Burning Man Read online

  Lytton Strachey, who ran into Lawrence at a party during this time, reported that he had ‘rarely seen anyone so pathetic, miserable, ill, and obviously devoured by internal distresses’.14 Methuen, The Rainbow’s publisher, did nothing however to defend their author, his masterpiece or his reputation. Instead, as Lawrence later put it in ‘The Bad Side of Books’, his editor ‘almost wept before the magistrate’, claiming to have not read the vile book himself and to have been wrongly advised by the reader who had.15 Nor did the Society of Authors, to whom Lawrence now turned in the hope that they would help reverse the court’s decision, offer any support: there was nothing, they regretted, that they could do in the current circumstances.16 Apart from his friend Catherine Carswell, who was sacked by the Glasgow Herald for her positive review of The Rainbow, not a single writer spoke up for Lawrence in the press, ‘lest’, as he put it, ‘a bit of the tar might stick to them’. For the rest of his life he submitted to publication ‘as souls are said to submit to the necessary evil of being born into the flesh’.17

  Lawrence’s immediate response to the conviction of The Rainbow was to consign the magistrate and the prosecutor and the reviewers and the editors to the circle of hell reserved for cowards and philistines: ‘I curse them all, body and soul, root, branch and leaf, to eternal damnation.’ England having become enemy territory, he arranged an immediate passage to New York, sailing on the Adriatic on 24 November.18 He would transfer all his life to America, a world beyond the rainbow where, Lawrence explained, ‘life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld.’19 From New York, he and Frieda planned to continue down to Florida so that, beneath a perpetual sun, he could be reborn. ‘There must be a resurrection,’ Lawrence insisted, explaining his departure.20 His doctor advised against a winter sea passage, but Lawrence never listened to doctors: he postponed his departure, he said, because he wanted to fight for his novel.

  In late December he and Frieda left Byron Villas and spent Christmas with Lawrence’s sister Ada in the Midlands, where he received a present from Ottoline. ‘Your letter and parcel came this morning,’ Lawrence told her on 27 December, ‘but why did you give me the book, the Shelley, you must value it. It is gay and pretty. I shall keep it safe.’ The Shelley was a first edition of Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems; the other poems included ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘To a Skylark’, and the theme of the volume was rebirth. Prometheus Unbound is a verse drama about the Titan’s release from the rock to which he was chained by the gods for giving fire to mankind, and the poem’s unrepresentable topography replicates that of Dante’s Paradise. The imagery of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley explained in his preface, was drawn from the operations of the human mind, a procedure ‘unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of it, and Dante more than any other poet and with greater success’. Shelley, more than any other poet, was filled with Dante. Lawrence’s thank-you letter to Ottoline ended with a postscript telling her that they would be leaving for Cornwall the following Thursday, the penultimate day of the old year. This is the nearest he could get to self-exile, and he packed Ottoline’s present in his luggage.

  Ottoline knew that Lawrence liked Shelley because that April he had enjoyed a book called Shelley, Godwin and their Circle by H. N. Brailsford, which described the impact of William Godwin’s anti-marriage, anti-ownership, free-love treatise Political Justice on the Romantic poets. ‘To these young men,’ Brailsford wrote, ‘the excitement was in his picture of a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated, and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream of human benevolence.’ This free community was how Lawrence wanted to live as well. ‘Very good,’ he reported to Ottoline. ‘I like Brailsford. Can I meet him?’ Brailsford was a friend of Bertrand Russell, and Lawrence, Russell told Ottoline, was ‘very like’ Shelley, ‘– just as fine, but with a similar impatience of fact. The revolution he hopes for is just like Shelley’s prophecy of banded anarchs fleeing while the people celebrate a feast of love.’21 Hectic, pale, combative and combustible with a high voice and a shrill laugh, Lawrence was compared by his circle to Shelley, while Shelley’s circle thought that Shelley – described by Hazlitt as a fanatic who ‘put his friends into hell’ – was like Dante.22

  Lawrence resembled Shelley in temperament and physique only. In other respects they were opposites, Shelley being sexually unrestrained and politically radical, and Lawrence being uxorious and largely conservative. Mad Shelley, as the poet was known at school, was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism after which he eloped, aged seventeen, with a fifteen-year-old girl called Harriet Westbrook. Three years later, in 1814, he abandoned Harriet – who was pregnant with their second child – and ran away with the teenage Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin. In late 1815 Harriet drowned herself, and Mary’s half-sister, Fanny (also in love with Shelley), took an overdose of laudanum. Implicated in both suicides and considered ‘an outcast’, as he put it, from human society, Shelley found refuge, in the autumn of 1815, with the Hunts in Hampstead and it was here that he and Mary began their married lives in early 1816 before, later that spring, exiling themselves to Italy. It was serendipitous that Lawrence shared for a moment the same piece of earth as the man he considered ‘our greatest poet’, but then, as he put it in 1913, he was ‘always trying to follow the starry Shelley’.23

  * * *

  Everyone who saw Lawrence in 1915 commented on how unhinged he had become, and the sightings were legion. In early January, when the war was in its infancy, he decided to form his own free community based on Godwinian lines. ‘About twenty souls,’ Lawrence suggested, could ‘sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go’.24 He called his colony Rananim and gave it a heraldic emblem of ‘a phoenix argent, rising from a flaming nest of scarlet, on a black background’. The search for recruits now on, Lawrence invited more or less everyone he met, often within moments of meeting them, to join him. In letters to friends he drew sketches of his phoenix emblem, and in The Rainbow Will Brangwen carves a similar phoenix into a butter stamper. The phoenix rising soon came to represent not Rananim but Lawrence himself. ‘It gives me a real thrill,’ he confessed to Ottoline Morrell, when he sent her his ‘new badge and sign’. ‘Does that seem absurd?’25 It does seem a little absurd to give oneself a personal logo, but then Lawrence thought in symbols.

  On 21 January he was introduced to E. M. Forster at a lunch party hosted by Ottoline in her Bloomsbury home, and the following day Duncan Grant invited Forster, David Garnett and the Lawrences to tea in his studio. It was not a success. Upset by the evident attraction between Grant and David Garnett (who were beginning an affair), Lawrence focused his distress on the paintings themselves. Garnett recalled that he held his head ‘on one side, as though in pain’ and looked more ‘at the floor than at the pictures’. Embarrassed by his behaviour, Forster slunk away, muttering something about his mother and a train, while Frieda tried to save the day by exclaiming heroically, ‘Ah, Lorenzo! I like this one so much better! It is beautiful!’26 By the time the Lawrences left, Grant was rocking silently, apparently nursing a toothache. Grant’s canvases, Lawrence reported to Ottoline, were ‘silly experiments in the futuristic line’. Art, he believed, should aim to represent an entire cosmos. It should contain an image of the ‘Absolute … a statement of the whole scheme – the issue, the progress through Time – and the return – making unchangeable eternity’. Resurrection, the Absolute and Sodomy were Lawrence’s themes of the year.27 His crisis was religious, emotional, philosophical, sexual and ethical; it involved everything and is written into every page of The Rainbow, because, as he said, ‘one sheds one’s sicknesses in books’.28

  Two days after Duncan Grant’s tea party, Lawrence and Frieda moved into a cottage in Greatham near Pulborough in S
ussex, with panoramic views of the South Downs. Lawrence thought the house, which belonged to friends, monastic and he loved the calm curvaceous landscape. From here he wrote to Forster that ‘It is time for us now to look all round, round the whole ring of the horizon – not just out of a room with a view.’29 He was speaking metaphorically (and referring to Forster’s novel), but this panoramic perspective was precisely what Lawrence asked for in a view and he tested the character of his friends on their response to the one from the Downs to the sea. Forster agreed to visit Lawrence for three days and in February the two men walked to the viewing point, Lawrence pointing out the snowdrops and early signs of spring. He was finishing The Rainbow and Forster had just completed Maurice, his tale of homosexual love that would remain unpublished until 1971. They will have talked about their books and Forster very probably showed Lawrence his manuscript; the evidence that Lawrence knew Maurice can be found in the pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a closely observed heterosexual retelling of Forster’s story, and it was after Forster’s visit that Lawrence added to The Rainbow the affair between Ursula Brangwen and Winifred Inger.

  Lawrence had admired Howards End, whose Anglo-German, mind-body union between the mental Margaret Schlegel and the physical Henry Wilcox recalled his own marriage, but Forster found impossible what he called the ‘team spirit’ of the Lawrences. The two men had been, Lawrence reported to Bertrand Russell, ‘on the edge of a fierce quarrel all the time’. The quarrel concerned Forster’s homosexuality – of which Lawrence only now became aware – and he veiled his abhorrence behind an attack on his guest’s celibacy: why could Forster not act on his instincts and ‘fight clear to his own basic, primal being?’ He was all mind-consciousness and thus ‘dead’. After one particularly gruelling session in which he was attacked on all fronts, Forster took himself to bed ‘muttering’, Lawrence reported, ‘that he was not sure we – my wife and I – weren’t just playing round his knees’.30 In his thank-you letter, Forster explained to Lawrence why he wouldn’t be taking up their offer to come again:

  I like the Lawrence who talks to Hilda [the maid] and sees birds and is physically restful and wrote The White Peacock, he doesn’t know why; but I do not like the deaf impercipient fanatic who has nosed over his own little sexual round until he believes that there is no other path for others to take: he sometimes interests and sometimes frightens and angers me, but in the end he will bore [me] merely, I know.31

  The difference between the Lawrence who was physically at peace and the ‘deaf impercipient fanatic’ had long been recognised by Lawrence himself. ‘The trouble is, you see,’ he had told his first love, Jessie Chambers, ‘I’m not one man, but two.’32 Jung, also split, called his extroverted false self No. 1 and his submerged true self No. 2; I will similarly refer to Lawrence’s opposing personalities as Self One and Self Two.

  He delivered The Rainbow to his typist on 2 March, and three days later went to stay with Bertrand Russell at Trinity College. Lawrence and Russell had been introduced by Ottoline the previous month and Russell was electrified, as everyone was, by the erudition and energy of the collier’s son. When Lawrence later wrote in ‘A Rise in the World’ that ‘I rose up in the world ’Ooray! / rose very high, for me. / An earl once asked me down to stay / and a duchess came for tea’, he was referring to Russell (whose brother was an earl). ‘I feel frightfully important coming to Cambridge,’ he told Russell at the time, ‘– quite momentous the occasion is to me. I don’t want to be horribly impressed and intimidated, but am afraid I may be.’33 Having pined for a cloistered world of medieval men, Lawrence cannot have failed to be ‘horribly impressed’ by Cambridge, but he left no record of the impact of its monastic splendour. He sat at high table between Russell and the philosopher G. E. Moore, and over coffee the professors walked around the room with their hands behind their backs, discussing the Balkans about which, Lawrence thought, they knew nothing. He later impersonated their after-dinner strutting. Lawrence, however, went down as well as Russell hoped he would: the mathematician G. H. Hardy ‘was immensely impressed’ by the outsider and felt he had at last met ‘a real man’.34

  There is a snobbery attached to this remark because Lawrence, thin as a wire with a high-pitched voice, was nothing like a ‘real man’. He was euphemistically described by his friends as ethereal, the vagueness of which elides the fact that Lawrence was not One of Us; what G. H. Hardy meant by ‘real’ man is that he was not a gentleman. Lawrence told Forster that he had become ‘classless’, but this was neither how he was seen by others nor how he really saw himself. Only David Garnett told the truth about how Lawrence was perceived among the upper-class literati: he was ‘a mongrel terrier among a crowd of Pomeranians and Alsatians’, he looked ‘underbred’, his ‘nose was short and lumpy’, his chin ‘too large and round like a hairpin’, and his ‘bright mud-coloured’ hair was ‘incredibly plebeian’. He was ‘the type of plumber’s mate who goes back to fetch the tools’,

  the weedy runt you find in every gang of workmen, the one who keeps the other men laughing all the time, who makes trouble with the boss and is saucy to the foreman, who gets the sack, who is ‘victimised’, the cause of a strike, the man for whom trades unions exist, who lives on the dole, who hangs round the pubs, whose wife supports him, who bets on football and is always cheeky, cocky and in trouble. He was the type who provokes the most violent class-hatred in this country: the impotent hatred of the upper classes for the lower.35

  It is important to hold this description in mind as Lawrence rises in the world.

  The next morning Russell took him to meet Maynard Keynes, and Lawrence made his own discovery about ‘real men’ in Cambridge. ‘We went into his rooms at midday,’ he recalled, ‘and it was very sunny.’

  He was not there, so Russell was writing a note. Then suddenly a door opened and K. was there, blinking from sleep, standing in his pyjamas. And as he stood there gradually a knowledge passed into me, which has been like a little madness to me ever since. And it was carried along with the most dreadful sense of repulsiveness – something like carrion – a vulture gives me the same feeling. I begin to feel mad as I think of it – insane.

  What happened in Keynes’s rooms was ‘one of the crises of my life. It made me mad with misery and hostility and rage … I could sit and howl in the corner like a child, I feel so bad about it all.’36 The visit had been, Russell conceded to Ottoline, ‘rather dreadful’ and Lawrence left ‘disgusted with Cambridge’. But because Russell was equally upset by sodomy, he and Lawrence ‘made real progress towards intimacy. His intuitive perceptiveness is wonderful – it leaves me gasping in admiration.’37

  So what did happen in Keynes’s rooms? What did Lawrence actually see when suddenly the door opened ‘and K. was there’? His accounts of his various crises – sexual or otherwise – always hold something back. Was someone else in the bedroom? His description operates like the memory of a primal scene: the location, the time of day, the sunlight, the writing of the note, the opening door, the ‘knowledge’ passing into him followed by the ‘little madness’. Lawrence became conscious in that moment of something which, unconsciously, he had known all along.

  Back home he went straight to bed with a cold, telling Russell that he was ‘struggling in the dark – very deep in the dark’. He saw evil everywhere, especially in himself, he wanted to love but also ‘to kill and murder’. He wrote to Russell with a special request: ‘I wanted to ask you please to be with me – in the underworld – or at any rate to wait for me … I feel there is something to go through – something very important. It may be that it is only in my own soul – but it seems to grow more and more looming.’38 Lawrence told Ottoline that what he saw ‘plainly’ with Keynes in Cambridge made him ‘sick’ but that Shelley ‘believed in the principle of Evil, coeval with the Principle of Good. That is right … Do not tell me there is no Devil.’39

  His descent continued. On 17 April, David Garnett came to stay, bringing his friend Francis Birrell. The tw
o men were, Lawrence realised, ‘like Keynes and Grant’ and he began to dream of beetles; his underworld was crawling with insects. Homosexuality, he told David Garnett, is ‘so wrong, it is unbearable. It makes a form of inward corruption which truly makes me scarce able to live.’40 But he also acknowledged his need for male intimacy. ‘All my life I have wanted friendship with a man,’ he later wrote. ‘What is this sense? Do I want friendliness? I should like to see anybody being “friendly” with me. Intellectual equals? Or rather equals in being non-intellectual … Not something homosexual, surely?’ This was the question.41 What Lawrence saw in Cambridge, he told David Garnett, was ‘enough to drive one frantic’, so what kind of friendship had he been imagining when he included in his first novel, The White Peacock, the scene in which Cyril and George dry one another after a swim?