Burning Man, page 23
The two novelists planned to sail to the South Seas, and even advertised in The Times for a secretary. Mackenzie suggested filming the adventure, but Lawrence, wanting to return to the spirit of Melville, refused. Hearing that Lawrence had turned down Mackenzie’s invitation, Magnus wrote to Douglas: ‘Any chance for me? I’d love a trip to the South Sea Islands. Can’t you recommend me as something?’130
Instead of sailing to the South Seas, Mackenzie leased the Channel Island of Herm, one mile long and half a mile wide. ‘The Lord of the Isles’, Lawrence wrote to him in September 1921. ‘I shall write a skit on you one day.’131 But Faith thought Herm was haunted by unhappy spirits and so they moved to the smaller and even more derelict rock of Jethou. Still not satisfied by island life, in 1925 Mackenzie bought the uninhabited Shiat Isles in the Outer Hebrides but lived on the nearby rock of Barra.
Lawrence and Compton Mackenzie would each write a skit on the other. After his death, Lawrence appeared as the ‘innately’ homosexual Daniel Rayner in Mackenzie’s novel sequence The Four Winds of Love. In The South Wind of Love, which is set before the war, Rayner is introduced in his apron scrubbing the living-room floor while his fleshy German wife, Hildegarde, formally married to a Birmingham doctor, is having a nap upstairs. Rayner, whose consciousness ‘of his own genius’ was ‘aggressive and self-assertive’, speaks with a Midlands accent. In The West Wind of Love the war is over and Rayner, brutalised by the censorship of his novel and being hounded out of Wales, turns up in Rome: ‘I believe that hate is becoming the driving force of his genius,’ reports John, the protagonist, ‘and that without it he would be lost.’132 The Rayners then come to the island of Citrano (Capri) where Rayner discourses on the sickness of western man. ‘“Man went off the track when he started to think here,” he tapped his forehead, “instead of here,” he pointed at his generative centre.’ He later sends John a postcard from Monte Cassino: ‘This place is rotten with the past,’ it says. Rayner was not yet mad, John believed, but ‘moving towards madness’.133
Mackenzie himself was the model for Cathcart, the islander in Lawrence’s 1926 parable ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’. Cathcart wants his first island to be ‘Paradise regained’ but finds instead that he has landed in Limbo, ‘where all the souls that never die veer and swoop on their vast, strange errands’. He is living in ‘the dark, wide mystery of time’, where the ‘moment begins to heave and expand in great circles’ and ‘the chariots of the so-called dead dash down the old streets of centuries, and souls crowd on the footways’. The island frightens him and so Cathcart moves to a smaller one near by, where the past is not so ‘vastly alive, and the future is not separated off’.134 He then buys a third island which should be his Elysium but even the baaing of the sheep proves a curse, and so he drives them over the cliff. Soon the birds themselves disappear, and there is nothing on the island left living. The story ends with Cathcart being buried by snow, like Gerald in Women in Love and the sinners in the lowest circle of hell, up to their necks in ice.
‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ is strong, spare and cruel, and Mackenzie threatened legal action. But Lawrence, who also loved islands, used his friend’s experience to mock himself equally: Cathcart’s first island – ‘a quiet, busy little world’ which he shared with a fisherman, a carpenter, a mason and the souls of all the dead – is a parody of Rananim, Lawrence’s own ‘island idea’.135 Islands played a significant part in Women in Love: it is on an island that Gudrun dances before the cattle, and on another island that Birkin’s true communion with Ursula takes place. And the same month that Compton Mackenzie was being driven from Herm by malevolent spirits, Lawrence would leave Magnus alone on an island to face his fate.
* * *
On New Year’s Eve, Magnus paid for his six weeks at Rome’s Grand Hotel with the money stolen from the Excelsior and then fled thirty miles south to the fishing port of Anzio, where he booked himself into the Hotel Vittoria. Meanwhile, the cheques cashed at the Excelsior were returned unpaid by the Banca Commerciale Italiana on the grounds that Mr Magnus did not have an account with the Metropolitan Trust Company on which they were drawn. Making enquiries at the US embassy, Colleoni heard that Maurice Magnus was – for reasons unknown – ‘persona non grata to the authorities of his country’ and that a passport visa would be denied him if he ever tried to re-enter the United States.
Posing at the Hotel Vittoria as a client of the Banca Sebasti, Magnus cashed two cheques for £200. Having stayed at the Vittoria before, he was trusted by the manageress, Maria Tomaselli, who instead of presenting him with a weekly bill agreed to let Magnus draw up a tab and pay it off on the day of his departure. He then, on 3 February 1920, wrote a final fraudulent cheque for £1,600: £1,400 to cover his bill for the past thirty-five days, and £200 to be given to him in cash. All three cheques were later returned unpaid to Maria Tomaselli.
Allowing the Hotel Vittoria to believe that he was returning to his apartment in Rome, Magnus instead fled to Monte Cassino, where the monks had been expecting him for the last six weeks. ‘I don’t know what my next step will be,’ he wrote to Douglas when he reached the monastery, ‘– if there is going to be any step at all. I have drifted into a sort of resignation – the sort Heine wrote about in his “Reisebilder” – you can’t fight God.’136
* * *
From Capri, Lawrence wrote a number of important letters. The first was to Katherine Mansfield, now dying in Menton. ‘I loathe you,’ he said. ‘You revolt me stewing in your consumption.’137 It’s an astonishing remark even by Lawrence’s standards, and one of the few occasions on which he called the dreaded illness by its name. His attack should be seen in the context of an earlier letter to Mansfield, written in December 1918, when one of his childhood friends was in the final stages of TB: ‘Katherine – on ne meurt pas: I almost want it to be reflexive – on ne se meurt pas: Point! Be damned and be blasted everything, and let the bloody world come to its end. But one does not die. Jamais.’138
Lawrence then wrote to Magnus in Monte Cassino, whose reply had ‘a wistful tone – and I don’t know what made me think he was in trouble, in monetary difficulty. But I felt it acutely – a kind of appeal.’139 Lawrence several times described Magnus as ‘appealing’ to him; the word can be read in both senses. That week, Lawrence had received a gift of twenty pounds (1,300 lire) from Amy Lowell in America, and so his own monetary difficulties were for the moment relieved. His thank-you letter to his benefactress pulled no punches: Lawrence resented his reputation in America as a martyred genius beaten down by establishment bully-boys. It ‘irks me a bit’, Lawrence told Amy Lowell, ‘to have to accept a sort of charity … I am a sort of charity-boy of literature, apparently.’140 He then did something entirely characteristic, and passed his humiliation on to Magnus. ‘I felt … I owed Magnus that dinner,’ he wrote in the Memoir of Maurice Magnus, ‘and I didn’t want to owe him anything, since he despised me a little for being careful. So partly out of revenge, perhaps, and partly because I felt the strange wistfulness of him appealing to me, I sent him five pounds…’141 It was a complex and loaded decision. ‘I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang,’ Lawrence began his poem ‘Money Madness’.
While Lawrence hated owing anything, Magnus believed he was owed a good deal. ‘Your cheque has saved my life,’ he told Lawrence in his thank-you letter. ‘Since I last saw you I have fallen down an abyss.’142 His cheque, Lawrence admitted, was vengeful: he wanted to prove that Magnus was wrong to think him a puritan, he wanted to place Magnus on the rung beneath him, charity-boy wise, and he wanted to compete with Douglas, whose friendship with Magnus had equally begun with a gift of money. In Triumph to Exile, Mark Kinkead-Weekes describes Lawrence’s trip to Monte Cassino as an irritating ‘distraction’ to his work, something he was ‘pressed’ by Magnus to do. But what Lawrence principally wanted when he sent Magnus that £5 cheque was to confirm his intention to visit the monastery by putting down a deposit.
Lawrence finally wrote to Frieda’s mother in Bavaria, asking her to send on a manuscript he had left there seven years before. It consisted of 200 pages of an unfinished novel called ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’ which, had it been completed in 1913 as intended, would have followed Sons and Lovers. On 12 February, the manuscript arrived. Lawrence left the first five chapters untouched, and discarded the rest (around 140 pages). ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’, he told his publisher Martin Secker, is ‘quite unlike my usual style’, and will be ‘quite unexceptional, as far as the censor is concerned’. It would make, Lawrence believed, a ‘perfect selling novel’.143 Loosely based on the true fortunes of an Eastwood family called the Cullens, who were known to Lawrence as a child, it is the story of Alvina Houghton, a would-be New Woman who lives ‘like a mole’ in Manchester House in the mining town of Woodhouse, a place of ‘cabbage stumps’ and ‘rotten fences’. ‘I can’t stay here all my life,’ Alvina declares. ‘I can’t bear it. I’m buried alive – simply buried alive.’144 Alvina is twenty-five when the book begins, and has nothing to look forward to: her mother dies, her father’s various businesses – a fashionable clothing store, a brick kiln and a coalmine – invariably fail. ‘How many infernos,’ she wondered, ‘… did she not travel?’145 At this point in Alvina’s story Lawrence put down his pencil and sailed for the mountain-isle of Purgatory, the place where sinners pay their debts.
PART TWO
‘I always remember getting up in the black dark of the January morning, and making a little coffee on the spirit lamp, and watching the clock, the big-faced, blue old clock on the campanile in the piazza in Capri, to see I wasn’t late.’1 It was in fact 18 February 1920 when Lawrence set off for Monte Cassino, five days after Otto Gross, found frozen and starving on a Berlin street, died of pneumonia. At ten minutes to six, Lawrence crossed the campanile, ‘slid’ down the vertical rock in the funicular and took a rowing boat over the ‘dark sea’ to the steamer ‘that lay there showing her lights and hooting’. He watched the dawn rise as the steamer, pushing against the wind from the snow-crests, made its way round Vesuvius and into the harbour at Naples.
Lawrence ‘always loved hanging over the side’, he wrote in the Memoir, ‘and watching the people come out in boats from the little places of the shore, that rose steep and beautiful. I love the movement of these watery Neapolitan people.’2 When Dante and Virgil were transported to Purgatory by the angel with the burnished wings, the sun ‘with his arrows bright’ was also ‘shooting forth the day’. Lawrence’s own boat was late and he reached the station at Naples just as the train was pulling out; running along the platform, he leapt on to the last carriage. ‘Perhaps if I had missed it,’ he mused, ‘fate would have been different.’3 What he means by this is unclear. In what way would fate have been different? Would Magnus’s fate have been different had Lawrence missed his train? Or would Lawrence himself be a different man had he not gone to Monte Cassino on that particular day?
Hell had been described by poets before Dante but the shape and dimensions of Purgatory, where we shed our former selves, were his own invention. Earlier authors placed Purgatory underground, but for Dante the border crossing between two worlds was a conical mountain in the southern hemisphere, made of the matter displaced when Lucifer’s fall from heaven created the Inferno. A stairway of ledges, each eighteen feet wide – which Dante compared to the steps of the Church of San Miniato – is cut into the slope, which is composed of seven circles, one for each of the sins. Dante’s Purgatory was a composite of Mount Sinai, Mount Zion, Mount Arafat, the Mount of Olives, Mount Tabor, Mount Carmel, Mount Parnassus, Mount Olympus and the mountain in Lactantius’ late Latin poem ‘The Phoenix’, on whose peak can be found the mythical bird. Purification is not something we always achieve willingly, and a character in Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Radio reflects on the fact that the men in Dante’s Purgatory are nostalgic for who they once were. Instead of saying ‘I shall be,’ they lament, ‘I was, I was.’ Lawrence followed suit.
From the station at Cassino he hired a carrozzella – or what Magnus called ‘a dirty little cart’ – to take him to the monastery.4 ‘We twisted up and up the wild hillside,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘past the old castle of the town, past the last villa, between trees and rocks. We saw no one.’ Dante’s own progress up Mount Purgatory, which took three days, was halted when darkness extinguished the divine guiding light, and Lawrence similarly saw his journey as a race to reach the summit before sunset. At twilight, they turned the corner of the oak wood, and there it stood, rearing above him ‘from its buttress in the rock’, a ‘huge square fortress-palace of the sixteenth century crowning the near distance’.5 It had taken him nearly twelve hours, and every available means of transport, to get here.
The angel who holds the keys to the door of Purgatory warns Dante that having entered, he cannot look back and sigh, ‘I was, I was’: ‘he who looks behind returns outside again’. Stepping through the portal into the white marble world, Dante hears the ringing of bells and the chanting of a Te Deum. When Lawrence arrived at Monte Cassino the monks were at Evensong and it was Magnus, still chubby-cheeked but ‘greyer at the temples’, who stepped over the threshold to greet him – Magnus always appeared to Lawrence from out of the darkness. There being no Douglas to fuss over, the host gave the pilgrim his full attention. Reaching for his hand as Lawrence stepped down from the cart, Magnus looked into his eyes ‘rather like a woman who isn’t quite sure of her lover’. He had a ‘wistful and watchful tenderness’ which was both ‘charming’ and oddly pompous in the freezing air of the vast place, with its ‘ponderous stone walls’ and ‘masses of coldness cloaking around’.6
Plan of the monastery at Monte Cassino
‘So very glad to see you,’ Magnus said, taking Lawrence’s bag. ‘I’m so pleased you’ve come.’ Lawrence responded by asking Magnus for five francs to pay the driver. ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Magnus, pressing the coins into the driver’s palm. Lawrence, who had 125 lire (just over £1) in his pocket, could have paid the man himself, but asking Magnus to do so was a reminder that he had bought Magnus for £5. Neither had any news to share except that Magnus was ‘very short of money’, which, he said, ‘of course is no news’, and he ‘laughed his little laugh’. ‘I’m so glad to be here,’ Magnus continued. ‘The peace and the rhythm of life is so beautiful! I’m sure you’ll love it.’ They passed through the great door and down the covered entrance into the first courtyard. Young monks stood in clusters chatting to one another, a peasant was driving his sheep from the cloister grass and an old monk was darting into the post office. Coming towards them under the arches was a labourer with a two-handed saw, and behind him, ‘hastening forward with a quick smile’, was Magnus’s particular friend: a handsome Maltese monk called Don Martino, fresh and bespectacled and around the same age as Lawrence. Only fifty monks now lived in the vast abbey, and ‘one felt’, thought Lawrence, that ‘one was at college with one’s college mates’.7 It reminded him, in other words, of his traumatic visit to Cambridge.
They turned the corner into the central courtyard, attributed to Bramante, with its great well and colonnades of arches; from here a grand sweep of steps leads to the higher courtyard, at the end of which stand the doors to the Desiderian Basilica. Lawrence recorded the scene in his photographic memory, and Don Martino then led him to his rooms in the fortress walls which were down a narrow staircase and along a ‘cold, naked white corridor, high and arched’. It was ‘dead, silent, stone cold, everywhere’. The term ‘stone cold’ must, Lawrence thought, have been invented here, and he used the phrase again to describe his reaction to reading, in Dregs, Magnus’s accounts of homosexual relationships in the French Foreign Legion. He had been given by the monks a ‘charming and elegant’ bedroom whose balcony looked down to the monastery garden, ‘a narrow strip beneath the walls, and beyond, the clustered buildings of the farm, and the oak woods and arable fields of the hill summit: and beyond again, the gulf where the world’s valley was, and all the mountains that stand in Italy on the plains as if God had just put them down ready made’.8 Still further beyond, the sun had gone down, giving the snow a rosy glow and casting the valleys in shadow. ‘One heard, far below, the trains shunting, the world clinking in the cold air.’ Magnus stood there beaming, and looking wistfully at Don Martino. ‘Isn’t it wonderful! Ah, the most wonderful place on earth! What now could you wish better than to end your days here? The peace, the beauty, the eternity of it.’ All he needed was some money, Magnus said, and he could begin his religious studies in Rome.9
Magnus talked about his future as a Benedictine monk, said Lawrence, ‘like a boy planning a new role’. But the monastic life, in which time stood still, had long tempted Lawrence as well. He had described Higher Tregerthen as a monastery, and the ideals of Rananim were close to those of St Benedict’s ethic of work, brotherhood and soil. Magnus was on the cusp of achieving for himself the life that had so far eluded Lawrence. Magnus’s own ‘sumptuous’ bedroom was further down the corridor. He had a curtained four-poster bed, a sofa, a desk covered in papers and photographs, a table with a green-shaded electric lamp, and the usual array of powders and pomades on the dressing table. He kept the drawers of his desk locked as though they contained great secrets, and he carried, like Dante’s doorkeeper, his keys on a chain. ‘I always wonder what the secrets can be,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘that are able to be kept so tight under lock and key.’ Night had now fallen, and ‘from the window one saw the world far below, like a pool the flat plain, a deep pool of darkness with little twinkling lights, and rows and bunches of light that were the railway station’. Magnus, Lawrence and Don Martino sat around the table, drinking tea and talking. Lawrence had only a thin coat, so Magnus wrapped him inside a coat of his own, ‘made of thick, smooth black cloth, and lined with black sealskin’, with a collar also of sealskin. ‘I can still remember the feel of the silky fur. It was queer to have him helping me solicitously into this coat.’ Lawrence disliked being touched, but didn’t flinch when Magnus tenderly buttoned his stiff, high-necked collar. He must have looked like a Prussian officer. ‘So off we went, he in his grey overcoat and I in my sealskin millionaire monster, down the dim corridor to the guests’ refectory.’10
