Burning Man, page 20
Lawrence was always relieved whenever Magnus left. ‘So the little outsider was gone, and I was rather glad. I don’t think he liked me.’62 But despite repeating that Magnus despised him, was impatient with him, didn’t like him, Lawrence was determined to see him again.
Frieda was not expected until 3 December, which gave Lawrence and Douglas ten days alone. They clearly got on well: Frieda was ‘thrilled at the fireworks of wit that went off’ between them.63 Douglas’s influence can be seen in a postcard sent by Lawrence on 24 November (showing a picture of the Piazza della Signoria) in which he described himself as ‘loafing’, a word he repeated in a second card sent that same day. It was not in Lawrence’s nature to loaf, but Douglas, like Whitman, defined himself as a loafer. ‘I lean and loaf at my ease,’ sang Whitman in ‘Song of Myself’. In Alone, where Douglas describes his southern Italian wanderings, ‘loafing’ is repeated like a mantra. ‘What did you do in the Great War, grandpapa?’ Douglas imagines being asked one day. ‘I loafed, my boy,’ is his reply. ‘I have loafed into Levanto,’ Douglas drawls in the chapter on Levanto; in Rome, he makes his ‘plans for loafing through the day’.64
When Lawrence saw Keynes emerge from his bedroom in 1915 it was one of the crises of his life. So how was he feeling now about drinking whisky in the bedrooms of homosexuals? There was a difference, for Lawrence, between the intellectual inverts of Cambridge and Bloomsbury and the robust homosexuality of the ancient world and the 1890s. ‘I myself never considered Plato very wrong, or Oscar Wilde,’ he explained to David Garnett.65 What Lawrence admired was physical strength, and Douglas, unlike Keynes, was a goliath of a man.
With Magnus now gone, Douglas moved into his friend’s former room in the Pensione Balestri and tried to persuade Lawrence to take over his own unaired quarters. Lawrence stayed put on the third floor. Neither says how he occupied his time until Frieda arrived, but it was during these days that Lawrence was introduced, by Douglas, to Reggie Turner. ‘I have D. H. Lawrence (The White Peacock, The Rainbow etc) with me,’ Douglas wrote to Reggie.
Would you care to meet him? If so, let me know and I will arrange a quiet dinner somewhere, ONLY WE THREE.
I am going to prevent his meeting certain other people, because he is a damned observant fellow and might be so amused at certain aspects of Florentine life as to use it as ‘copy’ in some book: would be annoying.
Read his Twilight in Italy, if you can get a copy – that gives you a clue as to his nature which is sympathetic and yet strangely remote.66
It was probably now that Lawrence produced his astonishing essay on Michelangelo’s David with its refrain ‘Perpetual sound of water’. He wrote in a clipped, staccato present tense which he called ‘cinematographic’ because it sounds like he is directing a film: ‘Morning in Florence. Dark, grey and raining, with a perpetual sound of water’. The river churns with rain, the weir is ‘a fighting flurry of waters’ and out of a similar wetness blossoms David, ‘corpse-white and sensitive’, the ‘flower of adolescence’ standing up for naked liberty in the Piazza della Signoria. Frozen in ‘hot excitement’, David – ‘the Lily, the Water-born, most dazzling nearest the sun’ – is the child of the wet north and the fiery south, and he strains in wait, like the lover on the Grecian urn, for the orgasm that Florentines say ‘possesses him at midnight of the New Year’. This is why, Lawrence wrote, the ‘lily of Florence’ is ‘unforgettable, now I am safe in my upper room again’.67
Later, in the Memoir of Maurice Magnus, Lawrence mocked his innocent idealisation of David’s nakedness. Here he was in the lily town, home of heavy-limbed and acrid-fearless men, with Magnus fussing around in his silk kimono in demi-toilette. Magnus’s servile love for Douglas is presented as grotesque, and his pudgy body as the opposite of the Renaissance ideal. Imagine Magnus’s soft pink flanks, wet with rain, displayed on a plinth, or Douglas and Magnus wrestling naked like gladiators, their glossy flesh driving ‘deeper and deeper’, like that of Birkin and Gerald, ‘as if they would break into a oneness’.
Reggie Turner said that Douglas never read ‘a line of Lawrence except the thing about Magnus’,68 but Douglas had read a good deal of Lawrence and knew exactly what he was up against. He had warned Reggie, after all, about the dangers of dining with him. Douglas knew that Lawrence’s recklessness made his own insurrections look like those of a music-hall villain.
When he had been working at the English Review, Douglas ‘persuaded’, as he put it, the editor to publish two of Lawrence’s early stories, ‘The Prussian Officer’ (originally called ‘Honour and Arms’) and ‘Vin Ordinaire’ (later renamed ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’). ‘The Prussian Officer’, Douglas regretted, had to be cut by a third or the journal would not run it, ‘and I was charged with the odious task of performing the operation’. Having conceded that the task of cutting Lawrence down by 1,500 words was odious and due to the issue of page-space, Douglas then suggested that the fault lay with Lawrence himself: ‘Would Lawrence never learn to be more succinct, and hold himself in hand a little? No; he never would and he never did; diffuseness is a fault of much of his work.’69 But there was, as Douglas knew, nothing diffuse about ‘The Prussian Officer’, one of the finest short stories in the language – and Douglas’s amputation was not an improvement. No writer likes to be cut by an editor, and what happened at the English Review, which left Lawrence furious, played a small part in the later Magnus business.
Written in Germany in 1913, ‘The Prussian Officer’ is about the attraction of an aristocratic captain to his Bavarian orderly. ‘Gradually the officer had become aware of his servant’s young, vigorous, unconscious presence about him. He could not get away from the sense of the youth’s person, while he was in attendance. It was like a warm flame upon the older man’s tense, rigid body.’ The officer is all conscious will, but the orderly ‘received life direct through his senses, and acted straight from instinct’.70 When the officer discovers that the orderly has a sweetheart, he is ‘mad with irritation’; he makes the young man work in the evenings to prevent him from seeing the girl, and thrashes him – first across the face with a belt, and then on his legs. During a manoeuvre in a forest, the orderly kills the officer, and then dies himself, the next day, from dehydration. In his final moments of consciousness he gazes out at the mountains ‘straight in front of him, blue and cool and tender’, ranging ‘across the pale edge of the morning sky’.
He wanted them – he wanted them alone – he wanted to leave himself and be identified with them … There they ranked, all still and wonderful between earth and heaven. He stared till his eyes went black, and the mountains, as they stood in their beauty, so clean and cool, seemed to have it, that which was lost in him.71
The orderly’s last thoughts are of wanting not to be on the mountains but to be the mountains, to share their certainty, clarity and ancient serenity. All mountains, for Lawrence, were magic.
The prose in ‘The Prussian Officer’ has an airborne, suspended quality, hallucinatory at times. In one scene the orderly spills the wine and the officer, his eyes ‘bluey like fire’,
held those of the confused youth for a moment. It was a shock for the young soldier. He felt something sink deeper, deeper into his soul, where nothing had ever gone before. It left him rather blank and wondering. Some of his natural completeness in himself was gone, a little uneasiness took its place. And from that time an undiscovered feeling had held between the two men.72
This is one of the passages that Douglas cut. Public-school educated, half-Austrian and attracted to younger men, Douglas belonged to the peculiar world that Lawrence – a nobody from nowhere – seemed instinctively to understand. Added to which, Douglas’s father had died on a mountain, and his own love of mountains was second to none. ‘The Prussian Officer’ was not Lawrence’s story to tell, and nor was this the last time he would trespass on Douglas’s turf. Years earlier, in collaboration with his wife, Douglas had written a collection of stories called Unprofessional Tales which proved his lack of talent for the genre. Lawrence’s tales, Douglas now conceded, had an ‘enviable flair, an enviable freshness, an enviable mastery’: Douglas envied Lawrence.73 ‘It has always seemed to me possible,’ suggests Douglas’s biographer Mark Holloway,
even likely, that Douglas recognised in Lawrence a quality of lyricism and spontaneity – the Shelleyan, the Blakean streak – of which he himself, at one point in his life, might have been capable, might have developed, if he had not progressed in another direction, and that perhaps it filled him with a kind of nostalgia for what might have been, a kind of envy.74
Like Lawrence, Douglas had pursued the shade of Shelley, visiting Viareggio in the hope that he might see the poet ‘flit along’ the shore, searching for the spot where they burned his body.75 If it is hard to see how a figure as terrestrial as Douglas might have developed in a Shelleyan direction, it is because by the time he knew Lawrence the mask had eaten into his face.
‘Vin Ordinaire’, written in the same summer as ‘The Prussian Officer’, depicts the relationship between another bullying officer and his noble subordinate. Bachmann is a private in the Bavarian army, stationed in the garrison town of Metz (where Frieda was raised). His officer is a thug and a drunk, and on the day in question Bachmann, who has a fear of heights, has to climb to the top of the ramparts on a ladder. The ramparts are like ‘a low cliff, along whose summit the grass and the tall daisies grew’. The exercise is the ‘supreme test’ for the private of ‘whether his will, sufficiently identifying itself with the will of the Army, could control his body’. But his body fails him: halfway up the ladder, Bachmann feels his bladder relax and water run down the leg of his uniform. The soldiers below laugh uneasily and the officer on the summit above turns ‘yellow with fury’. Gathering his nerves, Bachmann completes the climb, but before reaching the top, he is hauled over the edge by the large hands of the officer who then hisses into his face. ‘Bachmann started away; the vision of the sergeant’s face, the open mouth, the upper lip raised from the teeth, the snarling, barking look had shocked him away on the reflex.’ His heart pounding, Bachmann jerks up his arm to protect himself and in doing so hits the officer, who staggers backwards and falls down the ramparts into the moat. Bachmann runs; in an instant he has become a deserter.76
These two studies of crime and punishment are Lawrence’s Dostoevskian masterpieces, and in his memoirs of the French Foreign Legion, Maurice Magnus would produce his own version of them both.
* * *
When he reached Rome on the morning of 24 November, Magnus booked into the Grand Hotel by the station where he drafted a document stating that in the event of his death he left his literary material and letters to Norman Douglas. He then walked into the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel on via Vittorio Veneto and asked the Deputy Director, Leone Colleoni, to cash for him two cheques worth a total of £3,800.
Meanwhile in Florence, Lawrence found himself weary of Renaissance self-consciousness; with the exception of Michelangelo’s David, the sharpened perceptions of Florentine art sated and appalled him. In a belligerent essay called ‘Looking Down on the City’, he described the state of his soul. Florence, Lawrence believed, was the birthplace of personality and thus the snake in the Garden of Eden: ‘At the Renaissance, mankind, and Florence perfectly, took a new apple, and opened a new field of consciousness, a new era.’ The rebirth of art was accompanied, he felt, by ‘a misery in the loss of spontaneity’ and ‘in my tissue’, he conceded, ‘I am weary of personality.’77
Happiest when he set himself in opposition to a place, the personality of Florence now became Lawrence’s psychic battleground. The only sight in Florence to move him was the view of the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo, the paved hilltop across the Arno built by Giuseppe Poggi in the mid-nineteenth century. A different man in every place, Lawrence travelled to find ‘unchangeable eternity’, and when he looked at the prospect of the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo, he was ‘moved by a strange deep feeling which I cannot fathom: a kind of far-off emotion, like the sound of surf in the distance, heavy. Who knows what it is.’
The town lies below and very near. The river winds beneath one, under four bridges, disappearing in a curve on the left. And the brown-red town spreads out so thick, so intense, so far. One could almost stroke it with the hand. The Duomo – the naked tower of Giotto – the hawk-neck of Palazzo Vecchio – a few other churches – rising above the ruffled brown roofs, all level, far-spreading, and the hills half encircling – a strange sight. One has looked down on many cities – Turin on her plain with the Alps flashing beyond – London in her smoke – Edinburgh. But Florence is different, quite different: not worldly.78
Florence lies below and spreads out, the river winds beneath and under the bridge, the towers and churches rise above, the mountains flash beyond; he looks down, along and across; he sees near sides, far sides, near distance, further nearness. Florence from above is like a vision or memory, something that has passed away. It is the ‘brown-red town’ that wounds him like a punctum. It could be the view from the house in Walker Street where Lawrence lived when he was the same age as Michelangelo’s David and which, he once said, with its ‘amphitheatre of hills’, now spoiled by ‘new patches of reddish houses, and darkening of smoke’, he knew better than any other view in the world.79 Just as there was only one marriage and one conflict, there was only one view, and Lawrence, who identified completely with whatever place he was writing in, was rarely in the place he was writing about. He wrote about Garsington from Cornwall, Monte Cassino from Taormina, Cornwall from Australia, Australia from New Mexico, and Eastwood from everywhere.
Looking down on Florence awakened in him now a ‘far-off sadness, an emotion deeper than the natural planes of emotion, unrealizable, lying in the sub-stratum of one’s being’. Only once, he recalls, has he known a sadness similarly intolerable, and that was looking at Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks in London’s National Gallery. Madonna of the Rocks brought out in him ‘a sadness so deep that it has hardly yet begun to be felt: root of all our modern nostalgia and neurasthenia’. No other painting, said Lawrence, ‘touches these roots’.80
Preferring symbolic to imitative art, Lawrence was drawn to the unreality of Leonardo’s landscape. The Madonna and child – the origin and centre of the world – are in a rocky place; their comfortless red-brown cave could be the stone Ezel, where David hides from Saul. There is a womb-like quality to the image, and not a father in sight. Luminous in a blue and gold robe, the Madonna is resting from her journey; sheer, red-brown rocks turn in the smoky distance to the colour of precious stones. Cool and contained, Mary has her arm around her red-headed child, her hand supporting his chubby shoulder as he reaches towards his cousin, John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence, who is being tended by an angel. The baby’s plump feet, like those in Lawrence’s first published poem, ‘Baby-Movements: Running Barefoot’, are firm and silken among the clusters of aquilegia and white narcissi.
Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks (1483–1486)
The sadness he feels, Lawrence suggests, when he looks down on the city or across at the Madonna of the Rocks, is comparable to ‘the pain which overcomes a man when he eats of the Tree of Knowledge’. What Lawrence sees in the painting and what he sees in the view of Florence repeat for him the birth of self-consciousness, the sudden shift from instinct to knowledge. Self-consciousness brings with it the never-ending dialectic: the ecstasy of ‘delirious triumph’ is accompanied by the agony ‘of sin and despair’.81 All Renaissance art describes this awakening, captured by Michelangelo in David’s combination of primitive spontaneity and subtle self-awareness.
Looking down on the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo, Lawrence yearned for a return to what he called man’s ‘first primal consciousness’, figured historically as the Middle Ages. But, he concluded when he was safe in his upper room, ‘one must go right through with consciousness. Forward is the only direction. Sufficient consciousness liberates us to spontaneity again … There is faith still in Florence.’82
His Florentine life was astonishingly fertile. It was also now, in the company of Douglas, that Lawrence began to formulate the six essays which compose Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, the first of his two books on the controversial new Viennese science. If his repressed motive for joining in the debate was to displace Otto Gross as Frieda’s psychoanalytic hero, his declared aim was to challenge Freud’s understanding of the incest drive. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious reads like a natal autobiography in which Lawrence returns with nostalgia to his months in the womb, his first blind suck, his first angry cry, his first expulsion of wind, his violent but necessary separation from his mother’s body and the kicking into action of his nervous system. Even after birth, Lawrence explains, the Madonna and child form an island: a ‘lovely, suave, fluid, creative electricity … flows in a circuit between the great nerve-centres in mother and child’.83 He might be describing Leonardo’s painting.
Few writers have returned with Lawrence’s intensity to their time as a foetus. In Sons and Lovers, the pregnant Mrs Morel, her son boiling in her belly, is locked out of the house after a row with her drunk husband. In the front garden, ‘the moonlight standing up from the hills in front’, she becomes aware of ‘something about her’.
With an effort she roused herself to see what it was that penetrated her consciousness. The tall white lilies were reeling in the moonlight, and the air was charged with their perfume, as with a presence. Mrs. Morel gasped slightly in fear. She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. Then she drank a deep draught of the scent. It made her almost dizzy.84
