Burning Man, page 27
Later the same day Lawrence sent Magnus a cheque covering his hotel bill, adding 200 lire to keep him going (‘What good to me,’ Magnus complained to Douglas, ‘were these few pounds?’). Lawrence also wrote Magnus a letter saying that he ‘could not do any more, and didn’t want to see him any more’. This, Magnus told Douglas, was ‘because his wife was angry!!!!! Finis.’ Playing on Magnus’s horror of women, Lawrence now turned Frieda into the villain of the story. When Magnus received this news, he returned, his ‘mouth dry’, to the Fontana Vecchia but ‘– he was out – she was in – I asked her if she knew what he had written me – she said “more or less” – of course I knew it was her doing. I spoke as nicely as I could, and pleaded without losing all my dignity … she looked like nails…’70
If, wrote Lawrence in his Memoir, he had had the money to send Magnus off to Egypt to sponge off someone else, he would willingly have done so. But Lawrence did then have the money. He was, for the moment, relatively flush: in the first six months of 1920 he received Amy Lowell’s gift, plus a second surprise cheque of £75 from Mary Cannan’s husband, Gilbert, who had organised a collection in America for the charity-boy of literature, plus American royalties worth £145, plus two $50 payments from Seltzer, plus £19 from Land and Water for his story ‘You Touched Me’, $40 from The Dial for his story ‘Adolf’ and an offer from them of $50 for the companion story ‘Rex’, plus a whopping $250 from Metropolitan Magazine for ‘Wintry Peacock’. Added to which he was expecting £100 in advances for The Lost Girl and Women in Love, which was to be published in a limited American edition by Thomas Seltzer. Lawrence currently had so much money that when, in May, Catherine Carswell sent him £50, he burned the cheque. He then burned a second cheque for £5, sent from Kot for the royalties for the preface he had written to Kot’s translation of Shestov’s All Things are Possible.
Meanwhile, Magnus told Douglas that ‘my hotel bill ate up every cent I got – Lawrence never asked me for a meal or offered a room in his most commodious house.’ Magnus now sent Dregs to the first of several publishers in London, and wrote to an English friend asking for a thousand lire. ‘If I get it,’ he told Douglas, ‘I shall go to Malta and from there to Egypt … If anything happens in the meantime, look for my grave in the foreigner’s cemetery and I leave all my manuscripts and papers to you – and their proceeds. They are all on the hilltop.’71
For the next ten days Lawrence heard nothing from Magnus, and when he reappeared in the garden of the Fontana Vecchia it was in the form of a note handed to Lawrence by Melenda, Magnus’s landlord, who had asked him to leave. He had been paid, wrote Magnus, seven guineas by Land and Water for his article on ‘Holy Week at Monte Cassino’ (published on Lawrence’s recommendation), but the post office would not give him the letter because it had been wrongly addressed. Would Lawrence kindly advance him the seven guineas, after which he would leave Sicily at once. According to Melenda, Magnus was a mezzo signore, a half-gentleman: he had slept beneath his roof for ten nights, made daily orders of delicious, specially cooked food, drunk as much as he could stomach and so far not paid a penny. The money, Melenda complained, was always coming tomorrow.
Lawrence’s proceedings with Magnus were observed by the South African artist Jan Juta, who had come to the Fontana Vecchia in the spring of 1920 to paint the novelist’s portrait. Magnus, Juta thought, was persecuting Lawrence but Lawrence was colluding in the game. On the day they were to begin their sessions, Lawrence was too angry to sit. ‘If I tried,’ he explained to Juta, ‘I know you would paint me scarlet all over.’ So they went for a walk along the mountain path that climbed behind the town. Magnus, said Lawrence, was begging for money which he then spent on luxuries, ‘and now he throws his “memoirs” at me and, believe me, I am to write a foreword to them AND get them published for him … Oh, I could kill him.’ So it was during Magnus’s lifetime that Lawrence committed himself to writing an introduction to Dregs: it was a favour to his friend.
The next Lawrence heard of Magnus, he was safely in Catania, fifty miles away. ‘Ah, I breathed free now he had gone,’72 wrote Lawrence, and for a brief moment Maurice Magnus dwindled into the past.
Mary Cannan, now also living in Sicily, suggested they all take a two-day trip to Malta, paid for by her. So on 17 May, Lawrence, Frieda and Mary caught the train to the port at Syracuse, only to hear that the steamers were on strike and the next sailing would not be until the following day. They spent the evening wandering along the harbour, watching the sun dissolve behind the skyline of flat-topped hills, and the Arabs and Turks saunter beneath the pomegranate and hibiscus trees. They booked themselves into the dilapidated Grand Hotel for the night where the porter gave Lawrence an envelope addressed in the all-too-familiar hand. ‘Dear Lawrence,’ wrote Magnus. ‘I saw you this morning, all three of you walking down the Via Nazionale, but you would not look at me … The strike of the steamboats has delayed me here. I am sweating blood. I have a last request of you. Can you let me have ninety Lire, to make up what I need for my hotel bill. If I cannot have this I am lost.’73 Magnus, like Christ on his last night, was sweating blood to the ground. Who was Lawrence to deny him his last request?
‘Well, here was a blow!’ thought Lawrence: Magnus was also bound for Malta. He had no choice but to meet up with the fugitive in the hotel lounge, where Magnus explained that he had been driven to sell his precious trinkets, including his opal cufflinks. His eyes ‘were swimming with tears’ and Lawrence gave him a 100-lire note. The steamer to Malta was leaving that night and so Magnus paid his hotel bill and booked himself – with what remained of Lawrence’s lire – a second-class ticket. At least, reasoned Lawrence, he was not travelling first class, but ‘I should have gone third myself, out of shame of spending somebody else’s money.’74 It was now, inspired by the insect-smeared walls of his hotel bedroom and the blood which Magnus was both sweating and sucking, that Lawrence wrote ‘The Mosquito’, a summing-up of his relations with Magnus to date and a parody of his belief in a blood brotherhood. The poet begins with respect for the insolence of the vampire: ‘When did you start your tricks / Monsieur?’ (Lawrence would refer, in his Memoir, to ‘Monsieur Magnus’). Monsieur Mosquito stalks the air ‘in circles and evasions, enveloping me’, and the poet becomes increasingly angry as he fails to swat him:
I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air
Having read my thoughts against you.
Come then, let us play at unawares,
And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.
By the end of the poem Lawrence’s combination of cold contempt and boiling rage, so out of proportion to its object, is presented in a language arcane enough to be comic:
I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in oblivion,
Obscenely ecstasied
Sucking live blood
My blood.
Such silence, such suspended transport,
Such gorging,
Such obscenity of trespass.
Lawrence succeeds in killing the mosquito – ‘the infinitesimal faint smear of you’ – but what has his victory achieved? The pest was a ‘nothingness’ to begin with.
The ‘sly game of bluff ’ had only just begun. After he, Frieda and Mary Cannan had boarded the steamer, Lawrence leaned on the rail of the deck and watched the passengers course up the gangplank: Arabs, Maltese, Greek and at the last minute, ‘like the grandest gentleman on earth’, came Magnus, ‘very smart in his little grey overcoat and grey curly hat, walking very smart and erect and genteel, and followed by a porter with a barrow of luggage’ (so he had managed to retrieve his belongings from Monte Cassino). The carabinieri were lounging around on the harbour front and Lawrence felt his heart quicken; but Magnus sailed past, ‘his nose in the air’. Hooting and twinkling, the ship heaved into the night and Lawrence, still leaning on the rail, was watching the lights of Syracuse ‘sinking already forlorn and little on the low darkness’ when ‘suddenly, like a revenant’, appeared Magnus at his side. ‘Oh my word,’ Magnus said, ‘I begin to breathe free for the first time since I left the monastery! How awful it’s been! But of course, in Malta, I shall be all right.’75 Then lurching off sideways into the air, Monsieur Mosquito reappeared, just as suddenly, on the first-class deck, smoking a cigar and comporting himself in conversation with an officer in a thoroughly first-class manner: ‘Such obscenity of trespass’.
The following dawn Lawrence saw for the first time the ‘heaped glitter’ of Valetta, and he thought of St Paul who was shipwrecked here and ‘must have struck the island from this side’. When Coleridge landed in the same harbour 115 years earlier, to take up his position of Secretary to the British Governor, he had felt like Aeneas arriving at Carthage. Lawrence watched Magnus disembark and present his passport to the Maltese official. This was the egregious little modern moment to which all pilgrims were now subjected: would he pass the examination? ‘Yes, he passed all right. Once more he was free.’76 And so off Magnus went through the tilting streets and stairways of the town.
The Knights of Malta, who came to the island in 1530 after being expelled from Rhodes, are a religious and military brotherhood whose mission, dating back to the time of the Crusades, is to defend the poor and sick. Malta’s reputation as a sanctuary was confirmed in the Great War, when 20,000 hospital beds were made available for the wounded. The monks of Monte Cassino had connections on Malta, and so Magnus was in good hands: he would be safe here, looked after by two Maltese friends of Don Martino, called Mazzaiba and Salonia.*
Malta shows every sign of being a colonial outpost. The butter-yellow rocks of the port have been, Lawrence noted, ‘cut straight by man’, and the Maltese speak fluent broken-English. It is a place of barking dogs, military bands and bacon-and-egg breakfasts. It was also, when Lawrence was there, staggeringly hot: ‘so hot’, he wrote, that ‘I feel quite stunned.’ No sooner had Lawrence booked into the Great Britain Hotel in the Strada Reale than he ran into Magnus whose (superior) hotel was on the same street, and he now did nothing to resist him. They lunched together and went back to Magnus’s bedroom for whisky: such had become their routine. Magnus was sporting a ‘smart white duck suit’ and Lawrence – astonishingly – paid a tailor £6 to make him a similar white suit of Indian silk. He doubtless needed cooler clothes, but this sartorial extravagance is evidence of the degree to which Lawrence resigned himself to the appeal of Magnus. The two men, it will have been noted, explored the island in identical outfits.
The steamer strike turned their two-day jolly into an eight-day sentence, and so, with nothing else to do, Lawrence joined Magnus, Mazzaiba and Salonia in the car for sightseeing excursions to St Paul’s Bay and the fortress-city of Medina, the stately and impregnable former capital of the island. On the other side of Medina’s walls lies the overflow town of Rabat (meaning suburb), and beneath Rabat (because the dead could not be buried beneath Medina) are the Phoenician catacombs of St Agatha and St Paul, a vast subterranean country covering more than 20,000 square feet. The underworld is entered through a shaft in the stone which opens into a cave where tables and couches hewn from the rocks impersonate the furniture of Roman villas. This is where the mourners once feasted in celebration of the life to come. Narrow corridors like the passages in a mine lead to further chambers, and gangplanks lead on to the sarcophagi where a thousand corpses once waited for the Day of Judgement. We do not know if Lawrence toured the catacombs – he says next to nothing in his letters about what happened on Malta – but it is hard to believe that he would have overlooked the opportunity.
What Lawrence did say is that he loathed Malta, a land without rivers or streams or even snakes because St Paul, surviving a snakebite, drove them all away. Lawrence described it as a ‘bone-dry’, ‘bath-brick’, ‘hideous island’, ‘stark as a corpse, no trees, no bushes even: a fearful landscape, cultivated, and weary with ages of weariness, and weary old houses here and there’.77 Eight days was a long time for Lawrence to remain in the same spot without writing, and the blistering heat would have made his need for constant movement difficult. The dryness of Malta gets under your skin, and Coleridge felt much as Lawrence did. Or rather, Lawrence’s ‘glittering’ Malta sounds very like that of Coleridge, who in one of his notebook entries pictured himself after three months on the island as gasping like a fish ‘on the glittering mud, the mud of his once full stream’. In a letter to his wife in the Lake District, Coleridge described Malta as ‘a barren Rock … no rivers, no brooks, no hedges, no green fields, almost no trees, & the few that are unlovely’.78
For Magnus, Malta was – literally – a last resort. When Lawrence said goodbye to him at the end of May, the fugitive was settling into a tiny house (rent: £6 a year, paid in advance) in a ‘quiet forlorn little yellow street’ in Rabat, directly above the underworld.
According to the Memoir, during their days on Malta Lawrence and Magnus discussed nothing but the publication of Dregs and various of Magnus’s drama translations, and we know that Lawrence wrote to publishers on Magnus’s behalf. Douglas had separately tried to place Dregs but, as he had predicted, no one would touch it with tongs. Magnus was determined, however, to live from his writing, and his letters from Rabat are evidence of his campaign to survive. To one editor who had turned the book down on the grounds of obscenity, Magnus grandly replied:
I believe I should deserve the reproach that ‘there are some things that cannot be published’ if ‘Dregs’ were vulgar. Only vulgarity without wit is unpublishable, or rather not permissible … I think I have mentioned the eulogistic verdicts of Norman Douglas, D. H. Lawrence, and Douglas Goldring …79
Undeterred, Magnus began a second set of memoirs, settling down in the burning heat to recall his winter tour of ‘Golden Russia’.
He was making plans. In the long term, Magnus wanted to clear his name and return to what he called the ‘place on the hill’, but he also wrote to the Queen of Spain (‘There are so few queens left now!’) to enquire about ‘a room in one of her country houses, or a cell in one of the monasteries she is protecting. No answer – not that I expected it.’ Another plan was to go to Morocco. ‘What the hell will you do in Morocco’, asked Douglas, ‘besides —?’ There were, Magnus conceded, ‘a few desirable Arabs – though I only fly to the physical when I can’t have the other’. Douglas was planning a trip to Morocco himself, ‘to indulge in the carnal delights’. Magnus and Douglas used code-words when what they discussed was illegal: ‘Most interesting,’ Magnus told Douglas, ‘what you say about the Maltese and the tobacco. Of course you are a connoisseur of young tobacco…’80
Lawrence returned from Malta at the end of May, relieved that his friend was ‘shut up in that beastly island’. He hoped that Magnus had now exited the stage but had ‘that fatal lurking feeling that he hadn’t’,81 and one morning in July he came down to find once again a serpent in his garden. This one was gold and soft-bellied rather than pink and soft-bellied, and drinking not from a whisky glass but from Lawrence’s water-trough. Magnus’s latest incarnation as a snake recalls the circle of hell where the thieves are turned into serpents who slither into and out of one another’s bodies.
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.
Lawrence felt ‘honoured’ to have such a guest.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
Lawrence then threw a ‘clumsy log’ in his direction which missed the snake but hit the water-trough with a clatter. The god ‘writhed like lightning’ and ‘immediately I regretted it’.
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king
A king in exile.
That July he returned to the manuscript of Aaron’s Rod, discarded in 1918. Breathing life back into The Lost Girl had been easy – the novel had effectively written itself – and Lawrence assumed that Aaron would be just as quickly off his hands.
* * *
In August and September of 1920 Lawrence did two remarkable things, both in response to Magnus. The first was to go back, this time with Frieda, to Monte Cassino – the place in which he had understood, with such devastating impact, the full meaning of not going back. And the second was to have an affair.
He says nothing in the Memoir, or anywhere else, about his second visit to the monastery, where he and Frieda stayed between 2 and 5 August as guests of Don Martino, but in the last letter Lawrence ever sent to Magnus, in July, he tells him that he is returning to the place on the hill. The subject of Magnus’s plight will have arisen during Lawrence’s stay: did he denounce his friend or remain loyal? Either way, he had displaced him. Lawrence was now the guide who pointed out to Frieda the Bramante courtyard, the Cellini casket, the exquisite mosaics and agonising views. In a repetition of the time they had toured Florence by moonmist, Lawrence showed his wife a town of men.
