Burning Man, page 24
They were waited on at supper by a lay brother ‘with a bulging forehead and queer, fixed eyes’ who belonged in an Italian picture, and while Magnus’s Italian was as incorrect as it was possible to be, he still patronised the lay brothers. Because the food had grown cold on its journey from the kitchen, Magnus nibbled instead on a piece of bread. ‘I could tell the meals were a trial for him,’ wrote Lawrence, and that Magnus’s ‘tisickyness’ was equally a trial for the lay brothers, who bore a ‘grudge’ against their pompous little guest.
After supper they went, ‘by our two secret little selves into the tall dense nearly-darkness of the church’. Lawrence pictured them ‘creeping’ about like thieves, which in a sense they were, being trespassers in this hallowed place. Raised as a low Protestant, Lawrence was drawn to the headiness of high Catholicism; his pilgrimage had brought him from the parish church in Eastwood, with its fanatical pastor, to the medieval basilica where Thomas Aquinas had been educated. Magnus led Lawrence by the arm as though he were guiding him through a city, clicking on the light switches as they tiptoed from altar to altar.
We looked at the lily marble of the great floor, at the pillars, at the Benvenuto Cellini casket, at the really lovely pillars and slabs of different coloured marbles, all coloured marbles, yellow and grey and rose and green and lily-white, veined and mottled and splashed: lovely, lovely stones – And Benvenuto had used pieces of lapis lazuli, blue as cornflowers.11
Lilies and lapis lazuli: two of Lawrence’s favourite symbols. Still holding his arm, Magnus ‘whispered ecstasies’ in his ear, and whenever they passed an altar, ‘whether the high altar or the side chapels’, he performed ‘a wonderful reverence, which he must have practised for hours, bowing waxily down and sinking till his one knee touched the pavement, then rising like a flower that rises and unfolds again, till he had skipped to my side and was playing cicerone once more’. Lawrence compared Magnus to Klingsor, the sorcerer in Wagner’s Parsifal, while he was Parsifal himself, on the quest for the Holy Grail.
They crept about examining the treasures of the chancel and the roly-poly babies carved into the choir stalls and ‘everything in the church – and then everything in the ancient room on the side’, after which they went down to the crypt where Magnus clicked on the lights so that the ‘gold mosaic of the vaulting glittered and bowed’ and the ‘blue mosaic glowed out’.
Lawrence was glad to get away from the glittering splendour of the church and retire to the normality of Magnus’s bedroom, where he was presented with the contents of the old leather suitcase containing his host’s treasures.
He showed me a wonderful photograph of a picture of a lovely lady – asked me what I thought of it, and seemed to expect me to be struck to bits by the beauty. His almost sanctimonious expectation made me tell the truth, that I thought it just a bit cheap, trivial. And then he said, dramatic:
‘That’s my mother.’
It looked so unlike anybody’s mother, much less Magnus’s, that I was startled. I realised that she was his great stunt, and that I had put my foot in it.12
Of course Lawrence knew that this lovely lady was the great Hedwig herself, outcast daughter of emperors and sister of kings. It was perversity on his part to describe her image as ‘a bit cheap, trivial’, simply because Magnus wanted it praised. But Lawrence was the only boy ever to have had a sacred mother, or to have known the suave electricity that flows in a circuit between the great nerve-centres in mother and child. The tense silence that followed was broken by the appearance of Don Martino, who chatted happily about his former life (‘I was, I was’), while all three sipped a liquor that Magnus liked and a bottle of which, Lawrence said – to compensate for his earlier cruelty – he would buy for him. They discussed politics until midnight, at which point Lawrence ‘came out of the black Overcoat’ and went to bed.
The following morning was bright and still and sunny. From the loophole window of his room, Lawrence ‘looked down on the farm cluster and the brown fields and the sere oak-woods of the hill-crown, and the rocks and bushes savagely bordering it round’. Dante, who might have stayed in the same room when he too visited the Abbey, will have known the view. It was now that Lawrence had the first of his crises on the hill. ‘He who looks behind’, the doorman had warned Dante, ‘returns outside again’, and Lawrence’s crises over the next two days were precisely to do with looking back and returning outside.
And the poignant grip of the past, the grandiose, violent past of the Middle Ages, when blood was strong and unquenched and life was flamboyant with splendours and horrible miseries, took hold of me till I could hardly bear it. It was really agony to me to be in the monastery and to see the old farm and the bullocks slowly working in the fields below, and the black pigs rooting among weeds, and to see a monk sitting on a parapet in the sun, and an old, old man in skin sandals and white-bunched, swathed legs come driving an ass slowly to the monastery gate, slowly, with all that lingering nonchalance and wildness of the Middle Ages, and yet to know that I was myself, child of the present.13
Farms were where Lawrence had been happiest, and his ‘agony’ recalls the word’s single appearance in the Bible where, on the night before his betrayal and arrest, Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives: ‘And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’
What agonised Lawrence in the view from his window was not the rocks or the river or the roads, but the railway. It was ‘so strange’, he said, to see ‘the white road going straight past a mountain that stood like a loaf of sugar, the river meandering in loops, and the railway with glistening lines making a long black swoop across the flat and into the hills’. It was strange to ‘see trains come steaming with white smoke flying. To see the station like a little harbour where trucks like shipping stood anchored in rows in the black bay of railway … to see all this from the monastery, where the Middle Ages live on in a sort of agony, like Tithonus, and cannot die, this was almost a violation to my soul, made almost a wound.’14 It was not the sight of the trains and their tracks, as destructive to the view as windfarms today, that Lawrence could not bear: it was their sound, the savage music of his childhood.
He liked to follow an experience of height with one of depth, and when we next see Lawrence in the Memoir, he is safely in a crypt underground where they are attending mass. Magnus was ‘scrupulous in his going up and down’ while Lawrence felt like ‘an outsider’. The monks ‘seemed very human in their likes and jealousies’, and Lawrence compared them, again, to a group of dons at Cambridge.
After mass, Magnus continued his guided tour and Lawrence’s day got steadily worse. They walked in the Bramante courtyard where once there had been a Renaissance world; now it was ‘dead forever’ and when pilgrimages thronged in, they were ‘horrible artisan excursions from the great town’. The local peasants, however, still had their white-bunched and swathed legs, but this made Lawrence equally wretched.
He and Magnus climbed the stairs of the observatory. Here, at the highest point of the monastery, they ‘looked at the world below’:
Roads, railway, river, streams, a world in accurate and lively detail, with mountains sticking up abruptly and rockily, as the old painters painted it. I think there is no way of painting Italian landscape except that way – that started with Lorenzetti and ended with the sixteenth century.
The roads through the mountains from Rome, Lawrence said, came ‘straight as judgment’. Today was Judgement Day.15
* * *
When Moses was dying, God took him to the top of Mount Pisgah and showed him the Promised Land. A ‘Pisgah sight’ is thus a view offered and denied, and Lawrence’s writing is filled with Pisgah sights. The symbolism of views he learned from the Bible, but writing about views was a skill picked up from Ruskin’s art of word-painting: ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world,’ wrote Ruskin in Modern Painters, ‘is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.’ Seeing, for Ruskin, was a double act, involving both visual accuracy and historical imagination, and Lawrence, as Aldington was quick to point out, was ‘strangely akin’ to Ruskin, ‘both in the character of his mind and in his social views’. Lawrence learned from Ruskin that mankind was ‘nobly animal, nobly spiritual’, and that the integrity of the Middle Ages has never been replaced. The name given to the ‘Dark Ages,’ writes Ruskin in Modern Painters, ‘is, respecting art, wholly inapplicable’.
They were, on the contrary, the bright ages; ours are the dark ones … We build brown brick walls, and wear brown coats … There is, however, also some cause for the change in our own tempers. On the whole these are much sadder ages than the early ones; not sadder in a noble and deep way, but in a dim wearied way, – the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and uncomfortableness of soul and body.16
The Divine Comedy contains all this brightness, as do the illuminated manuscripts of the poem: Dante in a blue cap, red shoes and rose-pink, indigo or amber robe, beneath a cobalt vault of golden stars. Lawrence, stiff in his military coat, had come to Monte Cassino in a dim and weary age: what for Ruskin was an observation, for Lawrence was an agony.
They went from the watchtower to the bowels of the building, the ‘ancient cell away under the monastery, where all the sanctity started’, after which they looked round the library, with its copies of Virgil, Cicero, Ovid and Tacitus and Divine Comedy. Among the books and illuminations, Lawrence had his second crisis on the hill. He described himself as being overcome by tiredness and cold, but his experience sounds closer to an attack of claustrophobia: ‘I could not bear it any more. I felt I must be outside, in the sun, and see the world below, and the way out.’17 Whatever space he was in, Lawrence looked for the exit.
After supper he broached the question which had been hanging over them both. ‘And what was the abyss, then?’ Magnus told Lawrence about one of the cheques in Anzio – ‘there should have been money to meet it, in my bank in New York’ – but not about the fraudulent cheques in Rome, whose existence Lawrence never discovered. ‘It is an absolute secret that I am here,’ Magnus confided. ‘As you see, I’m in a very nasty hole.’ The money he had paid to Lawrence’s driver was, he laughed, all he had left in the world: ‘I haven’t even anything to buy a cigarette or a stamp.’ What happened to the £5 Lawrence had recently sent him? Of his own 125 lire, Lawrence needed a hundred to get home, so he could spare Magnus twenty-five for the bottle of liquor he had promised. Expecting more, Magnus looked ‘rather crestfallen’. ‘But I didn’t want to give him any money this time,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘because he expected it.’ This was also why Lawrence had called the image of Hedwig Magnus ‘cheap’ and ‘trivial’: because Magnus had expected something more. Lawrence would, however, write to various people in London recommending Magnus’s articles, which he privately considered ‘very self-conscious and poor’. The best of them was ‘Holy Week in Monte Cassino’ which Lawrence thought might sell ‘because of the photographs’, one of which showed the interior of the basilica while another was of the monastery from one of the terraces below.18
On his second night in the monastery, Magnus showed Lawrence the eighty-page manuscript of Dregs which he had got ‘rather raggedly typed out’. Lawrence, who began reading it in bed and completed it the next morning, found himself ‘moved and rather horrified’ by this tale of bullying officers, proud insubordinates, shame and defiance. It was, he said, ‘like a map of the lower places of mankind’s activities’.19 The story of Magnus’s journey from Italy to Algeria, where he enlisted in the Legion, and then from Algeria to France when he made his escape back into Italy, is described as one of disappointing train carriages (‘I was informed that a private soldier cannot travel first class’, ‘the second class of the Sidi Brahim did not sport any luxuries whatever’), disappointing meals (‘watery soup’, ‘a sardine and an olive’, ‘a vegetable done up beyond recognition’, ‘a very meagre meat course’, ‘a second helping was charged extra’, ‘an orange’) and disappointing hotels (‘The dining-room was as ill-lighted by the weak gas as the halls’). Magnus was as disturbed by the discomfort of his bed as he was by the violence of the legionnaires, and all he learned from his trials were that ‘the things one is accustomed to do become privileges after one has been deprived of them for a long time’. These ‘things’ include ‘the cleanliness and care of a first-class hotel, the feeling of wearing clean clothes, the comfort of breakfast in bed, and lounging over the New York Herald’.20
Without Lawrence’s introduction – even with Lawrence’s introduction – Magnus’s readers would be bewildered by the character of the author. Why would a sensitive and self-pampering man with a vocation to be a monk ever choose to join the hardest and most elite fighting force in Europe? Furthermore, why would a sensitive and self-pampering man have a vocation to be a monk? For Lawrence, Magnus’s need to balance his passion for blissful holiness with his passion for violence needed no explanation: this was the eternal dialectic, the progression of history. Even so, the rigorous physical and psychological training the legionnaires underwent could never have suited a man like Magnus; their marching pace would by itself have been a problem. Rather than the usual 116-step-per-minute speed of other French units, legionnaires employ a slow 88-step-per-minute tempo known as ‘the crawl’. Lawrence pictured the figure of Magnus ‘in the red trousers and blue coat’ of the legionnaire, ‘with lappets turned up, surging like a little indignant pigeon across the drill yards’.21
The legionnaires were for the most part, as Magnus knew, men who needed to disappear; as such they were expected to enlist under false names. ‘The idea in founding the Legion,’ Magnus wrote, ‘had been to give a man who had committed some error a chance to rehabilitate himself.’ It was, in other words, a form of Purgatory. No questions were asked, and if they were the answers were not required to be truthful. Many a volunteer in the Legion’s history had turned out to be a ‘murderer, thief, cut-throat, deserter, adventurer, embezzler, forger, gaol-bird and fugitive from justice’.22 Some, like Magnus, had even been unrecognised princes. For example, a ‘simple young man’ who had registered himself in the Legion as ‘John Smith, or some such name’ and unfortunately died shortly afterwards ‘was discovered to be no other than a nephew of Emperor William II’. Magnus calculated that ‘John Smith’ must have been one of ‘the three sons of Prince Albrecht of Prussia, Regent of Brunswick’.23
The composition of the Legion, Magnus discovered, was 70 per cent German. The food, manners, discipline, arrogance, insolence and ‘arbitrariness’ of the outfit were all German characteristics: ‘it was a German regiment of the lowest type transplanted to Africa’. Magnus found himself consorting with the dregs of German society, men who had no interest in personal redemption: ‘There was nothing to redeem; a man was a living shell, with his soul dead, with no conscience or scruple, without heart or feeling, with only a belly to feed and fill with drink, and sexual organs to serve him for his depravities.’24 The Legion licensed these men to continue as thieves and murderers: ‘there was no friendship, no self-respect, no respect for others, nothing was sacred’. Those few, like Magnus, who had enrolled as innocents were ‘made beasts of’ so often that they became beasts themselves.
In addition to the filth and disgusting surroundings, living among the dregs of human society, doing strenuous exercise at great expense to my purse, I was treated like a dog, a ruffian, a blackguard, an outcast. I would not stay another minute more than was absolutely necessary.25
After a few days a helpful German count asked Magnus how he had washed up in the Legion, having evidently ‘not done anything wrong’.
‘No one is going to believe that you have come here for idealistic purposes of doing your share to aid the Allies. They could not understand that; and any one can see that you are not a soldier born, and that you have no love for the life … I would advise you to get out if you can – something sinister might happen to you if you don’t. That is all I can say.’
… I realized that what he told me was the truth. I was the butt of the officers, who were suspicious of me and partly jealous, and did everything to humiliate me, and make me feel as cheap as possible. I was the butt of the petty officers, who wished to ingratiate themselves with their superiors. I was the butt of the soldiers who thought I was not one of them, and I was the butt of others who were jealous or bore me a grudge for not lending them unlimited money.26
One of those who humiliated Magnus was an officer called Steinmann, ‘a typical Prussian bully, mean, brutal, domineering, ignorant, sly, and cowardly, and usually in a nasty temper’.
There was a system, Magnus discovered, of girants (otherwise spelt girons, or gironds, meaning passive homosexual boys). Having been picked up in Marseille or Paris by soldiers on their way to the Legion, the boys then also enlisted. In exchange for sexual favours, the girants, who enjoyed the protection of their lovers, ran their chores and carried theirs packs on marches. The girant culture was embedded in legionnaire life, and rivalry over boys could lead to murder. When their protectors tired of them, the girants became ‘public property’.
