Burning Man, page 19
He would work his congregation up to a frenzy; then, licking his finger to turn the imaginary pages of the book of Judgement and suddenly darting a finger at some sinner in the congregation: ‘Is your name written in the book?’ he would shout.
A collier’s wife in a little sailor hat, in a frenzy of repentance, would clatter down the aisle, throw herself on her knees in front of the altar and pray: ‘O Lord, our Henry would ’ave come too, only he dursn’t, O Lord, so I come as well for him, O Lord!’ It was a marvellous scene! First as the parson then as the collier’s wife Lawrence made me shake with laughter.44
Lawrence, said David Garnett, made them all laugh ‘until laughing was an agony’, but it was less mirth than hysteria. Douglas, however, never laughed at Lawrence’s satires. Charles Duff recalled in his memoir of Norman Douglas that while Douglas ‘preferred the humorously satirical to the serious … there were some subjects about which I never heard him speak other than seriously. One was D. H. Lawrence.’45
Max Beerbohm, ‘A flask of Bombarolina; and Mr. Norman Douglas bent on winning an admission that the rites of the Church are all a survival of Paganism pure and simple.’
This was a great age of parody, and shortly before Lawrence left England in 1919, Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men appeared. One of the most curious and perfect books ever written, Seven Men is a collection of biographical fantasies about figures from the 1890s who find themselves at sea in the twentieth century, and Beerbohm – a friend of Douglas and one of these figures himself – wanders among his creations. In the opening story, ‘Enoch Soames’, Beerbohm and the illustrator William Rothenstein are drinking vermouth in the Café Royal when they spot a man in a soft black hat and cape, with the expression of ‘a donkey looking over a gate’. He is, they realise, Enoch Soames, Catholic diabolist and author of a neglected collection of poems called ‘Negations’. Some time later, Beerbohm and Soames are lunching together in Soho when they are joined at their table by a stranger.
On one side sat a tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelian man whom I had seen from time to time in the domino room and elsewhere. On the other side sat Soames. They made a queer contrast in that sunlit room – Soames sitting haggard in that hat and cape which nowhere at any season had I seen him doff, and this other, this keenly vital man, at sight of whom I more than ever wondered whether he were a diamond merchant, a conjuror, or the head of a private detective agency.46
The flashy man turns out to be the Devil, with whom Soames makes a pact that in exchange for his soul he will be transported a hundred years into the future to discover his posthumous reputation. Landing in the reading room of the British Library in 1997, Soames searches for his name in the catalogue. When he returns to 1897 – and before being escorted to hell – he reports to Beerbohm that the only mention of Enoch Soames to be found was a satire by Beerbohm himself, in a book called Seven Men.
Maurice Magnus and Norman Douglas step straight from these same pages. The fate of Magnus, who also aspired to literary immortality, is precisely that of Enoch Soames: if Maurice Magnus is heard of today, it is because of the satire by D. H. Lawrence. Could Lawrence – who also wandered among his own creations and was equally at sea in the twentieth century – have read Seven Men? He did not mention Beerbohm but Beerbohm mentioned Lawrence: ‘Poor D. H. Lawrence. He never realized, don’t you know – he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat of a handicap to a writer.’47 The two men could not have been more different, but in the opening section of the Memoir of Maurice Magnus, the detached and immaculate Max Beerbohm and the stark, staring mad D. H. Lawrence meet at the same table and share the same joke.
The person whom Lawrence most constantly mocked, said David Garnett, ‘was himself … He mimicked himself ruthlessly and continuously.’ He ‘acted ridiculous versions of a shy and gawky Lawrence being patronised by literary lions, of a winsome Lawrence charming his landlady, or a bad-tempered whining Lawrence picking a quarrel with Frieda over nothing.’ Garnett likened these self-parodies to Charlie Chaplin, but Lawrence was more bitter and ‘less sentimental’ than the tramp in the curly hat.48
The provincial persona Lawrence adopts in the Memoir of Maurice Magnus serves, at least in part, as a defence against the sexualities of his companions, and he insists throughout the Memoir on his difference from both Magnus and Douglas, a difference manifested most forcefully in their attitudes to money. Who paid what percentage of the bill for drinks and meals was always for Douglas a bone of contention, while Lawrence was intent on holding tight to what little he had. Precisely how much this is we are kept informed of at every stage. ‘I landed in Italy with nine pounds in my pocket,’ he tells us in the first paragraph of the Memoir, ‘and about twelve pounds lying in the bank in London. Nothing more. We should have to go very softly, if we were to house ourselves in Italy for the winter.’ Magnus, Lawrence thought, despised him for being penny-pinching.
‘Oh,’ said Magnus. ‘Why, that’s the very time to spend money, when you’ve got none. If you’ve got none, why try to save it? That’s been my philosophy all my life: when you’ve got no money, you may just as well spend it. If you’ve got a good deal, that’s the time to look after it.’ Then he laughed his queer little laugh, rather squeaky. These were his exact words.
‘Precisely,’ said Douglas. ‘Spend when you’ve nothing to spend, my boy. Spend hard then.’
‘No,’ said I. ‘If I can help it, I will never let myself be penniless while I live. I mistrust the world too much.’
‘But if you’re going to live in fear of the world,’ said Magnus, ‘what’s the point of living at all? Might as well die.’
I think I give his words almost verbatim. He had a certain impatience of me and of my presence.49
Lawrence, who would remember Magnus’s remarks about living in fear of the world, was as frugal as anyone raised in a large family on thirty-five shillings a week, and in conversations like this he became his mother taunting her husband for spending his income on drink. Lydia Lawrence’s anger about money set the tone of the house, and Lawrence later, in ‘An Autobiographical Fragment’, described her generation of women as reacting against ‘the ordinary high-handed obstinate husband who went off to the pub to enjoy himself and waste the bit of money that was so precious to his family. The woman felt herself the higher moral being: and justly, as far as economic morality goes.’50 Lawrence also felt himself the higher moral being as far as economic morality goes, in relation to Douglas and Magnus.
But these were happy days, spent ‘mostly’, he recalled in the Memoir, ‘in one or other of their bedrooms, drinking whisky and talking’. They got through a bottle a day; Lawrence even bought a bottle himself although he drank very little of it, preferring the wine at mealtimes, ‘which seemed delicious after the war-famine’.51 In the company of Douglas and Magnus, Lawrence came back to life. They too were expatriates and here, in their otherworld, they amused one another and lived well.
The Memoir of Maurice Magnus tells us precisely what Magnus and Douglas sounded like, while revealing very little, beyond discussions about food and money, of their conversation. This is because, according to Douglas in Looking Back, Lawrence did not ‘understand’ in writing ‘how conversation works’. ‘In Women in Love, for example,’ Douglas complained, ‘we find pages and pages of drivel. Those endless and pointless conversations! That dreary waste of words!… Lawrence never divined that conversation and dialogues are precious contrivances, to be built up con amore; that they should suggest a clue to character and carry forward the movement instead of retarding it; that they should be sparkling oases, not deserts of tiresome small talk.’52 Most of our conversations, however, are a ‘dreary waste of words’, and the conversation between Douglas and Magnus, as recorded by Lawrence, is indeed a desert of ‘tiresome small talk’. This is quite possibly an accurate account: according to Aldous Huxley, from the 1920s onwards Douglas talked about nothing but boys, sex and drink. Did Magnus, however, not have a wider repertoire? Did he expand, for example, on his tour of pre-revolutionary Russia, his experience as a theatrical agent, his brief marriage or his daring escape from the French Foreign Legion?
We know from his many admirers that Douglas had once been a versatile companion whose interests ranged from the formation of forest loam to the best recipe for potato salad, and that he had no patience with tourist gush (‘Isn’t that all rather Cinquecento, my dear,’ he said to Nancy Cunard, when she suggested seeing Renaissance art in Florence).53 An aesthete, a pagan and a Darwinist, aged eighteen, Douglas had contributed an article to The Zoologist on ‘Variation of Plumage in the Corvidae’, and in his twenties he published such monographs as The Herpetology of the Grand Duchy of Baden, The Pumice Stone Industry of the Lipari Islands and On the Darwinian Hypothesis of Sexual Selection.
Apart from catching his likeness, Lawrence says nothing in the Memoir about the life and times of Norman Douglas. He would, however, have been familiar with the details. Seventeen years older than Lawrence, Douglas was born in Austria in 1868 and was aged five when his father, a Scottish laird called John Sholto Douglas, died in a fall in the Austrian Alps. Douglas’s family were a cadet branch of the Queensberry Douglases: his father shared the name of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, father of Lord Alfred Douglas and the man who destroyed Oscar Wilde. His mother, Wanda Freiin von Poellnitz, was the daughter of a Prussian baron and the granddaughter of James Ochoncar, 17th Lord Forbes. When Douglas was eight, Wanda remarried and sent her son to school in England, which he hated. He completed his education at the Karlsruhe Gymnasium after which, in 1893, he joined the British diplomatic service. As a schoolboy Douglas had travelled extensively across the Mediterranean where he observed the flora and fauna, and as a diplomat he visited Finland, Poland, Istanbul, Ankara and the Lipari Islands. His career terminated, however, in St Petersburg 1895 – the year of the Oscar Wilde trial – when one of his two mistresses fell pregnant. Douglas fled to Europe, bought a villa in the Bay of Naples (where Wilde also went in 1897) and became involved with the fifteen-year-old brother of his current mistress. He then married his first cousin, after which his life rapidly changed course. By 1904 he was divorced, no longer sexually interested in adults, and – to his ex-wife’s distress – the sole custodian of their two young sons. Like his good friend Hilda Doolittle, Douglas was more comfortable in the ancient world and so he bought land on Capri, the former Xanadu of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, where he took over their imperial role. It was Douglas’s siren’s song that drew to the rock all those writers and exiles who washed up on Capri in the first half of the twentieth century – including D. H. Lawrence.
In 1908, when the family fortune disappeared, Douglas took a desk job at the English Review in London and reinvented himself, aged forty, as a classical travel writer. His essays about Ischia and Tiberius, published in the English Review in 1909, reappeared in Siren Land in 1911. The first of his celebrations of Capri and its environs, Siren Land is an entirely idiosyncratic creation: erudite, curmudgeonly, witty, digressive and nostalgic. Siren Land, said Douglas, was simply an account of ‘dreaming through the summer months to the music of cicadas’. Framed around the search for what songs the Sirens sang, it is a celebration above all of Tiberius, an inhabitant of the rock islet and ‘a siren-worshipper all his life’. This was followed by Fountains in the Sand, about a walking tour in Tunisia, and, in 1915, Old Calabria, which proved his most enduring work. Then, in 1916 – the year his former wife burned to death in her bed – Douglas was obliged, as he liked to say, ‘to put a slice of sea’ between himself and England when he was arrested for kissing a boy in South Kensington Underground station. Skipping bail, he fled London and returned to the Mediterranean where he set himself up as a pederast and a gentleman. The following year he became a celebrity when South Wind, his first novel, was published. Set on a Mediterranean rock called Nepenthe (after the opiate in The Odyssey), whose inhabitants are caricatures of those people Douglas didn’t like, South Wind proved an opiate for the war years. Like the island itself, which was part Capri and part Never-Never Land, the book distracted its readers from current events.
Douglas’s writings on southern Italy introduced Lawrence to the Mediterranean, and to the idea that travel writing was a dual narrative involving a geographical and a symbolic journey. Before he met Lawrence, Norman Douglas had been a figure to contend with: Joseph Conrad, an early friend, encouraged him; Graham Greene, a later friend, revered him, and Evelyn Waugh emulated his ironic detachment. Nabokov admired his muscular prose but not his sexuality. Douglas, Nabokov told his wife, was a ‘malicious pederast’, and as such is surely the model for Lolita’s Humbert Humbert.54 Nabokov ensures Douglas a part in the novel: Gaston Godin, Humbert’s homosexual colleague at Beardsley College, has a photograph of Norman Douglas on his studio wall and Godin is later involved, Humbert gleefully informs us, in a ‘sale histoire in Naples of all places!’
The sight of Douglas promenading down the strade with an urchin by his side became a feature of Florentine life. Occasionally, when the boy’s parents caught up with him, he was obliged to flee. ‘Florence is taboo for me … at present,’ Douglas wrote to Lytton Strachey on one such occasion in 1922, when he was hiding out in Prato. He currently went out ‘thickly veiled and wearing blue glasses and a carroty beard’. Looking, in other words, like D. H. Lawrence.55
Before he left England, Lawrence complained that he found people ‘ultimately boring’.56 In the company of Douglas and Magnus he found them interesting again. Florence, Lawrence told Katherine Mansfield, was filled with ‘extremely nice people’,57 especially those the Florentines called the stranieri inverti, whom Douglas called the ‘pederast loungers’. This group – including Reggie Turner, best friend of Beerbohm and acolyte of Oscar, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, translator of Proust, the painter and musician Collingwood Gee, and Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude – lived in what Reggie Turner’s biographer describes as a ‘world without time’ but was, more precisely, the world of the 1890s.58 Reggie, like Beerbohm, was too solid a construct of the fin de siècle to gain a foothold in the twentieth century, and his apartment on the Viale Milton, which Lawrence knew well, was decorated with drawings by Beerbohm and photos of Wilde. Here Reggie held court, said Douglas, like an old maid in Kensington. Reggie in turn described Douglas as a combination of Roman emperor and Roman cab driver.
It is worth pausing to watch Lawrence among the bohemians because he was not, as Douglas noted, bohemian himself; he mixed with the avant-garde but did not belong there. Lawrence ‘belonged’ nowhere, but bohemia was as close as he would get to a convivial culture. Douglas mocked his discomfort in bohemia but bohemia was equally uncomfortable around Lawrence because he was a remover of masks, and Douglas was posing as a sybarite. A Victorian scientist with a Romantic sensibility, Douglas also belonged nowhere; he teased his audience by swishing his tail and stomping his cloven hoof, but he kept his precise nature under wraps. He led a double life: he had his ‘Mediterranean’ circle who discussed his wickedness at catty tea parties but he was not prepared to stand in the dock and defend the love that dare not speak its name: when he had been arrested in South Kensington station, he crossed a few borders rather than face a scandal. ‘Burn your boats!’ he counselled in Looking Back. ‘This has ever been my system in times of stress.’59 Douglas lived, like Lawrence and like Magnus, on the move and on the run.
While his larger conversations with Douglas and Magnus are not recorded, Lawrence does let slip a tender moment where Magnus says, ‘How lovely your hair is – such a lovely colour! What do you dye it with?’ Lawrence laughed, but Magnus was perfectly serious. ‘It’s got no particular colour at all,’ Lawrence replied, ‘so I couldn’t dye it that.’ Magnus didn’t believe him. ‘It puzzled me,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘and it puzzles me still.’60
On Sunday 23 November 1919, the pomades and powders packed up in the silver-studded suitcases, Magnus caught the midnight train to Rome, snuggled up in a first-class compartment. ‘Why should I go second?’ he reasoned. ‘It’s beastly enough to travel at all.’ His plan was to continue after Christmas to Monte Cassino. Lawrence, who would be spending Christmas twenty miles away from the monastery in Picinisco on the edge of the Abruzzi mountains, asked whether he might pay the place a visit. ‘Certainly,’ Magnus replied. ‘Come when I am there. I shall be there in about a month’s time. Do come! Do be sure and come. It’s a wonderful place – ah, wonderful. It will make a great impression on you. Do come. Do come.’61
