PART THREE

The idea of return had dominated Lawrence’s last nine months: the return of Quetzalcoatl, the return of Pan, the return to Mexico, the return to London, the return to Hampstead. They approached America from the east, leaving Southampton on the Aquitania on 6 March 1924 and docking at New York six days later. In Brett’s account of the voyage, Frieda doesn’t exist: it is Brett and Lawrence making their lonely way across the Atlantic. As they passed Ellis Island, Lawrence hurried Brett on deck to see the Statue of Liberty, but Mabel’s ‘great hollow stone image’ was lost in mist and cloud. New York is bitter in March, with sudden snow showers, instant ice and wind whooshing round corners. Lawrence hated it. They had tea with Willa Cather, a friend of the Brewsters and the only American novelist that Lawrence would ever meet; in what Brett described as ‘his mischievous naughty-boy mood’, Lawrence ‘teased Willa Cather about women writers, belittling them, mocking them’.¹ Pan and his party then travelled by train to Santa Fe: three days of playing cards and seeing America pass by the window like a film. The Bynners, ‘hugging and shouting’, met them at the station and the next day they continued on to Mabeltown by stagecoach, Brett squeezed between Lawrence and Frieda. The snow made for a perilous journey, during which Brett held on to Lawrence’s knee.

Having wintered in California (where they were getting their treatment), Mabel and Tony were not due for another few days and so the travellers had the Big House to themselves. In his Stetson hat and Western boots – he now dressed as a cowboy – Lawrence taught Brett how to ride although having been raised on a stud farm, she hardly needed his help. ‘You ahead, I behind,’ Brett lovingly recalled. ‘You, turning your head at intervals to make sure I am all right, which gives me a feeling of security I have rarely felt since.’² When Mabel’s Ford rolled through the gate to the estate, with Tony tooting the horn, Lawrence, ‘breathless and shaking’, ran down the steps to greet them. Frieda followed, giving out her usual ‘hearty sounds’. Mabel braced herself to plant a kiss on Frieda’s ‘hard, pink cheek’, but Frieda recoiled and Lawrence ‘giggled the same faint, small giggle I had heard so often before’.³

Up at the house Mabel was introduced to the latest member of the community. Brett, she thought, was a ‘grotesque’ whose ‘long, thin shanks ended in large feet that turned out abruptly like the kind that children draw’. Her ear-trumpet – known as Toby – which seemed to ‘suck into itself all it could from the air’, was ‘almost always … pointing at Lorenzo’. Mabel saw Toby as an ‘eavesdropper’, a ‘spy’, and Brett wielded him like a truncheon, keeping him ‘forever between Lawrence and the world’. She took on a similar role herself. Brett was, Lawrence explained to Mabel, ‘a kind of buffer between him and Frieda’, but she was also a buffer between Mabel and Lawrence.4 Brett’s first impression of Mabel was equally Hogarthian: her hostess was a woman of ‘square, sturdy build’, with hair ‘bobbed like a Florentine boy’ and a ‘curved fringe’ pointing down in the middle of the forehead ‘like a Mephistophelian cap’.⁵ While Frieda airily dismissed the relevance of Brett (‘she doesn’t count’), it took Mabel to see the new girl’s power. Brett’s presence around Lawrence, wrote Mabel – who similarly used silence to impose her authority – was as ‘pervasive’ as the ‘air’.⁶

The Lawrences moved into a two-storey house, known as the pink house, that was across the garden from the Big House, with Brett in the adjacent studio. The plan was to rendezvous for lunch and supper, and thus began, wrote Mabel, ‘our second effort to live a kind of group life’.7 It was no easier now for Mabel to get Lawrence on his own than it had been in the autumn of 1922. She managed to detach him from his entourage only when they went riding, on which occasions, by feigning a newly discovered timidity which allowed Lawrence to protect her, she tried to prove herself as submissive a horsewoman as Brett. ‘I am not the same as I was!’ Mabel admitted as she ‘trembled’ by the side of her mare. Lawrence ‘grinned’ and helped her to mount. They then ‘rode decorously away across the desert; no more wild riding with me in the lead and he tearing after me!’⁸

It was Mabel who recognised that Brett also hid her aggression beneath a mask of femininity. ‘I cannot describe to you my increasing irritation at Brett’s ridiculous ways,’ she complained. One of these mannerisms was to describe everything as ‘little’ as in ‘Oh! a li-ittle flower-pot!’ Mabel’s impersonations of Brett’s whimsy made Frieda laugh and Lawrence ‘sore’, and Brett got her revenge when, trimming Mabel’s bob, she nipped the lobe of her ear. ‘I looked at Brett in amazement and, I must admit, in some admiration!’ It could not be more symbolic, thought Mabel: the deaf woman had tried to ‘mutilate’ the ear of her rival.⁹

Lawrence now started to paint. He painted the windows of Mabel’s bathroom in Aztec patterns of yellow and blue and green and red, and he painted a lovely chrysanthemum and a nimble phoenix on a cupboard door in the pink house. He painted an enormous serpent coiled around the stem of a sunflower on the walls of the outside privy, and on the upper half of a Gothic door he painted a medallion of a golden phoenix rising from a nest of flames, while Brett decorated the lower half with a carving of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge. ‘“Here’s Eve – the bitch,” Brett said, viciously, “cause of all the trouble. Here, let’s give her a good fat tummy!”’ The reason Lawrence and Brett hated Eve so much, Mabel believed, is because ‘I was Eve.’¹⁰

He was woken at night by the whipping and wailing of the Penitentes, who dragged their crosses past Mabeltown on the way to Calvary. Revolted by the thought of them, Lawrence slept with his windows shut, but during the day he would walk up and down the Calvary Road. The presence of the Penitentes was a drawback, and Lawrence was restless. Because Mabel didn’t want to lose him again, she came up with a solution: she would give Lawrence her ranch on Lobo Mountain, the same one she had prevented him from living in with the Danes on the grounds that it belonged to her son, John. Two miles further up than Del Monte, the ranch consisted of 160 acres, a barn, two reasonably sized cabins and a third cabin measuring nine feet by eleven, the size of what the English call a Wendy-house. Mabel, in her capacity as Beatrice, had excelled herself: the ranch she gave Lawrence is 8,600 feet above sea level. He had reached the empyrean, where all becomes one.

Lobo, Spanish for wolf, was a mountain of wild animals and on its ‘Jaguar-splashed, puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes’, Lawrence once saw two hunters carrying the corpse of a lion they had shot. ‘So, she will never leap up that way again,’ he wrote in ‘Mountain Lion’, ‘with the yellow flash of a mountain lion’s long shoot!’

And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more, out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock, Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Kiowa, as Lawrence called his ranch – after the Indian tribe who had once lived on the land – is the only home he would ever own, except that Lawrence didn’t strictly own it. To prevent him from turning her gift down, Mabel put the ranch in Frieda’s name. Lawrence insisted, however, on giving Mabel something in return and that something was the manuscript of Sons and Lovers, currently in Germany in the care of Frieda’s sister, Else. The quid pro quo was, Mabel believed, a ‘cold and distrustful’ gesture that ‘spoiled the whole exchange’,¹¹ yet the manuscript was apparently valued at $4,000 and Mabel had originally paid $1,200 for the ranch. Having given the place to her son as a shooting lodge, she bought it back from him with a buffalo-hide coat and a small sum of money so that Lawrence could take up residence.

By April the ice had thawed and new life was stirring: the Indians were ploughing their furrows, baby burros were taking their first steps, and the wild-plum hedges were coming into flower. Mexican workers were preparing Lawrence’s ranch for habitation, and over Easter he went to the pueblo at Santo Domingo to see the Dance of the Sprouting Corn. He had compared his experience at the Jicarilla reservation to a ‘stage’, and while his responses to the ceremonials would evolve, Lawrence’s sense of New Mexico as a theatre remained the same. This is clear in the two essays he wrote during Holy Week 1924, ‘Indians and Entertainment’ and ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’.

‘Indians and Entertainment’ was a response to the latest disturbance in Taos pueblo: on Good Friday, Charles Burke, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, arrived from Washington to advise the Indians against keeping their boys from school in order to instruct them in religion in the kivas. This was a further attempt, in the aftermath of the Bursum Bill, to integrate the indigenous people into mainstream American life by depriving them of their customs and beliefs. Eighteen months earlier Lawrence would have complained that all anyone in Mabeltown talked about was Burke! Burke! Burke! School! School! School!, but he now accepted the atrocity of Burke’s intervention and wrote an account of Indian ‘otherness’ in which he broke through his earlier blockage.

The essay begins with an attack on the ‘shadow-pictures’ of films which offer the audience ‘an orgy of abstraction’. While white Americans canoodle in the back row of the movie house, Native Americans, Lawrence argued, have no notion of ‘entertainment’, and this is what makes their dances so hard for liberals like Mabel or John Collier to understand: ‘sentimentality’ always ‘creeps in’. What follows is a reading of Indian ceremonials as a form of theatre of the absurd: performances of ‘no words’ meaning ‘nothing at all’, involving ‘no spectacle, no spectator’, ‘no beginning and no end’, in which we cannot judge what we see ‘because there is nothing outside it, to judge’. Only when we stop trying to root out the meaning of the dance can we appreciate its beauty. Lawrence was adamant about this: the ceremonial dances were a mystery to him and would remain so.12

So how to describe such a ceremony? This is what Lawrence set out to achieve in his account of the Dance of the Sprouting Corn. His solution was to imitate the dancers themselves. ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ is subtle, soft re-enactment recalled with astonishing precision. The opening lines are stage directions:

Pale, dry, baked earth, that blows into dust of fine sand. Low hills of baked pale earth, sinking heavily, and speckled sparsely with dark dots of cedar bushes.

The action then begins: ‘Thud – thud – thud – thud – thud! goes the drum, heavily the men hop and hop and hop, sway, sway, sway, sway go the little branches of green pine.’ The dance ‘tosses like a little forest’, the bells on the knee-garters pulse and ripple, the gourd-rattles shudder, the barefoot women, motionless as ‘solid shadows’, tread their steps behind the men. These lines, ‘straight as rain’, break into four rings and then form a star, before falling back into lines – every pattern folding into place without apparent direction, like the shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope. Meanwhile the clowns or Koshares, daubed in black and white earth, weave ‘like queer spotted dogs’ through the dancers, calling something up from the earth or down from the sky, catching a word from the singers, fluttering their hands in slow motion, up and down, up and down. ‘They are anything but natural,’ wrote Lawrence; they are like the ‘blackened ghosts of a dead corn cob’. The drum then stops, breaking the trance, and the dancers silently file into line and thread their way back to the kiva, where the thud thud thud begins again, and the men hop and hop and hop, and the little forest starts once more to sway.¹³

There is no howl of misery, in either essay, about the impossibility of going back, no acute sadness or nostalgia or unbearable yearning, no insistence on the need to push onwards, no suggestion that the Native Americans lack any ‘inside’ or anger about being an outsider; no sense of looking through a screen or despair at the unbridgeable difference between Lawrence’s own wretched world and the better one of the Indians. He just runs forward with the wonder like a half-empty ship heading into warm waters, feeling the long, slow, waveringly rhythmic rise and fall, lilting in the slow flight of the elements, winging outwards.

What is most extraordinary about ‘Indians and Entertainment’ and ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ is how little their vanishing, egoless author resembles the impossibly self-aggrandising, semi-sane bore whose fantasies of divine leadership were currently being suffered by Frieda and nurtured by Mabel and Brett.

Memoirs of Lawrence are driven by either love or hate, depending on whether they are written by women or by men. Good haters are better company than blind lovers, and Brett’s adulation of Lawrence takes its toll on the reader. Brett, unlike Mabel, has no interest in Lawrence’s complexity or awareness of her own. Mabel is the better writer by far, not least because – taking seriously Lawrence’s moratorium on seriousness – she casts herself as a comic character in her own drama and is ready to laugh at the things that matter to her most. Take her account of greeting her guests one morning with the news that she feels ‘marvellous’. ‘Hah!’ snorts Frieda and ‘Humph’ mutters Lawrence, who then blames Mabel’s irritating sense of well-being on ‘sheer unrestrained ego’. Strolling over to see Brett, who is of course eavesdropping from her doorway, Mabel ‘screams’ into Toby, ‘Isn’t it a wonderful day?’ ‘What?’ Brett screams back. ‘Hay? Is José cutting hay?’¹⁴

Mabeltown was enhanced by the presence of Ida Rauh, the former actress whom Mabel knew from her Greenwich Village days and who was now living in Santa Fe with Andrew Dasburg. Despite (or because of) her feminism, Lawrence liked Ida and with their combined talents, the evening charades were fuelled by an excess of fierceness, daring and laughter. No subject was considered off-limits: Mabel described one charade ‘that represented me taking Tony to Buffalo to visit my mother!’ Lawrence, ‘dressed in a shawl and a big hat, flourishing a horrified lorgnette’, played Sara Ganson, Ida played Mabel, and Tony, ‘wrapped in his blanket’, played himself, ‘very seriously, making deep bows to Lorenzo’. It was ‘so funny’, said Mabel, that ‘we couldn’t finish the act!’¹⁵ The laughter Lawrence generated always had an edge of panic. Only Brett picked up on Tony’s hatred of these theatricals: ‘We have a hilarious evening of charades,’ she recalls in the present tense of Lawrence and Brett. ‘You are eager, alive, and full of fun. Even Tony is roped in: solemn, bewildered, he re-enacts with Mabel their marriage. “I have married an Indian Chief,” announces Mabel. “No,” says Tony, with offended dignity, “not a chief.” And he turns and walks solemnly out of the room, which brings the charade to an abrupt finish.’¹⁶

On Lobo Mountain Lawrence and Frieda moved into one of the larger cabins, the second cabin was reserved for Mabel and Tony, and Brett took the Wendy-house, which just about contained a single bed and the desk on which she typed Lawrence’s manuscripts on a typewriter borrowed from Mabel. ‘It’s quite big enough, really,’ Brett said brightly.¹⁷ It was smaller than the larder of one of her childhood homes. That summer, Mabel and Tony were picnicking at the ranch when Lawrence began a diatribe against the decadence and corruption of society. Lowering his voice and glaring around the table, he reached his crescendo: ‘only the doctors know the truth about all these “best people”! They know that the ratio of syphilis among them is enormous. They are rotten with it. The men have lost their manhood from it, the women their fertility. Our own best friends are filthy with it for all we know!’ Tony, in his ancient wisdom, looked Pan in the eye and asked, ‘What that syphilis? Something like TB?’¹⁸

In early July when the Lawrence party came down to Mabeltown for supper, Frieda and Mabel’s latest protégé, a young man called Clarence, disappeared after drinking moonshine and dancing together. Lawrence went to bed in a rage and Mabel, wildly excited by Frieda’s transgression, stayed awake until she heard the couple return. Creeping through the dark to Clarence’s house, she asked him what they had been doing. ‘I have been learning the Truth!’ he replied.¹⁹ The Truth, revealed to Clarence by Frieda, was that Lawrence was trying to murder Mabel, who would be getting weaker and sicker after each of his visits. Yes, thought Mabel, that made sense: Lawrence always talked about people ‘destroying’ one another, and when she had recently said to him ‘you want to kill me, that’s what you want!’, he had replied, in a ‘hesitating voice’, ‘No–o. Not exactly.’²⁰

The next morning Lawrence handed Mabel his latest story. While Mabel sat on the couch reading ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, as it was called, Tony and Clarence had words with Lawrence outside, and Frieda and Brett began to pack their bags.

‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ is a dream-like parable about a bored American wife who rides off to discover the secrets of the Chilchui people. Meeting three Indians in the desert, she goes with them over the mountains, climbing up and up through the night until they reach ‘the roof of the world’ where the snow ‘slashes’ against the heavens. When the horses can go no further, the woman crawls on her hands and knees up ‘mile-long sheets of rock’. Three thousand feet below lies a lush green valley where houses glisten like little white cubes; the party descend, and the woman is taken to the earthen sun-roof of a temple in which an ‘old, old man’ is lying on a bed. The woman tells him that she wants to bring her heart to the god of the Chilchui, and the other men in the room, dressed in white sheets gathered into loincloths, cut her riding boots and clothes away from her with knives. The old, old man touches her naked breasts and runs his moistened fingertips down her body. It is, Lawrence says, a curiously sexless experience for the woman because she already ‘feels dead’. She is then clothed by the men in a white cotton shift and imprisoned in a small house where she can hear ‘the long, heavy sound of a drum’. A magical drink makes her vomit and then hallucinate: she can hear ‘the vast sound of the earth going round, like some immense arrow-string booming’. Every time she is given the drink she gets a little weaker and more sick, but she now understands the oneness of the universe.

The highbrow white woman, the Indians explain to her, has ‘stayed too long on the earth, the moon and the sun are waiting for her to go’. The woman’s death will be an offering to the gods; she will save the tribe. On her last day she is taken on a long climb to a mountain chamber which can only be entered by a ladder descending from the roof, and then to an amphitheatre fanged with icicles, and finally to a cave over which a waterfall has frozen and behind which tunnels lead to other, smaller caves. Here she is ‘fumigated’ before being laid naked on a large flat stone. ‘She knew she was going to die, among the glisten of this snow’, but as ‘she stared at the blaze of blue sky above the slashed and ponderous mountain, she thought “I am dead already.”’ The old, old man approaches her with his blade and she knew that when the sun had reached its reddest point, it would hit the column of ice, and ‘the old man would strike … and accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power’.²¹ It is at this point that the story ends, with the figures at the sacrifice as frozen as the ‘men or gods’ and ‘maidens loth’ in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

‘Do you like it?’ asked Lawrence when Mabel had finished reading. ‘Oh, it’s splendid!’ Mabel replied, annoyed that the story was set in Mexico when it was clearly about New Mexico.²² Lawrence had captured, as Mabel wanted him to, the strange, sinister spirit of the place and then called it by another name. ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ was filled with messages to Mabel, who had announced herself ‘dead’ to Tony when she contracted syphilis, who had once been given by Tony a ‘magical drink’ made from cacti (called peyote) which, she said, ‘revealed the irresistible delight of spiritual composition: the regulated relationship of one to all and all to one’.²³ The cave itself was inspired by a visit that she and Lawrence had made to Lucero Peak, a 10,800-foot rock above the town of Arroyo Seco; the ancient ceremonial chamber, considered by the Taos Indians to be a sacred place, can be found behind a heavy waterfall that freezes in the winter.

Lawrence described ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ as ‘Mabel’s story to me’, and Mabel called it the story ‘where Lorenzo thought he finished me up’,²⁴ but it was Lawrence and not Mabel who was ‘finished up’ by the tale. When Sexual Politics, Kate Millett’s study of literary misogyny, appeared in 1969, her analysis of ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ dealt the final blow to Lawrence’s flagging reputation. The story, said Millett, was ‘monstrous’, ‘demented’, ‘sadistic pornography’, a snuff-movie ‘reeking of Hollywood’. The scene, she argued, in which the woman, preparing for her sacrifice, stands between the priests while ‘the throng below gave the low, wild cry’ is shot in ‘MGM technicolor’.²⁵ After Millett’s verdict, Lawrence dropped off university reading lists and was thrown into the Inferno where he has remained ever since.

If ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ is read as the sacrifice of a single and specific woman, then it might certainly seem like a work of sexual sadism. The tale is sick, but then we shed our sicknesses in books. Yet it can equally be read as an allegory in which modern America sacrifices the mechanical world it now worships for the cosmic world it has lost, thus displacing the power of the dynamo with that of the virgin. Either way, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ is concerned with regeneration rather than death, because the woman’s sacrifice is to ensure the movement of the planets. There is nothing surprising in the tale’s savagery: Lawrence’s sole mission was to uncover the demonic soul of America, the ‘under-consciousness’ beneath the upper layer of ‘nice-as-pie’. The destroy! destroy! destroy! that lurked beneath the surface of American literature is given here upfront, leaving us with the problem of what exactly is being destroyed: one woman, all women or the modern American ego.

While it has proved impossible to save this particular tale from the artist who created it, what Kate Millett did was to flip the tale and the teller around. She made Lawrence himself the human sacrifice, and encouraged his ‘throng’ of readers to strip him naked and give the ‘low, wild cry’ for his destruction. What matters in the biographical context however is not how critics have responded to ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, but how Mabel herself responded, and Mabel let Lawrence think that she did not mind: her acceptance of his offering was part of her new ‘submission’. But she told Leo Stein that Lawrence was ‘too damn mean’, and that he had ‘satisfied his sadism’ in a story about ‘a white woman whom he makes sacrifice herself voluntarily to the Indians who finally cut out her heart’.²⁶

When she had finished reading his story and the Lawrence party were being driven back to the ranch by Clarence, Mabel promised Tony that she would never contact Lorenzo again. Then a few days later a battered package arrived for her at the local post office. It was the manuscript of Sons and Lovers, delivered from Germany, and no sooner had Mabel ripped open the wrapping than there was ‘a clap of thunder’ in the clear blue sky and the rain came down in sheets. ‘Well,’ she said as she looked at Lawrence’s handwritten pages, ‘I had the essence of him in my hands. Perhaps that should have been enough for me, you think? It wasn’t.’²⁷

Clarence reminded Mabel every day that Lawrence ‘wants you dead’, but Tony, now ‘tired of Lorenzo’, did not, Mabel said, take ‘this sensational news sensationally’. Nor, however, did Mabel, who was far from tired of Lorenzo. On the contrary, she ‘missed’ him ‘and the fun of his company, the thrill that got into everything when he was about’. Masochists need sadists and Mabel knew from her marriages that the connection between the hunter and his prey was the most thrilling one of all. Life without Lawrence was ‘too peaceful’ and so she broke her promise to Tony and sent a card up to the ranch, asking how her killer was doing. Lawrence replied that all was well, and she should come and see him in the ‘lion’s den’.²⁸ He presented himself as having the power, but Mabel was guiding his every move. He was living in her ranch, he had stolen her friends, he was jealous of her husband, he had met her mother; having defiantly left her in 1923, he skulked back to her in 1924, crossing the globe in order to do so. To remind Mabel that it was she who was in debt to Lawrence, Frieda now told her that the manuscript of Sons and Lovers was worth a good deal more than $4,000. It had been valued, she revealed, at ‘$50,000, at least!’²⁹

Lawrence’s next story, the novella St Mawr, was about a woman who ‘had had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she didn’t know where she was’. Lou Witt, as the heroine is called, is a wilful American with a European background and a sexually available mother (modelled on Sara Ganson). St Mawr is the name of the stallion that Lou buys for her husband Rico, but Rico prefers cars to horses and is anyway scared of St Mawr who attends to his surroundings ‘as if he were some lightning-conductor’. The groom is a small and wily Welshman called Lewis, who considers his beard a part of his body; a second groom called Phoenix has a Mexican father and a Navajo mother. Fragments of Lawrence can be found in every character, including St Mawr himself, who is the latest incarnation of Pan. Leaving Rico in England, Lou returns with Phoenix, her mother and her horse to the ‘absolute silence’ of America. New Mexico feels to her ‘like a cinematograph’; it is peopled by ‘flat shapes, exactly like men, but without any substance of reality’. Self-conscious cowboys herd their cattle in black Ford motorcars: ‘It was all film-psychology.’ To get away from the movie set, Lou buys, for $1,200, a ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains identical to the one in which Lawrence was now living. Lou has reached the beyond, a place of ‘pure, absolute beauty’, where the desert spread its ‘eternal circles’ beneath and below, the ‘long mountain-side of pure blue shadow closed in the near corner’. Here the thought of sex becomes repellent to her and she decides to give herself ‘only to the unseen presences’. Another female sacrifice, Lou Witt forsook the life of her body in order to become ‘one of the eternal Virgins, serving the eternal fire’.30

The relation between the dynamo and the virgin had been noted before, in a book so Lawrentian that Lawrence himself might have written it. Sixteen years earlier, Henry Adams – grandson of John Quincy Adams – had described, in The Education of Henry Adams, his own struggle with the scientific and technological revolutions of the age. In the chapter called ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’, Adams visits the 1900 Paris Exposition where ‘the forty-foot dynamos’ represent ‘a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross’.³¹ He now understands the ‘absolute fiat in electricity as a faith’; the energy of the dynamo has become ‘divine’, the dynamo is the new ‘symbol of infinity’. The Virgin – by which Adams means the eternal goddess, symbol of female fecundity – was once ‘the greatest force the Western world had ever felt’, but modern America has never feared her. She is admired as an image of ‘reflected emotion, beauty, purity’ and ‘taste’, but not as the power that built Chartres Cathedral. The purpose of American art, said Henry Adams, was to return to the Virgin her former stature.³²

On 3 August, halfway through writing St Mawr, Lawrence spat blood into a handkerchief. When Frieda called the local doctor, Lawrence hurled an iron eggcup at her head. The doctor’s diagnosis, Frieda was happy to report, was that this was not at all a death sentence: the patient’s lungs were ‘strong’ – he had nothing but a ‘touch of bronchial trouble!’³³ But from now on it was Lawrence and not Mabel who got weaker and sicker, and Mabel wondered if he was bent on ‘destroying himself instead of me’.³⁴

After a week in bed, Lawrence told Mabel that his throat ‘hurt like billy-o’ but he wanted to go to the Hopi Snake Dance in Arizona. Mabel wanted this too, because he would write about it afterwards. While Lawrence wrote about the Snake Dance itself, which took place on 17 August 1924, Mabel described, in Lorenzo in Taos, the 400-mile drive there, which was dominated by Lawrence’s hostility towards Tony. The journey contained other dangers too: cars had been swallowed by quicksand on the roads through Navajo country, and Mabel realised, as Tony sang in the front of the Ford and Lawrence fired verbal missiles at Frieda in the back, that she was ‘thrice alone’ with her three companions; nothing but ‘a smiling, embalmed mummy’. Mulling over Lawrence’s intention of destroying her, she wondered if the Sybil Mond novel might itself have been a weapon, and was sorry that Frieda had put a stop to it, ‘because it would have been an easier and a quicker end’ had Lawrence ‘done it with the magic pen rather than by the reiterated blows he gave me with the strange power of his presence’.³⁵

The Hopi Snake Dance, a petition for lightning, is the apotheosis of snake-power. In preparation for the ceremony, twelve officiating men of the tribe catch the rattlesnakes in the rocks; they wash, soothe and ‘exchange spirits with them’ before keeping them in the kivas for nine days. On the day of the dance the snake priests, with the snakes in their mouths, circle around one another before letting the creatures slither back down to the underground to give the gods the prayers ‘which had been breathed upon them’.³⁶

Lawrence had described Sybil Mond as a ‘seductive serpent’, but as far as Tony Lujan was concerned Lawrence was the snake, and it is hard to tell, in their own particular snake dance, whether Lawrence is dangling Mabel from his mouth, or Mabel dangling Lawrence. Lawrence’s first account of the Snake Dance, ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance – Tired Out’, was written in the back of the car as Tony drove them home from the ceremony. Later published in Laughing Horse, the piece was a fresh attack on Mabel. ‘One wonders what one went for,’ Lawrence began. ‘The Hopi country is hideous’, with ‘death grey mesas sticking up like broken pieces of ancient, dry, grey bread’. The dance itself was a ‘tiny little show’ laid on for white Americans, involving eight ‘so-called’ antelope priests and a dozen ‘so-called’ snake priests, while the so-called snakes themselves looked like ‘wet, pale silk stockings’.³⁷ Reading Lawrence’s description, Mabel was duly disappointed – she had not taken him to the Snake Dance to have him mock and belittle it. He then agreed to do the piece again, and this time ‘not for the Horse to laugh at’.³⁸

In his second account, ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, we see exactly what Lawrence went for and how intensely he had absorbed the ceremony and its meanings. He begins with their arrival at the ‘ragged ghost’ of a mesa where they join a line of black automobiles which, having ‘lurched and crawled’ across the desert, now moves slowly up the slope, drawing its slow length over the burned earth. While the crowd – Lawrence thinks there are 3,000 people – have come to see men hold rattlesnakes in their mouths, his own interest is in the animism of a religion in which ‘all is alive’. For the Native Americans, the sun and the moon and the wind are ‘the great living source of life’, to which ‘you can no more pray than you can pray to Electricity’. Which brings Lawrence to his central theme: today we capture electricity in ‘reservoirs and irrigation ditches and artesian wells. We make lightning conductors, and build vast electric plants’, but the Native Americans approach lightning ‘livingly’ and ‘from the mystic will within’. Herein lies the gulf between the white Americans and the Native Americans: ‘We dam the Nile and take the railway across America. The Hopi smooths the rattlesnake and carries him in his mouth.’ To us, ‘God was the beginning and Paradise is lost’, and to the Hopi, ‘God is not yet’ and Paradise is yet to come.³⁹

The snake priests, ‘heavily built, rather short’, with ‘bobbed hair’ and an ‘anarchic squareness’, look like Mabel. But they also, with their faces smeared in black clay, look like miners. They are ‘the hot, living men of the darkness, lords of the earth’s inner vital rays’. The ceremony over, the tourists ‘hurry back to the motor-cars, and soon the air buzzes with starting engines, like the biggest of rattlessnakes buzzing’. The long line of black steel uncoils itself back down the slope.⁴⁰

In April 1923, a German art historian called Aby Warburg, founder of the Warburg Institute, gave a slide lecture at Ludwig Binswanger’s Kreuzlingen sanatorium in Switzerland. Five years earlier Warburg had suffered a psychotic breakdown and his Kreuzlingen Lecture, as it became known, was the result of a deal he made with his doctors. If he proved able to deliver a rational and sustained talk for one hour, drawing on material he had cellared since his journey to the American Southwest in 1897, he would be deemed sane enough to return to Hamburg. Warburg chose as his topic the Snake Dance, and he described his own performance as ‘the gruesome convulsion of a decapitated frog’. The event was extraordinary in many ways, not least because Warburg, despite his extensive knowledge of Native American life and culture, had never actually seen the Snake Dance, which puts his lecture in the same category as those essays on classic American literature that Lawrence had written in Cornwall, before he had actually seen America.

Warburg went to the Southwest in order to experience life ‘in its polar tension between pagan, instinctual forces of nature and organised intelligence’. The culture and religion of the Native Americans, he believed, was built on the same ‘synchrony’ of higher civilisation and magical causation as the Renaissance; in addition, both cultures were orientated around the symbol and ‘symbolic connection’. In the Snake Dance, said Warburg, the serpent serves as the agent of lightning but also as lightning itself: one of his slides showed an image taken from the altar floor of a kiva, in which lightning is represented by serpents rather than zigzags descending from the clouds. Now that we have scientific explanations, Warburg argued, we no longer fear the snake or feel its force.

Warburg’s talk, illustrated throughout with his remarkable photographs – the lightning altar in the kiva at Sia, the antelope dance at San Ildefonso – ends with an image he had captured on the streets of San Francisco. It represents, he said, ‘the conqueror of the serpent cult and of the fear of lightning, the inheritor of the indigenous peoples and of the gold seeker who ousted them’. In centre frame is ‘Uncle Sam in a stovepipe hat, strolling in his pride past a neoclassical rotunda. Above his top hat runs an electric wire. In this copper serpent of Edison’s, he has wrested lightning from nature.’⁴¹

So eighteen months before Lawrence wrote about the Snake Dance and electricity, a German in a Swiss sanatorium also wrote about the Snake Dance and electricity. Warburg’s lecture was equally concerned with synchronicity, and his thoughts synchronised entirely with those of Lawrence, as he reached the empyrean.

September was a time of frenzied composition. Lawrence finished ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, revised the proofs of the Memoir of Maurice Magnus and wrote a story which he saw as the third part of the triptych which contained ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and St Mawr. ‘The Princess’ was Lawrence’s story for Brett, in which he showed that he knew (probably through Frieda) she had lost her virginity to Murry. The daughter of a Scottish aristocrat, Dollie Urquhart – ‘the princess’ – comes to New Mexico and is attracted to a Mexican guide called Romero who takes her on a long ride into the mountains. In a hunting lodge where they rest for the night, Dollie gives herself to Romero. The next day she tells him that she did not enjoy the experience – ‘I don’t care for that kind of thing’ – which provokes Romero to throw her boots and breeches into a pond. He holds her captive in the hut until he is shot dead by two men from the forest service. The princess, who tells no one what happened on her excursion, remains, for all the world, ‘a virgin intact’. But now ‘her bobbed hair was grey at the temples, and her eyes were a little mad’.42

Having vented his anger with Brett, Lawrence returned to the image of Pisgah. Looking down today from the mountain, Lawrence wrote in ‘Climbing Down from Pisgah’, all that can be seen is a scrawny image of the globe – ‘the graveyard of humanity’.⁴³

‘You are so near the final blessedness,’ Beatrice told Dante when they had passed through the seventh sphere of Paradise, ‘that you have need / of vision clear and keen.’ Now that he was ending his journey, Beatrice commanded Dante to look down, for ‘much of the world is there’. This was the first time that he had taken in the view, and he smiled at the ‘scrawny image’ of the globe.

After her crisis on the way to the Snake Dance, the life went out of Mabel. She lost touch ‘with all that is human’, had ‘no recognition of the interests of others’, was ‘outside, inhuman, unloving, insentient, an exile from the earth’.⁴⁴ She went to New York for two weeks to consult Dr Brill; his repeated advice, which she always ignored, was that the cure for her melancholia was to find herself something – anything – to do. Mabel needed a project.

Her letters to Lawrence from New York are searching and desperate. She treats him as Brill’s equal, and places herself entirely in their joint hands: ‘Both you and Brill feel I have to do all the work this winter. With guidance I have to do the thing, whatever it is. Can you tell me what this thing literally is?’ Lawrence replied that Mabel should ‘try, try, try to discipline and control yourself’.⁴⁵ In another letter, Mabel noted that the only times she felt alive and ‘flowing’ were when she was in love and when she was ‘writing’. ‘If I can once get started and know I want to say something – it comes. Then I am off – in a good running pace.’ But she had to write ‘for someone’ and Lawrence was ‘positively the only audience I care to say anything to’. Lawrence, however, had dismissed her as a writer: ‘I always remember your words: “I shall never consider you a writer or even a knower.” And these words paralyze me…’ So Mabel tentatively asked his permission: ‘Shall I start a life-history or something?’⁴⁶

When she returned to Taos, everyone was leaving: Lawrence, Frieda and Brett were wintering in Mexico (Lawrence’s chest was feeling ‘raw’ at this altitude), and Mabel herself was returning to New York for a longer spell of analysis. In early October – when the Memoir of Maurice Magnus was finally being published in England – Tony took them all for a last drive through the valley. The cottonwood trees stood yellow against the windless autumnal sky, the purple mountains hung quietly around, and the world was at peace. ‘Perhaps we shall look back on this afternoon,’ said Mabel, breaking the silence, ‘and think how happy we were.’ The Lawrences left the next day. ‘We’ll write,’ said Lawrence, leaning from the window of the motorcar.⁴⁷

Breaking their drive in Santa Fe, Lawrence told Mabel’s friends that she was ‘dangerous’ and ‘destructive’. When this was duly reported back, Mabel finally ‘gave up Lawrence’.⁴⁸ They continued to exchange letters but she no longer asked him to be her genius loci. That ‘frail failure of a man,’ she said in Lorenzo in Taos, had ‘overcome’ her.⁴⁹ She and Lawrence would never meet again, and Mabel now began, without his help, to tell the story of her life.

After a month in Mexico City, the Lawrence party travelled south to Oaxaca, the land of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs. Lawrence and Frieda took a house at 43 Avenida Pino Suárez, and Brett, with whom relations were becoming strained, booked into a hotel. ‘The little town of Oaxaca is lonely,’ Lawrence told Secker, ‘away in the south and miles from anywhere except the Indian villages of the hills. I like it, it gives me something.’⁵⁰ Oaxaca was a place of crumbling colonial churches, bloodied Christs, walled gardens, narrow streets, dusty plazas and processions with Virgins. Lawrence, haggard and emaciated, was of course mistaken for the resurrected Jesus. In December, at the same time that Norman Douglas, holed up in his Sicilian hotel, was penning his Plea for Better Manners, Lawrence returned to ‘Quetzalcoatl’, which had been sleeping now for over a year. Writing with his usual rapidity, he doubled its length and spoiled its beauty.

Lawrence didn’t simply revise ‘Quetzalcoatl’. He did as he always did and started the novel again, because what he now wanted to say was no longer what he had originally wanted to say. The Plumed Serpent, as it was renamed (because, as Lawrence’s publisher said, no one could pronounce Quetzalcoatl), has the same structure as ‘Quetzalcoatl’ but a sourer flavour. Lawrence changed some names – Kate Burns becomes Kate Leslie, Lake Chapala is Lake Sayula – but, most importantly, he changed the ending: Kate now marries the ‘savage’ rather than returning to her home and mother. Cipriano’s proposal is presented as a form of therapy – she needs a project and he needs a woman: ‘You marry me. You complain you have nothing to do.’ Socialism in Mexico, Lawrence wrote, ‘is nothing but an infectious disease, like syphilis’, and the implication is that Kate’s marriage is syphilitic too: ‘how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to this death?’ Kate, like Alvina Houghton, is held captive by her husband: ‘You won’t let me go!’ she says to Cipriano in the final words of the novel.⁵¹

When Kate sits on her throne as Cipriano’s goddess, the dynamo has once again become a virgin: ‘How else, she said to herself, is one to begin again, save by re-finding one’s virginity?’ A way of ensuring that Kate re-finds her virginity is to prevent her from reaching orgasm, and this is Cipriano’s great achievement. He ‘drew away from her as soon as this desire rose in her’ and Kate realised, ‘almost with wonder, the death in her of the Aphrodite of the foam’.⁵²

The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive and hard to forget. It is also boring, at times brutally so. Especially tiresome are the ‘Quetzalcoatl hymns’, a variation on the interminable pledges of tribe loyalty made by the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras: ‘Who sleeps – shall wake! Who sleeps – shall wake! Who treads down the path of the snake shall arrive at the place…’ Witter Bynner thought it was the influence of Mabel that ruined The Plumed Serpent, which is true although not in the sense that he meant. Bynner was referring to the novel’s burden of theosophy, but Mabel alone saw that the book was about her. ‘I hear that Mabel thinks she is the heroine in The Plumed Serpent!!’ Frieda wrote mockingly to Bynner.⁵³ Lawrence, Mabel rightly said, had ‘simply transposed’ New Mexico for Old Mexico. ‘What I wanted him to do for Taos, he did do, but he gave it away to the mother country of Montezuma.’⁵⁴ Kate Burns had been warmly inhabited by Lawrence, but Kate Leslie is his enemy and Lawrence compares her to a ‘great cat, with its spasms of voluptuousness and its life-long lustful enjoyment of its own isolated individuality’.⁵⁵

Lawrence never knew or cared what his novels were about and this is part of what makes them interesting, even when they are bad. At the level of plot, The Plumed Serpent is his take on The Taming of the Shrew and in terms of his Dantesque journey The Plumed Serpent is the novel in which he reaches a greater understanding of the universe. This is symbolised by the Quetzalcoatl emblem: an eagle enclosed by a serpent with its tail in its mouth. The tail-eating serpent, also the symbol of the theosophical movement, brings, Lawrence said, ‘the great opposites into contact and union again’.

When Dante reached the Eternal Light he understood how all the disparate events and all the arbitrary thoughts and all the chance occurrences of all the universe were connected. Here he saw:

ingathered

and bound by love into one single volume –

what, in the universe, seems separated, scattered:

substances, accidents, and dispositions

as if conjoined.

(Paradise, Canto 33, 89–93)

‘I managed to finish my Mexican novel,’ Lawrence wrote to Amy Lowell. ‘And on that very same day,’ he continued, ‘I went down, as if shot in the intestines.’⁵⁶ His collapse coincided with an earthquake in Oaxaca which made the walls of the house rock. Lawrence blamed his condition on the tension generated by Brett (who had been banished by Frieda back to the ranch), but he also described it as the ‘tail-end of influenza’ getting ‘tangled up with a bit of malaria’,⁵⁷ which makes it sound like the serpent in the Quetzalcoatl emblem. He further explained that he had a case of malaria tangled up with the ‘grippe’ with ‘a typhoid inside’, none of which would account for the pain in his intestines.⁵⁸ He was taken by stretcher to a local hotel, and three weeks later Lawrence and Frieda were back in Mexico City. Their train journey was described as a ‘crucifixion’ by Frieda, who cried ‘like a maniac the whole night’.⁵⁹ They had planned to return to Europe for the spring, but a doctor in Mexico City took an X-ray of Lawrence’s lungs and diagnosed the advanced tuberculosis that the Taos doctor had missed. She did not know he was consumptive, Frieda insisted in ‘Not I, But the Wind…’, until the doctor in Mexico told her.

Lawrence’s Self One rejected the diagnosis, but Self Two took the doctor’s advice about returning to the healthy air of the Rockies. Because legislation had recently been passed which stopped consumptives from entering the United States, Lawrence, despite wearing blusher to disguise his pallor, was detained, stripped and examined at the El Paso border before eventually being let through on a six-month visa. His rage and humiliation were intensified when the officials accused him of lying about his health. The ingenuity with which he deceived himself about his symptoms probably explains the pain in his intestines: Lawrence simply displaced the location of his sickness, moving it from the upper to the lower body.

When he and Frieda returned to the ranch on 1 April 1925, Mabel was still being analysed by Brill in New York. She was also conducting an affair with a young songwriter called Everett Marcy, about whom very little is known. Carl Van Vechten described Everett as a ‘callow youth’ and Mabel as currently ‘at her most beguiling and dangerous’.⁶⁰ Everett was also being analysed by Brill, with Mabel paying his fees, but rather than write Brill a cheque for their sessions, Mabel gave him the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. In a letter dated 24 April, she explained to Brill that she was ‘glad’ to put to ‘some creative use’ what had been given to her ‘by Mr & Mrs Lawrence not openly in exchange for the ranch in New Mexico’.⁶¹ But nor was the manuscript of Sons and Lovers openly in exchange for Everett Marcy’s analysis, its being worth a great deal more than the amount that Brill would have charged Mabel.

The exchange rate in Mabeltown was fluctuating. Mabel had bought the ranch for $1,200 and given it to her son; she then bought it back from him with a buffalo-hide jacket and a pot of cash and gave it to Lawrence, but in Frieda’s name. Lawrence insisted on ‘exchanging’ the ranch for the manuscript of his novel about a dangerous and destructive mother which Mabel then gave to Brill in lieu of payment for his analysis of her lover who was young enough to be her son. Critics of Mabel have assumed that she failed to appreciate the value of Lawrence’s manuscript because she had no interest in his novels, but the opposite is the case.⁶²

At the same time that Lawrence was writing The Plumed Serpent in Oaxaca, Mabel embarked on the project that would absorb her for the next thirty years, and the impetus behind her memoirs, she explained, was to ‘save’ herself from the impact of Lawrence’s ‘disloyalty and treachery’. Brill had counselled her to work, and ‘the only work that suggested itself’ to her ‘was to tell Lawrence about my whole life from the beginning so he would understand more completely, so he would stop calling me dangerous and destructive’. Mabel went one step further: she would achieve in her memoirs a ‘self-destruction’ more assured than ‘anything’ that Lawrence ‘could accomplish were he to take a hammer and beat my brains upon a stone’. Her aim was ‘undo’ herself, to ‘unravel the fabric of the artificial creation’,⁶³ and Brett, who witnessed the unravelling, described how Mabel ‘wrote incessantly, without stopping, day after day, lying on her sofa with a copybook and pencil’.⁶⁴ As she wrote, Mabel’s melancholy lifted and she ceased to feel, as she put it, that there were ‘serpents coiling and uncoiling in madness’ in her ‘vagina’.⁶⁵ She wrote with the same ease and fluency as Lawrence himself, whom she no longer needed to capture the genius of Taos because spirit of place would prove to be Mabel’s own genius.

Background, the first volume of Intimate Memoirs, describes the corrosive effect of capitalism on fin de siècle America. In a reversal of the story in which the white woman is held captive by the Indians, Mabel is born in captivity in bourgeois Buffalo, on land stolen from the natives who will eventually free her. Buffalo is a city much like Freud’s Vienna, where the inhabitants repress their own ‘pain and fear’ and pretend ‘to ignore each other’s inward lives’. The culture is at an advanced state of degeneration: a man is found hanging in his bedroom, a girl disappears, and her mother does not mention her absence. The hyacinths in the garden of the Ganson mansion come up ‘in rigid rows’ of ‘hard and ugly colours … pink, blue, white, deeper pink’. The tulips, every leaf ‘strong, aggressive, and tailored’, ‘would radiate in symmetrical circles of white, red, yellow, and pink’.⁶⁶

The silence of Mabel’s home was broken only by Charles Ganson’s desperate rages which, being ignored, made him rage all the more. When her husband stormed upstairs and slammed his door, Sara Ganson ‘would raise her eyes from the pretence of reading and, not moving her head … grimace a little message of very thin reassurance’.⁶⁷ Deprived of maternal love, Mabel found pleasure in other women’s breasts. She stroked and fondled the breasts of every female friend she had, and in one memorable passage describes how, contriving to share a bed with a servant, she spent an ‘ecstatic’ night rolling the sleeping woman’s bosom ‘from side to side’ and ‘slathering’ it with her ‘dripping lips’.⁶⁸

The release Mabel found in writing can be felt in the freshness of her voice, the swiftness of her gait and the ease with which she turned chaos (‘serpents coiling and uncoiling’ in her vagina) into a tale as tailored as her mother’s flower garden. She gives the impression of confessing everything, while revealing next to nothing of the truth. Framing her narrative around the drama of a wife who hates her husband and a child with incestuous longings, Background is Mabel’s Sons and Lovers. It was Lawrence who showed Mabel, when he asked her questions for his novel about Sybil Mond, what happened when she wrote things down: ‘I was thrilled to find how reasonable and logical life seemed,’ Mabel recalled.⁶⁹ She also learned from Lawrence how to reduce a mass of psychological detail to the stark orderings of an Oedipal triangle, and Lawrence’s stylistic influence can be felt from the start: Mabel’s hellish home with its rigid rows of spiked hyacinths recalls the neat little front gardens of Hell Row in Eastwood, with the ‘auriculas and saxifrage in the shadow of the bottom block’ and ‘sweet-williams and pinks in the sunny top block’.⁷⁰ Only from the back of Hell Row is it possible to smell the excrement rising from the ash-pits. Mabel learned one other trick from Lawrence too. After Background had been published, she was asked by a shocked friend ‘how far’ she thought a person was ‘justified in going in art, if it sacrifices other people’.⁷¹

From his bed in the ranch, where he now described his consumption as ‘mountain fever’ brought on by lack of rain, Lawrence spent April 1925 writing a sixteen-scene play about his old friend, David the giant-slayer. Lawrence’s attitude to David always tells us how he felt about himself, and his interest was no longer in David’s love for Jonathan but in his relationship with his father-in-law Saul, who anoints him heir to the throne of Israel and then suffers agonies about being supplanted. Lawrence’s theme is familial jealousy, and in his new-found sympathy for the king, he atoned for supplanting his own father.

David is now a trespasser with a ‘fox-red’ beard who brings home the head of Goliath as ‘a fox brings his prey to his own hole’, who eyes Saul’s daughter, Merab, as a ‘fox eyes a young lamb’, who is pursued by Saul ‘as a fox with the dogs upon him’. The play closes with David, last seen on stage stripped down to his leather loin-strap, hiding from Saul in ‘a rocky place by the stone Ezel’. Jonathan, given the closing speech, describes his friend as ‘subtle,’ ‘shrewd’ and ‘prudent’ and says that Saul is right to fear him. David might be a ‘smiter down of giants’ but he would never, like Saul, go naked into the fire. He will wait, concludes Jonathan, ‘till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more be fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame’.⁷²

Mabel returned to Taos in July 1925, and in early September, the Lawrences – their visa having expired – suspended their table and chairs from the rafters with leather straps to protect them from the rats, and departed the ranch on Lobo Mountain. They left Taos, without saying goodbye to Mabel, in the same month that, three years earlier, they had first arrived. Lawrence’s fortieth birthday was spent in New York, and on 25 September, he and Frieda sailed to Southampton knowing that, given the medical examination required to renew his visa, he would not be allowed to return to America. From England they went on to Italy, and settled on the top floor of a villa outside Florence, from whose windows Lawrence could see the Duomo and the hills of Fiesole. Here, in 1926, Frieda began an affair with a married officer in the Italian army called Captain Angelino Ravagli.

Lawrence’s closest friends in his last years were Aldous and Maria Huxley, whom he had met through Ottoline Morrell. A tall, near-blind Etonian from a distinguished family of scientists, Huxley felt as Lawrence did about mass culture and modernity, and he would be the first reader of Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ‘Let’s go to New Mexico in the autumn,’ Lawrence suggested to the Huxleys. ‘Let’s be amused.’ Lawrence ‘often talked of the place,’ Huxley recalled, ‘with a mixture of love and dislike.’ He longed ‘to be back in that ferociously virgin world of drought and storm’ but also resented ‘its alienness and lunar vacancy’.⁷³

Lawrence’s New Mexico, with its films, Freuds and Fords, pueblos, kivas and snake dances, found its way into Huxley’s next novel Brave New World. Set in AF (After Ford) 632, the citizens of the World State are no longer obliged to have feelings, to look any older than thirty or to inhabit family units. Monogamy, emotions and parents belong to history, and history, according to ‘Our Ford’, is ‘bunk’. Freud, meanwhile, has revealed the dangers and perversity of family life; those who belong to the lowest social order are conditioned by electric shocks to fear books and flowers, and happiness is ensured by a drug called soma. The theatre no longer exists and silent movies have evolved into ‘feelies’ – a pansensual experience where the audience can not only watch but feel the giant kisses on the screen.

The old world can still be found in the Savage Reservations of New Mexico whose pueblos – ‘stepped and amputated pyramids’ – are places of eagles, ladders, old people, ill people, married people and religious people. In snake dances the men swarm up from their subterranean chambers and limp round and round, the drums quickening like ‘the pulsing of fever in the ears’ while snakes are flung into the crowd; in one pueblo a teenage boy in a loincloth is whipped during the dance by man wearing the mask of a coyote. Huxley, who had not been to New Mexico when he wrote Brave New World, would, like Warburg, never see the Snake Dance he described. His impression came from Lawrence’s description, and the entire novel is saturated in Lawrence.

The teenage boy, whose name is John, is white but he was born in the pueblo when Linda, his pregnant mother, was accidentally left behind after visiting the reservation on holiday. Linda now has an Indian lover with hair like ‘two black ropes’ whom John wants to kill. The ‘brave new world’ itself – which phrase he learns from The Tempest – is the shallow, pornographic World State where the mother and son are now taken and in which John, referred to as ‘the Savage’, is treated as a celebrity. When Linda dies (aged forty-four), John’s grief is not understood because no one knows any more what a mother is. Increasingly depressed, he retreats to a hilltop tower where he can once again flagellate himself and experience pain: ‘I don’t want comfort,’ John says before ending his life. ‘I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’ His hanging body is described as a compass, dithering over which direction it should take:

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as hurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east …⁷⁴

When she had completed the first two volumes of her memoirs, Background and European Experiences, Mabel sent copies of the manuscripts to her friends. Carl Van Vechten said that ‘Probably, it’s going to be the best thing yet done in America’, Brill said it was ‘one of the best books of mental and emotional evolution that has come to my attention’,⁷⁵ and then, in April 1926, came Lawrence’s verdict from Florence. Mabel had written, he said, ‘the most serious “confession” that ever came out of America, and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced. It’s worse than Oedipus and Medea, and Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth are spinach and eggs in comparison.’ Mabel’s book was ‘a sort of last word’, it was ‘hemlock in a cup’.⁷⁶ Mabel had written, in other words, the Great American Memoir.

Lawrence liked Mabel’s memoirs because her prose had a strong pulse rate and made no attempt to be literary, and because she wrote about the body, the family and the claustrophobia of homes. Having initially dismissed her as a writer or even a ‘knower’, his letters to Mabel in the last years of his life amount to a masterclass in writing, editing and publication. He suggested that she send the book to Sylvia Beach, who had published Ulysses in Paris; Mabel should, Lawrence further counselled, bring out Background first, ‘so that there would be nothing to startle the prudes’, before hitting the public with the other volumes. He advised her to ‘turn off the tap’ and give herself breaks, not to write if she was ‘out of mood’ but ‘wait for grace’, to write about only those things in which she had a ‘burning interest’ and then to write ‘without reflection,’ to put her pages in a safe and ‘let them lie still’ before returning to them at a later date. He passed Mabel’s manuscripts on to Aldington and Huxley, who was ‘pining’ to read them; he advised her on editors, royalties, translations, foreign rights; he told her to have her books reviewed in a few good newspapers ‘and no more. As little publicity as possible, and the thing makes its own way and won’t be quashed. And preserve your incognito as quickly as you can.’ She should, ‘for once’ put her ‘ego aside’.⁷⁷ Finally, he warned her to change the names: ‘Remember, other people can be utterly remorseless, if they think you’ve given them away.’⁷⁸ Not that Lawrence followed these rules himself: none of his own manuscripts were locked in a safe. Some were currently mouldering in the ranch; could Mabel, he now asked, try to salvage them?

Lawrence’s essays on ‘Indian Entertainment’, ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ were published in a collection called Mornings in Mexico, which he dedicated to ‘Mabel Dodge Luhan, who called me to Taos’. His title, as Mabel will have noted, suggests that his subject was Mexico rather than New Mexico, but the centrepiece of the volume is the essay about ‘New Mexico’, in which Lawrence described his time there as ‘the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had’.⁷⁹ It was now that he finally repaid his debt to Mabel. But because he gave with one hand and took away with the other, Lawrence wrote a second essay that same week, ‘Introduction to these Paintings’, whose subject was ostensibly the portrayal of sex in painting but actually the scourge of syphilis, brought to England by merchants trading with America. Syphilis was a disease of the ‘upper classes’ and while he knew, Lawrence said, ‘very little about diseases’, he remained ‘convinced that the secret awareness of syphilis, and the utter secret terror and horror of it, has had an enormous and incalculable effect on the English consciousness and on the American’. After tracing the syphilitic line through English literature, he confided that ‘I have never had syphilis myself. Yet I know and confess how profound is my fear of the disease, and more than fear, my horror.’⁸⁰

‘I feel so strongly as if my illness weren’t really me,’ Lawrence told Mabel in October 1929, describing it as ‘bronchitis’.⁸¹ Now aged forty-four, he was living with Frieda in a small house in Bandol near Marseille where, that winter, he wrote Apocalypse. Officially his exposition of ‘The Book of Revelation’, Apocalypse was the final revelation of D. H. Lawrence, his last will and testament. When Frieda’s sister Else came to stay with them in January 1930, Lawrence weighed six stone. As soon as he was well enough, he told Mabel that same month, he would return to New Mexico; in the meantime he counselled her to yield ‘entirely’ to the needs of her body.⁸² In February Lawrence agreed to be admitted to the Ad Astra sanatorium in the medieval hill town of Vence, between Nice and Antibes, beneath the steep Baou rock. From the balcony of his room he could see the coastline, and in preparation for his return to Mabel, he began to read a life of Columbus. When he developed pleurisy, he asked to be moved. ‘This place no good,’ he told Maria Huxley; it was the last line of the last letter he sent.

Frieda rented a local villa where Lawrence was carried on 1 March. After breakfast the next morning he sketched, on a piece of paper on his tray, a happily shining sun, a peacock, a locomotive engine of the sort that carried the coal in Eastwood and a dead man lying on his back, his beard and feet pointing straight upwards. Which was how Lawrence also appeared when his body was laid out that night.

It was appropriate, said Mabel, that he died on the second day of March because he was ‘always double – split in two’.⁸³ He was buried in the local cemetery, in a service without speeches or prayer. ‘Like a bird,’ Frieda said, ‘we put him away.’⁸⁴ And like a phoenix, he rose.

Lorenzo had prepared in advance his final assassination attempt on Mabel. ‘None of That’, written in May 1927, is about a twice-married, super-rich American ‘dynamo’ called Ethel Cane whose hobby is doing up houses. Ethel Cane, who likes dangerous men, especially if they like look prophets or reformers, imagines herself to be an ‘extraordinary and potent woman, who would make a stupendous change in the history of man’. She meets a Mexican matador with whom she becomes sexually obsessed, but she will have ‘none of that’ because Ethel Cane refuses to yield to the needs of her body. One night, however, she goes to the matador’s house where he hands her over to half-a-dozen ‘of his bull-ring gang, with orders not to bruise her’.⁸⁵ Three days later she swallows poison, leaving half her fortune to the matador who ordered her rape. It’s a grim little tale, made more malevolent by Ethel’s suicide mirroring that of Magnus. ‘None of That’ – a catchphrase of Mabel’s – operates alongside Lorenzo in Taos like pistols at dawn, with both parties injured but not killed.

Mabel’s memoir of Lorenzo, largely completed while he was still alive but not published until 1932, was dedicated to ‘Tony and All Indians’ and presented as a letter to the poet Robinson Jeffers, now being groomed as Lawrence’s replacement. Lawrence, Mabel concluded, failed to capture the spirit of Taos because ‘somehow he could not give himself to it’. He would have, in other words, none of that. His problem, Mabel continued, was to do with the ‘rarefied air. Too much oxygen will burn out the lungs. He ran to save himself from purity and died in the old country.’⁸⁶ ‘It is not a pretty book,’ wrote the reviewer for the New York Evening Post. ‘To anyone who has deep regard for Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and Aaron’s Rod, the picture of Lawrence as a sadistic, violent, arrogant, hypersensitive man must be considerably repulsive.’ Brett had not realised until Lorenzo in Taos ‘the width, depth and height of Mabel’s dislike of me’, and reading it in Vienna, where she was now being analysed by Freud, H.D. said that she had never laughed so much in her life.

Aldous Huxley’s edition of The Letters of D. H. Lawrence also appeared in 1932, but without the 100 letters that Mabel published in Lorenzo. His achievement was considerable: Huxley collated, in the immediate aftermath of his subject’s death, nearly 1,000 pages of correspondence: it was as though he feared that Lawrence – ‘the most extraordinary and impressive being’ he had ever known – would vanish completely without evidence of his reality. The preface to Huxley’s Letters remains the best account we have of what it was like to know Lawrence. ‘He was an artist first of all,’ Huxley wrote, ‘and that fact of his being an artist explains a life which seems, if you forget it, inexplicably strange.’ Lawrence’s spirit was essentially ‘nocturnal’; he was at home in ‘the darkness of mystery’ and thus denounced science in ‘the most fantastically unreasonable terms’. While he was often exasperated by him, Huxley admired beyond measure his friend’s ‘unshakeable’ loyalty to his ‘own self’. This loyalty, Huxley said, was ‘fundamental’ in Lawrence, and ‘accounts, as nothing else can do, for all that the world found strange in his beliefs and his behaviour’.⁸⁷

As a widow, Frieda was once again free. Within weeks of Lawrence’s death she and Murry slept together, and the following year she returned to her ranch accompanied by Angelino Ravagli, who now left his wife and children. She recorded her memories in ‘Not I, But the Wind…’ which was published in October 1934, eighteen months after the appearance of Brett’s Lawrence and Brett. Frieda’s memoir, Newsweek calculated, was the seventeenth book on Lawrence to appear since his death. In 1935 she sent Ravagli back to Vence with instructions to bring home her husband’s ashes in a bespoke urn, which would be kept in a specially made memorial chapel at the end of a steep path 8,000 feet up Lobo Mountain, making his final resting place the highest point of his journey.

Ravagli’s mission involved driving 100 miles through deserts and canyons to Lamy Junction, where he took a train 2,000 miles across the continent to New York, from where he sailed 3,920 miles to Marseille. From Marseille, he travelled a further 120 miles along the coast to the cemetery in Vence to supervise the exhumation. Norman Douglas heard about the procedure from Mrs Gordon Crotch, who ran the local pottery shop and looked after the writer’s grave. ‘So glad to get your exciting letter about Lawrence,’ Douglas replied to Mrs Crotch, his enthusiasm recalling that of Trelawny over the burning body of Shelley. ‘Now do tell me more – about bones and skull etc etc. I love macabre details … send those photos of the exhumation, and I shall be delighted to pay for them.’⁸⁸

The ‘golden hoard’, as Douglas called Lawrence’s remains, was then taken by hearse to Marseille to be cremated, after which Ravagli let Mrs Crotch know that ‘the ashes of Lawrence is all ready [sic]. I go take the boath at Villefranche at 4 April with the Lawrence’s ashes.’⁸⁹

There are several versions of what happened next. In the first version, Ravagli took the boat and handed the urn to Frieda in Taos. In the second version, Ravagli – according to his own tearful confession, made many years later – collected Lawrence’s ashes and then, overwhelmed by the task ahead, dumped them in Marseille, returning to America with an empty urn which he later filled with other ashes picked up on the way to Taos. But whatever it contained – Lawrence’s ashes, cigarette ash or the cinders of a fire – the urn had a will like Balaam’s ass. No sooner had he cleared customs at New York Harbor than Ravagli left the urn outside the Sheldon Hotel on 49th Street, where Alfred Stieglitz was holding an exhibition of his photographs. ‘Someday I’ll tell you the story,’ Stieglitz reported to Brett. In her joy at being reunited with her lover, Frieda then left the urn on the station platform at Lamy Junction; they had reached Santa Fe before noticing that her husband was not with them. Like the gentleman from San Francisco, Lawrence was ‘subjected to many humiliations, much human neglect’ in the journey to his final resting place.

Once the ashes were safely back at the ranch, Mabel and Brett agreed that they should be scattered over the landscape rather than turned into a tourist attraction in a mock chapel which Frieda thought looked like a temple to Isis but Mabel and Brett considered more like a station lavatory. Mabel therefore decided to steal the urn, but, getting wind of what was afoot, Frieda had Ravagli stir its contents into a wheelbarrow of cement which was then used to make the altar stone. When the stone was laid men from the pueblo performed a ceremonial dance, after which a storm broke out and the horses panicked as thunder and lightning circled Lobo Mountain.

A third version of what happened to Lawrence’s ashes was told to me by the sister of a friend, who heard it in the 1980s when she and her husband were travelling in Taos. Lawrence was not stirred into the cement of the altar stone because Frieda, Mabel and Brett sat down together and ate him. The power of this version rests, of course, on the assumption that it was indeed the body of Lawrence that they ate.

When Dante left the dark wood to climb to Paradise up the mountain of Purgatory, his way was barred by a lion, a leopard and a wolf. Turning back he met Virgil, who had been sent by Beatrice, who had been sent by St Lucia, who had herself been sent by the Virgin Mary; and so, said Virgil, with ‘three such blessed women, / concerned for you within the court of heaven’, there was no need to fear the steep and savage path.