Mark Rudmanfrom On the Road, Touch and Go, with D. H. Lawrence
"There are blows in life, so powerful ... I don't know!"
--César Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshleman
I didn't want to, but for reasons that will become abundantly clear, I'm forced to begin at the beginning, at the sources that gave rise to this writing. In the summer following my mother's death, with my son for the first time, at the age of sixteen, safely stowed in a summer camp, my wife and I headed to Italy for a breather. Other losses had also occurred. At some point, we were staying in Lazio to be within proximity of both Rome and several Etruscan sites. I began to feel a thickness in my lungs building up. Cats in the courtyard? Except for one respiratory flu in my mid-twenties, I hadn't had an asthma attack since I was eleven when we moved from Illinois to Utah, and I lingered--and malingered--in the West long enough, as they say, to outgrow it. Outgrow it, but not without fear of its reoccurrence. Everyone has a defining fear having to do with their own mortality, usually connected to childhood illness, and mine is suffocation: not getting enough air in my lungs. After Lazio we headed into the Abruzzi, to a town called Abateggio, as far as possible from "culture" and where the most wonderful dishes were made from rabbits and boars and could be had for less than it cost to eat at the local Cuban-Chinese restaurant in New York City. Pretty soon I would be out hunting rabbits with a bow and arrow like figures in a painting by Paolo Uccello. As night came on, my voice lowered several octaves, my lungs began to thicken, my breathing grew heavy. What could it be? What could have followed me from Lazio to Abateggio?
* I feel imperiled by the heat and the toxic smoke from the cement factory in Scafa, yet too restless and curious to imitate the lizard's stillness. The heat of the day is trapped in the valley of Scafa. Turns the port of Pescara into a dead zone. I found the following passage in Lawrence's novel The Lost Girl on November 4, 2004: "It seems that there are places which resist us, which have the power to overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every country has its potent negative centers, localities which savagely and triumphantly refuse our living culture. And Alvinia had struck one of them, here on the edge of the Abruzzi."
The light pattern in the scattered villages reaching from these mountain heights to Pescara, is reminiscent of what it looks like from the hills in miniature, above Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, or Albuquerque; the distance between sustained bands of segments, the abrupt break off into hilly darkness, the disbanding of illumination, is as much an impression, a healing vapor.
And the mystery of the scattered zigzag ablaze in the night is resolved, if not solved, in the twilight: it was like a runway to Pescara, like an unlit pinball machine.
The heat trapped in the Apennines. The refracted possibility that the scarce coolness from the snow-covered peaks will blow over and down. The heat made twilight come early in the Abruzzi one night. The young woman who runs the herboristica in Scafa was tugging on her tee shirt to emphasize the heat. She was amused at my requests for multiple products containing green tea, and when I commented on its proximity to eucalyptus she said she'd been thirteen times to Australia to visit her brother, a professional soccer player, who lived there with his Australian wife, and handed me a koala with an Australian flag. When she learned why I was so avid about green tea, she told me of a secret place "where the mothers take their babies to breathe the vapors."
Where will this lead lead?
* No one around, except history. Plaques that inform how this river has provided hydraulic power for five-hundred years. I wade into turquoise shallows. Softer than belief, they grab my feet. And now with quicksand between my ankles and knees I grip a log. Test my weight, haul myself on like mounting a mule, edge onto my back, sit down. Safe, for the time being. It's an effort to maintain equilibrium: to stay on the log and have my ankles in the water at the same time, shoulders aching from the balancing act--left foot braced against solid, sensuous and mossy rock, right foot embraced by the milky sand.
I lie across the log and try to dip my head into the curative waters. To dip my head and not crack my skull. Impossible. And so to splash acqua fredda on my head I am forced to fill my baseball cap with this sulfurous water--murky and clear and way colder than the legendary waters that assail, jab and pound, Schoodic Point's imperious granite, far enough north on the Maine coast to know you're somewhere else, unfamiliar, and real.
* One night in Pescara, we got the scuttlebutt from a pharmacist. (Pharmacists in Italy are often like what doctors used to be like in the U.S.A., serious, thoughtful, empathetic human beings.) "It is a late spring this year," he said. His daughter, a girl of thirteen, has been so choked up that they closed all the shutters of the house, and for days she couldn't leave because she couldn't breathe, and as far as he knew, she had no history of asthma or allergies. "It's the late spring," he said. "The trees are blooming in July when they ought to have bloomed in May, so the entire climate is altered." He recommended a new drug, a tawny allergy pill the size of a bullet. His main warning about taking it was: wait until night. (I did what he said, and it helped a bit, and when I later showed it to a pharmacist in the U.S.A. she recognized it as instantly as our mega advertised Allegra.) I sought other remedies, including cortisone shots which, once again, pharmacists can administer in emergencies in Italy, but this led to insomnia...
We left Italy a week early, reluctantly. Waiting in the mail was a letter from a professor at the University of Illinois named Gary Adelman. It told of how when he tried to give a course on D. H. Lawrence, his students rebelled. (But did they muster a loathing and detestation worthy of a character in a work by Lawrence?) Now that Lawrence's reputation, as a novelist, had fallen, in what "they" call the "canon," he wanted to compile a book called Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence around the responses of poets and novelists to Lawrence's work. How strange, having just lost myself in wonder at Sketches of Etruscan Places, to have received such a letter at that moment. The next day I fired off a response. Lawrence has been much on my mind ever since.
* To read D. H. Lawrence is to be revived by the electric current of energy that flows through his words. Lawrence was a living conduit, an electrical force whose existence took the form of a man. I'm sure that others have also noted a certain resemblance of his to that of van Gogh, the red hair, the beard, the piercing eyes, the spectral intensity--their longing for connectedness.
I think the reason that most of his novels after Women in Love, with the exception of Saint Mawr, fall apart for me is that the electrical current of the poetic impulse is so powerful that it dismantles the narrative and the concept. And yet when I open The Plumed Serpent at the page where I gave up reading it, I feel as if the next paragraph were overhearing my thoughts, offering a silent reproach, and I catch my breath.
The electric light in Sayula was as inconstant as everything else. It would come on at half-past six in the evening, and it might bravely burn till ten at night, when the village went dark with a click. But usually it did no such thing. Often it refused to sputter into being till seven, or half-past, or even eight o'clock. But its worst trick was that of popping out just in the middle of supper, or just when you were writing a letter. All of a sudden, the black Mexican night came down on you with a thud. And then everybody running blindly for matches and candles, with a calling of frightened voices. Why were they always frightened? Then the electric light, like a wounded thing, would try to revive, and a red glow would burn in the bulbs, sinister. All held their breath--was it coming or not? Sometimes it expired for good, sometimes it got its breath back and shone, rather dully, but better than nothing.Maybe it's this flickering, as inconstant as everything else, that is more conducive, finally, to a poetry of the present and the Etruscan essays, where his impatience doesn't impinge on his underdeveloping characters, than fiction. Lawrence pressed language to its limit to convey instantaneous occurrences. Is Lawrence's imagination prophetic of Teilhard de Chardin's fantasy that if instantaneous communication would occur globally, through technology, we would have found God? His writings trace the transformation of coal through hydroelectric power. This is reflected in the change from his early rhymed poems to the controlled style of Sons and Lovers to the charged, hyperkinetic prose of Women in Love and many poems in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers--works which exhibit an almost unprecedented charge.
An enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried into every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness. (223, Women in Love)There are electrical analogies strewn throughout Lawrence's work like a system of signs. In "Bare Almond-Trees," he asks,
What are you doing in the December rain?
Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?
Do you feel the air for electric influences
Like some strange magnetic apparatus?
Do you take in messages, in some strange code,
From heaven's wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so constantly round
Etna?
* Lawrence is a coalminer's son. Every day his father, grimy with soot, carbonized, emerged from the underworld. In other words, his whole existence had been forged from within by an energizing principle, whose palpable form was his family. His mother wanted to curtail his energy, "Don't go into the mines! You were made for better things!" But he knew to follow the non-verbal message transmitted by his father, that this descent into the underworld was the necessary prerequisite to creation. Wherever he is he obsesses about the condition of coal in England. On the twenty-fourth of June 1926, he writes to Margeret King from Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence: "The beastly coal strike, it sounds too dreary for words. Coal was the making of England, and it looks as if coal were to be the breaking of her too. But one can do nothing, so it's no good fuming." (317)
The fiercely Oedipal construction of Sons and Lovers was as new at that moment as the raw and open sexuality of Lady Chatterley's Lover would be later. But there were also farms and open fields rife with flowers and animals around Nottingham, that provided a critical counterpoint to squalor and left Lawrence unabashed to name his great book of unrhyming poems, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers.
But he left out fruits! And fruits give rise to his most explicitly sexual, usually female, images.
Now in Tuscany,Everything conspires to lead him to the Etruscans and the underworld. The descent into the Etruscan tombs must have let him feel he was commingling with his father, father and son consubstantial.
Pomegranates to warm your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.And, if you dare, the fissure!
Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.
("Pomegranate")
* Lawrence was a master at making a mess of things, and out of this mess, he forged his imperfect works. He had before him Joseph Joubert's wisdom: "Everything beautiful is indeterminate." Before he took on the assignment of writing Sketches of Etruscan Places, he had written a poem that already contained many of the revelations that he had several years afterwards. He was moved to write "Cypresses" after he viewed some fragmentary Etruscan walls in Fiesole. He asks if the Etruscan cypresses contain "the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans/The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans,/Who made so little noise outside the cypress grove?" The Etruscans, the "slender, flickering men of Etruria/Whom Rome called vicious."
They say the fit survive,
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back into life again,
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.* Even though he was a coalminer's son, Lawrence was under no ordinance to make Gerald Crich in Women in Love the son of the coal baron and a man whose desperate energy and violence would allow him to enact fantastically dramatic scenes and also register his withering. His "way" wears out and when he wanders out into the snowy wastes to die, it is to kill what is already dead inside. Crich can't change, can't make the transformation, the leap. His death drive proceeds on a similar course as would his inherited industry, coalmining--though his father had the foresight to use hydroelectric power to light their own house. Gerald Crich's steely bloody-mindedness makes him an unforgettable character.
* So many poets and writers have taken an essential impulse from Lawrence. A short list would include Henry Miller (who would never finish his tome on Lawrence, who would never finish his Study on Thomas Hardy...), then his friends and co-conspirators Lawrence Durrell and Anias Nin (who did complete her elegant study of Lawrence), William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Galway Kinnell (if I leave out Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, it is because their copious use of animals is more specific and doesn't have a trace of a Lawrence-like energy). And Lawrence himself comes out of a rural English tradition of which an exemplar is John Clare. And there's an entirely other domain that I won't attempt to enter at all, the "working class hero" novel, which flourished in the late-fifties and early-sixties, like Allan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and David Storey's The Sporting Life. All of these novels were translated into breakout films; here Lawrence ignited the radical transformation that occurred in British filmmaking at that time. (I don't remember anyone who, like me, saw these films in revival houses or on TV a decade or more after they appeared, who felt moved to read the novels. Though we mustn't lose hope; there may come a time; film is an ephemeral medium...) John Boorman--in my view the most resourceful of the British postwar film directors--on the first page of his autobiography Adventures of a Suburban Boy, speaks of Lawrence and The Lost Girl as an initial source: "In The Lost Girl, D. H. Lawrence describes Nottingham miners watching those early films: while they looked at the live music acts out of the corners of their eyes, embarrassed, uneasy, they stared at the movies, unblinking, mouths agape, like men in a trance, mesmerized."
There is a striking parallelism between Boorman's The Emerald Forest filmed on the Amazon and in the rain forest, and Lawrence's Nottingham, which isn't far from Sherwood Forest. The film has aspects of Sons and Lovers and recaptures some of the dynamic between Lawrence and his father, Walter. The Emerald Forest is about an engineer who goes into the Amazon to build a dam to harness hydroelectric power to accommodate the usual--industry, urban sprawl, capital. The project spills into the rain forest, and along with it, he and his wife, daughter, and five-year-old son. The boy wanders off, is kidnapped by the Invisible Tribe--it's based on a true story--and the engineer spends every available moment over the next ten years returning to search for him. Finally he succeeds, but his son, played by the director's son, Charlie Boorman, loves living in the forest with the Invisible Tribe. His father warns that the dam will bring men who will further impinge on the Emerald Forest and destroy everything. His son calls the dam a "logjam"; he will chant a rain storm out of the sky strong enough to break through the dam. And he does. Father and son are reconciled, though they will never see each other again. The extermination of these Indian tribes--down to a hundred thousand from four million--along with the razing of the forest, is the link between Boorman's film and Lawrence's ideas about the genocide of the American Indians in Studies in Classic American Literature.
Inevitably, Boorman arrives in Hollywood. Worn down by the post-election day blues, I stare in disbelief at the page as Boorman's reflections on Christopher Isherwood slide inexorably into my thoughtstream.
Like a crackle of electricity he seems to jump the terminals, short-circuit the mysterious process by which a great writer subsumes his raw material, passes it through the murky acids and leaden depths of the unconscious before it flows out again at an even voltage on to the page. (123)
* Poets admire Lawrence for all sorts of reasons. Poets, more than novelists, have found in Lawrence's brilliant and protracted use of birds, beasts, and flowers, a counterpoint to the forces of technology and mechanization that threaten the poetic imagination as well as the earth--and the two are inseparable. Poetry must be autochthonous. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow and Don DeLillo in Underworld can respond to the global predicament with a critical, ironic, satirical edge ideally suited to the novel as a form. Poets are more involved in a salvage operation. Take Theodore Roethke. Roethke has always been identified with John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, but vastly more has been written about these other poets than about Roethke and for the simple reason that critics, deaf to the music of poetry, to what makes a poem a poem, find him limited in range. Once again, how much can be said about birds, beasts, and flowers, and in Roethke's case, his father's greenhouse?
What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water.Sylvia Plath took flight from Roethke's miraculously condensed and staccato lines. It accounts for the decisive, flick of the wrist of her later poems: "Bare-handed, I hand the combs." ("Stings") In the 20th century, when global awareness has become instantaneous, a poet's work has to be read in light of what it leaves out as much as what it leaves in. Lawrence's animals are expressions of a life-force shorn of the inhibitions, attitudes, and neuroses that infect his characters so often thwarted by willfulness and, to use a word Lawrence favored, perversities, unsuccessful attempts to experience being. The author of "Tortoise Shout" knew that tortoises are not known for spending too many hours on the psychoanalyst's couch (and probably had not read either of Lawrence's treatises on the subject, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious) but the very act of confronting and imagining what it is like to be these creatures is a move toward enlightenment. God knows they have a lot to say and can free-associate with the best of us.
Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow's here.
I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and mother.
Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.What gliding shape
Beckoning through halls,
Stood poised on the stair,
Fell dreamily down?From the mouths of jugs
Perched on many shelves,
I saw substance flowing
That cold morning.Like a slither of eels
That watery cheek
As my own tongue kissed
My lips awake.
("The Lost Son")
His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings,The creatures behave according to their natures, and if you were to put them all together, all their natures into one human being, you would have characters as tortured and ambivalent as those who populate Lawrence's novels and whose contradictions overwhelm his narratives. In "Man and Bat," Lawrence endures a confrontation that would drive other people to murder, but he is able to limit his exasperation at the bat to its inappropriate invasion of his working space. The bat drives him batty, but Lawrence never forgets that it is a bat, and that in ways difficult for a man to fathom, it is behaving according to its nature, staying inside because he hasn't got sunglasses, much less a sleep-mask.
And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.A mere obstacle,
He veers round the slow great mound of her--
Tortoises always foresee obstacles.It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:
"This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg."He does not even trouble to answer: "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"
He wearily looks the other way,
And she even more wearily looks another way still,
Each with the utmost apathy,
Incognisant,
Unaware,
Nothing.Something seemed to blow him back from the window
Every time he swerved at it;
Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my room.He could not go out,
I also realized....
It was the light of day which he could not enter,
Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast furnace.He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the window.
It was asking too much of his nature.Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my handkerchief
Saying: Out, go out!...
Was the horror of the white daylight in the window!So I switched on the electric light, thinking: Now
The outside will seem brown....But no.
The outside did not seem brown.
And he did not mind the yellow electric light.Silent!
He was having a silent rest.
But never!
Not in my room.* Lawrence's sensitivity was such that he almost always in the end polarized other people. One illustration of this is Aldous Huxley's portrait of him in his novel Point Counterpoint. Unfortunately for me, Huxley's name for the Lawrence character in the novel is Mark Rampian (but this is not nearly as bad as the little boy's repetition of "redrum" in The Shining, which shivers my spine). Huxley could do no more than portray Lawrence as thin-skinned, irritable and argumentative, all of which is true, but just scratches the surface. He was Lawrence's loyal friend and advocate, but his Lawrence is almost a cartoon of the man, just as his novel Point Counterpoint is a skeletal rip-off of Andre Gide's wonderfully weird and innovative novel within a novel Les Faux Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters).
Lawrence found it hard to be around himself--one reason he was always moving around. He was also moving around when he was still, and the world moved around him. Lawrence illustrates Osip Mandelstam's assertion that "standing still is a variety of accumulated motion." In his poem "Snake," it is the snake who seeks out the man, who is lured there by his energy. Even snakes know a receptive and empathetic witness when they sense one. (Scratch "even...").
A snake came to my water-troughCreatures find him because he is one of them. He is fully human, but somehow he escaped desensitization. This is what makes Lawrence so popular with creatures often feared and disdained by people.
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.The Etruscans behaved according to their own nature as well. And then the Romans, the real barbarians, arrived. And the power drive became predominant.
But in the bewildering experience of searching for the Etruscans there is the one steady clue that we can follow: or rather, there are two clues. The first is the peculiar physical or bodily, lively quality of all the art. And this, I take it, is Italian, the result of the Italian soil itself. The Romans got a great deal of their power from resisting this curious Italian physical expressiveness: and for the same reason, in the Roman the salt soon lost its savour, in the true Etruscan, never. (Sketches of Etruscan Places)
Mark Rudman's most recent volume of poems is The Couple; Sundays on the Phone is forthcoming in 2005 from Wesleyan.
