 The only truths we learn are these: that Lawrence and Magnus spent, altogether, no more than two weeks in one another’s company, that Magnus had a habit of turning up unexpectedly and bleeding money out of Lawrence, and that Lawrence felt he owed Magnus a debt. The question raised by the Memoir of Maurice Magnus is the complex nature of that debt.
The Memoir was begun in the Sicilian hilltop town of Taormina in November 1921 and completed in January 1922, the year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room and C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. It was, ‘after all’, wrote Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot, ‘a grrrreat litttttterary period’.17 Willa Cather called it the year ‘the world broke in two’,18 and Lawrence’s ambivalence about that break is the defining feature of the Memoir of Maurice Magnus. The events he describes had taken place two years before but Lawrence’s recall needed no correction: apart from revising his opening line and rethinking some later sentences, his sixty handwritten pages are as neat and unblotted as the work of a medieval scribe.
