Burning Man, page 40
Lawrence and Mabel were carriers of the plagues: together their infections could have wiped out half the population of New Mexico. And the only way of ridding the world of corruption, Lawrence believed, was by destroying it in a flood, which is what he now described as he sat down in late September 1922 to write the concluding chapter to Kangaroo. In their last week in Australia, Richard and Harriett are confined to the house by a storm of biblical proportions: the sea reaches the doors and the rain comes in room after room. ‘It was like the end of the world.’21
‘I don’t think I can bear to be here very long,’ Lawrence told Mountsier on 28 October. ‘Too much on Mabel Sterne’s ground … I don’t choose to be anybody’s protégé.’ He now read Ulysses and a newly published novel by Carl Van Vechten called Peter Whiffle in which Mabel appeared in the person of the New York society hostess Edith Dale, ‘a dynamo’ of ‘electric energy’ who ‘invented her own kind of wireless long before Marconi came along with his’.22
As ever, Lawrence worked in the mornings, keeping abreast of the industry that was his writing life. His increasingly complex publication arrangements included completing Kangaroo, waiting for the proofs of England, My England (a collection of ten short stories), The Ladybird (a triptych of longer stories containing ‘The Ladybird’, ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Captain’s Doll’) and Fantasia of the Unconscious; placing his article about the Bursum Bill, ‘Certain Americans and an Englishman’ going through the manuscript of his Verga translations, putting together Birds, Beasts and Flowers, whose last additions were his first American poems – ‘Spirits Summoned West’, ‘Eagle in New Mexico’, ‘Bibbles’, ‘The Red Wolf’, ‘Men in New Mexico’, ‘Autumn in Taos’ – writing a book review for Laughing Horse and dashing off his daily letters. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lawrence’s writing life is his dependency on and trust in the postal service. Manuscripts, made without copies, were regularly despatched from one-horse towns; proofs from London and New York similarly journeyed across oceans to catch up with Lawrence in whatever hut he had laid his hat. He knew at any moment which of his writings were in the press, which were out to publishers, which were on hold, which proofs were expected, which needed completing and which needed rewriting. Only occasionally, as with the essays that would comprise Studies in Classic American Literature, did he get confused over those pages that were with his English agent and those with his American agent.
In the afternoons he and Frieda picked apples with Mabel in the orchard, bathed in the hot springs on the Rio Grande and learned to ride. Tony laughed when Lawrence’s pony went cantering off down the field with its rider clinging on, he thought, like a monkey and so that was the end of any sympathy between the two men: Lawrence was increasingly unable to cope with being challenged or mocked. But he was a fast, free and fearless rider who never fell, and every day Lawrence and Frieda, initially in the company of a guide, galloped to the pueblo or down to one of the canyons or round the desert, returning at sunset. In the evenings they played charades in Mabel’s house, and sometimes Mabel invited the men from the pueblo to come and play their drums and dance, which Lawrence always enjoyed. He repeats in his early letters how ‘generous’ and ‘nice’ Mabel was, but also how wilful he found Americans.
Lawrence, in turn, encouraged Mabel to do her own baking and housework: one morning she made an inedible loaf of bread, and on another she tried to wash a floor (‘You don’t know your floor,’ Lawrence explained, ‘until you have scrubbed it on your hands and knees!’).23 Her maids, meanwhile, stood by ‘half-distressed and half-amused’.24 Mabel’s account, in Lorenzo in Taos, of her inability to do basic tasks is comic and self-aware: she knew what she looked like from the outside, and she knew that she and Lawrence were flirting. Once, when they were washing up together on the porch of his house, ‘our fingers touched in the soap-suds and he exclaimed, with a blue and gold look through the clamour of magnetic bells: “There is something more important than love!”’ ‘What?’ asked Mabel. ‘Fidelity!’ replied Lawrence, his tone ‘grim’.25 He now encouraged her not to hide her shape – which Mabel compared to a Christmas tree – inside flowing robes, but to dress as his mother had done: ‘A woman is a woman. A waist-line is a waist-line.’ Frieda accordingly went about in white stockings, starched petticoats, long skirts, neat aprons and peasant bodices to emphasise her magnificent bosom, and Lawrence suggested Mabel do the same. It was curious, Mabel reflected as she bought herself ‘yards and yards of gingham, calico and dimity’, to find herself in this sacred place, dressing up to look like Lawrence’s mother.26
On 22 September, Lawrence wrote to his American publisher, Thomas Seltzer, asking him to send a new biography called Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic by Raymond M. Weaver, and the ‘MS copy of Studies in Classic American Literature’ which he had delivered in the summer of 1921 and heard nothing of since. He wanted to take another look at the dozen essays and add to them ‘the first reaction on me of America itself’.27 This would therefore be his third version of Studies: the first being written in the Inferno years, and the second when he had climbed the purgatorial hill in Italy. He had ‘nightmares’, Mountsier despaired, ‘of you spending the rest of your life rewriting it!’28 But what Lawrence wrote in New Mexico became the definitive edition of Studies. He revised his opinions of some of the ‘classic’ writers but he did not alter the line-up: Franklin, whom Lawrence now disliked (‘I can’t stand Benjamin’), remained at the helm, but without the brilliant comparison with Frankenstein because Lawrence was no longer interested in the Shelleys. ‘The Perfectibility Of Man!’ he now said of Franklin’s clockwork version of selfhood. ‘Ah heaven, what a dreary theme!’29
What would dramatically change in the newly revised Studies was the style: Lawrence described the ‘voice’ of American literature as ‘a new bird’, and so too was the voice of his American criticism. He was ‘Americanising’ the essays, Lawrence explained to Mountsier and Seltzer, by making them ‘much shorter’,30 ‘sharper, quicker’.31 Having never before made anything ‘shorter’, ‘sharper’ or ‘quicker’ during revision he slashed away at his lovely sentences so they became like irate telegrams. ‘I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE,’ Lawrence yelled in the Whitman essay that closed the collection:
CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!
CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFFFF!32
The cinematographic style pioneered in his essay on ‘David’ was pushed to breaking point: ‘You may think them too violent now, to print,’ Lawrence warned Mountsier.33 This final version of Studies will here be referred to as the ‘Mabel’ edition, not least because we have Mabel Dodge to thank for the book that is itself a classic of American literature.
The difference between the transcendental reflections of Zennor 1917, the enthusiastic revisions of summer 1920 and the combative, virtuoso ‘Mabel’ edition of Studies is that of hope defeated by experience. Lawrence in Taos was, once again, a disappointed man and terrible in his wrath. He was also a famous man, with James Joyce to contend with. He and Joyce, Lawrence said, usually mentioned together and doomed to be yoked through eternity, were like ‘Paolo and Francesca floating down the winds of hell’.34 The challenge he set himself was to write with authority about literature while hating the literary scene: no one disliked the pedantry of scholarship more than Lawrence, and he was going bare-knuckled into the ring. If the first and second versions of Studies were critical prose, the ‘Mabel’ edition was free verse: Lawrence measured and indented his sentences; he paid attention to his line endings; his words had rhythm. What he emphasised was his lone maleness: this is Lawrence the cowboy riding into town and slinging his pistol. The quick fire of the ‘Mabel’ edition of Studies is thus a parody of the critical discipline practised by T. S. Eliot, but it also follows, to the letter, Pound’s instruction to the young American critic to ‘put down exactly what you feel and mean! Say it as briefly as possible and avoid all sham of ornament.’35 Having said exactly what he felt and meant, Lawrence blew all the other American critics out of the water.
The argument of Studies in Classic American Literature is that both America and its literature have a pathological attachment to ‘a sort of double meaning’. These double meanings start with the tale Americans tell about themselves: the Pilgrim Fathers, Lawrence argued, say that they came here for freedom of worship but this is a lie because ‘England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had.’ The real reason they came here was ‘to get away’ – from home, from mother, from themselves. The Pilgrim Fathers ‘were driven by IT’ – by which he meant their inner magnet – and they came on the same invisible winds that also carried ‘swarms of locusts’. As for ‘the land of freedom’ – where is the freedom in slavery and mammon and the drive for domination?36 What we find in American literature, Lawrence suggested, are two tales sandwiched together. There is the surface tale which comes from the artist’s upper-consciousness, a children’s story in which everything is ‘nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey’, and humming away beneath is the real, demonic tale: ‘Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper-consciousness. And the world only hears the Love-and-produce cackle.’37 To deal with this doubling, Lawrence gives his readers clear instructions: ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.’38
This was a reformulation of Lawrence’s sense that the part of him that was a writer (his under-consciousness) knew things instinctively and should therefore be allowed to get on with the job, while the part of him that was not a writer (his over-consciousness), by trying to master and control the writing, robbed it of its magic. But Lawrence’s observation also refers directly to Mabel, who was similarly putting up a double meaning. The goody-goody all-American story of her life which she had told Lawrence on the sun-roof, disguised the destructive hum in the airwaves which he had tuned into. What Lawrence now needed to do was to save Mabel’s tale from the artist who created it.
The ‘Mabel’ edition of Studies is packed with references to Mabel. At times Lawrence just played with her name. ‘The world,’ he added to the opening chapter ‘The Spirit of Place’, ‘is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest.’ More generally, the descriptions of America and Americans tend to be descriptions of Mabel herself: ‘White Americans’, he said in the closing lines of ‘Henry St John de Crèvecoeur’, ‘do try hard to intellectualise themselves. Especially white women Americans. And this latest stunt is the “savage” stunt again.’ As for Tony, Lawrence reflected in ‘Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels’ on the ‘pride’ felt by an Indian man who lives with a white woman: ‘he will be a big man amongst his own people, especially if the white mistress has money’, but he will also ‘jeer’ at his mistress and ‘try to destroy her white pride’.
In ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, Lawrence was forced to deal with the subject of tuberculosis, from which Poe had died aged forty. The cause of TB, Lawrence explained, in a repetition of his self-diagnosis, is love: ‘It is love that causes the neuroticism of the day. It is love that is the prime cause of tuberculosis.’ Love/neurosis messes with the wiring of the body by causing the ‘sympathetic ganglia’ of the breast to vibrate ‘over-intensely’, thus weakening the lungs and giving ‘the tubercles a ripe field’.39 Lawrence and Mabel were here in agreement. But, by the close of the essay, Poe’s illness, which was also Lawrence’s illness, has become a description of Mabel’s illness because syphilis is also caused by excessive love. So Poe was ‘doomed’, Lawrence concluded.
He died wanting more love, and love killed him. A ghastly disease, love. Poe tells us of his disease: trying even to make his disease fair and attractive. Even succeeding. Which is the inevitable falseness, duplicity of art, American art in particular.40
At the end of November, having revised his essays on Franklin, Crèvecoeur, Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, Poe and Dana, with the essays on Melville and Whitman still to do, Lawrence and Mabel had a fight. It was ostensibly caused by Mabel’s living too much ‘from her head’: even the vast, multicoloured scarf she had knitted to keep him warm throughout the winter had been ‘knitted with her head’ and ‘willed’ on to Lawrence.41 But the final straw seems to have been when Mabel told Frieda that Lawrence was ‘not physically attractive to women’ and that women didn’t ‘want to touch him’. Frieda apparently agreed with Mabel, describing her husband as sexually ‘dry’, at which point in their conversation they became aware of Lawrence standing in the doorway. The next day Lawrence told Mabel that there was ‘a witch’s brew on this hill’ and that they had been offered a ranch in the mountains, where they would decamp with two Danish artists called Knud Merrild and Kai Gøtzsche. In Mabel’s version of their departure, she begged Lawrence and Frieda to stay and Frieda promised that they would pay regular visits to Taos. ‘But,’ Mabel decided, ‘I wanted none of that. I did not care for what I knew would be broken, breathless visits full of errands and practical needs. No. I wanted the flow and rhythm of daily living.’ She would not remain polite friends with the Lawrences: ‘Unless I could have what I wanted, I wouldn’t have anything. My will be done!’ This is the only occasion in Lorenzo in Taos that she uses the phrase ‘none of that’, which Lawrence would associate with Mabel and employ in his darkest Mabel story. The last words Lawrence said to her were: ‘You are like a great cat – with your green eyes. Well, I snap my fingers at you – like that!’ Lawrence, the nifty mouse caught in her paws, was making his escape.42 The day the Lawrences left, Mabel and Tony vanished off into Santa Fe. She says it was because she couldn’t bear to see them go but it was presumably also to get their Salvarsan shots.
Knud Merrild and Kai Gøtzsche, touring America in their own Ford Model T, had been passing through Taos when they met Lawrence and Frieda at a dinner party in early November. Lawrence took a shine to them both, and in an attempt to persuade them to stay longer, he passed on the copy of The Land of Poco Tiempo that Mabel had given him. He no longer wanted it, Lawrence explained, because he hated Mabel. Mabel in turn hated the Danes, as they were generally called, and Merrild, who also hated Mabel, taunted her by parading around in the scarf she had knitted Lawrence ‘with her mind’. Lawrence and Frieda suggested to the Danes that they pool their resources and winter together in Mabel’s ranch on Lobo Mountain, but Mabel vetoed the idea by saying that she wanted it for her son. Lawrence, in a fury, found two cabins to rent on a ranch lower down the mountain called Del Monte, which belonged to a man called Hawk who had moved there because of his lungs.
In A Poet and Two Painters, his memoir of the savagely cold winter they spent on the last foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Merrild explains that he had been reluctant to throw in his lot with the Lawrences because they hardly knew one another, but that Lawrence had bullied him into it. This is almost certainly the case: as far as Lawrence was concerned, there were practical benefits to sticking with the Danes. Not only would their friendship torture Mabel, but the two men were strong and healthy and had a car. It would be impossible to survive in the Rockies without their help.
So Lawrence’s ascent continued: Del Monte Ranch, sixteen miles north of Taos, was a further 2,000 feet above sea level. He had moved from a soft, brown adobe house on a desert plateau to a dilapidated shack in a Hercynian forest. The ranch was, as ever, magnificently placed, with forests and mountains behind, desert below and further mountains to the west, but Lawrence refused to admire the view because, as he repeated, America ‘was hopelessly empty in its vastness of death’.43 Before they could settle in, there was work to be done: the cabins needed fumigating, the roofs and windows needed mending, and the walls had to be plastered and painted. In order to survive, wood had to be chopped which meant felling trees, and water had to be brought from further up the mountain. When the ice became too hard to break, they made water by melting snow in a pan. To wash, they either rode seventeen miles to the hot springs in the Rio Grande, or scrubbed themselves down with snow. Lawrence, having bolted from the Abruzzi during a winter milder than this, and then having barely survived the winter rains in Sicily, was pushing on like Scott of the Antarctic. ‘We have to go on, on, on,’ he now wrote in his essay on Moby Dick, ‘even if we must smash a way ahead.’44
We can measure the difference between the man Lawrence was in the winter of 1922 and the man he had been five years earlier by comparing the earliest version of the Melville essay, written in Zennor 1917, with the version he wrote in the Rocky Mountains. The 1917 essay, ‘Herman Melville’ (which had never been published), began like this:
The greatest seer, and poet of the sea, perhaps in all the modern world, is Herman Melville. His vision is wider than that of Swinburne, and more profound than that of Conrad. Melville belongs to the sea, like one of its own birds. Like a sea-bird, he seems merely to perch on the shore, he does not belong to this land.45
In his revision, Lawrence divided the essay itself into two, called ‘Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo’ and ‘Herman Melville’s Moby Dick’. ‘Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo’ now began like this:
The greatest seer and poet of the sea for me is Melville. His vision is more real than Swinburne’s, because he doesn’t personify the sea, and far sounder than Joseph Conrad’s, because Melville doesn’t sentimentalise the ocean and the sea’s unfortunates. Snivel in a wet hanky like Lord Jim.46
‘The greatest seer and poet of the sea for me is Melville’: the inclusion of ‘for me’, removal of ‘perhaps in all the world’, and replacement of sea-birds by snivelling turns the passage from critical reflection to a playground brawl. The ‘Mabel’ version of Studies is a fist-fight: Lawrence against everyone else. His schoolboy taunt about sentimentalising the sea suggests that Melville is more of a man than Lord Jim, which matters because literature – like life – is about sexual strength. But Lawrence was more of a man than Melville, because the cannibalism which so ‘horrified’ Melville did not horrify Lawrence at all. Eating the body of another human, he said, is much the same as – indeed, ‘more valid than’ – taking the sacrament. ‘This is thy body, which I take from thee and eat. This is thy blood, which I sip in annihilation of thee.’47
