Burning Man, page 32
To get the full measure of the offence to his ego caused by the figure of James Argyle, we need look no further than Douglas’s account of the Emperor Tiberius, published first in the English Review in 1909 and then in Siren Land, both of which Lawrence read. ‘Let us examine this Siren-loving monster,’ Douglas began. The young Tiberius was ‘broad-shouldered … and tall above the common measure’. The possessor of a ‘large and powerful intellect’, he was ‘courteous and formal, a strenuous cultivator of the “grand manner”’. Detesting all ‘slipshod expressions’, he was ‘economical, conscientious, methodical’ and ‘a scorner of luxury and dissipation’. His ‘frugality’, of course, ‘was interpreted as avarice, while an invincible shyness, peculiar to many great men, was put down to pride’. After Tiberius divorced his loathed wife and moved, as an old man, to the isle of Capri these admirable qualities were replaced by cruelty and lust: ‘We have all heard of the reformed rake; Tiberius was the reverse.’30 Bryher (the lover of H.D.) recalled the reception Douglas had received on the island in 1921, when he returned after several years away:
The news of his arrival spread from mouth to mouth. I have never seen a political leader enjoy so great a triumph. Men offered him wine, women with babies in their arms rushed up so he might touch them … The signore had deigned to return to his kingdom and I am sure that they believed that the crops would be abundant and the cisterns full of water as a result.31
Douglas played the part of Tiberius right to the end. In 1952, when he returned to Capri to die, he was given a ceremonial funeral. But then ‘no man was written down’, as he liked to say, ‘except by himself’.
Today it is hard to see how A Plea for Better Manners might once have trounced Lawrence’s Memoir, but at the time of publication Douglas won the moral high ground. It was, however, a writing and not a morality contest and Lawrence outwrote Douglas on the subject of Magnus. What is lacking in A Plea is precisely what Douglas complained of in Lawrence: the novelist’s touch in biography. Thinking it ‘vulgar’ to show curiosity, Douglas knew, as he conceded, ‘practically nothing’ about Magnus, but he was incapable of describing the man that he did know. In his account of their conversations, there are no clues to character, and Magnus’s speech, astonishingly alive in Lawrence’s hands, falls dead on the page when Douglas records it. ‘Rather a mess in here,’ Magnus says of Douglas’s bedroom, in what is presented as a moment of high comedy in Plea. ‘I’d like to tidy the room a bit, if you don’t mind.’32 Having recalled how they had met in Capri and again in Rome, Douglas summed Magnus up as ‘charming’ and ‘a far more civilized and multi-faceted person than the reader of Lawrence’s Introduction might be led to expect’. He illustrates this with examples of Magnus’s generosity when he had money to spare. Lawrence’s assumption that Magnus’s ‘off-hand manner’ revealed an essential ‘commonness’ showed evidence, said Douglas, of a crucial failure of insight. Magnus’s brusqueness was the ‘mask’ of a ‘sensitive man’, it was ‘his armour, his defence against the world’. Nothing is said about the nature of this mask or what lay behind it; instead Douglas puts his energies into polishing his own persona as a bluff old railer of the old school. The difference between them is that when Douglas wrote about Magnus, he served himself, but when Lawrence wrote about Magnus, or Douglas, or anyone else who crossed his path, he served his art.
The problem for Douglas in writing about Magnus is that he had wet his powder three years earlier when he described him as an ‘earthquake connoisseur’. The phrase was perfect, and there was nothing more to add. Every time he now tried to nail Magnus down, Douglas found himself quoting from Lawrence. Lawrence’s description of Magnus in his kimono as ‘a little pontiff’ is, Douglas admits, ‘admirable’, ‘a perfect etching – not a stroke too much or too little’, and he ‘commends’ the phrase ‘to those simpletons who say that friend Lawrence cannot write’.33 He again turns to Lawrence to describe how Magnus looked when he was tired: ‘“rather yellowish under the eyes”, as Lawrence picturesquely puts it’. As for Magnus’s mother, she was ‘his great stunt’, as ‘Lawrence calls her’.
Having lost the writing contest, Douglas rounds on his opponent’s ‘bad breeding’. He tried to generalise his argument by describing Lawrence as part of a literary vogue trading in ‘low-class allusions to living people’, but his hatred is aimed at Lawrence alone; no other writer is named and, in a buffoonish parody of good manners, Douglas suggests that only duelling ‘would put an end to these caddish arts’. Literary codes of etiquette, he implies, are unintelligible to the sons of coalminers. He then moves on to friend Lawrence’s masculinity. Lawrence was ‘sexless’, he belonged to ‘the school of cerebral hermaphrodites’, his caricatures were ‘derided not with frank wit or invective or mockery or Rabelaisian laughter, but with that squeaky suburban chuckle which is characteristic in an age of eunuchs’.34
Lawrence, said Douglas, was one of those men who had ‘never got beyond the shock of puberty’. His friend H. M. Tomlinson slavishly agreed, writing to Douglas that Lawrence’s ‘transition state is that of a girl’.35 This sentence in Tomlinson’s letter was marked up by Douglas with a blue crayon, as though he were putting together a file of evidence. Douglas similarly told a correspondent that ‘Lawrence is all wrong about my room; table obviously untidy: as to keeping my windows shut, I can afford to do so; I haven’t got a syphilitico-tuberculous throat like he has.’36 The vileness of his remark recalls the vileness of Lawrence’s letter to Mansfield: ‘I loathe you … stewing in your consumption.’
If the Memoir of Maurice Magnus was, as Douglas said, ‘a masterpiece of unconscious misrepresentation’,37 then A Plea for Better Manners is a masterpiece of unconscious misreading. By fixating on Lawrence’s lack of class, lack of masculinity and lack of literary etiquette, Douglas elides his descriptions of Florence, Monte Cassino, Capri, Sicily and Malta, his journeys across land and sea, his ascents and descents, his agonies and his ecstasies, the dilemma that the dead man had posed for Lawrence about whether to look backwards or move forwards, and the devastating views that Magnus had afforded him. ‘Every place has its genius,’ Douglas wrote in Old Calabria, ‘if one could but seize upon it’,38 and Lawrence had seized with both hands upon the genius of Monte Cassino, one of the few places in Italy that Douglas had never been. By fixating on the Memoir as failed biography, Douglas avoided mention of the area in which Lawrence had excelled. The ‘reader of a good travel-book’, Douglas wrote in a review of Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, ‘is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to a description of scenery and so forth, but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with the outer one’.39 The travel writer, he suggested, travels into himself and should therefore have a self worth exploring. The Divine Comedy is in this sense a first-rate travel book.
Lawrence at Villa Mirenda
Lawrence has never found a home in the canon of twentieth-century travel writers, but this is one of the places where he belongs. He perfected the art of interior and exterior movement; he discovered in geographical extremes a way to symbolise his own poles of being. Thus, without a glimmering of what he was up to, Lawrence turned his journey with Maurice Magnus into the finest piece of travel writing of the age.
Douglas included A Plea for Better Manners in the collection of essays, Experiments, which appeared in 1925, and in February 1926 the reviewer for the New Statesman praised the author for defending Maurice Magnus from Lawrence’s ‘brilliant but unfair portrait’. Lawrence, who had been unaware of the pamphlet, now read what Douglas had to say. His reply was in the form of a letter to the New Statesman: ‘It is time that I said a word,’ Lawrence began. ‘One becomes weary of being slandered’, and he quoted the letter in which Douglas gave him permission to ‘do what you like with the MS … Pocket all the cash yourself … I’m out of it and, for once in my life, with a clean conscience.’ Having now repaid Magnus’s debts to Mazzaiba, Lawrence also, for once in his life, had a clean conscience. ‘As for Mr Douglas,’ he concluded, ‘he must gather himself haloes where he may.’40
Three months after his New Statesman letter, Lawrence returned to Florence where, on the upper floor of a house called the Villa Mirenda in the hills outside the city, he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And it was once again on the Lugarno that he and Douglas were reunited, this time in the bookshop of Pino Orioli, who would publish the first edition of Lady Chatterley. Lawrence and Frieda were talking when Douglas stepped through the door. ‘Have a pinch of snuff, dearie,’ Douglas boomed, breaking the embarrassed silence. Lawrence accepted. ‘After that meeting,’ Douglas recalled, ‘I induced Lawrence to buy several whiskies-and-sodas for Orioli and myself; the surest way to win his regard was to make him suffer small losses of this kind.’ But Lawrence played the last card. When he and Frieda were leaving Florence for Germany, they invited Douglas and Pino for a farewell lunch where Lawrence ordered a sole costing sixty lire. Having licked the plate clean he looked at his watch. ‘Good God!’ he announced to Frieda. ‘We’re just in the nick of time. Hurry up! I can’t pay now, because I’ve only got a few coppers and a five-hundred-franc note which they’ll never be able to change.’ Off they rushed for a cab (paid for by Douglas), leaving their guests the bill. And as Lawrence sailed away, Douglas ‘thought to detect – it may have been imagination on my part – the phantom of a smile creeping over his wan face’.41
David had slayed his Goliath with a single stone.
AMERICA, 1922–1925
Paradise
Dante and Beatrice ascending to heaven
PART ONE
November of the year 1916. A woman travelling from New York to the South west, by one of the tourist trains. On the third day the train lost time more and more. She raged with painful impatience. No good, at every station the train sat longer. They had passed the prairie lands and entered the mountain and desert region. They ought soon to arrive, soon. This was already the desert of grey-white sage and blue mountains. She ought to be there, soon, soon she ought to be there. The journey alone should be over. But the train comfortably stretched its length in the stations, and would never arrive. There was no end. It could not arrive. She could not bear it.
D. H. Lawrence, fragment of a novel, 19221
Lawrence’s Great American Novel was a tale of slow time. The train, like the snake who came to his water-trough on that hot day in Sicily, moved ‘slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream’, drawing his slow length, snake-easing his shoulders over the burned earth. The woman from New York was in a hurry: she ‘ought to be there, soon, soon she ought to be there’, but while she was hurtling forwards, the clock was ticking backwards and the train, in his slackness, was resting in the sun.
All we have of this untitled fragment, started in Taos, New Mexico on 19 September 1922, are seven handwritten pages. But the prose is as compact and charged as a battery, and battery charge was Lawrence’s theme: the woman from New York, he continued, was a highly explosive figure, heavy with energy like a small bison, and capable of a soft, heavy, grateful magnetism. Her impatience was volcanic. She was approaching forty but had the round face of an obstinate girl of fourteen; her dark brows were curved horns, her forearms were muscular, her eyes had devilish grey and yellow bits like the headlights of a great machine coming full at you in the night. She was a bull in a ring but she was also, Lawrence said, a seductive serpent lying on the Western trail. Hercules had better think twice, he joked, before picking up this particular hydra. ‘He had picked up a snake long ago, without hurting himself. But that was before Columbus discovered America.’2
This bull-like, serpent-like, much married woman who was called Sybil Mond but started out as Sybil Hamnett and then became Sybil Thomas before becoming Sybil Danks had left New York in a frenzy, and as she crossed Kansas and Oklahoma, her head was ‘a mass of thoughts and frenzied ideas, almost to madness’ and she was ‘curiously heart-broken at being alone’. They were now only hours from Lamy where her third husband, a Russian artist whom she had ‘torn to atoms and thrown to the four corners of the universe’ and then put back together like Isis, was to meet her at the station. But the train ‘would not arrive, could not arrive. Could not arrive. That was it.’ Perhaps, she reasoned as they dozed on the track, ‘some power of her will would at last neutralise altogether the power of the engines, and there would come an end to motion, so there they would sit, forever, the train and she, at a deadlock on the Santa Fe line’. Lawrence’s America, with its theological faith in technology and Whitmanesque worship of the self, is condensed in this image of the high-voltage woman whose telekinetic power can, she believes, bring an end to motion.
His repetitions, meanwhile – ‘more and more; soon, soon, soon; would never arrive, would not arrive; could not arrive, could not arrive’ – catch Sybil Mond’s sense of being trapped in the wrong speed. Twelve years earlier, in 1910, D. W. Griffiths had made Hollywood’s first film, a drama called In Old California about the Mexican era before it became a Western state, and Lawrence, miserably aware of the impact of cinema on human consciousness, describes Sybil Mond’s impatience with the train as though she were watching a silent movie, with her perception running ahead of the action. One of the disorientating effects of moving pictures for early audiences was that screen time felt out of sync with real time and this was also, for Lawrence, the effect of the Southwest. ‘The time,’ Lawrence said of New Mexico, ‘is different there.’3
In her next whirl, Lawrence continued, Sybil ‘sprang’ from her Pullman and found ‘a worn-out old Dodge’ and a sixteen-year-old boy to drive it. She was in the hands of destiny: destiny had brought her to the Southwest, destiny had made her abandon the train in Trinidad. They would get to Lamy ahead of that hateful Pullman, ‘she must get to her journey’s end, she must arrive’. Having never been out west before, Sybil had no idea of her route through the desert but at least – at last – they were moving. Instead of a road, however, there was only a trail of sorts: the motorcar squirmed up sandbanks, rattled along riverbeds, scrambled at an angle of forty-five degrees over landslides and precipices. Banging against boulders, they lurched and jerked and shuddered through lost villages of windowless mud boxes where the Brotherhood of Penitentes scourged their backs in perpetual Purgatory. Night fell and the car had no headlights so they sniffed their way ahead, tracing the scent of the pinion and cedar. They had reached a table land guarded by mountains. Sybil’s sturdy body was now so battered that she felt like a penitente herself: ‘Here was a country that hit her with hard knuckles, right through to the bone.’ It was impossible, she realised: they would never arrive.
So at eight o’clock that night, the Dodge dropped Sybil Mond at Wagon Mound station where she waited three hours for the slow train to Lamy which had followed the train she abandoned. She reached her destination at three o’clock the next morning.
* * *
This is as far as Lawrence got with the tale of Sybil Mond before Frieda, disliking his heroine, put an end to the writing. ‘I had always regarded Lawrence’s genius as given to me,’ she explained in ‘Not I, But the Wind…’4 But a different account of what happened might be that Lawrence put an end to a novel that had already stalled. We know how Sybil’s story would have continued, however, because it was to be based on the society sorceress Mabel Dodge Sterne, later called Mabel Dodge Luhan and called here for convenience Mabel Dodge, who published four volumes of memoir called, collectively, Intimate Memories, and a separate memoir of Lawrence called Lorenzo in Taos.5 Mabel, as famous when she knew him as Lawrence was himself, explained in Lorenzo in Taos that he ‘wanted to write an American novel that would express the life, the spirit, of America and he wanted to write it around me – my life from the time I left New York to come out to New Mexico; my life, from civilization to the bright, strange world of Taos; my renunciation of the sick old world of art and artists, for the pristine valley and the upland Indian lakes. I was thrilled at the thought of this.’6
Mabel Dodge, the embodiment of the American will-to-power, dominates Lawrence’s writing between 1922 and 1925, and she figures in his bestiary as ‘a big, white crow, a cooing raven of ill-omen’ and ‘a little buffalo’.7 He reflected on her life in St Mawr and The Plumed Serpent, and on her death in ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and ‘None of That’. But versions of Mabel had appeared in Lawrence’s writing long before they met. Mabel’s type of dynamo had always been employed by Lawrence for fictional purposes; her English prototype was Ottoline Morrell, but her most recent blueprint was Alvina Houghton, who ran away from home to join the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras.
Mabel’s worst quality, according to her close friend Carl Van Vechten, was also the one that made her great: ‘she adored to change people’,8 and New Mexico, Lawrence conceded, ‘changed me forever’.9 Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel’s account of ‘what I went through in my friendship (if that’s what it was)’ with Lawrence, is the story of that change, of ‘the painful days that brought about changes in us all,’ and of ‘the process of change, of the permutations of the spirit worked upon by spirit. It does not,’ she warns, ‘end happily.’10
Lawrence’s journey to the Southwest, like that of Sybil Mond, was composed of detours and delays. On 5 November 1921, a letter arrived at Fontana Vecchia from Mabel Dodge inviting Lawrence and Frieda to live in an adobe house in New Mexico, built on Native American soil. Mabel, who had admired Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, wrote to Lawrence after reading the excerpts from Sea and Sardinia in The Dial. He was to come to Taos, she suggested, to save ‘the Indians’ and reignite the American literary tradition. Her letter has not survived, but she recalled in Lorenzo in Taos that it was so long that she rolled it up ‘like a papyrus’. She ‘tried to tell him every single thing I could think of that I felt would draw him – simple things as well as strange ones’. She told him that Taos was 7,000 feet up in the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains, so named because the highest peak reflected the scarlet colours of the setting sun; that the sun was born here; that in Taos there wasn’t enough night for the sky or blue for the day; that the mountains had waterfalls which turned, in the winter, into ice sculptures and that behind the waterfalls were caves; she told him that there was a Sacred Mountain, 12,000 feet high, on whose uppermost flank was the Blue Lake from which the Taos people, who had been here since the flood, were first created. She told him that the Taos Pueblo were a tribe of 600 ‘sun-worshipping’, rain-making ‘free Indians’, one of whom was her lover; that Taos was a place where ‘one did not go out to things’ but was already ‘part of them. The mountain, if anything, came to one, came into the house.’ She told him that his house here would be on ‘a lofty, pastoral land far from railroads, full of time and ease’ where the high, clear air was filled with ‘an almost heard but not quite heard music’.11 The Taos hum, also called the singing waters and the mountain music, likened by some to the seven ascending notes of a musical scale and by others to the rumbling of an engine, is believed to come from electromagnetic vibrations emanating from the Sacred Mountain. Like Prospero’s Island, the air was filled with a thousand twanging instruments humming about the ears, and Lawrence absorbed the idea of Taos as a field of invisible forces.
