Burning Man, page 30
Argyle sees life as ‘the search for a friend’, by which he means lover (‘same thing, same thing’). In his previous life he had been married and is thus an authority on the subject of wives. ‘They’ve got the start of us the women: and we’ve got to canter when they say gee-up … Oh, they are the very hottest hell once they get the start of you.’117 His apartment, known by the porter as ‘Paradise’, is high up under the eaves in the cathedral square, level with the roof of the Baptistery of St John where Dante was baptised and whose south doors, designed by Andrea Pisano, were likened by Michelangelo to the doors to Paradise. The sunlight ‘caught the façade of the cathedral sideways, like the tips of a flower, and sideways lit up the stem of Giotto’s tower, like a lily stem’. ‘“I love it,”’ said Lilly. ‘“I love this place … the dark stripes are as they should be, like the tiger marks on a pink lily.”’118
Where was the recently deceased Magnus in all of this? He appears as ‘Little Mee’, one of the more striking names in a novel filled with striking names. Little Mee, who sits through raucous luncheons ‘with a little delighted disapproval on his tiny, bird-like face’, might look like ‘an innocent little boy’, explains Argyle, who is – as ever – ‘in his cups’, but ‘he’s over seventy if he’s a day. Well over seventy. Well, you don’t believe me. Ask his mother – ask his mother. She’s ninety-five.’119 Little Mee soon flutters away, never to be heard of again.
If Magnus was both bird and beast, Lawrence in Florence was a flower. ‘Consider the lilies,’ said Christ in his Sermon on the Mount, ‘how they grow. They toil not, they spin not.’ Living like a lily, Lawrence explained in Aaron’s Rod, is ‘being by oneself, life-living. One toils, one spins, one strives, just as the lily does.’ Lilly lives like a lily, and Aaron wants to do so too: ‘The lily is life-rooted, life-central. She cannot worry. She is life itself.’120 In Florence, Lilly believes, ‘men for a moment were themselves, as a plant in flower is for the moment completely itself.’ Lilies are everywhere in Lawrence’s Florence and Aaron’s Rod is his lily book. The symbol of the city is a red lily on a white background; Aaron’s flute is ‘a black rod of power, blossoming again with red Florentine lilies and fierce thorns’,121 Giotto’s tower is a ‘lily stem’ while the Duomo is the lily’s pistil. Michelangelo’s David is ‘the lily of Florence’, and the Florentines are ‘flower-souled’ people: ‘Flowers with good roots in the mud and muck, as should be: and fearless blossoms in air, like the cathedral and the tower and the David’.122
Paul Morel was also flower-souled: while he boiled away in his mother’s belly, she fainted from the scent of lily pollen in the garden. And Lawrence himself had been flower-souled until the war was announced. He was walking that day in the Lake District with ‘water-lilies twisted round my hat – big, heavy, white and gold water-lilies that we had found in a pool high up’.123
From Capri, where he had confided in the Brewsters about his stagnant novel, Lawrence returned to Florence in the spring of 1921, where Rebecca West and Norman Douglas called on him one day after lunching with Reggie Turner. West’s account of their meeting is worth quoting in full:
He was staying in a poorish hotel overlooking what seems to me … to be a trench of drab and turbid water wholly undeserving of the romantic prestige we have given the Arno. Make no mistake, it was the hotel that overlooked the Arno, not Lawrence. His room was one of the cheaper ones at the back. His sense of guilt which scourged him perpetually, which was the motive-power of his genius, since it made him enquire what sin it was which he and all mankind have on their conscience, forbade him either enjoying comfort or having money to pay for it, lest he should weaken. So it was a small, mean room in which he sat tapping away at a typewriter. Norman Douglas burst out in a great laugh as he went in, and asked him if he were already writing an article about the present state of Florence; and Lawrence answered seriously that he was. This was faintly embarrassing, because on the doorstep Douglas had described how, on arriving in a town, Lawrence used to go straight from the railway station to his hotel and immediately sit down and hammer out articles about the place, vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people. This seemed obviously a silly thing to do, and here he was doing it. Douglas’ laughter rang out louder than ever, and malicious as a satyr’s.
He was probably hammering out the Florentine chapters of Aaron’s Rod, in which case the joke was on Douglas. But Rebecca West later realised that he was writing not about Florence at all but about ‘the state of his own soul at that moment’, which ‘he could only render in symbolic terms; and the city of Florence was as good a symbol as any other’. If Lawrence was ‘foolish’ to ‘make allegations’ about the state of the world which were ‘only true of the state of his soul’, then, West reasoned, ‘so too was Dante, who made a new Heaven and Hell and Purgatory as a symbol for the geography within his own breast’. More than any of his other readers, Rebecca West understood what Lawrence was up to.
Lawrence was, she thought, ‘one of the most polite people I have ever met, in both naïve and subtle ways’. He described to her, in a ‘curious hollow voice, like the soft hoot of an owl’, the journey he had made, ‘up from Sicily to Capri, from Capri to Rome, from Rome to Florence’, and West compared his wanderings to those of the mystic or Russian saint, who ‘says goodbye and takes his stick and walks out with no objective but the truth’. Lawrence, she instantly saw, ‘travelled, it seemed, to get a certain Apocalyptic vision of mankind that he registered again and again and again, always rising to a pitch of ecstatic agony’.
The following day she, Douglas and Lawrence walked together in the campagna. Lawrence was so thin that ‘it seemed as if a groove ran down the centre of his chest and his spine, so that his shoulder-blades stood out in a pair of almost wing-like projections’ (Aretaeus, a doctor in second-century Rome, described one of his tubercular patients as also having shoulder blades ‘like the wings of birds’). He moved, however, ‘quickly and joyously. One could imagine him as a forerunner, speeding faster than spring can go from bud to bud on the bushes, to tell the world of the season that was coming to save it from winter. Beside him Norman Douglas lumbered along stockily.’ They looked, West thought, like Ormuzd, the Zoroastrian creative deity, and Ahriman the evil spirit. Bending over a flower, Lawrence’s face ‘grew nearly as tender as a mother bending over her child’.
During lunch, Rebecca West listened while Lawrence and Douglas ‘talked for long of a poor waif, a bastard sprig of royalty, that had recently killed himself after a life divided between conflicted passions for monastic life, unlawful pleasures, and financial fraud’. He and Douglas spoke of their friend, Rebecca West thought, ‘with that grave and brotherly pitifulness that men who have found it difficult to accommodate themselves to their fellow men feel for those who have found it impossible’.124
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Women in Love was eventually published in England in June 1921, and was described by John Middleton Murry in Nation and Athenaeum as:
five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end; the persistent underground beating of some dark and inaccessible sea in an underworld whose inhabitants are known by this alone, that they writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of each other.125
One month earlier, Lawrence had completed Aaron’s Rod, writing the last pages in a dark wood in Baden-Baden. It is not a mad book in the sense of engagingly bonkers like The Lost Girl: Aaron’s Rod is barely sane, and its madness is bound up with its badness. Lawrence allowed his anger to spoil his beautiful story. Everyone he met during its five-year gestation appeared in parody, but playing along in the background was his row with E. M. Forster: Aaron’s Rod is an inversion of A Room with a View. Forster’s novel begins in Florence and continues in England, and Lawrence’s novel begins in England and continues in Florence. Lawrence gives us a city of men while Forster’s Florence is a city of women: Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett share the Pensione Bertolini with the two Miss Allens and the observant Eleanor Lavish, whose own novel, Under a Loggia, uses as copy the kiss in Fiesole between Lucy and George (where Lawrence had also kissed Rosalind Baynes). Lawrence’s men have endless theories about women, but Forster’s women find nothing in men to wonder about. ‘Why will men have theories about women?’ muses Lucy. ‘I haven’t any about men.’126 Lawrence inverts Forster in another sense too: Forster uses Florence as the stage for a heterosexual romance, while for Lawrence Florence is a city of homosexuals.
The novel ends with Lilly in full D’Annunzio mode, shouting and yelling and ranting about love and power and how women must submit to men and how Aaron, too, must submit to Lilly. Meanwhile, Lawrence’s Self One puzzled away about Magnus, and it is with these thoughts that the novel ends.
After a bomb has exploded in the café where he is sitting with Lilly and Argyle, Aaron dreams that he is in a strange country with nowhere to sleep. Passing through the mouth of a cave ‘his second self’ appears in what seems to be a house where tin miners are coming home from work: ‘a sort of underworld country spreading away beyond him’. He wanders from ‘vast apartment to apartment, down narrow corridors like the roads in a mine’, until he comes to a room in which the miners are preparing to eat. ‘And it seemed to him that what they were going to eat was a man, a naked man.’ They are like the Morlocks of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, feasting on the Eloi. Aaron’s first, non-dreaming self knows that it is not in fact a man but a ‘skin stuffed with meat’, but he then sees the naked figure who is to be eaten walking ‘slowly and stiffly across the gangway and down the corridor’. He is a man ‘in the prime of life’.127
The queerest product of subconsciousness, Aaron’s dream hangs suspended in the book’s final chapter, playing no role in the plot. It is a record, surely, of a dream of Lawrence’s, still fresh in his mind when he sat down that day to write. And in his dream Lawrence returned to the catacombs of Rabat, where he left Magnus to die before feasting on his body, and to the dawn boat from Capri where he sailed to the mountain isle of Purgatory.
PART THREE
Comedy begins badly and ends well, tragedy begins well and ends badly. Or, as Dante put it, tragedy is ‘admirable and tranquil in its beginning, in the end fetid and horrible’.1 The Memoir of Maurice Magnus, which started out as pantomime, ended in fury and despair. Magnus’s suicide, Lawrence repeated in the Memoir’s final section, made his world stand still. He was stunned by the news; maimed. But, like Beatrice in The Trespasser, who was afraid to meet the accusations of her dead husband, Lawrence put Magnus on trial instead, leaving the verdict on himself suspended.
Magnus’s death inspired in Lawrence a contradictory set of responses. ‘I could,’ he conceded, ‘by giving half my money, have saved his life’, but ‘I had chosen not to save his life.’ It was only now that Lawrence ‘realized’ how ‘the hunted, desperate man’ must have felt, what his inner life must have been, what suicide ‘must have meant’ to him. Even now, however, a year later, Lawrence stands by his choice: ‘I still would not save his life,’ he ‘shall and should die, and so should all his sort’. But he also, Lawrence said in the same paragraph, respected Magnus ‘for dying when he was cornered. And for this reason I still feel connected with him: still have this to discharge, to get his book published, and to give him his place, to present him just as he was as far as I knew him myself.’2
Six months after Magnus’s death, Douglas, as his literary executor, sent to Mazzaiba for Dregs, declaring himself the book’s ‘co-writer’. There was a publisher, he explained, who was prepared to take the project on and the profit would all go to Mazzaiba. Hearing nothing back, Douglas then applied for the manuscript via Carl Loop, the US Consul in Valetta, again to no avail. Loop explained that he had ‘no authority’ to dispose of any of Magnus’s property ‘except to satisfy local debts’.3 The dead man’s chattels now belonged to Mazzaiba who, assuming that Douglas was cut from the same cloth as Magnus, rejected his appeals and promised the manuscript to Lawrence instead: this way he could be certain of being repaid his £55. Added to which, Mazzaiba held Lawrence to blame for his loss: had he been forewarned about Magnus’s leech-like tendencies, he would not now be out of pocket.
Memoir of Maurice Magnus
While he was hiding from the police in Taormina, Magnus, as we know, had asked Lawrence to write a foreword to Dregs. He considered himself a Lawrentian outlaw: The Rainbow had been banned for indecency, and some of this glamour might rub off on Magnus. So the introduction Lawrence now wrote served a dual purpose: to repay the money owed by Magnus to Mazzaiba, for which Mazzaiba held Lawrence responsible, and to honour his own commitment to Magnus, who similarly held Lawrence responsible for his welfare. If he could sell Dregs to an American publisher for $400, Lawrence reasoned, he would be able to pay his debt to Magnus, pay Magnus’s debt to Mazzaiba, reimburse himself for the £23 Magnus owed to him and pass on to Douglas what was left. With Douglas, Lawrence was at least in part settling a separate score: ten years earlier, as his editor at the English Review, Douglas had cut ‘The Prussian Officer’ down to size, and Lawrence would now do the same to him.
Lawrence was in Florence for the Dante Festival on 15 September 1921, and the next month he was sued by Philip Heseltine for the libellous portrayal of himself and the Puma as Halliday and the Possum in Women in Love. Lawrence duly altered the appearance of Halliday and the Pussum before going ahead, in November, with his portraits of Magnus and Douglas in the Memoir.
* * *
Lawrence fell out with places in the same way that he fell out with people, and Europe was now ‘like a bad meal’ in which he had ‘got indigestion from every course’, ‘a dead dog that died of a love disease, like syphilis’.4 He was once again ready to shed his European skin and become an American writer. When he returned from Malta that June, Lawrence had reworked his essays on classic American literature (five of which had been published in the English Review) with the plan of turning them into a book.
In December 1920, the New Republic published Lawrence’s pulpit piece, ‘America: Listen to Your Own’, written as the foreword to his proposed Studies in Classic American Literature. His thoughts about American literature had evolved since Cornwall, and he now counselled American writers to turn away from the ‘lovely monuments of our European past’ with their ‘almost fatal, narcotic, dream-luxurious effect upon the soul’, and towards the ‘spirit’ of their own ‘dark, aboriginal continent’. The real America belonged not to the dollar princesses of Edith Wharton but to ‘the Red Man’. ‘America: Listen to Your Own’ is Lawrence at his most daring and original: ‘Now is the day when Americans must become fully self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life.’5 He was referring to men like Henry James, Eliot and Pound, who turned to Europe because America was where art withered on the vine; the ‘lovely monuments’ of the European past were necessary in order for art to flourish. For writers like James, as Van Wyck Brooks put it, America ‘signified failure and destruction’: it ‘was the dark country, the sinister country, where the earth was a quicksand … where men were turned into machines, where genius was subject to all sorts of inscrutable catastrophe’.6 In his life of Hawthorne, James lamented the fact that ‘the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature’. Hawthorne’s entire genius, James continued, expressed itself in ‘four novels and the fragment of another, five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for children’.7 Only James could have seen this as a paltry offering. While James created his myth of Europe, Lawrence – for whom England’s ‘whole tree of life’ was ‘dying’ – nurtured his myth of America as a place where ‘life comes up from the roots’.8
Lawrence then launched himself in The Dial. America’s leading journal of the vanguard, The Dial ’s remit was to ‘display the role of the imagination in an age of science’ and publish the best that was available in American fiction, art, anthropology, history, sculpture, philosophy, criticism and poetry.9 He had been recommended to the journal’s editor, Schofield Thayer, by Pound – ‘two stories (or somethings) by D. H. Lawrence have been accepted [by Schofield] through no particular fault of my own’, wrote Pound.10 The first something, published in September 1920, was ‘Adolf’, Lawrence’s charming account of the wild rabbit he kept as a child, and the second was ‘Rex’, which appeared in The Dial ’s February 1921 issue. In March, April and July 1921 The Dial published Lawrence’s poems ‘Pomegranate’, ‘Apostolic Beasts’ and ‘Snake’, and in October and November, they printed extracts from Sea and Sardinia, which appeared in America two years before it appeared in England.
In eleven months, The Dial had published Lawrence in seven issues and three different genres: his appearance in the journal consolidated his place at the very top of the American literary league. It was The Dial that would establish the fame of e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore (who became, in 1925, the editor) and Hart Crane; Pound’s Cantos were first published in its pages, together with Eliot’s The Waste Land. During the 1920s, Lawrence’s work would appear in thirty issues of The Dial, and he was reviewed in eighteen further numbers. Those issues in which he was neither published nor reviewed usually mentioned D. H. Lawrence in passing. The Dial did for Lawrence in America what the English Review had done for him in England.
In May 1921, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was published in New York. This was followed in June 1922 by a sequel, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which was composed in the autumn of 1921 and contained Lawrence’s current thoughts on child consciousness, cosmology and dreams (‘The generality of readers’, he warned, will find it ‘bosh and abracadabra’). Lawrence told Kot in November 1921 that ‘Nowadays I depend almost entirely on America for my living’,11 and Fantasia, he said in the epilogue, was his ‘real American book. If there had been no America I would never have written it.’12 The Memoir of Maurice Magnus was thus composed in the spirit of departure: Lawrence was clearing his desk, paying his debts and burning his bridges. But he was also returning to a story he already knew. The image of the suicidal man on the burning island, his dead body discovered by a man on a ladder, had been with Lawrence since 1909 when he wrote The Trespasser, and his experiments in the art of fictional biography began.
