Burning Man, page 41
‘At first you are put off by the style,’ Lawrence continued in the essay he now began on ‘Herman Melville’s Moby Dick’. ‘It reads like journalese. It seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you’, which is exactly what the critics of Studies said about Lawrence.48 The power of Moby Dick, Lawrence noted, lies in the way in which actuality becomes symbolic, which is equally true of the power of Lawrence’s life and fiction. The Pequod, Lawrence wrote, with its crew of Africans and Malays and Native Americans under the deranged command of a Quaker, was the symbol of America, while the whale, ‘hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness’, was the ‘last phallic being of the white man’.49 If Lawrence was the great white sperm whale (Mabel described his body as ‘white as lard’ but ‘indomitable, with a will to endure as ivory endures, sinewy and resilient’),50 and Tony Lujan was Queequeg the noble savage, then the mad captain Ahab himself was none other than Mabel Dodge.
Lawrence did not reread Melville’s novels before his revision: the changes he made were the result of reading Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, published in 1921. Weaver’s biography, the first on Melville to appear, instigated the resurrection of his reputation that took place in the 1920s: had Lawrence’s first reflections on ‘Herman Melville’ been published with his other essays on classic American literature in the English Review of 1918, the honour of saving Melville from oblivion would have gone to him. As it is, Lawrence’s defence of Melville helped to awaken America to the presence of their sleeping giant. Before Raymond Weaver all that Lawrence, or anyone else, had previously known about Melville came from the semi-autobiographical Typee, in which the son of a gentleman goes to sea on a whaler, is marooned on the island of Nantucket and lives for four months among cannibals, and the semi-autobiographical Omoo (meaning ‘rover’), in which, having mutinied with his crew off the coast of Tahiti, Melville roves the island in a state of bliss. What Lawrence learned from Raymond Weaver is that, when Melville returned to Home and Mother aged twenty-five and wrote his first three books, he was a disappointed man. He had ‘found Paradise’, wrote Weaver, but ‘even in Paradise’ he felt himself ‘an exile’.51
After the baffled reception of Moby Dick, published when he was thirty-two, Melville withdrew from literature and spent his last forty years in misanthropic despair. He described himself as a seed that had flowered late, rapidly reached ‘the inmost leaf of the bulb’ and then fallen ‘to the mould’. He became what Weaver wonderfully called ‘a crabbed and darkly shadowed hieroglyph’ whose life amounted to ‘a quenchless and essentially tragic odyssey away from home … in search of “the unpeopled world behind the sun”’.52 Melville’s books, said Weaver, more ‘volcanic in energy’ than those of any other American writer, ‘are a long effort towards the creation of one of the most complex, and massive, and original characters in literature: the character known in life as Herman Melville’.53
The artist in Melville, Lawrence now understood, ‘was so much greater than the man’, but Lawrence was equally struck by his own similarity to the man, especially now that he too had sailed the Pacific and visited Tahiti and was also living among primitive people.54 Lawrence’s new essays on Melville, which incorporate his excitement at reading the Weaver biography, therefore put up a sort of double meaning: his reflections on Melville’s life serve as the latest instalment of Lawrence’s own spiritual autobiography. Melville, wrote Lawrence, ‘hated the world: was born hating it’ and he ‘hated it to the pitch of madness’. Melville went as far as he could go from the shores of civilisation, but he could not ‘escape his European self’. He was ‘looking for Paradise … Paradise. He insists on it. Paradise.’
Then why wasn’t he happy along with the savages?
Because he wasn’t.
He grizzled in secret, and wanted to escape.
He even pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had run away from as fast as ships would carry him. HOME and MOTHER. The two things that were his damnation.55
‘But I should not have been happy either,’ Lawrence sighed. ‘One’s soul seems under a vacuum, in the South Seas.’56 When Melville returned to Home and Mother, he ‘found it Purgatory’:
No more Typees. No more paradises … A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet. Life: a sort of disgrace. Fame: another disgrace, being patronised by common snobs who just know how to read.57
Melville says nothing about Purgatory in either Typee or Omoo, and Lawrence said nothing about Purgatory in his 1917 essay on Melville. But the permanence of Purgatory now became his theme: ‘Poor Melville! He was determined Paradise existed. So he was always in Purgatory … Some souls are purgatorial by destiny.’58 Why, Lawrence asked as he wrote in the freezing conditions of his snowbound mountain cabin, ‘pin ourselves down on a paradisal ideal? It is only ourselves we torture.’
‘There is no Paradise,’ he concluded. ‘Fight, fight. That is life.’59
* * *
Lawrence had himself been thinking of Home and Mother. In ‘Spirits Summoned West’, his first American poem, he called his mother’s spirit to join him ‘on this high American desert / With dark-wrapped Rocky Mountains motionless squatting around in a ring’.
For virgins are not exclusive of virgins
As wives are of wives;
And motherhood is jealous,
But in virginity jealousy does not enter.
Thus Lydia Lawrence became the Virgin of the Rockies.
* * *
Once the Lawrences had left Mabeltown, the fight began in earnest. Mabel’s son told everyone in Taos that Lawrence and Frieda were spongers and so his mother had to turn them out, and Tony told everyone that Lawrence was ‘a snake and poison and a sick man’. The reference to Lawrence’s health, Mabel triumphantly recorded, ‘is almost the worst he could say!’60 Lawrence, meanwhile, spread it around that Mabel had tried to seduce him on the sun-roof of her bedroom on the day that he had begun working on the novel about her life, which was the worst he could say. After hearing what Lawrence was saying about her, everything became ‘too much’ for Mabel and she lost consciousness while putting on her shoe. When she describes this same loss of consciousness in ‘The Statue of Liberty’, it was after being diagnosed with venereal disease; Lawrence’s own diagnosis was that, for the first time in her life, Mabel’s ‘will had been defeated’.61
He had defeated Mabel’s will in a strikingly Melvillian manner. His refusal to be her scrivener while squatting in her property recalls Bartleby, that other great creation of Melville’s, who lives in the scrivener’s office while repeating, when asked to do any writing, that ‘I would prefer not to.’ ‘She wants to bully me into writing a book on her,’ Lawrence now told Knud Merrild. ‘Never, never, in my life shall I write that book.’62
A Poet and Two Painters is not among the best of the Lawrence memoirs. The main fault is that Merrild lifts great wads of Lawrence’s prose from his novels and essays, and places them in quotation marks as examples of his current ‘conversation’ (‘To quote Lawrence,’ he explains, ‘is to quote his books’).63 He thus gives us the public Lawrence whose voice we know already instead of the private Lawrence whom Merrild alone knew on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the winter of 1922–3. There are, however, some striking moments. One is Merrild’s account of how Lawrence would insist on joining the Danes for day-long excursions through deep snow to reach Lobo peak. Because he lacked their stamina, Lawrence tended to lag further and further behind and eventually sit himself down somewhere, claiming that he was not resting but watching the birds and animals. On one occasion when the Danes were bounding ahead, ‘enjoying the deep forceful breathing, bringing the cold pure air into the innermost corners of our lungs’, they realised that they had lost Lawrence altogether: looking back they saw him on a tree trunk, ‘a mere speck in an immense sheet of white, and so alone in the vast wilderness of rugged mountains and endless sky’.64 Frieda warned Merrild that Lawrence was not well enough for hiking on this scale but the hikes continued nonetheless. ‘When I think of it now, knowing he had a weak chest, our behaviour does seem a bit cruel,’ Merrild concedes, ‘but we didn’t know it then.’ Except that they did know it then: ‘We had heard somebody say that Lawrence was a sick man, but people say so many things and we merely let it pass over our heads.’65 They preferred, in other words, to ignore what was in front of them.
Merrild describes their winter together as a happy time but what emerges is a theatre of mutual cruelty; Lawrence even described himself at one point as ‘going off the stage’ when he slipped into the forest at the sound of Mabel’s car.66 On another occasion, when Frieda lit her after-supper cigarette, Lawrence, hating the way she dangled her smokes from her corner of her mouth, tried to punch her in the face. But Frieda smoked in this way precisely to provoke Lawrence. Lawrence lost his mind completely when his mongrel, Bibbles (a present from Mabel), came on heat and disappeared for the night. In his memoir’s central scene, Merrild describes how Lawrence burst into their cabin and found Bibbles, freshly impregnated, sitting on Gøtzsche’s lap. ‘So there you are you dirty, false little bitch,’67 Lawrence roared, striking her so hard that she fell and rolled under the table. He then slithered around on his stomach in pursuit of the dog, knocking over the furniture as he did so. Because the door was open, Bibbles bolted into the snow where Lawrence first kicked her and then, picking her up, hurled her though the air. This, presumably, is how he felt when he similarly heard that H.D. was pregnant.
Those who witnessed his rages commented on how surprising it was to see a man as fragile as Lawrence combust with such berserk energy, and the scene with Bibbles is a particularly painful example of this. Lawrence’s current murderous mood was the same as his murderous mood in Higher Tregerthen. He told Merrild that he would enjoy committing a murder and that his first victim would be Mabel, whose throat he would cut. But a second victim might have been Merrild himself, whose insufferable behaviour is overlooked by all readers of his memoir, including Aldous Huxley (who describes A Poet and Two Painters as ‘the most disinterested’ of all the portraits of Lawrence).68 Lawrence, said Merrild, was itching for a fight and we can see why he might have wanted to punch this muscle-flexing, chest-thumping Prince of Denmark, who packed the corners of his voluminous lungs with mountain air while Lawrence sat depleted on a tree stump.
Merrild, with no sense of his own aggression, spends a good deal of A Poet and Two Painters comparing his healthy body to Lawrence’s unhealthy one. Lawrence might have been the taller man but he was otherwise, gloats Merrild, ‘underdeveloped, athletically speaking’, with ‘thin legs like the Archbishop of Canterbury’. When Lawrence (a poor swimmer) and the Danes bathe in the hot Manby springs, Merrild – who lists in a footnote to this passage that he won the Nordic championship in backstroke in 1919 and qualified for the Danish Olympic swimming team in 1920 – gives a three-page comparison of their naked bodies. Being the first to undress, he was stepping around ‘shadow-boxing’ while the other two struggled out of their trousers when ‘a feeling of superiority, of bodily superiority, came over me’. Merrild noticed that, while he still had his summer tan, Lawrence and Gøtzsche were white as a ‘sprout of a potato in a darkroom or a tapeworm’.69 As they swam, Merrild recalled the wrestling scene between Gerald and Birkin and wondered whether the rumours about Lawrence’s sexuality were true: but ‘happily’, he realised, Lawrence was neither a ‘hermaphrodite’ nor ‘the pervert he was accused of being’.70 Few writers have been paraded naked oftener than Lawrence, who revealed no homoerotic feelings for either of the Danes, on whom he depended to buy the provisions, drive the car, chop the wood, break the ice, carry the water and mend the leaks in the roof.
The year 1923 saw the publication in America of four books by Lawrence in four different genres – The Ladybird, Studies in Classic American Literature, Birds, Beasts and Flowers and Kangaroo. The year also began with two major losses. The first was Katherine Mansfield, who died of tuberculosis in the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau. Lawrence described the Institute as ‘a rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt’, but he would not admit the cause of her death.71 The second loss was Mountsier, also associated with Higher Tregerthen and whom, Lawrence decided, he no longer liked. ‘I wish now to break the connection between you and me,’ he told his friend and agent.72 And just like that, Mountsier – Lawrence’s champion through the darkest of days, who paved the way for him to come to America – was directed off the stage. ‘Mountsier didn’t believe in me,’ Lawrence told Seltzer, his American publisher, ‘he was against me inwardly … It has been ugly. First Mabel Sterne, then him.’73 To Murry, Lawrence sent his condolences on the death of his wife. ‘Feel as if old moorings were breaking all. It has been a savage enough pilgrimage these last four years.’74
* * *
Their six-month visas were due to expire in March, so the Lawrences planned, in time-honoured fashion, to slip over the border to Mexico. Mabel had initially suggested that she come with them, but Lawrence ruled it out: ‘I don’t feel angry,’ he wrote in the briefest of possible letters. ‘I just want to be alone.’75 But he didn’t want to be alone, as Mabel well knew, because he invited her friends Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson to join them, and Mabel would later punish Bynner for his disloyalty by appropriating Spud for herself. Lawrence and Frieda were now never able to be alone: he needed an audience for their fights and she needed witnesses. ‘Lawrence was theatre,’ said Bynner, ‘and Frieda was life.’76
The Bynners, as the Lawrences called them, were a striking pair, and it is equally striking that Lawrence was now, after his days in Florence, comfortable around homosexual men. Witter Bynner, aged forty-one, had met Spud, now twenty-seven, when he taught him in a poetry course at UCLA. With three other students, Spud then founded the countercultural journal Laughing Horse, which he ran from Bynner’s house in Santa Fe, where he lived as his ‘secretary’. In addition to being one of the ‘steaming shits’ of the literary scene, Bynner was a six-foot-tall Harvard graduate, and his memoir of Lawrence in Mexico, Journey with Genius, written twenty-eight years after the journey itself, is a well-marinated character-assassination by a writer denied the status of genius himself. Like everyone else, Witter Bynner avenged himself on Lawrence by jeering at his body: ‘bony, pinched, pigeon-breasted, clay-white’. Lawrence, said Bynner, ‘could seldom have seen a body weaker than his own’, which is why the writer shadow-boxed with ‘the muscles of his mind’.77
They crossed into the Mexican desert at the El Paso border, and travelled the 1,200 miles to Mexico City by Pullman. Lawrence loathed the intimacy of passengers lying in their berths behind heavy green curtains, but he loved raising the blind when the lights went out and feeling the train chuffing and shunting down the wild slopes. Arriving in the capital on 23 March, they booked into a small Italian hotel by the public square on the Avenida Uruguay, where they ate minestrone soup and drank Chianti. Mexico, Lawrence thought, was more like southern Italy than America; it was another noisy, colourful, careless country with collapsing buildings and soldiers everywhere. The two places had long been linked in his imagination: it was in Italy that ‘a lake-city, like Mexico’,78 had come to Aaron in the dream described at the end of Aaron’s Rod, where he found himself hanging over the side of a boat in an underground expanse of dark blue water.
Mexico City, no longer on a lake, was on the edge of exploding. The thirty years of revolution which began in 1910 would kill 2 million citizens, and when Lawrence arrived there were soldiers riding on the roofs of cars, random shootings and the possibility of strikes at any moment. Lawrence’s mood, said Bynner, was equally incendiary. Once he began ranting about the failings of Mexico he would continue for hours; the country’s insurrections were, for Lawrence, a personal attack. But the immediate difference between America and Mexico, Lawrence wrote in ‘Au Revoir, USA’, was that the former put a ‘strain on the nerves’ and the latter put ‘a strain on the temper’.79
Having done an immense amount of preparatory reading (Mexico, Mabel noted sourly, had ‘some written “history”’, while ‘New Mexico had none’),80 Lawrence was alive to the current political scene. The revolutionary fervour he had imagined in Kangaroo was all too real here. In 1911, after thirty-five years of dictatorship, Porfirio Díaz was overthrown in a coup and fled to France. One of his atrocities, Lawrence reported to Bynner, was to summon the strikers to a meeting to address their grievances, then lock them inside the building and set it on fire. The history of Mexico was one of endless, wholesale cruelty: the Mesoamericans, the Spanish, the Aztecs, Porfirio Díaz, all ruled by fear. It was an unbreakable cycle: Mexico was the land of death. Díaz was replaced by Francisco Madero who, unable to resolve the conflict between the Bolshevists, the nationalists and the conservatives, was murdered in 1913 by his trusted general, Victoriano Huerta. Huerta’s own reign of terror lasted until 1914 when another coup forced him too into exile. Mexico was then controlled by warring factions until the Constitution of 1917, which expressed the ideals of the Revolution: land reform, ownership of the means of production, the banishment of foreign priests. The election of the revolutionary Venustiano Carranza in March 1917 then resulted in open war, and Carranza was murdered in 1920 when he was on the run with the state treasure. For the remainder of Carranza’s four-year term, the presidency was held by Adolfo de la Huerta who was replaced, in the September 1920 elections, by Álvaro Obregón. When Lawrence arrived in Mexico, Obregón was nearing the end of his term and the question of who was to succeed him was causing further disturbance, with a rebellion led by de la Huerta gathering headway. So Lawrence’s stay coincided with the first serious attempts to return the land to the people, get rid of the Catholic Church (the process described by Graham Greene as ‘the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth’) and involve Mexican Indians in national life.
