Burning Man, page 33
On 8 November, Lawrence had told Earl Brewster that he wanted ‘to get a little farm somewhere by myself – in Mexico, New Mexico, Rocky Mountains or British Columbia’.12 The synchronicity of Mabel’s letter was therefore remarkable. Should her description fail to draw him, Mabel enclosed in her package some herbs, ‘a few leaves of desachey, the perfume the Indians say makes the heart light, along with a little osha, the root that is a strong medicine’.13 In separate packages, Mabel sent Frieda a Native American necklace ‘that I thought carried some Indian magic’, and for Lawrence – with an irony she must have registered – she sent a book by Charles Fletcher Lummis called The Land of Poco Tiempo. Mabel translated ‘poco tiempo’ as ‘not yet’, and Charles Lummis translated it as ‘pretty soon’. ‘Why hurry with the hurrying world?’ The Land of Poco Tiempo begins. ‘The “Pretty Soon” of New Spain is better than the “Now! Now!” of the haggard States … Let us not hasten – mañana will do.’14 Both packages got lost in the post: The Land of Poco Tiempo arrived, accordingly, in its own time, but the magic necklace simply vanished into the air.
While Mabel felt the weight of her responsibility to save Native American culture, she took for granted her role as Lawrence’s divine guide. In Lorenzo in Taos, she explained that she had ‘sensed’ from the start ‘Lawrence’s plight’ and ‘willed him to come’, which is what Beatrice also tells Virgil in Inferno.
my friend, who has not been the friend of fortune,
is hindered in his path along that lonely
hillside; he has been turned aside by terror.
From all that I have heard of him in Heaven,
he is, I fear, already so astray
that I have come to help him much too late.
(Inferno, Canto 2, 61–6)
Lawrence responded to Mabel’s letter as though its appearance at this juncture in his life were part of the general plan, which of course it was. This was the invitation to cross into another world that he had been waiting for. ‘And so I cross into another world’, he wrote in ‘New Heaven and New Earth’ in 1917:
shyly and in homage linger for an invitation
from this unknown that I would trespass on.
His reply to Mabel was both immediate – that same afternoon – and resigned. He ‘smelt the Indian scent and nibbled the medicine’ and believed, he said, that he had heard of Taos through Leo Stein, ‘and even seen pictures of it’ in Stein’s house in Settignano. Yes, they would like to come; they could leave in January or February. He was ready ‘to take the next step’, in addition to which he liked ‘the word’ itself, which was ‘a bit like Taormina’. He told Mabel that he had written a sequel to Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious called Fantasia of the Unconscious but could not write ‘the third book … till I have crossed another border’. How much, he asked, would it cost them ‘per month’ to keep house, taking into account that they did their own washing, cooking and cleaning? Did Taos, like Florence, harbour a ‘colony’ of ‘dreadful sub-arty people’? Were ‘the Indians dying out’? Were there any trees? How far was her home from Santa Fe? (He couldn’t find Taos on the map.) Did Mabel know anything about ships from Italy to New Orleans or Galveston or Los Angeles, so that they could avoid docking in New York? He had an aversion to entering America from the east coast.15
When Beatrice led Dante by the hand through the vast bright air of Paradise, he too was overwhelmed with questions. What was this strange light world, with its unidentifiable sounds?
The newness of the sound and the great light
incited me to learn their cause – I was
more keen than I had ever been before.
(Paradise, Canto 1, 81–4)
Dante’s mind was in a sort of frenzy. How could he be flying above the earth, into these realms of eternal sun? His head was such a mass of thoughts and ideas that he couldn’t find the words to ask Beatrice ‘how my body rises past these lighter bodies’. Understanding Dante’s confused state, Beatrice answered his questions without his needing to voice them aloud:
And she who read me as I read myself,
to quiet the commotion in my mind,
opened her lips before I opened mine
to ask, and she began: ‘You make yourself
obtuse with false imagining…’
(Paradise, Canto 1, 85–9)
Dante’s ignorance about eternity drew from Beatrice a ‘sigh of pity’, and as she patiently explained the order of the universe she ‘settled her eyes’ upon him ‘with the same look a mother casts upon her raving child’.
* * *
Mabel Dodge is a much mocked figure. Parodied in the press as a millionaire Pocahontas, even her biographers do not take her seriously; in Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Emily Hahn adopts a tone of irony throughout. But what is striking about Mabel – and Lawrence was very struck indeed – is not only how well she interpreted her role as Beatrice, but how right she was about Lawrence. Mabel knew Lawrence: she knew from within her solar plexus that the man she was inviting to her sky-home was a borderer ready to make the next crossing, just as she knew before he even opened his lips that his body was failing him, and that he needed the unbreathed air of a higher altitude in order to survive another winter.
Mabel also knew that he believed in the power of what he had called in Sea and Sardinia, the ‘strange, sinister spirit’ of a place to ‘smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens’.16 Here was the man, she recalled, who could ‘understand things for me’ and ‘describe’ her home ‘so that it is as much alive between the covers of a book as it is in reality’. Lawrence was ‘the only person living’ who could ‘penetrate and define’ the ‘laughing, aloof, genius of Taos’.17
It was Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious that confirmed Mabel’s belief in the electricity that flowed between herself and Lawrence. If Beatrice represented theology, Mabel represented theosophy, in whose esoteric Esperanto both she and Lawrence were fluent. She, like Lawrence, adopted those aspects of theosophy that best suited her; she spoke of poles and souls, sources and circuits, and the womb as a centre of consciousness: ‘The womb in me roused to reach out to him,’ she said of Lawrence’s plight. She had, in addition, a second womb – a ‘womb behind the womb’ – and was able to bend the universe to do her bidding. Lawrence, Mabel believed, may well be ‘the key’ to ‘the source’.18
Having received his letter, Mabel set about preparing Lawrence’s headquarters. The house she had earmarked for them, 200 yards behind her own, was on Native American land that she was allowed to enter because of her relationship with a Taos Indian called Tony Lujan. Shaded by cottonwood trees, with the Sacred Mountain looming above, it was modest and low with five sun-filled rooms and a roof supported by twisted columns of pine, painted in her favourite sky-blue. ‘I foresaw’, said Mabel, quite rightly, that Lawrence ‘would love the isolation of it out there’.19 Leo Stein, in a letter warning Mabel about her guest, had a difference premonition: ‘I wonder which will give out first: his lungs or his wits.’20
Lawrence wrote to Mabel again on 21 November 1921 to say that he was looking for a cargo boat from Naples to San Francisco, as it was imperative that he approach America from the Pacific. The Atlantic was a thoroughfare, but the Pacific was, Lawrence thought, Tir-na-Og. On 28 December he told Mabel that there was a boat from Bordeaux to New Orleans on 15 January 1922. If they missed this sailing, they would get the next one and be in Taos, at the latest, by March: ‘I want very much to come, and wish I could start tomorrow.’ He ‘believed’ in Taos, he added. ‘I also believe in Indians. But they must do half the believing: in me as well as in the sun.’ Mabel did not at first, she said, ‘understand’ what Lawrence meant ‘about the Indians believing in him … but I learned later!’21
He did not mention that his American friends Earl and Achsah Brewster, also theosophists, were expecting the Lawrences to join them in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where Earl was studying Buddhism. Earl Brewster’s own interest in theosophy had begun in 1890 when Annie Besant, one of the leading figures in the theosophical movement, lectured in his native Cleveland. From now on Besant – whom Brewster had never met personally – became his own telepathic guide. Having initially told Brewster that he would ‘rather go to Mars or to the Moon’ than to Ceylon, Lawrence as good as confirmed that they would be arriving in February. Then on 2 January 1922, he told Brewster that they would no longer be coming to Ceylon because ‘the east is not my destiny’. By mid-January he had changed his mind: ‘I would rather go to Ceylon, and come to America later, from the east.’ Theosophists locate the centre of spiritual gravity in the East, which made the East, as Lawrence put it, ‘the source’ and America ‘the extreme periphery’. Frieda, tossed about on the winds of Lawrence’s indecision, explained to Mabel that ‘We were coming straight to you at Taos but now we are not. Lawrence says he can’t face America yet – he doesn’t feel strong enough! So we are first going to the East to Ceylon.’ The house that Mabel had prepared, meanwhile, had fires laid and plants at the window.22
The problem, said Lawrence, was his ‘compass’; the ‘shifty devil’ swerved one way and then the other. ‘I couldn’t simply face America,’ he told Norman Douglas, ‘– the magnetism shoved me away.’23 On 20 January, Lawrence asked Kot to send him that month’s issue of the Occult Review, which contained a description of ‘The Higher Science of Rhabdomancy’, the divination technique whereby a staff placed on its end and then dropped to the ground determines the direction in which we should travel.
Mabel, Frieda now suggested, should join them in Ceylon, and then ‘we will go with you to Taos from the other side’. But in Taos, as Mabel had made clear, one did not come to the mountain and she would certainly not be coming to this one. ‘I’d had the idea of having him come to Taos,’ she wrote in Lorenzo in Taos, ‘and I’d sit there and draw him until he came. I’d go down inside myself and call that man until he would have to come.’24
Only after Frieda had broken the news of their delay did Lawrence send Mabel a letter of his own. ‘It is vile of us to put off Taos for the moment,’ he said by way of apology. ‘But I have a Balaam’s Ass in my belly which won’t budge, when I turn my face west. I can’t help it. It just suddenly swerves away in me. I will come. But a detour.’25 The Old Testament tale of the ass who was prevented from transporting Balaam in the direction he wanted to go was a favourite of Lawrence: barred by the angel, whom Balaam could not see, the ass swerved as though magnetically into a field, banged into a wall and collapsed to the ground. On each occasion, the beast was beaten by her master for thwarting his progress.
Having explained to Mabel that he was propelled by forces against his control and that this ‘detour’ (‘silly detour’ as Mabel called it) was part of his ‘destiny’, Lawrence then launched an attack on everything she held sacred, beginning with psychoanalysis. ‘You want to send [A. A.] Brill to hell,’ he said of her New York psychoanalyst, ‘and all the analytic therapeutic lot.’ ‘And I don’t like Stein,’ he said of her good friend Leo, ‘a nasty, nosy, corrupt Jew.’ As for ‘all that “arty” and “literairy” crew’ – Mabel’s friends in Santa Fe – ‘I know them, they are smoking, steaming shits.’ This is why, he explained, he was going first ‘to the old, old, east’: to sweeten his blood before the ‘Onslaught on to that Land of Promise of yours.’26 Mabel now grasped that the man she had invited to live with her was built on a contradiction: ‘He whom I was trying to draw to Taos because he seemed to me to have more consciousness than anyone alive was inimical to conscious activity!’ She too had lived by ‘hunches’ and ‘intuitions’ until the Freudians had set her right. Lawrence, however, still let ‘It’ decide.27 ‘It’ was Lawrence’s word for the terrific, unavoidable, malevolent power to which we all at times have to answer.
But Mabel – and she must have realised this – had inadvertently given Lawrence his Get Out of Jail Free card. Because Taos was the land of Poco Tiempo, there was no hurry in arriving. ‘I shall have to go to America at length,’ he explained as she exploded with rage. ‘But not yet.’28 What had happened to Lawrence, that his compass swerved so violently? ‘Quite why Lawrence suddenly changed his mind once again,’ writes David Ellis in Dying Game, ‘is the kind of hermeneutic puzzle of which biography is full but which no amount of biographical enquiry is ever likely to solve.’29
Lawrence’s solar plexus was guided by a number of factors, some of which can be traced in his current writing. In January 1922, The Dial published, on Lawrence’s recommendation, Ivan Bunin’s ‘“The Gentleman from San Francisco”, translated from the Russian by D. H. Lawrence and S. S. Koteliansky’. Lawrence’s own role, he said, had been to ‘rub up’ Kot’s translation, but as far as the editor, Schofield Thayer, was concerned the work belonged to Lawrence. ‘Lawrence rewrote Koteliansky’s translation,’ said Thayer, ‘and that accounts for its value.’30 ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ has, accordingly, all the beauty, spareness and allegorical simplicity of one of Lawrence’s own short stories.
The gentleman and his family sail from San Francisco to Capri on board the Atlantis, which, like all ships, has two levels. There is the upper level, where the first-class passengers are treated like royalty, and the ‘gloomy and sultry depths of the inferno’ where the colliers work. ‘The submerged womb of the steamer’ is the ‘ninth circle’ of hell. Down here the ‘gigantic furnaces’ devoured ‘with their red-hot maws mountains of coal cast hoarsely in by men naked to the waist’. Once he has settled into his hotel in Capri, the gentleman has the bad taste to die. What is the hotel manager to do with his corpse? It has, straight away, to be removed from the sight of the other guests. So the gentleman from San Francisco is ‘subjected to many humiliations, much human neglect’, shunted from warehouse to warehouse and then back to Naples where he is ‘carried at last on to the same renowned vessel which so short a time ago, and with such honour, had borne him living to the Old World’. On his return to San Francisco, the gentleman, now ‘closed in a tar-coated coffin’ and ‘hidden far from the knowledge of the voyagers’, is ‘lowered deep into the vessel’s dark hold’.31
The gentleman’s humiliating passage from Naples to San Francisco is the same one that Lawrence, wretchedly ill, had until recently been planning on making himself.
* * *
‘What is it?’ Virgil asks Dante, when the pilgrim has been prevented by a lion, a leopard and a wolf from climbing the mountain of Purgatory. ‘Why does your heart host so much cowardice?’ Mabel also knew that Lawrence was ‘scared’, as she put it, but assumed that he was scared of her. The reason that he and Frieda wanted to meet her first in Ceylon, she believed, was to ‘take a look, take even a bite and be able to spit it out if they didn’t like it!’32 Lawrence was scared of Mabel – which is why he asked Frieda to break the news of their delay – but he was scared of other things too. Catherine Carswell, who missed Lawrence’s complexity, thought he was ‘most reasonably afraid of disobeying doctor’s orders by going to America in midwinter’, but Lawrence was never afraid of disobeying orders, particularly those of doctors.33 He was, however, afraid of dying and he had just spent the winter, as usual, shivering in bed and struggling to breathe. ‘I do not feel quite myself even now,’ he said in a letter on 15 February 1922. ‘It is a misery.’ Taormina, Lawrence wrote to Douglas in early March, ‘would have been the death of me after a little while longer’,34 and because he underplayed the state of his health, we have to take Lawrence at his word.
The thought of ‘AMERICA’, Lawrence told Schofield Thayer in August 1921, made his ‘knees lose their brassy strength, and feel like chocolate fondants’.35 America represented the end of his journey; this was the subject of ‘The Evening Land’, written in Germany during the summer of 1921.
Oh America
The sun sets in you!
Are you the grave of our day?
Anticipating the terms of his current conflict with Mabel, Lawrence suggested that rather than coming to America, America should come to him.
I would come, if I felt my hour had struck;/I would rather you came to me.
For that matter,
Mahomet never went to any mountain
Save it first approached him and cajoled his soul.
Because America made him panic – ‘I confess I am afraid of you’ – Lawrence changed the location of his Paradise. It was now, he now decided, in the ‘innerliche East’, where the sun rises, rather than the ‘ausserliche West’, where the sun sets. On 2 February, he sent two letters confirming this Columbus-like discovery; in the first, to Kot, he wrote that ‘there was once paradise down there, in Ceylon … I’m also looking for a bit of this paradise.’ In the second, to Jean Starr Untermeyer, he wrote: ‘They say Paradise was once in Ceylon. Was it ever in America. Or will it be? Or is America where Paradise is perfectly lost?’
