Burning Man Read online

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  To Ophelia Field

  I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me … One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist. I often think of my dear Saint Lawrence on his gridiron, when he said ‘Turn me over, brothers, I am done enough on this side.’

  D. H. Lawrence, Letters, 25 February 1913

  Medieval Cosmology

  ARGUMENT

  Isn’t it remarkable how everyone who knew Lawrence felt compelled to write about him? Why, he’s had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!

  Aldous Huxley, The Paris Review (1960)

  Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

  D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

  Everyone who knew him told tales about D. H. Lawrence, and D. H. Lawrence told tales about everyone he knew. The tales that Lawrence told about his friends, who consequently became his enemies, can be found in his fiction, and the tales that his friends – and enemies – told about Lawrence can be found in the numerous memoirs and portraits that appeared after his death, and the spate of novels which feature a thin and bearded prophet. He also, again and again, told tales about himself: no writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature, or held so fast to his native right to put everything he was into a book.

  Burning Man is a triptych of self-contained biographical tales which take as their subject three versions of Lawrence. My focus is his middle years, the decade of superhuman energy and productivity between 1915 when The Rainbow was prosecuted, and 1925 when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. ‘Inferno’ is set largely in England, ‘Purgatory’ is set largely in Italy, and ‘Paradise’ takes place largely in the American Southwest. I say largely because after 1912 Lawrence, who was a different man in every place, was never in the same place for more than a few months; he and his wife Frieda roamed the world like gypsies and slept like foxes, in dens. Because Lawrence believed there was no progress without contraries, each of these tales sees him in battle, and because he was always in battle, I have selected those battles that have been granted the least attention. In doing so I give major roles to those figures otherwise assumed to be minor and minor roles to those figures generally considered major; episodes and experiences that earlier biographers have passed over in a paragraph are here placed centre stage. I look closely at the novels because they mattered to Lawrence and tell us who he was at the time of writing, but I do not consider them his major achievement. When F. R. Leavis placed The Rainbow and Women in Love on his Great Books List, he consigned the best of Lawrence to the periphery where it has remained ever since, so that readers today have no sense of either his range or the preternatural strangeness of his power. One aim of this book is to reveal a lesser-known Lawrence through introducing his lesser-known works.

  Both censored and worshipped in his lifetime, Lawrence’s afterlife has been one of peaks and troughs. ‘If there was one person everybody wanted to be after the war, to the point of caricature,’ said Raymond Williams, ‘it was Lawrence.’ In 1960, after Penguin had been tried at the Old Bailey for issuing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence was hailed as the mascot of the sexual revolution, but when, in 1969, Kate Millet skewered him in Sexual Politics for his submissive heroines and bullying heroes, he became one of those figures whose name triggers a psychological lockdown.

  Lawrence is still on trial. When I was growing up in the 1980s my mother wouldn’t have his novels in the house and my (female) tutor at university refused to teach him. Being loyal to Lawrence, especially as a woman, has always required some sort of explanation, so here is mine. Like many readers, I came to him as a teenager and knew him only as a writer of fiction. Not all of it was good and not all of it was sane, but there was still nothing to compare. He asked the same questions as I did and I liked his fierce certainties: his belief in the novel as ‘the one bright book of life’, his belief in himself as right and the rest of us as wrong, his insistence that the unconscious was an organ like the liver; I liked the fact that his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world, that he saw in himself the whole of mankind; I liked his solidarity with the instincts, his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings.

  The Lawrence I have returned to in my own middle years, this time as a biographical subject, is composed of mysteries rather than certainties. Where I once found insight, I now find bewildering levels of naivety; for all his claims to prophetic vision, Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world. His fidelity as a writer was not to the truth but to his own contradictions, and reading him today is like tuning into a radio station whose frequency keeps changing. He was a modernist with an aching nostalgia for the past, a sexually repressed Priest of Love, a passionately religious non-believer, a critic of genius who invested in his own worst writing. Of all the Lawrentian paradoxes, however, the most arresting is that he was an intellectual who devalued the intellect, placing his faith in the wisdom of the very body that throughout his life was failing him. Dismantle his contradictions, however, and you take away the structure of his being: D. H. Lawrence, the enemy of Freud, impressively defies psychoanalysis.

  How can biography do justice to Lawrence’s complexities? Just as writers of fiction might provide a disclaimer declaring that what follows is a work of imagination not based on real characters, and writers of non-fiction might provide a disclaimer declaring that what follows is not a work of imagination and very much based on real characters, I should similarly state that Burning Man is a work of non-fiction which is also a work of imagination. I should further declare that I am unable to distinguish between Lawrence’s art and Lawrence’s life, which was equally a work of imagination, and nor do I distinguish Lawrence’s fiction from his non-fiction. I read his novels, stories, letters, essays, poems and plays as exercises in autofiction, which genre he pioneered in order to get around the restrictions of genre. ‘Art for my sake,’ he quipped, but he was being entirely serious. Accordingly, his letters are stories, his stories are poems, his poems are dramas, his dramas are memoirs, his memoirs are travel books, his travel books are novels, his novels are sermons, his sermons are manifestos for the novel, and his manifestos for the novel, like his writings on history, his literary criticism and the tales in this book, are accounts of what it was like to be D. H. Lawrence.

  ENGLAND, 1915–1919

  Inferno

  William Blake, The Lovers’ Whirlwind

  PART ONE

  Dante belonged to the close of the great medieval per
iod, called the Age of Faith. His chief work, the ‘Divine Comedy’, tells of his visionary visit to Hell, where the violent, passionate men of the old world of pride and lust are kept in torment; then on to Purgatory, where there is hope; then at last he is conducted by Beatrice into Paradise. It is the vision of the passing away of the old, proud, arrogant violence of the barbaric world, into the hopeful culture such as the Romans knew, on to the spiritual peace and equality of a new Christian world. This new Christian world was beyond Dante’s grasp. Paradise is much less vivid to him than the Inferno. What he knew best was the tumultuous, violent passion of the past, that which was punished in Hell. The spiritual happiness is not his. He belongs to the old world.

  Lawrence H. Davison, Movements in Modern European History (1921)

  D. H. Lawrence’s nightmare began in 1915, the year the old world ended,1 sliding in horror, as he put it, down into the bottomless pit.2 He was thirty years old – the notional middle of his life – and lost in a dark wood. The wood was on the slopes of Hampstead Heath, an ancient commons in North London which rises 499 feet above sea level and covers 790 acres, forty of them oak and beech copses. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, were living in an enclave of the Heath called the Vale of Health; as hidden as a nest at the top of a tree, the Vale of Health is one of the weirdest parts of the city, and hardest to find. It is reached from Highgate village by crossing through North wood and Springett’s wood, and from Hampstead village by following the Georgian terraces on Well Walk to the long incline of East Heath Road, which tapers the rim of the wilderness. As the road enters woodland, a dense, narrow path – easy to miss – opens to the right. Cutting through the trees, the path is bordered by a thicket of brambles and holly, and just when it seems to be leading nowhere, it ends at a mishmash of Regency and neo-Gothic cottages which included, when Lawrence was there, a fairground tucked behind the fishing pond. North of the Vale, by the Spaniards Inn where the highwayman Dick Turpin’s father had once been landlord, wounded soldiers in their hospital colours of blue and red sat in rows on benches, and lower down on Parliament Hill, recruits in khaki practised their drills. Lawrence described autumn leaves burning in heaps and ‘smouldering’ in a ‘funeral wind’: ‘and the leaves are like soldiers’.3 His image echoes Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’:

  the leaves dead

  Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

  Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

  Pestilence-stricken multitudes.

  At night, searchlights in great straight bars fingered their way over the sky, ‘feeling the clouds, feeling the body of the dark overhead’,4 and once when Lawrence and Frieda were walking home a Zeppelin hovered above them like a ‘long oval world, high up’. It was as if, Lawrence told his new friend Lady Ottoline Morrell, the cosmos had ‘burst at last’,

  the stars and moon blown away, the envelope of the sky burst out, and a new cosmos appeared, with a long-ovate gleaming central luminary, calm and drifting in a glow of light, like a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes on the earth, to burst away the earth also.5

  The falling flakes of flame reminded Lawrence of Milton’s war in heaven, but when Frieda, who was German, looked at the Zeppelin she saw the men she had danced with as a girl now come to kill her.

  The names of his many homes were often symbolic and Lawrence, who was tubercular, would spend his life in pursuit of vales of health. But there was nothing essentially healthy about this particular vale which, 200 years earlier, had been a malarial swamp known as Gangmoor. The first workman’s cottage to be built when the swamp was drained in 1720 was called Hatchett’s Bottom and at the turn of the nineteenth century, when there were nine more cottages and four houses, a resident was still able to describe the Vale as ‘a pit in the heath’.6 Number 1 Byron Villas, whose ground-floor rooms Lawrence rented, was a bay-windowed, red-brick Edwardian terrace backing on to a large ditch filled with nettles and berries. The topography was like that of his birthplace: the mining village of Eastwood, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, was also surrounded by pits, down which Lawrence’s father, a collier, had been lowered every day since he was seven years old.

  Lord Byron was as embedded in the Nottinghamshire landscape as the mines. Newstead Abbey, the Byron family’s ancestral seat, was ten miles from Lawrence’s home and the myth of the wicked milord who quarrelled with his wife and turned his back on his country was part of local heritage. After his exile, Byron evolved from a fashionable poet into an incendiary device, and it was in Byron Villas that Lawrence also became a Romantic outlaw. Byron knew the Vale of Health because, exactly 100 years before the Lawrences discovered it, his friend Leigh Hunt, released from a two-year prison sentence for libelling the Prince Regent, had moved with his growing family into a spindly white house overlooking the precise spot where Byron Villas was later built.

  The inspiration for the unworldly Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, who reminds his friends that ‘I am a child, you know!’, Hunt was a poet, critic, journalist and translator of Dante. In prison, after painting the walls and ceiling of his cell with flowers and clouds, he began his long poem The Story of Rimini, about Paolo and Francesca, the lovers glued in an eternal embrace in the wind tunnel that is the second circle of hell. The poem was completed in the Vale of Health, where Hunt also wrote the article on ‘Young Poets’ which launched the careers of Shelley and Keats. His Hampstead home thus became the centre of the Romantic circle in London: Shelley, Keats, Byron and Charles and Mary Lamb all made their way up the hill for musical evenings with Hunt and his family.

  The Lawrences moved to the Vale of Health on 4 August 1915, the first anniversary of the war. Two months later Lawrence’s fourth novel, The Rainbow, was published and one month after that, on 13 November, the book was brought before the bench at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and sentenced to death, the 1,011 remaining copies burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange. Sir Herbert Muskett, speaking for the prosecution, concluded that it was ‘a disgusting, detestable and pernicious work’, a ‘mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action’, and his judgement was supported by the novel’s critics, whose reviews were read out as evidence.7 ‘The wind of war,’ wrote one reviewer, ‘is sweeping over our life. A thing like The Rainbow has no right to exist in the wind of war.’ Another reviewer described Lawrence’s characters as ‘lower than the lowest animal in the zoo’, and a third condemned the book as ‘a monotonous wilderness of phallicism’.8 Twenty years earlier, the same magistrates’ court had charged Oscar Wilde with gross indecency; in 1907, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were sent from here to serve three months in prison; and in 1910 Dr Crippen stood before the Bow Street bench charged with murdering his wife.

  The Rainbow is a mythico-historico-biblical account of the sexual awakening of three generations of women in the Brangwen family, who live quiet lives on the Nottingham–Derbyshire borders. Beginning in 1840, a late Romantic moment where men are still in wordless communication with nature and women, the book closes in 1905 when railway lines, mineshafts and a rash of red houses have corrupted the local landscape and the lives of its inhabitants. Lawrence makes no mention of the war but his letters, in which he thundered and roared like the Old Testament God, were about little else. ‘The war is just hell for me,’ he repeated, ‘like one of those nightmares where you can’t move.’ The Underground was ‘a tube full of spectral, decayed people’, the Battersea Recruiting Office, where he submitted the medical certificate exempting him from military service, was ‘the underworld of spectral submission’, and London itself ‘seems to me like some hoary massive underworld, a hoary ponderous inferno. The traffic flows through the rigid grey streets like the rivers of hell through their banks of dry, rocky ash.’9 Lawrence’s rage and despair went beyond, by many miles, that felt by his anti-war friends like Bertrand Russell, who served six months in Brixton prison for his opposition to militarism, E. M. Forster, who volunteered in the Red Cross in Alexandria, and Davi
d Garnett, who avoided conscription by joining the Friend’s War Victims Relief Mission.

  Not that Lawrence was a pacifist. On the contrary, the suppression of his ‘big and beautiful work’, as he called The Rainbow, confirmed his conviction that ‘one must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it’.10 He believed deeply in conflict and thought incessantly about killing people – he would like, he said, ‘to kill a million Germans – two million’ – but he did not believe in crowd mentality, machinery or the wholesale destruction of civilisation.11 Had the war been conducted by noble savages shooting tufted arrows to defend their own land rather than by mud-caked soldiers firing machine guns for reasons they did not fully understand, he would have protested less. Given his commitment to the necessity of opposition, it is odd that Lawrence’s biographers take at face value his triumph at avoiding conscription, and evade the suggestion that his nervous collapse during 1915 might relate to his sense of having failed as a man. Lawrence’s response to the war was further complicated by the fact that, at the same time as hating herds, he insisted that the word ‘man’ had ‘no meaning’ in the singular; it was in unison – as colliers, soldiers, brothers-in-arms – that men had ‘all their significance’.12 Lawrence had therefore, by his own lights, become a man without meaning.

  Because the relevant correspondence has disappeared from the archive of his agent, J. B Pinker, it is not possible to know precisely what the prosecutors objected to in The Rainbow. The novel’s obscenity, even they admitted, was hard to locate: ‘although there might not be an obscene word to be found in the book,’ Herbert Muskett declared, ‘it was in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action’.13 The brief affair between Ursula Brangwen and her teacher, Winifred Inger, singled out for criticism, was certainly not phallic and nor was it a crime. Five years later, the Lord Chancellor would oppose a bill criminalising lesbianism on the grounds that ‘of every thousand women, taken as a whole, 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices’. The problem with The Rainbow was the author himself: a bearded upstart whose lack of patriotism was proven by his marriage to a German aristocrat who had left her husband and children to be with him, whose sister was the book’s dedicatee, whose father was a Prussian officer, and whose cousin, Manfred von Richthofen, was an ace fighter pilot known as the Red Baron; Baron von Richthofen was the only German name known to every British soldier. Lawrence’s so-called friend Richard Aldington said he ‘knew in his bones’ that the reason for the book’s prosecution was not its ‘filth’ but the author’s anti-militarism.