Ceylon and Australia,
1922
DURING THE WAR, when his movements were severely restricted, Lawrence had dreamed of escaping to the farthest corners of the earth: “I wish I were going to Thibet—or Kamschatka—or Tahiti—to the Ultima, ultima, ultima Thule. I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is nowhere to go, no ‘new world.’ One of these days, unless I watch myself, I shall be departing in some rash fashion, to some foolish place.”1 Though Lawrence never reached Tibet or Kamchatka, he did visit Tahiti en route to the New World.
After the war, Lawrence’s travels were marked by restlessness and indecision. In January 1922, when he had finally decided to cross the Atlantic and travel from the East Coast to Taos, he suddenly changed plans and wanted to avoid the harsh climate and unpleasant atmosphere of New York. He felt it was his destiny to know the entire world, so he visited the Brewsters in Ceylon and approached New Mexico from the west. Lawrence’s great problem was that he always longed to be in another place: he yearned for Europe in America and wished he were in America as soon as he returned to Europe.
In the early 1920s, when more money and better health allowed him to roam the earth, Lawrence contemplated visits to Greenland, Russia, China and India. When he was unhappy in Mexico, he thought: “perhaps I’ve no business trying to bury myself in out-of-the-way places.” But as soon as he was back in Europe, the Mediterranean inspired him to wander like Ulysses. From Italy he planned trips to Ragusa, Dalmatia, Crete, Cyprus, Constantinople, Damascus, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. “Anything, anything to shake off this stupor and have a bit of fun in life,” he said. “I’d even go to Hell, en route.” When his health deteriorated, he inevitably realized: “As one gets older, one’s choice in life gets limited—one is not free to choose any more.” But only three months before his death, he was still thankful to escape a permanent way of life and told Maria Huxley: “I sort of wish I could go to the moon.”2
Travel provided a relief from writing, changed the pattern of his daily life and introduced him to new people and stimulating experiences. He planned to write a novel about each continent, but died before he could capture Asia, Africa and America. Yet he did write distinctively on an enormous range of subjects: literature, history, art, religion, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and education. His visits to Ceylon and Australia inspired his poem “Elephant” and his novel Kangaroo.
The Lawrences sailed from Naples on the Osterley on February 26, 1922, passed through the Suez Canal and entered the Red Sea, where he saw “Mount Sinai like a vengeful dagger that was dipped in blood many ages ago, so sharp and defined and old pink-red in colour.” He translated Verga aboard ship and reached Colombo in mid-March.
Kandy—a hill town in the center of Ceylon, about fifty miles northeast of Colombo—is one of the most beautiful places in Asia. The views are magnificent, the foliage luxuriant; the town has a large lake in the center and is dominated by an exotic temple that is said to hold a tooth of the Buddha. Leonard Woolf, who served as a colonial official in Ceylon and visited Kandy fifteen years before Lawrence arrived, remarked that the town had thirty thousand inhabitants and was full of white men. And he was extremely enthusiastic about the atmosphere, the scenery and the early-morning climate: “Everything in Kandy sparkles, including the air; it is wonderfully soft and cool before the sun gets up high overhead. . . . In 1907 Kandy and its surroundings were entrancingly beautiful. It was half-way between the low country and the high mountains and enjoyed the best of every climate and every world. The great lake, which was the centre of the European part of town, lay in a hollow with the hills gently rising up all round it.”
The Brewsters had leased an old bungalow, with a broad veranda and many servants, about a mile and a half from the center of town. It was isolated in the midst of the jungle, stood on top of a high hill, and overlooked Kandy Lake and the Great Elephant River. There was no strife with the gentle Brewsters. Lawrence walked through the jungle, watched the animals, boated on the river, looked at precious jewels and visited the temples in this holy center of southern Buddhism. He wrote for four hours in the morning, and in the afternoon read the work aloud to his friends.3
The outstanding event of his visit was the Perahera ceremony. Buddha’s sacred tooth was taken out of the temple, placed on the back of an elephant and carried in a colorful procession before the great crowds of people who had swarmed into Kandy for the festival. The young Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor), on an official visit to Ceylon, was guest of honor. But he seemed, Lawrence told his sister Emily, exhausted and frightened, and nearly slept through the ceremony:
We were down at the Perahera at night—were just opposite the Prince. Poor devil, he is so thin and nervy: all twitchy: and seems worn out and disheartened. No wonder, badgered about like a doll among a mob of children. A woman threw a bouquet, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.
But the Perahera was wonderful: it was night, and flaming torches of cocoanut blazing, and the great elephants in their trappings, about a hundred, and the dancers with tomtoms and bagpipes, and half naked and jewelled, then the Kandyan chiefs in their costumes, and more dancers, and more elephants, and more chiefs, and more dancers, so wild and strange and perfectly fascinating, heaving along by the flame of torches in the hot, still, starry night. Afterwards fireworks over the lake, and thousands and thousands of natives, so that it looked like some queer dream when the fire flared up and showed their thousands of dark faces and white wraps packed on the banks.
Lawrence also expressed his excitement about the dazzling midnight procession under the tropical stars in his long, incantatory satiric poem, “Elephant.” His theme is power: its transformation and expression. The poem begins as he goes down to the river, past paddy fields where water buffalo are idling and half-naked men are threshing rice, and meets a working elephant carrying a heavy log. Elephants reappear that night in the Perahera and provide a strong contrast to the wispy, diffident Prince of Wales. His ironic, mock-modest motto is “Ich dien” (I serve), and he seems a feeble representative of imperial rule. Lawrence describes the hot dark blood of the devil dancers, whose energy, like the elephant’s, contrasts to the prince’s lassitude. As Lawrence dodges “under the hanging, hairy pigs’ tails/And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing haunches,” he feels dejected and frustrated by the pale, nervous royal boy. The prince also disappoints the Ceylonese, who expect and deserve an impressive show of power. The poem urges the prince to reject his unworthy motto and his weary irony, be truthful about his power, and adopt the natural might and dignity of the elephant. The prince should tell the people: “Serve me, I am meet to be served. / Being royal of the gods,” and should tell the great beasts: “A Prince has come back to you, / Blood-mountains. / Crook the knee and be glad.” “Elephant” expresses the same authoritarian ideas as the novels of power.
Lawrence had had his usual winter fortnight of flu in January 1922, shortly before leaving Sicily, and the extreme heat and steamy humidity of Ceylon, which a healthy man might not have noticed, affected him badly. It was the antithesis of the dry Alpine air recommended for lung disease. He hated the debilitating climate, found it difficult to breathe and could scarcely drag himself about. Achsah Brewster explained that “as the rainy season continued we felt as mildewed as our garments in the recesses of the rooms where there was waged a continual battle against mould. Lawrence sat disconsolately, his voice reduced to a minor key, reiterating that he felt his ‘heart’s blood oozing away, but literally ebbing out drop by drop.”4 He later told Earl that he hated much of his time in Ceylon and had never felt so sick in his entire life. Though Lawrence did not know it at the time, he had contracted malaria in Kandy.
Lawrence shifted, quite dramatically and characteristically, from fascination with the spectacular beauty to disenchantment with the teeming masses of Ceylon. Only two weeks after the Perahera he was (like George Orwell, then serving in Burma) repelled by the “barbaric substratum of Buddhism” as well as by the overpowering heat, the oleaginous people, the sickening smells, the claustrophobic jungle, the screeching of birds and animals, the nastiness of the monks and tawdriness of the temples:
Here the heat is terrific—and I hate the tropics. It is beautiful, in a lush, tangled, towsled, lousy sort of way. The natives too are quite good-looking, dark-skinned and erect. But something about it all just makes me sick. . . . My inside has never hurt me so much in all my 36 years as in these three weeks.—I’m going away. . . .
The East doesn’t get me at all. Its boneless suavity, and the thick, choky feel of tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrific noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night: and the scents that make me feel sick, the perpetual nauseous overtone of cocoanut and cocoanut fibre and oil, the sort of tropical sweetness which to me suggests an undertang of blood, hot blood, and thin sweat; the undertaste of blood and sweat in the nauseous tropical fruits; the nasty faces and yellow robes of the Buddhist monks, the little vulgar dens of temples: all this makes up Ceylon to me, and all this I cannot bear.
As usual, he blamed his illness on the climate, told Earl, “My being requires a different physical and psychic environment: the white man is not for this region,” and was glad to have seen that corner of the East so he would have no more illusions about it. It is a great pity that Lawrence did not stay a bit longer and write, as Orwell did of Burma, a caustic novel of the English in Ceylon.
Ceylon, nevertheless, had a powerful effect on his imagination and recurred several times in his writings and conversations of the 1920s. He compared the religious feeling of the devil dancers in the Perahera to that of the Pueblo Indians in his essay “New Mexico,” and drew on Buddhist sounds and ceremonies when describing Mexican customs and religion in The Plumed Serpent: “In Ceylon the natives tiptoe in to the little temples and lay one flower on the table at the foot of the big Buddha statues. And the tables of offering are all covered with these flowers, all put so neatly. The natives have that delicate oriental way of putting things down. . . . It was the sound of drums, of tom-toms rapidly beaten. The same sound . . . heard in the distance, in the tropical dusk of Ceylon, from the temples at sunset.” And in 1928, when living in Port-Cros in France, he again recalled the menacing jungle of Ceylon and told Brigit Patmore: “The nights were black, oh black. The jungle was just outside the bungalow and it seemed to step closer and bend over us when the darkness came. Sounds boomed, some animal shot a cry at you.”5 In Ceylon, cut off for the first time in his life from Western culture, Lawrence felt physically and psychologically uncomfortable. On April 24, 1922, he sailed for Perth in Western Australia and, living for a time in a coal-mining town near Sydney, recaptured the familiar atmosphere of his youth.
The Lawrences reached Perth on May 4 and stayed for two days. Following the advice of Australians they had met on the ship, they then moved sixteen miles inland to Darlington and spent two weeks in a guest house and nursing home run by Mollie Skinner. Born in Perth in 1876, she was the daughter of an English captain in the Royal Irish Regiment. She had spent her childhood in various parts of Great Britain, completed her nurse’s training before returning to Australia in 1900, and served as a nurse in India and Burma during World War I. In 1922, when Lawrence met her, she was “a middle-aged Quaker spinster of fairly Victorian standards.” In his Preface to her novel Black Swans (1925), Lawrence recalled: “There was Miss Skinner, in the house on the hills at the edge of the bush, in Western Australia, darting about rather vaguely in her white nurse’s dress, with the nurse’s white band over her head, looking after her convalescents.”
Lawrence had been given a copy of Skinner’s book about her nursing experiences, Letters of a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment), published in 1918, and was impressed by its originality and freshness. He encouraged her writing and said: “You have been given the divine spark and you would bury it in a napkin.” He became her collaborator, revised the novel, changed the title from The House of Ellis to The Boy in the Bush (which echoed the title of Henry Lawson’s Australian novel The Children of the Bush, 1902). He also wrote the last two chapters, in which Dorothy Brett appears as Hilda Blessington, and persuaded Secker to publish it (with Lawrence as co-author) in 1924.
Lawrence had always liked artistic collaboration, especially with less artistically experienced women. He considered Louie Burrows the coauthor of his early story “Goose Fair” and worked briefly with Catherine Carswell on an unfinished novel about Robert Burns. “ ‘I like that story of yours so much, Catherine,’ he said, ‘that I’ve written out a little sketch of how I think it might go. Then, if you like the idea, we might collaborate in the novel. You do the beginning and get the woman character going, and let me have it, and I’ll go on and fill in the man.’ ”6 He helped Mary Cannan revise her book about pet dogs, began to write a novel with Mabel Luhan (until Frieda put a stop to it), rewrote Kot’s literal translations of Ivan Bunin and Leo Shestov, and offered to write up Frederick Carter’s notes on the Book of Revelation. And Lawrence, a talented amateur painter, boldly touched up and even repainted not only the work of Barbara Weekley but also that of young professionals like Knud Merrild and Dorothy Brett. These artistic collaborations released him from the writer’s solitude and allowed him to indulge his passion for teaching.
Lawrence received some attention from the tiny literary circle in Perth (where he found a copy of The Rainbow), and one writer became so excited by the prospect of meeting him that she gave birth prematurely. Frieda, angry with a fellow guest at Darlington who disliked The White Peacock, tactlessly exclaimed: “But how stupid you people are! You do not know my husband. He is the genius Lawrence.”
In a letter to Kot of May 20, written when sailing from Perth to Sydney, Lawrence praised the natural landscape and described the intellectual limitations of the provincial Australians: “We stayed two weeks in Western Australia: weird land, marvellous blue sky, clear air, pure and untouched. Then the endless hoary grey ‘bush’—which is gum trees, rather thinly scattered, like a thin wood, with a healthy sort of undergrowth: like a moor with trees. People very friendly, but slow and as if unwilling to take the next step: as if everything was a bit too much for them.”7
The Lawrences reached Sydney on May 27, stayed only two days, and then found a comfortable, attractive bungalow called “Wyewurk” in Thirroul, a mining village on the south coast, about fifty miles from the city. They lived an isolated life for two and a half months, swimming, walking on the vast beach and seeing almost no one. Lawrence immediately began to write Kangaroo and finished the long novel in only six weeks.
Lawrence, in his authoritarian phase, disliked the quintessential Australian (and also American) characteristics: aggressive familiarity, offhand manner, rejection of class distinctions and contempt for authority. In a letter of mid-June to his sister-in-law Else, he described the rather ramshackle town and condemned the prevailing political attitudes:
The township is just a scatter of bungalows, mostly of wood with corrugated iron roofs, and with some quite good shops: “stores.” It lies back from the sea. Nobody wants to be too near the sea here: only we are on the brink. About two miles inland there is a great long hill like a wall, facing the sea and running all down the coast. This is dark greyish with gum trees, and it has little coal-mines worked into it. The men are mostly coal-miners, so I feel quite at home. The township itself—they never say village here—is all haphazard and new, the streets unpaved, the church built of wood. That part is pleasant—the newness. It feels so free. And though it is midwinter, and the shortest day next week, still every day is as sunny as our summer, and the sun is almost as hot as our June. But the nights are cold. . . .
This is the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. You never knew anything so nothing . . . as the life here.8
In Kangaroo, Lawrence portrayed a society solidly based on Western materialism, but isolated from the intellectual traditions of Europe.
In Kangaroo (1923), Lawrence imagines the Australian political system falling prey to the kind of organized Fascist movement he had seen in Italy. He contrasts Fascism to the distasteful democracy and uses the resulting chaos to symbolize the frightful emptiness of the uprooted people and their wild landscape. An Englishman, Richard Lovat Somers, the autobiographical hero of the novel, and his wife, Harriet, are visitors to Australia. Through their neighbors, the Callcotts, Somers becomes involved with a militant organization of World War I veterans, the Diggers. Their leader is Ben Cooley, or Kangaroo, but their fascistic principles are more accurately represented by the ex-officer Jack Callcott. He explains their military make-up, their revolutionary aims and their ambition to seize political power, while the thunderous ocean nearly drowns out his words. Jack insists that authority, discipline and obedience are needed to oppose the rotten politicians and the exploded ideal of democratic liberty. The old soldiers, returned from the war, “chaps with some guts in them,” are secretly sworn to keep silent, obey the leaders and wait for the moment to strike. The well-equipped Diggers’ Clubs practice martial sports, have regular military training and are indoctrinated with nationalistic ideology. There is a strong emphasis on intimate comradeship—“Men fight better when they’ve got a mate”—modeled on David and Jonathan, which had always been Lawrence’s cherished ideal.
The model for the Diggers, the Returned Servicemen’s League, represented almost everything that Lawrence disliked about Australia. It was militaristic, philistine, bigoted, brutal, crude, conformist, democratic and nationalistic, and had considerable influence in shaping the values of modern Australia:
The Returned Servicemen’s League did a great deal to make the values associated with Anzac Day and the “old digger” dominant in the Australian community. Along with the virtues ascribed to the idealised digger—courage, loyalty, mateship and democratic levelling—went other less admirable characteristics. The stereotyped figure exhibited also tough, sardonic contempt for coloured people and foreigners generally, for minority views, for art, literature, culture and learning; and something not far from contempt—patronage disguised as chivalrous protectiveness—for “good” women and brutal disdain for “bad” ones. He magnified “male” virtues like decisiveness, directness, physical strength, and despised “female” ones like thoughtfulness, gentleness, subtlety. The tone of most of the writing in the Bulletin or Smith’s Weekly at this period exactly mirrors the prevailing ethos—levelling values, rough manners and philistine tastes as the outer form; conformity, conservatism and unquestioning Anglo-Australian patriotism as the inner content.
Kangaroo is the first of Lawrence’s tyrant heroes who try to impose their will on the masses. When Somers meets Kangaroo he is struck by the unusual mixture of essential Jewish kindness and “shrewd fiendish subtlety of will”—though we never see anything of the latter. Unlike the ferocious Jack, Kangaroo favors benevolent tyranny, with humane laws and wise authority. But Kangaroo is also a charismatic and sexually attractive figure. Though Somers rejects his party and his ideas, he is drawn to the ugly, shapeless leader. Somers has to restrain his desire to touch Kangaroo’s body, which emits a “magnetic effusion.” He thrills to his voice and thinks: “the man is like a god, I love him.” But when Kangaroo presses Somers’ slight body against his own big breast, squeezes him so he can hardly breathe and passionately declares: “I love you so. I love you so,” Somers rejects this love and wishes that Kangaroo were dead. Lawrence portrays the attraction to Fascist power as a frightening homosexual force.
There are a number of serious contradictions in Lawrence’s portrayal of the Diggers, which undermine the credibility of the political theme in the novel. First, there is no motive for revolution in Australia and no real reason for the Diggers to exist, for unlike Italy, political affairs are running quite well. Somers feels that the real enemy is boredom (not democracy) and that the returned war heroes “were doing it all just in order to have something to do, to put a spoke in the wheel of the bosses, to make a change.” Jack’s colleague Jaz admits: “You can die in Australia if you don’t get a bit of excitement.”
Second, there is an illogical gap between the violent methods of Jack and the idealistic love of his leader, Kangaroo; between Jack’s anti-Semitic fulminations—“I hate the thought of being bossed . . . by Jew capitalists and bankers”9—and his fanatical allegiance to the “physically warm love” of the orderly, clever Jewish intellectual and savior with the not very Jewish-sounding name, Ben Cooley. Third, Kangaroo’s naive, high-minded and idealistic politics of love, which is much closer to Woodrow Wilson (whom Lawrence scorned) than to Mussolini, makes him an extremely ineffectual leader. During the Socialist riots, the defenseless Kangaroo bellows at the wild crowd while a gunman shoots him in the guts.
Jaz, who is aware of Kangaroo’s defects as a political leader and has a greater grasp of Realpolitik, wants to start the revolution by having the Diggers join their enemies and by inciting the Communists to act in Australia as they did in Russia: “Couldn’t we get [Kangaroo] to use all his men to back Red Labour in this country, and blow a cleavage through the old system. . . . These Diggers’ Clubs, they’ve got all the army men, dying for another scrap. And then a sort of secret organisation has ten times the hold over men than just a Labour Party, or a Trades Union. He’s damned clever, he’s got a wonderful scheme ready. But he’ll spoil it, because he’ll want it all to happen without hurting anybody.” When Somers puts this proposal to Kangaroo, the leader calls Jaz a traitor, rejects Somers and orders him to leave Australia.
Somers fares no better in his talk with the Labour leader, Willie Struthers. For Struthers, like his ideological adversary, wants to base his political movement on Whitman’s democratic-homosexual love of man for man: “He wanted this love, this mate-trust called into consciousness and highest honour. He wanted to set it where Whitman tried to set his Love of Comrades. It was to be the new tie between men, in the new democracy. It was to be the new passional bond in the new society.” Somers reacts to Struthers as he did to Kangaroo, on the physical level (“I don’t like him physically—something thin and hairy and spiderish”10), and rejects his offer to edit a Socialist newspaper because he is repelled more by his person than by his ideas.
After the complementary interviews with Struthers and Kangaroo, the action of the novel is interrupted and the climax delayed by the most lively and interesting part of the book. The retrospective and autobiographical “Nightmare” chapter describes Somers’ three humiliating medical examinations, his persecution by the military authorities who ransacked his house and accused him of spying, and his expulsion from his cottage on the Cornish coast. Though Graham Hough declares that “Nightmare” is “almost wholly irrelevant to the progress of the narrative,” this chapter is, in fact, crucial to the structure and meaning of the novel.
“Nightmare,” which seems to provide a contrast between England and Australia, actually reveals the fundamental similarities between the two countries. The chapter shows the evils of mass rule in the army, which tried to compel Somers to serve a dead ideal, and in Australia, where he felt a similar dread of the democratic mob. In Mornings in Mexico, Lawrence compares himself to his servant Rosalino, who refused to join the army and has “a horror of serving in a mass of men, or even of being mixed up with a mass of men.” This fear of the army and the mob explains Somers’ refusal to join the militaristic, authoritarian, violent and fascistic Diggers, who helped to create in Australia the kind of world he has just escaped in England. Somers, who had been falsely accused of spying in both Germany and England, is again called a spy by Jack Callcott in Australia.
Somers’ dearest friend in Cornwall, John Thomas Buryan, is based on William Henry Hocking. The passionate friendship with Buryan, whom Somers connects with the Cornishman Jaz, explains why Somers is so strongly attracted to male comradeship in the political movements of Kangaroo. Finally, the “Nightmare” chapter reveals why Somers left his own country: “England had lost its meaning for him. The free England had died, this England of the peace was like a corpse.”11 It also explains why he came to Australia in search of a new mode of life and why he had to leave Australia when its oppressive politics reminded him of the morbid atmosphere in England.
The climax of the novel occurs when Willie Struthers makes a speech to a packed Canberra Hall on the solidarity of labor, a group of Diggers shout him down and annihilate him “by their moral unison,” and an anarchist bomb explodes. The chaotic mass, “struggling with the Diggers, in real blood-murder passion,” inspires Somers with a blind but vague urge to kill: “small as he was, [he] felt a great frenzy on him, a great longing to let go. But since he didn’t really know whom he wanted to let go at, he was not quite carried away.” Guns are fired, Kangaroo is shot and Somers escapes to a remote Diggers’ Club. There he meets Jack, who gleefully describes how, with an iron bar, he bashed out the brains of the man who shot Kangaroo. He then makes a crude analogy between sex and power: “there’s nothing bucks you up sometimes like killing a man—nothing. You feel a perfect angel after it. . . . Having a woman’s something, isn’t it? But it’s a flea-bite, nothing, compared to killing your man when your blood comes up”—as in an erection. The newspaper accounts of the riot, in which three people were killed, blame the Labour incendiaries and cautiously praise Jack Callcott, who is neither tried nor punished for murdering two men.
When Somers visits the dying Kangaroo, who emits a sickening smell, the leader ironically claims “Perfect love casteth out fear” (I John 4:18) and begs Somers to save him from death, by love. Somers, who willed Kangaroo’s death during their previous interview, once again rejects the Christian doctrine of love and “kills” Kangaroo: “I don’t love him—I detest him. He can die. I’m glad he is dying.”12 Somers’ words on Kangaroo’s death are strikingly similar to Lawrence’s words on Magnus’ death: “He shall and should die, and so should all his sort.”
Somers had always insisted: “I never take part in politics at all. They aren’t my affair.” Though he longs for a smash-up of the social-industrial world, which has led to war and the postwar chaos, he considers love and benevolence to be as dangerous and unreal as riots and revolutions. He loathes both the politicians and the working class, holds himself back from both Jack and Jaz, denies the appeals of Struthers and Kangaroo, and remains “the most forlorn and isolated creature in the world, without even a dog to his command.” Somers resolves the conflict between artistic and political commitment by firmly rejecting both Fascism and Socialism. At the end of the novel, his vague and rather irrelevant commitment to the greater mystery of the dark gods—“This dark, passionate religiousness and inward sense of an indwelling magnificence, direct flow from the unknowable God”—undermines the significance of the political themes and prepares the way for The Plumed Serpent.
Jack and Victoria Callcott have tempted Somers with power and love, threatened his marriage with political and sexual involvement. But he finally chooses individuality within marriage. His wife, Harriet, criticizes his vain attempts to succeed in the world of men, and he inevitably returns to the protective security of the love of woman: “It only angered her when he thought these other things—revolutions or governments or whatnot—higher than their essential marriage. But then he would come to himself and acknowledge that his marriage was the centre of his life, the core, the root.”13 Kangaroo expresses Lawrence’s attraction to political movements, to the idea of the brotherhood of man and to homosexual comradeship. But for Somers, as for Lawrence, political activity is ultimately meaningless.
On August 11, about three weeks after completing Kangaroo, the Lawrences returned to Sydney and sailed for San Francisco on the Tahiti. Lawrence had told Earl Brewster, with perverse satisfaction, that he actually courted disappointment in the South Pacific: “I’m determined to try the South Sea Isles. Don’t expect to catch on there either. But I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.” He stopped at Wellington (where he sent Katherine the postcard with “Ricordi”), in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, and in Tahiti, but these islands could no longer sustain the legend of an exotic paradise that had been established by Melville, Gauguin and Stevenson. Lawrence found the tropics as rancid and revolting as Ceylon and thought the people were “ugly, false, spoiled and diseased”: “Papeete is a poor sort of place, mostly Chinese, natives in European clothes, and fat. . . . I never want to stay in the tropics. There is a sort of sickliness about them, smell of cocoa-nut oil and sort of palm-tree, reptile nausea. . . . These are supposed to be the earthly paradises: these South Sea Isles. You can have ’em.”
While living in Taormina, Lawrence had told Compton Mackenzie that he was drawn to the South Seas by Stevenson’s writings: “I read some of Stevenson. Idiot to go to Samoa just to dream and get thrilled about Scotch bogs and mosses. No wonder he died. If I go to Samoa, it will be to forget, not to remember.” Yet Lawrence’s attitudes were very similar to Stevenson’s, whose savage pilgrimage anticipated, in many significant ways, Lawrence’s own way of life and mode of travels.
Both Stevenson and Lawrence were archetypal expatriate writers whose cultural identities and artistic insights were strengthened by residence in foreign lands. Both rejected their family background but retained a strong sense of their native place. Both had adulterous affairs with and then married older, foreign, impractical women who had children from their previous marriages. Both remained childless themselves. Both were spontaneous, enthusiastic, generous men who inspired the adoration of possessive friends, despite their volatile temperaments and furious rages during sickness. Both wanted to live the life they wrote about, willingly endured the “incidental beastliness of travel,” and sought a simple and even spartan existence. Both were oppressed by civilization and hoped to create an ideal community. Both were brought up in puritan households but believed, as Stevenson told his cousin Bob, that man should “honour sex more religiously. THE DAMNED THING of our education is that Christianity does not recognise and hallow sex.”14
There are also striking similarities between Stevenson in Silverado and Lorenzo in Taos. Both became interested in America through Whitman and American literature, and were drawn to the continent by an older, divorced woman (Fanny Osbourne and Mabel Luhan). Both established a private and isolated life in a remote, rustic mountain cabin, near canyons and pinewoods, eagles, lions and bears. Both lived with their wives and with a painter as guest and companion, repaired and improved a dilapidated house, drew water, cut wood, practiced carpentry, fetched milk from a neighboring ranch, gave lessons in their household, bathed in medicinal springs. Both admired the Indians, defined their own identity and revalued civilization in relation to a primitive society.
Though Stevenson’s style was more constrained and self-conscious, he and Lawrence shared a similar aesthetic of travel: a preference for a rough and relaxed rather than a comfortable and formal journey, popular rather than high culture, colloquial rather than mandarin style. Both An Inland Voyage (1878) and Sea and Sardinia end with a description of a marionette theater and return to their starting point in a final chapter, called “Back to the World” and “Back.”
Unlike most men, whose lives are narrow and restricted, Stevenson and Lawrence had an infinite number of possibilities (especially in the days when the Empire and the pound were strong) and wanted to explore many of them before they finally decided where to live. Both wished to go to geographical as well as emotional extremes of temperature, height and distance. They were always excited by change and movement, by the exhilaration of departure and recourse to flight, by the opportunity to avoid people and mail, to clear out and be free. In Travels with a Donkey (1879), Stevenson wrote: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”15 Lawrence opened Sea and Sardinia by exclaiming: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.”
For both men travel was a method of inner exploration and a source of immediate inspiration. It intensified their sense of being British at the same time that it removed them from Britain and allowed them to see it more clearly. Both searched for a wild landscape and people who would reflect their own mood. “The frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage,” Stevenson observed. “It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished.” Both felt the excitement more than balanced the discomfort of travel, that hardship intensified experience and made it more real. Stevenson declared: “Discomfort, when it is honestly uncomfortable and makes no nauseous pretensions to the contrary, is a vastly humorous business. . . . Six weeks in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years in places that jumped more nearly with my inclination.”16
The initials of Richard Lovat Somers, wanderer in the antipodes and hero of Kangaroo, are doubtless a subtle acknowledgment of Stevenson’s pervasive influence. For in 1923, the year that novel was published, Lawrence expressed a desire to travel exactly as Stevenson had done: “I think I shall go to California, and either pack with a donkey in the mountains, or get some sailing ship to the islands.”17