Burning Man, page 42
During Holy Week, when the Catholics ‘grovelled’ into the churches on their knees, their arms outstretched like penitents, the Lawrences and the Bynners saw the 44-minute feature film La Vie et la Passion du Christ, and Lawrence left the cinema feeling depressed by the grip of the Church.81 The following day they went to a bullfight and saw a great white bull, taunted to the edge of his nerves, disembowel the matador’s horse, and Lawrence left the ring before the fight was over. They then went to the National Museum where Lawrence found the Aztec carvings ‘gruesome’, ‘ghastly’ and ‘sub-cruel’.82 His letters uniformly announce that he will now be returning to England.
Two days later they visited the Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan (the Aztec word for ‘Place where the gods dwell’), thirty miles north of Mexico City. Once covering an area of thirty-two square miles, Teotihuacan was the world’s largest theocracy: the building of the great pyramids of the Sun and the Moon began centuries before the birth of Christ, and 200,000 people were settled here before the city was destroyed by fire around AD 800. When the Aztecs discovered, and named, Teotihuacan it was a ruin and when Lawrence came here it was an archaeological site. Four years earlier, the snarling heads of feathered serpents had been uncovered on the outer walls of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, a six-layered pyramid which stands at the far end of the Avenue of the Dead. ‘Quetzal’ means bird and ‘coatl’ means snake: the god Quetzalcoatl was a plumed serpent. The walls of the pyramid had once been blue and the serpent’s eyes had been black obsidian glass which glimmered in the candlelight. Beneath the great plumed heads were carvings of enormous snakes and delicate fish and shells: Quetzalcoatl belongs to the earth but comes from the water. His presence on the temple wall is as threatening as that of Cerberus at the gates of Hades, and Lawrence, whose pantheon of symbols also included birds and snakes, found in Quetzalcoatl the god he had been looking for. At least in Mexico, he said, the gods still ‘bit’ and their ‘fangs are still obvious’: America might flow with the ‘same old dragon’s blood’, but the gods there ‘have had their teeth pulled’. Mexican civilisation, Lawrence decided, ‘never got any higher than Quetzalcoatl’.83
D. H. Lawrence, Witter Bynner and Frieda Lawrence at the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan
Terry’s Guide to Mexico, on which Lawrence depended, gave a brief account of the history of Quetzalcoatl. God of the air and the earth, Quetzalcoatl – whose name Lawrence loved – means ‘twin’. His complex mythological life included a period where he took the form of a bearded white man who ruled over a prosperous and happy country, but then he angered a god and was exiled, sailing away on a skiff made of serpent skins. It was the Aztec conviction that he would one day return which ensured the success of the Spanish invasion in 1519: believing that Hernán Cortés was the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, Montezuma handed the conquistador his empire and its gold. In the Zennor version of Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence considered the fatal Aztec prophecy about the return of Quetzalcoatl: they knew, he then wrote, through ‘vibrations in the ether’, that the legend describing the coming of bearded white strangers was ‘a fact’.84 It was now Lawrence who wanted Quetzalcoatl to return; the plumed serpent would preoccupy him for the next two years.
The word from Taos that April was that Mabel and Tony had got married. ‘I hear Mabel married Tony,’ Lawrence wrote to Mabel’s friend Nina Witt. ‘Why?’85 The reasons were sound enough: the scandal of their relationship was damaging John Collier’s campaign for Indian land rights, and inspectors from the Department of Interior regarded Mabeltown as ‘the centre of disturbance’. Officially, Mabel was marrying Tony to help Collier with his work; unofficially, she wanted as little gossip as possible about her private life given her current health problems. Lawrence was disturbed by Mabel’s news and told her so; later, by way of apology, he said that ‘I would never venture seriously to judge’, and he battled with the honesty of this self-assessment.86 Frieda voiced their joint opinion when she wrote to Mabel’s friend Bessie Freeman, ‘Your world must have come tumbling about your ears, your whole world, when you heard that Mabel had married Tony’, which recalls Mr May’s reaction, in The Lost Girl, on hearing that Alvina Houghton was running away with the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras (‘“Really!” Mr. May seemed smitten quite dumb. “I feel as if the world had suddenly come to an end”’).87 ‘In my head,’ Frieda continued to Bessie Freeman, ‘I say: why not, but somewhere else it’s so impossible.’88
The only guests at Mabel’s wedding were the artist Andrew Dasburg and the actress Ida Rauh, but the story nonetheless made the news: ‘Why Bohemia’s Queen Married an Indian Chief’ ran the headline in the Ogden Standard-Examiner. A Pittsburgh newspaper told its readers that Mabel Dodge Luhan (she changed the spelling of Lujan when she adopted her husband’s name) was tired of the ‘sophistications of New York and the European capitals’ and ‘soothed’ by the ‘primitive simplicity in which the Red Man lived’. Miscegenation between white Americans and black Americans was a felony in some states, but by marrying Native Americans, white Americans believed they could absorb, and thus erase, the indigenous population: ‘let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together,’ proclaimed Thomas Jefferson, ‘to intermix, and become one people’. Mabel turned the equation around: by intermixing and becoming one people, the Native American could absorb and erase the savage white man. ‘The Indians will save our race,’ she said in an interview with the Denver Post. ‘A wealth of artistic sentiment will be blended in the new blood infusion with the white race.’89 Mabel was breaking through to the America of the future.
Lawrence, meanwhile, was thinking about the future of the novel. Before leaving Del Monte Ranch, having consolidated in Studies his thoughts on the double consciousness of classic American literature, he dashed off an article called ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’. The modern novel, he now argued, had to grow up: ‘“Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character in Mr Joyce or Miss Richardson or M. Proust.’ The serious novel has to be convulsed out of these ‘purely emotional and self-analytical stunts’. Time was, philosophy and fiction had been inseparable: ‘they used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple’, at which point ‘the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract dry’. The future of the novel lay in resurrecting this mixed marriage: only then could the one bright book of life ‘present us with new, really new feelings’. The ‘poor old novel’, Lawrence diagnosed, has ‘either got to get over the wall, or knock a hole through it’.90
Now that he was freed from Mabel, Lawrence was able to write the novel of the future about the future of America, but Mexico proved as uncongenial as Taos. ‘I should never be able to write on this continent,’ he complained, ‘something in the spirit opposes one’s going forth.’91 So at the end of April he left Frieda with the Bynners in Mexico City and took an overnight train to Lake Chapala, 300 miles north-west in the state of Jalisco, arriving at a desert-like station in Ocotlán in the ‘full dazzling gold of a Mexican morning’. The town was noiseless and the streets empty, with broken cobbles and smashed pavements: ‘the stones seemed dead, the town seemed made of dead stone. The human life came with a slow, sterile unwillingness, in spite of the low-hung power of the sun.’ To reach his lakeside hotel he went by boat, down the ‘pale buff river’ into the vast open lake, the largest in Mexico. It was heavenly on the water, where the ‘aboriginal, empty silence’ was like ‘life withheld’.92
In the days before the Revolution, Lake Chapala – an onomatopoeic translation of the sound made by waves lapping on the shore – had been the Mexican Riviera. The haciendas were now, like everything else in Mexico, broken, but the warm climate brought songbirds, hummingbirds, snow geese, sandpipers, coots, scores of pelicans, pintails, widgeons, wildfowl, ravens and cockatoos to the water. In the village of Chapala itself, Lawrence found a cool dark house by the lake on the Calle Zaragoza whose rooms opened on to a shady verandah. This was a place where he could write, so he sent a telegram to Frieda: ‘Chapala paradise. Take evening train.’93
Back in Mexico City, Frieda confided in the Bynners about the state of her marriage and explained why she stayed with Lawrence. The Bynners had of course witnessed the fights: there was one in particular that Bynner described in Journey with Genius. Enjoying her after-dinner smoke, Frieda’s cigarette ‘began to slant downward in the left corner of her mouth’. Lawrence’s eyes lit up, he ‘jerked’ to his feet and ‘blared’ at her to ‘Take that thing out … Take it out, I say, you sniffing bitch. There you sit, with that thing in your mouth and your legs open to every man in the room! And you wonder why no decent woman in England will have anything to do with you.’94 Throwing his wine in her face, he left the room. Bynner thought he saw a tear in Frieda’s eye, but it was only cigarette fume. Their smoking number was the best-rehearsed act of the Lawrence roadshow.
Because he was ill, Frieda explained to the Bynners, it angered Lawrence that she was well. She was unable to leave him because she had nowhere to go, but she wouldn’t leave Lawrence anyway. And he would be happy as soon as he was writing again. Bynner wrote in his notebook that Lawrence was a man with nothing at his core but hatred. ‘With the tongue of a singing serpent, he searches for Edens. And in all the lost gardens he finds on the way, he adds to the damage already done.’95
* * *
It had become Lawrence’s habit to produce a novel in the summer months. The previous June he had written Kangaroo by the Pacific Ocean, the summer before he had finished Aaron’s Rod in the forest of Baden-Baden, and the summer before that he had written The Lost Girl in the garden of the Fontana Vecchia. ‘Quetzalcoatl’, as Lawrence called his new book, was penned beneath a pepper tree on the shores of Lake Chapala. Frieda swam while he wrote, the women washed their clothes, the pelicans glided in their single stately body and the fishermen in their dugouts floated silently by.
‘Quetzalcoatl’, like Kangaroo, is a leadership novel but it is closer to the consciousness of The Lost Girl because Lawrence returns here to the idea of marriage as female sacrifice. He also, for the first time, confronts what it means to ‘go back’ into the not-quite-dead past. In ‘America, Listen to Your Own’, Lawrence had called on America’s writers to ‘catch the spirit of your own dark, aboriginal continent’ and embrace the ‘black Demon’ at the heart of the country.96 The black Demon of Mexico was now Lawrence’s new subject: ‘Quetzalcoatl’, he told Seltzer, was his ‘real novel of America’.97
The novel opens in Holy Week, with a young widow called Kate Burns walking out of a bullfight in Mexico City because a magnificent bull has disembowelled a horse. She meets a soldier called Cipriano, who looks Italian but is in fact ‘pure Indian’ and speaks ‘English English’ because he was educated at Oxford. Cipriano introduces Kate to his handsome friend, Ramón Carrasco, who is Spanish and studied Philosophy at Harvard. Ramón is the leader, and Cipriano the follower; their bond is compared to Jonathan and David.
Kate then reads in the newspaper about a strange event on Lake Chapala: women drying their washing on the shore reported seeing a naked man wade out of the water towards them. The man explained that he has come from talking to Quetzalcoatl, who lives beneath the lake and is preparing his return. Leaving Mexico City, Kate goes to Chapala herself where she remeets Ramón, who has a house by the water and starts a religious revolution by posing as the returned Quetzalcoatl with Cipriano, his deputy, as the reincarnation of Huitzilopochtli, Aztec god of war. At Cipriano’s investiture as Huitzilopochtli, one man is decapitated in his honour, and five others are shot: the bodies of all six sacrifices are placed before Cipriano/Quetzalcoatl, seated on his throne.
Kate is appalled by the violence of Ramón’s revolution but she understands the need to reclaim the ancient soul of the people. The Mexicans need a leader, and no man has yet proved strong enough. Ramón’s vision is neither communist nor fascist but patriarchal; he wants to ‘establish a system something like the old Indian village system, with a war chief, and a cacique, and a peace chief’.98 Because the gods demand that Huitzilopochtli take a wife, Cipriano asks Kate to marry him. It is not love, he insists, but destiny. ‘I am the living Huitzilopochtli,’ he explains. ‘It’s a hard name to remember,’ she replies. Rejecting Cipriano’s proposal she decides to go home to her mother. The lake now becomes a kind of pasture: she sees a black and white cow being shoved into the dark belly of a boat and a bull stepping delicately up the same gangplank, a roan horse prancing along the shore and four mules looking like dark sea-horses. Yellow and white calves are ‘skipping, butting their rear ends, lifting their tails, and tripping side by side to the water to drink’, and a mother ass tethered to a tree tends to her newborn foal. Kate laughs with delight as the foal takes his first tentative steps, rocking on ‘four loose legs’ thin as hairpins. The world is being reborn. The novel ends with Kate returning to her bedroom where she tries to get on with her packing.99
‘No,’ Lawrence snapped at Mountsier, ‘my new novel has nothing whatever to do with Mabel, nor with Taos, nor with the United States at all.’100 In one sense this is true. Kate Burns is Lawrence’s fantasy of Frieda after his death: brave, grief-stricken and utterly loyal to his memory when a more masculine man comes along. Frieda’s future as a widow would become a preoccupation of Lawrence’s writing. But Kate’s complexities as a character have everything to do with Mabel and with Taos. Kate Burns, like Mabel, is a dynamo from whom revolutionary men draw their energy. She is fierce and opinionated with an ambivalence about her independence that reflects Mabel’s own. Chapala under the rule of Ramón and Cipriano, where it is all Quetzalcoatl Quetzalcoatl Quetzalcoatl!! the Gods! the Gods! the Gods!, is a satire of Mabeltown, where it had been all Bursum Bursum Bursum!! the Bill! the Bill! the Bill! ‘Quetzalcoatl’ is in many ways a continuation of the novel that Mabel had wanted Lawrence to write using ‘my experience, my material’, but it wasn’t the tale she wanted him to tell. The bull-like, goddess-like Sybil Mond is now the bull-like, goddess-like Kate Burns, who finds herself involved with a ‘pure-blooded’ Indian who might be Tony Lujan, and a white political activist who might be John Collier. Kate’s marriage to the Indian is essential to their cause, which is to return the land and customs to the native people. But in Lawrence’s version of the story, the white woman refuses to be a pawn in a political deal. It is remarkable, considering how badly he was getting on with Frieda, how angry he was with Mabel and how tediously monological he would become about the need for women to submit to the natural leadership of those few remaining men who were male enough to be natural leaders, that Lawrence now wrote a novel in which the heroine is a noble and sympathetic feminist who turns down the offer of marriage to a god.
Lawrence said that he liked this new novel ‘best of all’, but despite giving the manuscript to Thomas Seltzer to be typed up, he did not, he repeated, consider ‘Quetzalcoatl’ finished. It reads however like a finished work: it has a solid base, a strong forward movement and a pleasing symmetry: beginning with an angry bull disembowelling a horse in a filthy arena, it ends with a roan horse prancing along the shore and a happy bull sailing away on mystical blue waters. With its image of the Ark, the final page recalls that of The Rainbow. ‘Quezalcoatl’ is also an inversion of The Lost Girl: while The Lost Girl closes with Alvina wondering if her Italian husband, who masquerades as a Native American, will ever return from the war and take her to America, ‘Quetzalcoatl’ ends with Kate Burns refusing marriage to a Mexican Indian who looks Italian but masquerades as the Aztec god of war. Lawrence’s novels tend to close on a journey about to commence, but when Kate tries to get on with her packing, the reader feels that there is nothing more to say: she came in search of Paradise and found a garden on the lake. It is evidently a completed work, so why did Lawrence delay publication?
His problem with ‘Quetzalcoatl’ lay in the marriage plot. Should Kate have crossed the barrier between Cipriano and herself? It is this, rather than Cipriano’s impersonation of Huitzilopochtli, that causes her sleepless nights. On one occasion, as she watches Cipriano swimming in the lake, Kate sees that his skin is not black but ‘red’, and ‘would it be true for her to marry that red man there out in the water?’
There was a gulf between him and her, the gulf of race, of colour, of different aeons of time. He wanted to force a way across the gulf. But that would only mean a mutual destruction.101
Should she turn away from her own kind? Herein lay the chaos of Lawrence’s personal philosophy. For Mabel, miscegenation was the future but for Lawrence it was another kind of ‘going back’, and however much we yearn to return to the past we ‘can’t go back’. But Lawrence also believed in the vitality of difference, and marriage as the home of opposition. So what prevented him from marrying Kate to her ‘pure-blooded Indian’?
* * *
After he had written the last words of ‘Quetzalcoatl’, Lawrence and Frieda finished their packing and caught the train back to America. Crossing into Texas at the Laredo frontier, they continued to New York where he deposited the manuscript with Thomas Seltzer and booked a passage to England for 18 August. Frieda was also returning to Home and Mother; she wanted first to see her children in London and then to go on to Baden-Baden. But, at the last minute, Lawrence changed his mind about joining her. His readiness, over recent months, to return to England had depended to a large degree on his health: ‘When I feel sick I want to go back,’ he told the Danes. ‘When I feel well I want to stay.’102 He was currently feeling well but he also, he explained to his mother-in-law, had another Balaam’s ass in his belly. The Balaam’s ass that preventing him from coming to America now prevented him from leaving.
