Burning Man, page 31
* * *
When Dregs arrived from Malta in December 1921, Lawrence had more or less finished his Memoir. ‘It is exactly two years since I read it first in the monastery,’ he said of the manuscript now sitting on his desk.13 He had then advised Magnus to rewrite the last five chapters, but Magnus had instead rewritten ‘the whole thing’ and Lawrence’s reaction to the girants sections of the book suggests that this was the first time he had seen it. As for Magnus’s pretence of horror, Lawrence was left ‘stone-cold to this pink-faced, self-indulgent, morally indignant pigeon’, and the Memoir’s final pages, coming out of sheer rage, are the work of his Self Two.
Magnus, Lawrence said, was ‘a liar’ and a ‘hypocrite’: this was his ‘first grudge’ against him. ‘The “vice” which he holds his hands up so horrified at, in the “girants”, he had it himself.’ But the difference between Magnus’s attitude to sodomy and that of the legionaries – as Magnus himself had carefully explained to Lawrence – was that he, like a ‘gentleman’, paid for his men of the ‘lower classes’. But, said Lawrence, all Magnus’s friendships were based on money: he seduced people in order to bleed money out of them.14
His reason for introducing the dead man’s memoir in this unorthodox fashion, Lawrence explained, was to warn us not to take M.M. at ‘face value’; this was no ‘spiritual dove’ cooing among the ‘vultures of lust’. Magnus, who had objected to being treated like ‘a dog’ in the Legion and had been parodied as a pug in The Lost Girl, was now described by Lawrence as ‘a mongrel’ and ‘a cur’: tail-wagging and tongue-hanging, he would give anyone affection in exchange for twenty francs. ‘And he to sit in judgment on the Legionaries!’ Magnus was ‘worse’ than the legionaries themselves; they might be a tribe of cutthroats, but they at least carried their blood-passions ‘defiantly, flagrantly, to depravity’, while Magnus pussied around with his ‘conceit of spiritual uplift’. Magnus’s version of sensuality was ‘the modern form of vampirism’, so ‘Let him die and be thrice dead.’15
As for the delusion that Magnus was a ‘littérateur’, ‘I hope,’ Lawrence mocked, ‘this book will establish his fame as such. I hope the editor, if it gets one, won’t alter any more of the marvellously staggering sentences and the joyful French mistakes.’16 The only publisher brave enough to touch the book was Martin Secker, who cut Magnus’s descriptions of the girant culture, including the sexual assault he suffered in the shower, plus those pages in Lawrence’s introduction (quoted above) where Lawrence – as Secker put it – ‘let [him]self go, on Magnus’s attitude towards certain things’. The first edition of Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by M.M. was thus an amputated affair. Lawrence had told Secker that he didn’t care what he cut; Douglas, however, who had been cautious from the start about the ‘obnoxious material’, did care. Magnus’s manuscript had been ‘expurgated thoroughly … too thoroughly for my taste’, he said.17 He also disliked the pointless and confusing change of title: Dregs, Douglas thought, hit just the right note.
Having argued for the prosecution, Lawrence lent himself, in the final pages of the Memoir, to the work of the defence. Crossing to the other side of the courtroom, he confessed that he preferred Magnus, ‘scamp’ as he was, ‘to the ordinary respectable person’ because Magnus took risks and chose death over a stint in an Italian prison. ‘I like him for that. And I like him for the sharp and quick way he made use of every one of his opportunities to get out of that beastly army.’ Magnus had the courage of a ‘persistent louse’; he was a rat ‘determined not to be trapped’; he braved ‘vile experiences’ and ‘kept his manhood in spite of them. For manhood is a strange quality, to be found in human rats as well as hot-blooded men.’ Magnus ‘carried the human consciousness through circumstances which would have been too much for me’ and Lawrence ‘would rather have died than be so humiliated’. But Lawrence had been equally humiliated, having his genitals groped and his anus inspected by a laughing doctor in Derby. Magnus was a victim of a foul and shameful war whose ghastliness ‘we haven’t the soul-strength to contemplate’. It was because he did what few men have done, and fought ‘open-eyed’ with ‘lovely, terrified courage’ for his ‘spirit and liberty’, that Lawrence was giving him ‘his place in the world’s consciousness’.18
* * *
Only when he was finishing the Memoir did Lawrence write to Douglas, on 21 December 1921. ‘Apparently the shades of Magnus are going to give us no peace,’ he began, before explaining that he had been asked by Mazzaiba to get the ‘Legion’ book published. ‘I don’t know who really is responsible for the MS,’ Lawrence said, knowing full well that Douglas owned the rights. He would take on the burden of publication in America, Lawrence continued, and was ready to ‘write an introduction giving all I knew about M – not unkindly I hope’ (the words ‘not unkindly’ were underlined by Douglas in a green pen, and an exclamation mark added in the margin). Lawrence wished ‘you would do it really’ – he underlined the word ‘you’ three times himself – ‘and let me stand clear. If you will do it, I will write to an American publisher for you. – If you don’t want, then I’ll go ahead, rather unwillingly.’ Could Douglas, Lawrence added, refresh his memory of the ‘Hohenzollern myth? – who was the mother, and who the grandfather?’ And might he provide some photographs of Magnus and his mother? Lawrence repeated that he would ‘like best to be out of it altogether’ and that if Douglas instead were to take on the burden of introducing Dregs, ‘why, you might effect a sale’.
He then added a postscript in which he changed from future to present tense. The introduction he was ready to write was in fact, Lawrence let slip, already being written.
In my introduction I give a sketch of Magnus as I knew him in Florence, Montecassino, here, & Malta. In the first of course you figure, under a disguised name: along with me. The only vice I give you is that of drinking the best part of the bottle of whisky, instead of the worst part, like me. Do you mind at all?19
It was the dishonesty of a man who has packed his bags in preparation for crossing the border. Lawrence, like Magnus, was a confidence trickster and this letter to Douglas was his version of a bad cheque.
Douglas, always worried by Lawrence ‘writing nasty’, cannot have been reassured. What was Lawrence’s game? He knew that Douglas was Magnus’s literary executor, that Douglas should have been consulted on the publication at an earlier stage, that Magnus had gifted to Douglas the copyright of Dregs, had asked Douglas to write his biography and had left him a suitcase of papers in order to do so. Nonetheless, Douglas replied with cavalier good humour, not thinking that Lawrence – usually so careless with correspondence – would store away the letter. ‘Damn the Foreign Legion,’ he bellowed. ‘Whoever wants it may ram it up his exhaust pipe. I have done my best.’ Had Mazzaiba initially sent the manuscript to Douglas, ‘the book would be published by this time’, but then ‘some folks are ’ard to please’.
By all means, do what you like with the MS. As to M. himself, I may do some kind of memoir of him later on – independent, I mean, of Foreign Legions. Put me in your introduction – drunk and stark naked, if you like. I am long past caring about such things … Pocket all the cash yourself. Mazzaiba seems to be such a fool that he doesn’t deserve any … I’m out of it and, for once in my life, with a clean conscience.20
One month later, on 26 January 1922, Lawrence posted both Dregs and his completed introduction, which he called Memoir of Maurice Magnus, to his American agent. Three weeks after that, on 19 February, he and Frieda left the Fontana Vecchia altogether.
Douglas meanwhile wrote to Grant Richards, the publisher of George Bernard Shaw and A. E. Housman, proposing that he, Douglas, produce his own ‘Memoir’ of Magnus to go in front of an English edition of the ‘Legion’ book.
Lawrence’s memoir … is sure to be full of bias. He hardly knew the fellow – only for 2–3 months, and moreover, Magnus owed him money, which he never got back! My memoir would be the other way round. I knew him for 15 years or so, and moreover, he lent me money which, needless to say, he never got back. Judge if I should not be fair to his memory.
The problem for Douglas was that he would have to remain anonymous. ‘If the name of the author became known,’ he explained, ‘I should not be able to write anything.’ Did Douglas mean that he would be besieged by Magnus’s creditors or that he had to protect his own sexual reputation – or both?21 Either way, because Douglas had never been given the manuscript of Dregs, it was impossible for him to produce an edition, so it was Lawrence who eventually secured publication rights on both sides of the Atlantic. And by the time the renamed Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by M.M., with an Introduction by D. H. Lawrence appeared in England on 1 October 1924, and in America in January 1925, where it was published by Knopf, Douglas had already seen himself, drunk and stark naked, in the pages of Aaron’s Rod. Bound in black with gold lettering down the spine, the English edition of the Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by M.M. looked, Lawrence noted, like a hymn book. Which is precisely what Magnus would have wanted.
While M.M.’s prose was agreed to be – as one critic put it – ‘sodden, slipshod, no better than that of the average police reporter’, Lawrence’s introduction was applauded. ‘Lawrence’s introduction is one of the best things he has ever written,’ said the critic for the New Statesman. The American reviewers concurred. Lawrence’s introduction contained, said Laurence Stallings, ‘one of the most extraordinary memoirs in the world’. D. H. Lawrence, concluded The Sun, ‘has never published anything that throws so much light on his own enigmatic character’. Even those reviewers, like Ben Ray Redman in the New York Herald Tribune, who questioned the taste of denouncing the character of the dead man whose work is being introduced, conceded that ‘it is the damnable introduction that makes this book interesting’. Frieda said that Magnus had made ‘a fool’ of Lawrence, Douglas said that Mazzaiba had made ‘a fool’ of himself, while Lawrence now made a fool of Douglas not once but twice – first in Aaron’s Rod and then in the Memoir of Maurice Magnus. And by doing so he was catapulted to the first rank of writers.
Douglas had suggested to Secker that he might produce his own ‘introduction (little memoir): say 4000 words’ to any second edition of Magnus’s Memoirs, presumably displacing the one by Lawrence. Instead he wrote D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners, which was published privately in Florence in a print run of 500 copies, selling out in a fortnight. Two further print runs followed, after which A Plea was reprinted in 1925 as the centrepiece of Douglas’s new collection of essays, Experiments. The identity of the characters referred to by Lawrence as ‘D—’ and ‘M—’ was now revealed. Douglas’s ‘Magnus pamphlet’, as it was referred to, and Lawrence’s introduction, formed what was described in The Author as ‘a serious controversy between two literary giants’. Richard Aldington, who waded into the row with his usual glee (‘It is not for me to judge my two friends in this unhappy controversy’), put it about that Douglas had been paid, by a woman with a grudge against Lawrence, £100 to write A Plea. Douglas denied the charge, but it rings true: in December 1924, he booked himself into the most expensive hotel in Syracuse, which implies that he was feeling flush. It was in another hotel in Syracuse that Lawrence had written ‘Mosquito’, and there could be no more appropriate place for Douglas to defend the honour of Maurice Magnus. His 13,000-word polemic took eight days to produce.
‘All this is awkward,’ Douglas coughed. ‘One hates thrusting oneself forward in a matter,’ and his awkwardness shows through. While trying to appear at his languorous best, he comes across as bourgeois and insecure. He writes like a man who can’t get into character and so overacts instead. Of course, Douglas agrees, swirling his whisky and sinking into his wingback chair, there is no mistaking the ‘wicked red face’ and shabby clothes of the character called ‘N— D—’: ‘I should recognize myself at a mile’s distance, especially knowing, as I do, friend Lawrence’s idiosyncrasies in the matter of portraiture: what he contrives to see and what he fails to see.’ Friend Lawrence sees, for example, that Douglas asked the waiter in the pensione to weigh the wine they had left undrunk and deduct it from the bill, but ‘fails to see’ that ‘the man who does not act as I did is held to be weak in the head’. Returning again and again to Lawrence’s accusations of meanness, Douglas throws them back over the fence. Lawrence’s entire animus against Magnus, he said, was down to a few borrowed pounds which he has ‘recouped … many times over by the sale of these Memoirs’. Having told Lawrence to pocket the profit himself, Douglas now told his readers that he was ‘entitled to half the proceeds’ of Magnus’s book.22
Lawrence’s crime as a writer, Douglas argued, was to employ ‘the novelist’s touch in biography’. This consists in ‘a failure to realise the profundities and complexities of the ordinary human mind’. The novelist-biographer works from the ‘leitmotif system’ in which he ‘selects for literary purposes two or three facets’ and discards the rest. ‘What the author says may be true,’ Douglas explained, ‘and yet by no means the truth.’23 By the same token, what Douglas says of Lawrence may be true, and yet by no means the truth. The two or three facets that Lawrence selected in order to satirise ‘N— D—’ as a high-handed old swaggerer with a messy bedroom are the same two or three facets selected by Douglas in his own self-portraits. And the two or three facets of Magnus selected by Lawrence are brilliant enough to fully suggest the profundities and complexities of his mind. Lawrence was a catcher of quirks and the right quirks can take us straight to the mystery of character: Lawrence’s Magnus is a figure of sublime ridiculousness. But while Lawrence described his introduction as the ‘literal truth’, he at no point described it as biographical. He had written, very specifically, a memoir, and fidelity to one’s own experience is not at all the same thing as biographical truth.
According to Douglas, the occasions where Lawrence ‘novelized’ the biography include his claim that Magnus lived in Malta on £100 of borrowed money (‘He never borrowed a hundred,’ corrected Douglas. ‘Apart from what he got from Lawrence … he borrowed fifty-five: neither more nor less’) and his claim that Douglas ‘despised’ Magnus for being ‘an effeminate little bounder’. He felt towards Magnus, Douglas insisted, nothing of the sort. Magnus had been his friend, and he was not in the business of despising his friends. ‘I have no fault to find with his travesty of myself, no fault whatever,’ Douglas insisted. ‘It is perfectly legitimate fooling and my young friend might have presented me in a far less engaging fashion, since I gave him permission to “put me in as you please”.’24 Except that, as Douglas was well aware, Lawrence’s portrait wasn’t fooling, and nor was it strictly legitimate. According to Aldington, ‘what Lawrence wrote was a short imaginative novel about a possible (not necessarily real) Magnus’, and it was ‘his grave error … to publish this as a biography’.25
What really nettled Douglas about Lawrence was not his novelist’s touch in biography but his biographer’s touch in novels. And what really provoked Douglas’s anti-Lawrence pamphlet, Aldington believed, was not the satire of him in the Memoir of Maurice Magnus but the satire of him in Aaron’s Rod. James Argyle was evidently homosexual, part of a tribe of other thinly disguised homosexuals. ‘I can never read the book,’ said Aldington of Aaron’s Rod, ‘without laughing aloud at the perfection with which Lawrence has hit off his various unconscious portrait-sitters.’26 The problem for Douglas in being portrayed as homosexual is that this wasn’t the full picture: Lawrence had selected one facet of Douglas’s sexuality and discarded the rest. Douglas liked the company of boys rather than men, but he liked young girls too. He was not homosexual, he was a pederast lounger. He hated being misrepresented and he hated being parodied – not least because he hated being seen to mind (‘I am long past caring about such things’). Vanity – as Lawrence well knew – did not feature in a persona built on masculinity, amorality and effortless superiority, which is why Douglas made such a good target.
What Douglas said he objected to in the character of James Argyle were the ‘spiteful observations’ Argyle made about his friends, which Douglas himself would ‘never dream of uttering’. This was a ‘damnably vulgar proceeding. There was no reason why [Lawrence] should annoy people who, while he was in the place, fed him to bursting-point and went out of their way to show him every civility in their power.’ Lawrence was ‘trespassing on libel’. This kind of personality-mongering ‘menaces the living, wrongs the dead, and degrades a decent literary calling to the level of the chatter at an old maid’s tea party’ (an old maid’s tea party was also how Lawrence had described the chatter of the Florentine homosexuals). Are modern writers ‘too lazy or stupid’, asked Douglas, to make up their own characters instead of feeding on the people they know?27 This was thin ice because the cast list of South Wind – in which novel Douglas admitted that ‘men cannot live, it seems, save by feeding on their neighbours’ life-blood’28 – was also composed of the people Douglas knew. But the difference between himself and Lawrence, Douglas explained in A Plea for Better Manners, was that ‘I like to taste my friends, but not to eat them.’29
