Burning Man, page 26
With his immaculate linen, ‘small felt hats’ and ‘face clean-shaved like a cherub’, he cut quite a figure in Woodhouse, and when Mr May and James Houghton walked through the town they resembled a couple of vaudeville artists. Houghton, shabby in his overcoat and bending forward, ‘nipped along hurriedly, as if pursued by fate’, and Mr May, ‘tight and tubby, with his chest out and his head back’, recalled ‘a consequential bird of the smaller species’.
The mind of Mr May was ‘quick’ but ‘not winged’, and what excites him in Woodhouse is the Cinematograph and Variety Theatre in the old cattle market, where the colliers and working girls come on a Friday night. If James Houghton could be persuaded to buy a similar ‘erection’, as Mr May calls it, then he, Mr May, could manage the place. So Mr Houghton invests in a frame-section building in the neighbouring town of Lumley, and Mr May works hard at the programme. Up at 5.30 a.m., he is on his way by seven, sailing through the day like a ‘stiff little ship before a steady breeze’. Having done ‘a fair amount of journalism’, and garnered calling cards from a good number of newspapers, he takes over the publicity himself.
With ‘Houghton’s Picture Palace’ (his ‘ox-blood red erection’) up and running, Mr May entertains the colliers to conjurors, contortionists, comics, performing birds, five-minute farces and popular songs. Mr May even does a turn himself as a begging dog, wearing a pug ‘costoom’, as he calls it. The audience love the pug: it is ‘too lifelike, and too impossible’.52 It’s a surreal joke, turning Magnus, who described himself as ‘treated like a dog’ in the Foreign Legion, into a Chinese pug with a squashed, wrinkled face, and Lawrence repeated it two years later in ‘Bibbles’, his ambivalent paean to the bulldog with the ‘Chinese puzzle face’ and the ‘wrinkling reproachful look’ who appropriated him in New Mexico. Except that it was hard to tell, Lawrence said of Bibbles, who appropriated whom. Either way, he ‘owned’ Bibbles and ‘never dreamed, till now, of the awful time the Lord must / Have, “owning” humanity’.
Lawrence loses Bibbles in Taos plaza and then finds her, ‘prancing round the corner in exuberant, bubbling affection’, on the trail of a ‘yellow-green old Mexican woman’ who tries to shoo her off, but Bibbles doesn’t notice. Lawrence hates Bibbles, with ‘her imbecile bit of tail in a love-flutter’, but he also loves her, tearing along like a ‘dust-ball’ and not giving ‘a rap for anybody’. ‘Bibbles’ is the best dog-poem in the language and while it might be an account of female promiscuity, Lawrence’s fond, exasperated tone is also the one he reserved for Magnus.
Mr May, who ‘must have a good hotel’ (and ‘if he had to clear out without paying his hotel bill – well, that was the world’s fault’), is possessed of the ‘private innocence’ found in all Americans. He and Alvina bond immediately, but Alvina does not find him ‘physically moving. Physically he was not there: he was oddly an absentee.’ As for Mr May, were he to see ‘the least sign of coming-on-ness’ in Alvina, ‘he would have fluttered off in a great dither’.53 Lawrence’s parody of Magnus contains none of his future venom, but nor does it hint at the sensitive, intelligent man he had glimpsed in Monte Cassino, who understood ‘so much, round about the questions that trouble one deepest’. Mr May in his ‘pug-costoom’ is a violent reaction to the Mr Magnus who, on his last afternoon on the mountain, returned with Lawrence to the monastery as the air filled with snow. It is as though Lawrence were repulsed by his own affection.
When he renamed his novel The Lost Girl, he surely had H.D.’s baby daughter Perdita in mind, and H.D. will have seen his title as another flare sent from a window. She will have hated the novel because The Lost Girl is both a mad and a bad book (so ‘bad’, thought Katherine Mansfield, it ‘ought not to be allowed’), but the madness and the badness are not necessarily related. Its badness is because Lawrence had lost interest in human psychology – ‘his hero and heroine’, Mansfield rightly said, ‘are animals on the prowl’.54 And its madness is the result of his tearing along like a dustball without having the faintest idea of what’s coming next. ‘Begun a novel – don’t know if it will ever end,’ Lawrence wrote on 15 March 1920. ‘I may come to a full stop any moment – you never know,’ he wrote on 22 March. By 31 March, when he had completed 50,000 words, he described the book as running ‘out of control’ and jumping ‘through the port-hole into the unknown ocean’, and leaving him ‘on deck painfully imploring it to come home’. The first five chapters, those which Lawrence revised before leaving for Monte Cassino, do nothing to prepare us for the sudden appearance of Mr May, and the four chapters devoted to mocking Mr May do nothing to prepare us for what follows, including the anal rape of Alvina in the bedroom of her deceased mother (which page had to be spliced out of the printed book in order for the libraries to take it). There is also a problem of genre: The Lost Girl begins in the vein of Arnold Bennett and then turns round to eat its own tail. The satire that dried Lawrence’s bowels appears from left field, in the form of a bizarre spin on Jane Austen’s Emma: Alvina Houghton, handsome, clever and no longer rich, lives in Woodhouse with her elderly, widowed father. There is even a minor character called Frank Churchill.
Lawrence described The Lost Girl as ‘comic’ but the only genuinely funny aspect is the arrival in the town of the faux Native American tribe, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, whose souls belong to the primitive world and must therefore be as respected by the reader as they are by Lawrence. The Natcha-Kee-Tawaras consist of four strapping young men: Louis and Geoffrey, who are French, Max, who is Swiss, and a feral ‘yellow-eyed’ Italian called Ciccio to whom Alvina, when she has given up being a New Woman, will submit: ‘He gave the slight, almost imperceptible jerk of the head, backwards and sideways, as if summoning her towards him. His face too was closed and expressionless. But in his eyes, which kept hers, there was a dark flicker of ascendency. He was going to triumph over her.’55 Led by a plump, middle-aged actor-manager-mother-squaw known as Kishwégin, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras ride on horseback through Woodhouse dressed as braves in deerskin trousers and war paint. It is often the case in Lawrence that the passages he considered his finest are those most vulnerable to mockery.
The Natcha-Kee-Tarawa show contains a number of different acts, including yodelling, but their great turn is ‘The White Prisoner’, which Lawrence describes in reverential detail. Kishwégin, alone at the door of her wigwam, rocks a hanging cradle and the brave Louis brings home a white prisoner. The brave Ciccio then brings home a dead bear and tortures the white prisoner while Kishwégin continues to rock the cradle. The bear, not dead at all, then sits up and strikes Louis down.
On one occasion, when Kishwégin has a cold, Mr May takes over her role, wearing a long black plait, a short chamois dress, gaiters and moccasins. ‘Can you believe that that’s Mr. May,’ Alvina laughs, ‘he’s exactly like a girl.’56 The greatest of all insults for Lawrence – as for Douglas – was to describe a man as girlish. We are asked to laugh at Mr May but not at the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras themselves, who are the moral and spiritual core of the book.
While Lawrence marries his heroine to Ciccio, he does not allow her to love and be loved. After leaving the Midlands for Italy – as Frieda had also done – Alvina goes not to Lake Garda or the Gulf of Spezia, where Lawrence and Frieda had been happy, but to the very house in Picinisco in which their bones had turned cold.
The interiority denied to Alvina and Ciccio is accorded instead to the Midland and Abruzzi landscapes, and this is where the strength of The Lost Girl lies. Lawrence’s sense of place is, as ever, preternatural: the bleak beauty of Woodhouse, the bleak beauty of Picinisco; the hellishness of Manchester House, the hellishness of the Italian villa; the never-ending depths of the mines beneath Woodhouse and the never-ending heights of the devilish Abruzzi mountains. The bride and groom travel by train across France to Italy, and from Turin to Genoa and Rome, after which the hills approach and they are among the Alban hills: Alvina is penetrating the terrain looked down on by Lawrence from Monte Cassino.
Up and up they clamber until they reach the station from where the couple go by omnibus towards the core of the mountains. Lawrence was always impressed by the Italian roads; ‘splendid gestures’, he called them in Sea and Sardinia, swinging from impossible crags, scooped ‘with complete sang-froid’ from the sides of hills, piercing mountain forests.57 He loved their carelessness and disrepair and the relaxed expectation that they will be ruts and ruins in ten years’ time. The final stage of Alvina’s journey to her new home is a paean to the art of the Roman road, both ancient and modern. Moth-white oxen wave past the bus, followed by peasant men in black cloaks. The mountains are closing in, the rocks rise up straight into the thick darkness. Every time they turn a corner, Alvina thinks that they are ‘coming out on the top of this hollow between the heights’ but the road continues to coil. They reach Atina, a market town on the summit, and continue by foot through the wilderness towards Ciccio’s home. When the cart can go no further, they pile their luggage on to the back of a donkey, and navigate the icy river and rocky path until they reach a Victorian villa on a bit of ‘half-savage, ancient earth’. It had been built by Ciccio’s uncle, Pancrazio, who was an artist’s model in London in the 1890s. Suburban from the outside, it is cave-like within: the frozen kitchen is empty save for piles of straw and beans. In the bedroom on the first night, ‘a real terror took hold of her … Everything seemed electric with horror … What would she do, where should she flee? She was lost – lost – lost utterly.’58
All Lawrence’s novels are about the hellishness of home, but Alvina’s claustrophobia in houses outstrips even that of Siegmund in The Trespasser, or that of Paul Morel. The only happy interior in The Lost Girl is the stage wigwam in Houghton’s Picture Palace. If she has to ‘live in this part of the world at all’, Alvina says of the Abruzzi region, ‘she must avoid the inside of it … If she was to save her sanity she must keep to the open air, and avoid any contact with human interiors.’ Ciccio joins the Italian army and Alvina, in the open air, sheds her former self. The sound of men chopping wood and calling to the oxen makes her happy; hearing ‘the constant speech of the passing river, and the real breathing presence of the upper snows … a wild, terrible happiness would take hold of her, beyond despair, but very like despair. No one would ever find her.’59
Katherine Mansfield was wrong when she said there was ‘not one memorable word ’ in The Lost Girl, and that ‘the nature study’ of the final chapters was ‘no more than the grazing-place for Alvina and her sire’.60 The novel has flashes of intense beauty and its compulsive appeal is precisely the result of Lawrence’s having not a glimmer of what he’s up to. In our final glimpse of Alvina she is, as H.D. was when Lawrence last saw her, pregnant and alone, a white prisoner wondering if her sire will ever return. She has known agony and her heart is broken. The old world is not for her: it is the New World across the Atlantic that Alvina is left gazing towards.
* * *
In late April 1920, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Maurice Magnus. After three weeks of floundering, the police received a tip-off that he was hiding in Monte Cassino (Magnus was ‘denounced’ by a friend, probably Nathan Cobb who had loaned him the apartment in Rome). On the morning of 24 April, with only two more pages of Dregs to revise – he was concluding the climax of his flight from the Legion – Magnus was warned by Don Martino that the carabinieri were currently making their way up the mountain. It was time for his second great escape. Taking 150 lire from the monastery funds and throwing a change of linen and a toothbrush into his satchel, Magnus slipped through the back of the fortress and slithered down the other side of the pathless slope, over rocks and stones and thorns, before taking the backroads to the station at Cassino.
The walk to Cassino took seven hours. From here he caught the slow train (second class) to Rome, where he changed for Naples, hiding most of the way in the lavatory. He then caught the diretto to Sicily, and thirty hours later knocked on Lawrence’s door having had, during this time, nothing but a glass of wine and a little bread and cheese from a station café. But Lawrence was not there: he had gone down to Syracuse to see the spring flowers. So Magnus booked himself into the San Domenico, a former monastery and now the most expensive hotel in Taormina, and waited for his friend.
When Lawrence returned to his garden at the end of April, Magnus emerged through the orange trees like Dante’s Matelda. ‘A terrible thing has happened,’ he wailed, ‘and I came straight to you.’ He told Lawrence about his narrow escape, adding that it would be awful were the monks to discover ‘everything’, and ‘he laughed a little, comical laugh over everything, as if he was just a little bit naughtily proud of it’. Why, Lawrence asked Magnus, did he stay in the San Domenico at fifty lire at day if he had no money? The cost ‘of course’ was ‘ruinous’, Magnus heartily agreed, but the food was better at the San Domenico than at Fichera’s, a hotel which was half the price. Who, asked Lawrence, is going to cover the bill? ‘Well, I thought,’ said Magnus. ‘You know all those manuscripts of mine? Well, you think they’re some good, don’t you? Well, I thought if I made them over to you, and you did what you could with them, and just kept me going till I can get a new start – or till I can get away –’. His plan was to g0 to Egypt (then a British colony) where he had a friend in newspapers who might get him an editorship or some such. Until then, Magnus hoped that he might stay ‘very quietly’ with Lawrence and Frieda and do a little writing. ‘He looked up into my face, as if he were trying all he could on me. First thing I knew was that I could not have him in the house with me: and even if I could have borne it, my wife never could.’ Frieda then came down to meet Magnus who was charming and kissed her hand in the German fashion. ‘Such a beautiful place you have here,’ he said wistfully. Lawrence had a lunch appointment, so he gave Magnus the 100-lire note he had in his pocket and arranged to see him again the next morning. ‘You’re so awfully kind,’ said Magnus, but Lawrence wasn’t ‘feeling kind’.61
‘Whatever do you pick up such dreadful people for?’ asked Frieda when Magnus had gone. ‘He’s the first,’ replied Lawrence. ‘And even he isn’t dreadful.’62 This is how Lawrence remembered their exchange. In her own version, Frieda recalled her husband’s rage, asking, ‘Is it my duty to look after this man?’ Magnus, said Frieda, was ‘taking for granted that we would be responsible for him’.63
The next morning a letter addressed to Magnus arrived at the Fontana Vecchia. So he was already using Lawrence’s address. Then Magnus himself reappeared in the garden and repeated how beautiful it was. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But Magnus, there isn’t a room for you in the house. There isn’t a spare room, anyway. You’d better get something cheaper in the village.’ They agreed that Magnus would find a room with an old friend of his, a waiter called Melenda, after which Lawrence would settle his hotel bill: ‘But I can’t do any more. I simply can’t.’ Magnus’s eyes filled with tears, and Lawrence ‘looked away at the Ionian sea, feeling my blood turn to ice and the sea go black. I loathed scenes like this.’64
Magnus turned up in the garden again that afternoon, and Lawrence being out, he pleaded instead with Frieda, kissing her hand, wiping away his tears and ‘trembling in distress’. Her ‘spine’, Frieda reported to Lawrence, ‘crept up and down with distaste and discomfort’. According to Frieda, Magnus was without ‘meaning, or purpose’ and ‘made a fool of Lawrence’.65 In Magnus’s version of his encounter with Frieda, reported to Douglas, ‘She, the bitch, met me and asked some supercilious questions and passed some pleasant words.’66 Another visitor to the Fontana Vecchia that spring was a local mule-driver called Peppino d’Allura, who recalled that Frieda, once again alone, emerged naked in the garden and offered him her body, which he willingly enjoyed.
Magnus reluctantly agreed to move into Melenda’s house for ten francs a day. But before doing so he had one last request of Lawrence: would he mind nipping up to Monte Cassino to collect his things, including his papers and trinkets and clothes? Of course, the papers were highly confidential and mustn’t be shown to anyone. If Don Martino saw them, ‘there’s an end to me at the monastery. I can never go back there.’ Lawrence considered the sixty-hour round-trip, the heavy leather suitcases, the interruption to his novel and the embarrassment of seeing Don Martino again under these circumstances. ‘I don’t want to do that,’ he said, and the Ionian sea again went black. ‘Why not?’ Magnus asked, turning green. He could not take it in: ‘You will go, won’t you?’ Magnus insisted. ‘You will go to the monastery for my things?’ Lawrence did not reply, and Magnus left the garden with the ‘terrible insolence of the humble’, and a small glimmer of hope.67
What Magnus told Douglas about their encounter is this: ‘Lawrence heard my tale, was most sympathetic and ready to help me in the way I asked … I offered [him] half of the proceeds of that book, and all my other stuff, if he would help me now and go to that place on the hill and get my things and the other manuscripts. He seemed willing and was most nice.’68 It was now that Lawrence wrote the final chapter of The Lost Girl, in which he left Alvina abandoned and alone in Picinisco.
As Lawrence was walking into town the next day, Magnus again appeared on his path. Taking Lawrence’s hand, he looked up at him imploringly but Lawrence would not, he confirmed, be returning to the monastery. ‘It was final,’ he said, and Magnus ‘knew it’. They walked together ‘in silence’, as they had done that late winter afternoon at Monte Cassino, but now it was a ‘lovely, lovely morning of hot sun’ with butterflies ‘flapping over the rosemary hedges and over a few little red poppies’. As on the mountain top, when Lawrence had told him that he lacked the monastic vocation, Magnus seemed relieved to be denied by Lawrence, and ‘seemed almost to love me for having refused him’. They reached the garden gate and Magnus asked if he might come in. Lawrence, who now cast Frieda as the jealous Beatrice, said no, because ‘My wife doesn’t want it.’ But even that Magnus ‘accepted without offence, and seemed only to like me better for it. That was a puzzle to me.’69
