Burning Man, page 25
‘Well, dearie, where is your protector today? Why doesn’t he carry your pack?’
‘Can’t you walk? Did he hurt you last night?’
‘I’ll carry your pack if you’re tired, but you must let me come and see you tonight.’
‘These and other remarks,’ Magnus wrote, ‘were shouted across one column from another.’ After the lights went out, the legionnaires would creep across the barracks to their various boys. Magnus was not, he said, ‘that kind’ of man – he describes himself in these pages as heterosexual – but this didn’t prevent his being accosted. ‘You are not bad,’ said one lieutenant, pinching his cheek. ‘I wouldn’t mind sleeping with you.’ Magnus apparently ‘trembled with rage’ at the suggestion. He was also accosted by an Arab in a shop, and when an Armenian in the shower put his erect member in Magnus’s face, ‘my disgust and indignation gave vent to a volley of contemptuous language which completely cowed him’.27
What would Lawrence have made of this section of Dregs? The answer is that it was almost certainly not included in the draft he read in Monte Cassino. Douglas, having read a still earlier draft in 1917, had advised Magnus to tone down the obscenities. The manuscript at that point contained, Douglas recalled, many unprintable ‘allusions’ to the ‘ultra-masculine peculiarities of Legionary life’. These scenes, Douglas explained, would have to be expurgated but Magnus refused: ‘I’ve given chapter and verse,’ he proudly insisted. ‘I’ve just tried to tell the truth.’ ‘You want to sell the book don’t you?’ argued Douglas. ‘No publisher would touch it with tongs as long as it stands. Water your truth! The reader likes to think that the legionaries, for all their roughness, are brave men ready to die for their country, and not a cosmopolitan bunch of cutthroats and sharpers and sodomites.’28
Lawrence told Magnus that Dregs was ‘good’ and that if the last five chapters (which describe his escape) could be made ‘less vague and diffuse’ and given ‘more detail and definite event’ he would help find the book a publisher.29 The result is that Magnus’s account of his escape is the most readable part of the text. Having obtained leave to go to Paris for a night, Magnus then caught the train south to Menton on the French–Italian border. Guessing that the authorities would not look for deserters in first-class carriages, this is where he hid. From Menton he crossed into Italy on an omnibus with a Havana in his mouth, then caught the train to Naples and the boat to Spain.
Why did Magnus really join the Legion? He pictures himself as a naïf in the style of Candide and he perhaps did believe, on one level, that he was joining up to do his bit for the war. But he was also, like the other legionnaires, a man on the run, and ‘near enough’, Lawrence wrote, ‘to being a scoundrel, thief, forger … to appreciate their company’.30 Nothing is said by Lawrence about the similarity between Magnus’s ordeal in the Legion and his own when he was called up for the medical examination in Derby, which he counted – together with his visit to Keynes’s rooms in Cambridge – as one of the crises of his life.
That afternoon, Lawrence and Magnus walked through the woods and across the moorland to a ruined convent that lies on the rocks and heath over the brow of the monastery hill. Two rooms of the convent were inhabited by a peasant farmer, and as they explored the ruins they heard a ‘crying – crying, crying, crying with a strange inhuman persistence’. It might have been ‘a sharp-voiced baby’. Looking for the source of the sound they came to a ‘little cave-like place’ and found there a ‘blind black puppy crawling miserably on the floor’, his mother nowhere to be seen.31 Lawrence had recently explained, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, his theory about the cries of blind puppies: ‘there speaks the first consciousness, the audible unconscious, in the squeak of these infantile things, which is so curiously and indescribably moving, reacting direct upon the great abdominal centre, the preconscious mind in man’.32 He had always been moved by the sudden cries of the non-human world which he saw as ‘the upper mind losing itself in the inner first mind’. They passed the peasant farmer who lived in the ruin; his face was as lined as a ‘gnarled bough’, and he was leading an ass carrying brushwood. The ‘bitch-mother’, the peasant told them, had ‘gone off’ for the day to look after the sheep. The mind of the peasant was ‘utterly blank’ and he spoke ‘as a tree might speak’.33
Lawrence was as affected by the blind pup in the cave as he was by the peasants on the slope, who were:
crying their speech as crows cry, and living their lives as lizards among the rocks, blindly going on with the little job in hand, the present moment, cut off from all past and all future, and having no idea and no sustained emotion, only that eternal will-to-live which makes a tortoise wake up once more in spring, and makes a grasshopper whistle on in the moonlight nights even of November.
The puppy was crying, crying, crying, the peasants were crying, the crows were crying, Lawrence was crying, Magnus was crying. It was now that he and Magnus had the only conversation in the Memoir that Lawrence reports in full, and it ends in tears.
‘The monks keep their peasants humble,’ I said to Magnus.
‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Don’t you think they are quite right? Don’t you think they should be humble?’ And he bridled like a little turkey cock on his hind legs.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘if there’s any occasion for humility, I do.’
‘Don’t you think there is occasion?’ he cried. ‘If there’s one thing worse than another, it’s this equality that has come into the world. Do you believe in it yourself?’
Lawrence did not believe in equality, but nor did he know how to measure a man’s superiority, and he ‘could not accept Magnus’ superiority to the peasant’.
He and Magnus belonged, Lawrence explained, to the same tree as the peasant; they were the ‘growing tip’ of the tree, and the peasant was the ‘hard, fixed tissue of the branch or trunk’. Magnus leapt on the analogy. Yes, yes, he agreed: that is what the Church believes too. ‘It is terrible to be agreed with,’ thought Lawrence, ‘especially by a man like Magnus. All that one says, and means, turns to nothing.’34
Lawrence and Magnus were in danger of agreeing again, when Magnus warmed to the topic of marriage. ‘They talk about love between men and women,’ he said. ‘Why it’s all a fraud. The woman is just taking all and giving nothing, and feeling sanctified about it. All she tries to do is thwart a man in whatever he is doing. – No, I have found my life in my friendships.’ Magnus and Douglas both used the terms ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ to denote a sexual relationship. He liked the physical side of his male friendships, said Magnus, but it was the durability of his mental friendships that mattered more. Lawrence was pleased to find a point on which they could violently differ: ‘With me, on the contrary, if there is no profound blood-sympathy, I know the mental friendship is trash.’ Magnus looked crestfallen, as though Lawrence had been denigrating their own friendship. They walked on in silence until Lawrence suddenly said, ‘I should die if I had to stay up here.’ Having had no idea that he was suffering, Magnus asked why. ‘Oh, I don’t know. The past, the past. The beautiful, the wonderful past, it seems to prey on my heart, I can’t bear it.’ It was the third time on the mountain that Lawrence had looked back. ‘Really?’ Magnus replied, his eyes widening. ‘Do you feel like that? – But don’t you think it is a far preferable life up here than down there? Don’t you think the past is far preferable to the future, with all this socialismo and these comunisti and so on?’ Lawrence of course agreed. But he did not say so.
It was the end of a bright afternoon and they were seated on ‘the wild hilltop high above the world’ which had ‘been one of man’s intense sacred places for three thousand years’. An ancient path through the wood had once connected the pagan temples, and the great wall at the bend in the road preceded even the birth of Christ. From this ‘last foothold of the old world’, they looked down at ‘the great white road straight as a thought, and the more flexible black railway with the railway station’. The railway workers swarmed ‘like ants’. This was the new world of ‘democracy, industrialism, socialism, the red flag of the communists and the red white and green tricolor of the fascisti’. And it was ‘barren’ down there, ‘like the black cindertrack of the railway’.35
Both worlds, the emerging one of the present and the not-quite-dead one of the past, were an agony to Lawrence, ‘but here on the mountain top was worst’. Up here he was lost; they both were. It was not only the historical past to which he could never return. It was his own past in Eastwood, and England. ‘I feel one comes unstuck from England,’ he wrote later that year, ‘from all the past – as if one would never go back.’36 Lawrence now confirmed the decision he had made the previous morning at the window: ‘I think one’s got to go through with the life down there – get somewhere beyond it. One can’t go back.’ He said this to Magnus, who believed with a passion that one could go back and get beyond the life down there. ‘But do you call the monastery going back?’ Magnus asked. ‘I don’t. The peace, the eternity, the concern with things that matter.’37 This was both a Pisgah sight and a version of the angel’s command to Dante at the door of Purgatory, but it also recalls Satan taking Jesus to the top of a mountain and showing him the kingdoms of the world. ‘All this I will give you,’ he says, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ ‘Away from me, Satan,’ Jesus replies.
The devil on the mountain had disrupted the progress of the monks building Monte Cassino, and Lawrence now disrupted Magnus’s progress. Magnus would never be a monk, Lawrence told him; he lacked the ‘vocation’. It was a cruel thing to say but Magnus, Lawrence thought, seemed relieved to be released from the weight of this intolerably vivid and exhausting place. The ‘mediaeval spirit’ of the wild hill summit then overcame Lawrence so powerfully that for the moment he ‘was almost speechless’.
Something had happened on the mountain top: he and Magnus had formed a Blutsbrüderschaft of sorts. Lawrence never admits this, but it is the only explanation for what followed. Magnus put his hand on his friend’s arm and, rather than freeze with horror as he usually did when he was touched, Lawrence stopped mocking him and saw who he really was:
He seemed to understand so much, round about the questions that trouble one deepest. But the quick of the question he never felt. He had no real middle, no real centre bit to him. Yet, round and round about all the questions, he was so intelligent and sensitive.
Magnus, Lawrence’s guide, had reached into the pilgrim’s soul. They walked back slowly and in silence as the sun declined and the air filled with the cold of snow. Magnus kept close to Lawrence, ‘very close’ and reassuring, ‘and I feeling as if my heart had once more broken: I don’t know why. And he feeling his fear of life that haunted him, and his fear of his own self and its consequences, that never left him for long.’38
Returning through the great door of the monastery after the wailing and lamentations of the afternoon, the two men might have been Dante and Virgil entering, not Purgatory, but the gate to hell:
And when, with gladness in his face, he placed
his hand upon my own, to comfort me,
he drew me in among the hidden things.
Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries
were echoing across the starless air,
so that, as soon as I set out, I wept.
(Inferno, Canto 3, 19–24)
At the end of their visit to Purgatory, when they reach the Garden of Eden, Virgil bids farewell to Dante, and that night Lawrence announced that he would be leaving Monte Cassino. He says nothing about his third night on the mountain, but Magnus will have begged him to stay and Lawrence will have been cruel because he had shed one of his selves up here and, as he put it in his story ‘A Modern Lover’, ‘nothing is so hateful as the self one has left’.39
We next see them both the following morning, 21 February, and they are two figures walking down the slope. They take not the winding carriage road but the ‘wide old paved path that swoops so wonderfully from the top of the hill to the bottom. It feels like a thousand years old.’40 Magnus is miserable, so they stop for a glass of wine, which he pays for himself. Lawrence then offers him twenty lire which Magnus refuses, not out of modesty but because it’s too small an amount to do much with.
By the time Lawrence reached the station at Cassino, it had started to rain and his thin coat was soaked through. He took the train to Naples, and then the steamer to Capri: modern transport for a hurrying world. ‘I let myself be carried away, away from the monastery, away from Magnus, away from everything.’ For a moment on the deck of the boat the sun came out, and Lawrence ‘felt that again the world had come to an end for me, and again that my heart was broken’.41
But what is clear is that when Lawrence dismissed Magnus’s vocation as a monk, he accepted his own as a man of the future rather than the past. In the epilogue to Movements in European History, which he added to the proofs after his return from the monastery, Lawrence confirmed this position. When the war ended, he wrote, ‘We thought the old times were coming back. They can never come. We know now that each one of us had something shot out of him. So we have to adjust ourselves to a new world.’42
His utopias all turned to dystopias, and the Capri he returned to at the end of February 1920 had become a ‘gossipy, villa-stricken, two-humped chunk of limestone’. It was a ‘cat-Cranford’: Mrs Gaskell’s novel of Midlands provincial life was often evoked when Lawrence wanted to describe a particular form of hell.43 So the Lawrences sailed south to their latest Happy Isle, ‘dawn-lovely Sicily’, a place of rippling terraces and sudden drops, with mile upon mile of stone steps and sarcophagi cut into the rocks and mountains. Sicily had been recommended by Magnus, who had lived in Taormina in 1915 and still owed money to his landlord. ‘Whatever had died for me,’ Lawrence believed, ‘Sicily had then not died.’ Poised at the point ‘where Europe ends’, Sicily had, Lawrence thought, ‘a good on-the-brink’ feel to it.44 The island is on the join where European and African plates collide and ten years earlier one of Sicily’s many earthquakes had killed 120,000 citizens, and destroyed all but three of Messina’s ninety-one churches.
Magnus had suggested that they take a house on the south-west shore, but Lawrence preferred Taormina, ‘ledged so awfully above the dawn’ on the eastern side of the island on the slopes of Mount Etna, whose summit was believed in medieval Italy to be the location of Mount Purgatory.45 Today Taormina is a tourist resort but in Lawrence’s time it was a refuge for expatriate artists and ‘gentlemen’: Wagner came here and so did Oscar Wilde; Wilhelm von Gloeden photographed his nude Sicilian boys in Taormina, and Nietzsche wrote a portion of Thus Spake Zarathustra. The town itself, made of narrow streets, pastel-coloured houses and old white walls, lies on ancient ground. It has its own Greek amphitheatre facing what Lawrence called the ‘witch-like’ Etna, her ‘strange winds prowling round her like Circe’s panthers’.46
In Canto 28 of Purgatory, Dante finds himself in a wood where, on the far side of a stream, he sees a garden of flowering boughs. Into this ‘earthly paradise’ comes a fair maiden called Matelda, his final temptation before his encounter with the jealous Beatrice. Matelda explains that the stream comes from a fountain and that drinking from one side of the stream takes away the memory of sin, and from the other side the water restores the memory of good deeds. Shelley’s translation of the canto is called ‘Matilda Gathering Flowers’, and Lawrence, with the serendipity that accompanied the choice of every house he lived in, found his own earthly Paradise behind a pink and cream villa called the Fontana Vecchia or ‘Old Fountain’. ‘Here one feels,’ he wrote, ‘as if one had lived for a hundred thousand years.’47
Lawrence in Florence
Fontana Vecchia was a fortress-like house divided into two halves: the landlord and his family occupied the lower part and the Lawrences took the top floor, from which a generous terrace hung suspended over a terraced garden of magenta bougainvillea, wild cyclamen, pink gladioli, roses, snapdragons, orchids and finger-high irises that bloomed for only a day.48 A broken Roman tomb lolled across the track and the fountain after which the house was named still spurted water, ‘in a sort of little cave-place’. Marrows, beans and tomatoes grew in the sappy earth, and in the centre of the garden stood a great carob tree surrounded by an orchard of sweet-smelling citrus, olive, eucalyptus, medlar and almond trees. Fertilised by volcanic ash, Sicilian soil is endlessly bountiful: the Sikels, who first came here from Italy in the eleventh century BC, believed that their gods lived below ground, in the hot springs and boiling subterranean rivers. Legend says it was the goddesses of Sicily who first gave wheat to the world.
* * *
The sun rose every morning with ‘a splendour like trumpets’ and his days were filled with the clanging of goat bells.49 Lawrence was overcome by a suave indifference and in this enchanted garden he returned to his memories of Eastwood. ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’, which he completed in early May, contained his first, and most magnanimous, response to Magnus. He did not, Lawrence told Catherine Carswell, ‘want to do a satire’ because ‘it all just dries up one’s bowels’.50 So he cast Magnus instead as an upmarket Charlie Chaplin.
Alvina’s father, James Houghton, meets an American called Mr May who has ‘been in the music-hall line as a sort of agent’. Mr May, who appears in Woodhouse as if from nowhere, was ‘one of those men who carry themselves in a birdie fashion, so that their tail sticks out a little behind, jauntily’. There was a Mrs May somewhere in the background but they were no longer together; she was, Mr May explained, a vegetarian and had once ruined his buttered champignons by dousing them in old carrot water (‘Can you imagine such a person?’). Mr May had lived in Rome and managed the career of ‘Miss Maud Callum, the danseuse’, but he was currently down on his luck, hence prospecting for show business in the colliery towns of the English Midlands.51
