The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Like Eliot, who recorded his wife’s pleas for his attention in The Waste Land but did not attend to them in life, Lawrence, too, transcribed Frieda’s justified tirades in Kangaroo, as in other books, without absorbing her meaning or changing his behavior. (Lawrence, also like Eliot, was unsparing enough to document his incriminating inattention and surpassed Eliot in also reporting the lengthy speechifying that provoked Frieda’s outrage.) In Kangaroo, R. L. S. is unstoppable, “a determined little devil” who is self-aware enough to know “once he’d got an idea into his head not heaven nor hell nor Harriet would ever batter it out.” When Somers—as the intransigent Lawrence tended also to do—resumed speaking in the tendentious metaphors his wife had tried with her outburst to clip, she looks at him, “speechless for some time. Then she merely said: ‘You’re mad,’ and left him.”

  Then, after such quick progress, Lawrence faltered. On June 21, Lawrence wrote to Seltzer to say that he’d “done more than half” of Kangaroo. He was more forthcoming with Robert Mountsier, his American agent, on the same day—“now slightly stuck,” he told him. He had hinted to Seltzer of his fears, though. “I do hope I shall be able to finish it,” he told him, “not like Aaron, who stuck for two years, and Mr Noon, who has been now nearly two years at a full stop. But I think I see my way.” His wording was circuitous, hedging. I do hope. I think I see my way. June 21 was the first day of the Australian winter. Lawrence had only just lived through a winter without writing fiction. Perhaps this second winter of the year would be as bad as the first.

  Perhaps he did not want to disappoint Seltzer. His publisher needed a novel, considering the “depressing accounts of sales” for Lawrence’s nonfiction, stories, and plays. As one of Lawrence’s biographers noted of another period, “The trouble was that productivity was not the same as profitability.”

  The political parts of Kangaroo are largely invented, written by Lawrence in his role as “thought-adventurer, driven to earth.” And it was that part of the novel that balked. It was not clear what he must do in order to press on toward the deadline he had set. “Seven weeks today till we sail,” he reminded Seltzer, and himself.

  Meanwhile, in America, Seltzer had published Aaron’s Rod, which had not turned out to be as safe as he’d urged Lawrence to make it.

  Seltzer had hoped to avoid any threat of suppression and wanted to publish a novel of Lawrence’s free of controversy. This way Lawrence’s talent would be the main thing on display. But whatever sensitivities Seltzer may have professed to Lawrence in urging him to be careful were ultimately less important to him than potential sales. He may have worried about the frank depiction of the protagonist’s marriage in Aaron’s Rod, but he highlighted rather than downplayed it when the time came for promoting the book. In advance of the novel’s publication Seltzer prepared a pamphlet, “D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work,” in which he so effusively described his author’s genius that, as on other occasions, Lawrence himself was embarrassed by it and asked his agent to intercede with Seltzer to prevent any such rhetorical eruptions in the future.

  Have you ever stood on the shore watching a giant steamer come sailing in from the horizon? Out on the vague border line between sea and heaven it is a mere dot. Slowly, gradually, the speck expands, grows into a thing of dimensions, rises and broadens, and finally looms before you a Titian Leviathan. So with D. H. Lawrence …

  Sons and Lovers established D. H. Lawrence. Its bigness has never been questioned, and Lawrence has gone on producing works that show the man growing in stature, strengthening his power, adding to his material, and intensifying the beauty of his singular style.…

  D. H. Lawrence now has an ever-swelling host of admirers both here and in England. They look upon him as one of the greatest writers of to-day; some, as one of the greatest writers of all countries and all time.

  The forthcoming Aaron’s Rod Seltzer then described provocatively: “The book deals with the relation of man and wife, the passional struggles between the sexes that characterizes our day.”

  Seltzer touted Lawrence as a colossus but was smart enough to hint at more sensational elements that might inspire greater sales.

  The headline above the very good review of Aaron’s Rod in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was not that different from what John Bull had decried in 1921: “D. H. Lawrence Completes His Love-Cycle.” The critic knowingly addressed Lawrence’s reputation before he praised the new novel. “We recognize, of course that Mr. Lawrence is sex-obsessed; we feel, also, that he hates sex. He would escape from it; and yet, whichever way he turns, he runs into it.”

  As summer in New York began, and the sales of Aaron’s Rod peaked and trailed off sooner than expected, he was as much a prisoner of the reputation that demoralized—and bored—him as ever. And in Australia, Lawrence’s progress on Kangaroo ended. He had become “stuck” with his third novel in a row.

  Chapter 9

  “DO NOT FORGET YOUR EVER FRIEND”

  Morgan had been home in England for a month when, on April 8, he wrote in his diary, “Have this moment burnt my indecent writings or as many as the fire will take. Not a moral repentance, but the belief that they clogged me artistically.” It is impossible to know what the stories were or what they contained. He did not burn Maurice, so it was not simply an erasure of the unpublishable, specifically homosexual, fiction he had written. He was not ashamed of them, and even though he burned his own stories, he kept “the indecent writings &ct of others.” The pyre seemed to free him to follow Leonard’s advice to give up journalism and to read his Indian fragment. They were a “wrong channel” for his pen, he thought now, and it was as if just having them in the house were an obstacle to future work.

  On the last Friday of April, he listened to Beethoven’s late quartets and was surprised to find that, despite the doleful music, he had, as he put it in his diary, “the happiest day I have passed for a long time.” At the very same time he had been listening to Beethoven, it turned out, the young son of his friend Frank Vicary had been scalded accidentally while his mother was bathing him. “Frank’s boy,” was now “in hospital, probably dying,” just as Mohammed—whom Morgan fondly called “My boy”—was in a similarly precarious state. Morgan heard in the melancholy of Beethoven’s valedictory quartets the invigorating truth that there was life after unexpected tragedy. An old friend, visiting the next day, Saturday the twenty-ninth, asked him, “How can a great artist like you have stopped writing?” It was the question that Virginia and Sassoon had asked themselves after seeing Morgan, and though it was also the question Morgan had been asking himself for years, on that spring day he seemed to wonder it himself in a way he had not before, and to grasp that whatever had happened or would happen to the boy—or to Mohammed—he, Morgan, was alive. A farewell to Mohammed might mean a beginning for Morgan.

  Two days later, on Monday, May 1, he noted a change in his diary. He had sat “gloomily before my Indian novel all the morning.” Perhaps the great artist had not stopped writing. It was progress and was more than he had done in weeks or even years.

  * * *

  In retrospect, the “holocaust” he made of his “sexy stories” was a “curious episode,” he thought, a “sacrificial burning … in order that a Passage to India might get finished.” For the rest of his life the burning of his old stories remained an inexplicable, almost mystical breakthrough to the future: “I will try to connect it on to ‘God,’” he was to write Christopher Isherwood decades later. But Proust and the pyre of his stories were not the only thing that spring that galvanized him.

  Morgan read a poem called “Ghosts,” by J. R. Ackerley, in the April issue of the London Mercury.

  The title alone would have been enough to attract his attention, caught as he was in a mix of the morbid and romantic, thinking of the slowly dying Mohammed as a living ghost receding in distance and time—and of himself only as a living ghost of the writer he once had been. The poem, in twenty-four numbered stanzas, began with the question that had preoc
cupied him since he had left Egypt two months before.

  Can they still live,

  Beckon and cry

  Over the years

  After they die,

  Bringing us tears

  Meditative?

  Those we once set

  With us abreast,

  Shielded and cherished,

  Are they distressed

  If we forget

  After they’ve perished?

  The poem seemed written from within his own mind. Would the link between Mohammed and him survive the grave, as his friend continually but unavailingly urged Morgan to believe? Reading the poem so soon after reading Proust, Morgan saw that both writers had found a way to conjure the dead. Forster saw it “all in the opening lines” of “Ghosts,” as he had seen it immediately in his little sip of Proust.

  At the heart of the poem Morgan found the narrator’s recollection of a farewell almost exactly like his from Mohammed.

  Then came his words

  Back to my lips.

  Softly they stole,

  Wave upon wave,

  Crushing my soul

  Into his grave.…

  “You will forget.…

  You will forget.…”

  The friend’s remonstrance was an echo of Mohammed’s own last words to Morgan, sent from his deathbed and written in the form of an accidental sonnet—fourteen short lines—that captured on paper the shortness of Mohammed’s gasping, dying breaths.

  dear Morgan

  I am sending you the photogh

  I am very bad

  I got nothing more

  to say

  the family are good

  my compliment

  to mother

  my love to you

  my love to you

  my love to you

  do not forget your

  ever friend

  Moh el Adl.

  Morgan had saved all of Mohammed’s letters, collecting them together with some photographs and mementos of their friendship, including two of Mohammed’s visiting cards, the tram ticket that was a totem of their first acquaintance, and, in a small loose-leaf notebook, four pages of aphoristic remarks Mohammed had made, “Words Spoken.” Morgan kept the packet all his life, wondering decades later whether “my constant thinking of him an attempt to increase my own importance to show the universe that at all events I have had a great passion at all events.”

  * * *

  The “middle age of buggers” might be as lonely as Virginia Woolf, or Morgan himself, feared; but even though Mohammed had failed him as a lover, Morgan understood more of what he himself desired now that he had been disappointed. He could now, in a sharper way, gauge the sympathy and understanding he wanted from people and what, in reality, they offered; he could not be satisfied with the shallow conviviality of most of his relations with friends in England. The burning of his erotic stories was not only a way to find a new channel for his pen. It might be a way of liberating himself from living out his sexual desires only on paper. Reading Ackerley’s poem had an effect akin to the touch on the buttocks he’d received from Edward Carpenter’s lover.

  Finding camaraderie in the narrator’s inability to forget, Forster wrote Ackerley a long letter of praise on April 26, taking advantage of Ackerley’s facelessness beyond the poem itself to risk the revelation of his own sadness. “Yes, it is easier to write to strangers,” Forster once told T. E. Lawrence, “and that is the objection to meeting: the illusion of social intimacy starts, and spoils the other thing.”

  * * *

  Morgan’s letter to Ackerley—J.R. stood for Joe Randolph—was equal parts modesty and need. He had been moved, he wrote, by the poet’s sure-footed “combination of the reminiscent and the dramatic,” and praised Ackerley in words that echoed his reaction to Proust. He was confessional but oblique. “What you have done is to drive home the strangeness of a creature who is apparently allowed neither to remember nor to forget,” he wrote. He did not mention el Adl or his own artistic plight. And yet it was a letter demanding to be read between the lines, as if Forster trusted that if Ackerley were capable of writing with such sensitivity in “Ghosts,” he would also do that. Invoking Proust, Morgan seemed to suggest a camaraderie of homosexuals. “I have been reading Proust who knows all about it too.”

  Citing Proust was a bit like quoting Oscar Wilde, a code already well understood in the literary world. Shortly after Forster’s evening with Sassoon at the Reform Club, Sassoon had a long conversation with another group of members, all writers, including Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. The subject of Forster came up. He was maligned for his lack of productivity and for the fact that, as some of them thought, Howards End was “not really first-rate.” His homosexuality was an open secret, and despite the paucity of his output, there were rumors of his unpublished novel: “everyone seems to suspect F. of that unpublished novel,” Sassoon wrote, impressed, almost against his will, by the “astutely malicious” wit of one of the writers who joined in the talk, the now forgotten, but in his own time suitably productive, novelist Frank Swinnerton. “The usual subject?” Arnold Bennett asked. “That subject has been done once and for all by a man named PROUST.”

  Forster copied into his letter to Ackerley a passage of Proust that moved him in the way that Ackerley’s poem had, a few paragraphs very near to the end of the first part of Swann’s Way. If he usually transcribed to fill his emptiness, here he did it as a gesture toward friendship.

  The passage he wrote out is memorably placed in Proust’s novel, coming just before the famous incident of the petits madeleines from which the rest of the book flows, that day in winter when “as I returned home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to habit, I have a little tea.” When the narrator dips a madeleine into his tea, there is a seismic effect: “a delicious pleasure invaded me.” Transformed instantaneously by the sensations induced by the madeleine and the tea, the narrator no longer feels “mediocre, contingent, mortal,” and wonders, “Where could it have come from—this powerful joy?”

  The passage that Forster shared with Ackerley was more melancholy. The narrator, speaking of the relation of the living to the dead, and as yet unaware of the key to the past that awaits him in the tea, sees a possibility of reclaiming the dead in the Celtic idea that the souls of those “we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature,” an animal, or a tree. The souls of our beloved ones are trapped there, “effectively lost to us” until the day—which for many will never arrive—we pass close to the tree and perhaps recognize “the object that is their prison.”

  Morgan wanted to be among those to whom such a day would come, but he was not sure that he could share with Ackerley and Proust—or Mohammed—the belief that it might even be possible. “‘Out of death leads no ways’ is more probably the fact,” Morgan wrote to Ackerley, quoting the poet Thomas Beddoes.

  In copying out the French for Ackerley, and taking up more than one sheet to do so, Morgan made a slip of the pen, a practically invisible error. Proust, looking forward to a meeting of the souls, to an eventual liberation and communion, wrote, “Delivrées par nous, elles ont vaincu la mort, et reviennent vivre avec nous.” Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to live with us.

  But Forster wrote, “Delivrées pas nous.” Delivered not.

  In his version, there would never be deliverance, for the lost souls or for himself.

  Forster could not have been unaware that linking Ackerley to Proust, and to Poe, which he also did in the letter, would be high praise from a welcome quarter. He wrote as an artist grateful to have encountered in a poem an effect that was perhaps beyond his own talent. Ackerley, who idolized Forster, accepted that as flattery enough, and the surprise and delight he felt upon receiving Forster’s letter cannot be overstated. The letter was more important to him than the poem that had prompted it, and shortly before he died Ackerley would write that “Ghosts” was a “not very worthy midwife, I fear” to the lifetime
of close friendship that ensued. Ackerley saved Forster’s letter, the first of the more than one thousand, substantive or incidental, he was to receive from Forster over the next four decades. Morgan’s salutation soon became—and remained—“D. M. J.,” for Dear My Joe.

  * * *

  The next week brought to Morgan something of the same awakening that Virginia had exulted in in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” and the belated spring that had brought London itself to life. He recorded in his diary on Sunday, May 7, the “Sunshine and Happiness” that the Times would describe as arriving in London the next day. It was the first warm day since he had returned from Egypt, and Morgan spent much of it outdoors, in his aunt Laura’s garden. He and Lily both fell asleep, he wrote in his diary, “with our mouths open to the sun.”

  But he noted a more momentous quickening than the change of weather: “Have made careful & uninspired additions to my Indian novel, influenced by Proust.” The previous week he had steeled himself to spend one morning with pages of his novel. Now he had actually written something. He could not quite feel “happy” about it—that was “a silly word,” he wrote—but even this measure of progress left him feeling “at all events more master of my surroundings and time.” The first real days of spring also brought another letter from Mohammed, written, coincidentally, on the same day that Morgan had written Ackerley, April 26. Mohammed wrote that he was worse. But his letters had lost their power to move or to surprise Forster, who had read in Ackerley’s poem the narrator’s pained confession, “I had not cried when he was dead,” and who now wrote a similar confession in his diary. “I want him to tell me he is dead, and so set me free to make an image of him. Latterly my great love prevents me feeling he is real.”