The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Then, it was a two-day journey to New Mexico by rail—“the time-table, that magic carpet of today”—and with tickets provided by Mabel, he and Frieda boarded the Grand Canyon Limited, arriving in Lamy, twenty miles from Santa Fe, on Sunday, September 10. It was another seventy miles to Taos, and after a night just outside Santa Fe, with the poet Witter Bynner and his lover Spud Johnson, they drove to Taos, across the flat desert, that Monday, the eleventh, his thirty-seventh birthday.

  Ten days later, he wrote to Seltzer about Ulysses. Lawrence had in common with Joyce that they were both victims of John Sumner, and little else. Lawrence, of course, was triumphant over his suppression, even if, by law, the victory was Seltzer’s. He now set about getting his hands on a copy of Joyce’s elusive blue-covered book.

  The status of the complete Ulysses had not been tested in court, and though neither Liveright, Huebsch, nor Knopf had been willing to risk publishing it, it was not explicitly banned. Quinn ordered fourteen copies of Ulysses from Sylvia Beach and wrote her early in 1922 that he did not want to take a chance that they might be confiscated by customs. He had seen her advertisement for the book in the most recent issue of the Little Review, and, he warned her, “I know that Sumner is watching the Little Review, particularly because of the ‘Ulysses’ mess. He is therefore sure to have instructed the customs authorities to confiscate all copies of ‘Ulysses’ that come by mail or any other way.” Quinn agreed to pay for his copies in advance so that, he told her, “they will become my property and then I must be consulted as to how they are to be sent here.” He did not know, or care, what she planned to do about mailing anyone else’s copies to the United States, but once paid for, his must be set aside, “carefully wrapped up, and held subject to my order.” He proposed that a friend who was visiting Paris might bring them back for him, or he might ask her to send the books to Canada, where a dealer would receive them on his behalf and either mail them or bring them to New York himself. In fact, many copies of Beach’s first thousand-copy limited edition were sent to buyers in the United States or brought into the country by returning travelers, without incident.

  In his letter to Seltzer, Lawrence had also asked for some other books, a Spanish-language primer, Spanish-English dictionary, and a recently published book about Melville. When these arrived, but without a copy of Joyce’s novel, he wondered, “Couldn’t you find Ulysses? If you could just lend it to me, to read.”

  Ulysses had been on his mind even in Australia, where there was press coverage of the publication of the Shakespeare and Company edition. “I shall be able to read this famous Ulysses when I get to America. I doubt he is a trickster,” he had written to a friend in London in July—using the same formulation Virginia Woolf had—though reserving judgment. Like Virginia, he could not help but see his own work in tandem or in opposition to it, and added about Kangaroo, “I have nearly finished my novel here—but such a novel! Even the Ulysseans will spit at it.” His argument was less with Joyce than with the acolytes and critics, among them Pound, who valorized Joyce’s genius as if the (by comparison) more conventional novels Lawrence wrote—less visibly experimental in form, without the same obscuring emphasis on the internal, everything perceived by the characters rather than anything observed by an omniscient narrator—were not making a formal break with tradition, too.

  Lawrence’s novel Aaron’s Rod had, meanwhile, appeared in England that summer. It was, inevitably, compared to Ulysses, as no novel published after it, particularly so soon after it, could avoid. Lawrence was less self-conscious of this comparison than Virginia Woolf, but he was as aware as she was that any fiction published in the wake of even its excerpts was being read at least by critics in Joyce’s shadow.

  John Middleton Murry in the Nation and Athenaeum proclaimed, in August, that Aaron’s Rod was “much more important” than Joyce’s novel, his worry that with Women in Love Lawrence had passed his peak now completely allayed. Spit the Ulysseans might at Lawrence, and he might welcome their dismissal, but Murry embraced the difference: the intellectual armature of Ulysses, the foundation of it in the ancient Homeric myths, rendered it “sterile”; by contrast, Aaron’s Rod was “full of the sap of life.” The “whole of Mr Joyce is in Ulysses,” Murry wrote, as if the novel had exhausted Joyce as much as it exhausted Murry. Murry did not damn Joyce completely. He recognized Ulysses as a literary milestone, but thought that even if Aaron’s Rod were undoubtedly a smaller work in one way, it was not the whole of Mr. Lawrence, but rather a “fruit on the tree of Mr. Lawrence’s creativeness.… No other living writer could drive us to a frenzy of hostility as he has done; no other fill us with such delight.”

  Eliot, who had told Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House that Joyce had left himself nothing to build on after Ulysses, might have been surprised to find himself in relative agreement with Murry’s conclusion that it represented the “whole of Mr Joyce,” particularly given the personal and literary animosity he and Murry often felt for each other, and even more so because he thought Ulysses an unadulterated triumph. But he and Virginia spoke of Lawrence, too, at Monk’s House, and there remained some ground of opposition to Murry. Eliot had read Aaron’s Rod, he told Virginia, and thought that in it Lawrence “came off occasionally.” He “had great moments,” even if overall he was “a most incompetent writer.”

  * * *

  Mabel had spent the better part of a year willing Lawrence to come to Taos, but all along she had accurately understood Lawrence’s delays as a result of his fear of her. “They wanted to see me, take a look, even a bite, and be able to spit me out if they didn’t like it” she was to write in her memoirs. But whatever Lawrence’s considerable misgivings about America itself and about his hostess, he had anticipated his arrival in Taos as at least another fresh beginning for him as a writer. He had written his Australian novel as planned and left. Now, in a new place, he would revise it, and he planned to write another. “I build quite a lot on Taos—and the pueblo,” he had written Mabel from Australia. He would write “an American novel from that centre. It’s what I want to do.”

  Lawrence immediately fell in love with the landscape, and his first impression of it affirmed the foretaste of the primordial and fantastical that Mabel had wafted his way the year before. He was immediately curious, too, about the Indians, a people whose ancient ways persisted, he imagined, unsullied by the modern world, their pueblo a living symbol of the wellsprings of humanity he sought in the Far West. But Mabel was the center of things in Taos, as far as she was concerned, her domination of what was more of an outpost than a village complete enough that it was really “Mabel-town.” He had not come so far to be a citizen, or acolyte, of that little world, an ancient land populated by modern fools, the “sub-arty” here no different from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party he had fled in Taormina. But he had understood in Taormina that it would not be any different in Taos—had heard the similarity even in the sound—and yet here he was.

  For Lawrence, the erasure of the ancient was perhaps most disappointingly epitomized by Mabel’s lover Tony Lujan. He drove them all in Mabel’s Cadillac from the train station, a too willing victim, it seemed to Lawrence, of the automobile, and money, and, ultimately, of Mabel’s “terrible will to power—woman power.” In Lawrence’s eyes, Tony was more a symbol of Indian man rather than an Indian man.

  They moved into “Tony’s house,” which Mabel had completed in anticipation of the Lawrences’ arrival. It was as spacious and comfortable as promised, and lived up to expectations, too, in being a little too near to Mabel’s larger house, only about two hundred yards away.

  A few days after settling in, Lawrence came over to her house early in order to begin what Mabel was to describe as “our work together.” But that they would do any kind of work together was more likely Mabel’s fantasy than anything Lawrence would have promised her. Mabel retold the story of Lawrence’s arrival that morning in her memoirs. He was there early enough that she had not yet dressed and was sunbathing on the roof ter
race outside her bedroom. She called to him to come up and, walking through her bedroom on the way out to her, he was, she either saw or imagined, shocked by the sight of her unmade bed, “a repulsive sight” to him. By his glance around the room, she wrote, he had “turned it into a brothel … that’s how powerful he was.”

  The Lawrence of the SS Tahiti had arrived in Taos. Mabel was disappointed by the small-mindedness of this man who had come to loom so large in her imagination. For Lawrence, the “brothel” of Mabel’s unmade bed was the grave of whatever ancient aristocracy Lawrence had envisioned persisting.

  Mabel would go on to perfect the art of paying tribute to Lawrence while denigrating him. (T. S. Eliot was to write of Lawrence that he was a Johnson “surrounded by a shoal” of Boswells, “some of them less tender towards the great man than was Johnson’s biographer.”) And if Lawrence had been shocked that morning, it might have been less at the implicit display of any wanton sexuality than at the untidiness of the room, fastidious as he was; or perhaps it was surprise at her outfit, a voluminous white cashmere burnous designed, as all her clothing was, in “so-called flowing lines” to mask that “longing to be like a willow, I have always resembled a pine tree … the Christmas-tree variety,” Mabel would write.

  Lawrence wrote to his sister-in-law that Mabel “very much wants me to write about here. I don’t know that I ever shall.” The distinction between “here” and her—Mabel herself—was unclear and meant more to him in any case than to Mabel. In her recollection, it was not only her desire but his choice to write a book about her. “Of course it was for this I had called him from across the world,” and she waited for him to announce it as his intention to write this very book. “He said he wanted to write an American novel that would express the life, the spirit, of America and he wanted to write it around me.”

  “You have done her,” Mabel remembered she told him, referring to Frieda, who had appeared, in one way or another, as the female protagonist in all of his novels written after he met her, most explicitly in Kangaroo, which she had not yet read. “She has mothered your books long enough. You need a new mother!” But Frieda would not let him, Mabel reported as Lawrence’s reply to her. “She won’t let any other woman into my books.”

  Mabel also wanted Lawrence to join her crusade against legislation proposed in Congress that would make it more difficult for Indians to seek redress. She asked him to write an article on the subject, which he did, willingly, the request a collaboration easier to accept, and one that might postpone the other thing entirely.

  Mabel and Frieda now went to war over Lawrence, or at least Mabel saw it that way. In her eyes, the “tall and full-fleshed” Frieda overwhelmed Lawrence in sheer pulchritude, his head too heavy for his too slim body, over which it hung forward, the “whole expression” of his figure, slightly built and so stooped, one of “extreme fragility.” This was no match for Frieda’s imposition of weight and will. Nor might it be for Mabel’s own weight and will, which is where, briefly, she thought she saw her opening. And yet for all her disappointment in the sight and sound of Lawrence, or because of it, Mabel felt at the very first instant that she understood Lawrence’s “plight.” He was a husband in thrall, she thought, to a “limited” wife—Frieda, from whom he must be saved. She herself was the person who could do it, the impulse one she described, elementally, as “the womb in me roused to reach out to take him,” an act of psychic rescue selfless, as she saw it. Lawrence and Frieda, naturally, saw things differently.

  Lawrence dubbed Mabel the padrona and acknowledged her kindness to him and her generosity even if he was constitutionally unable to reconcile himself to patronage, in general, or to the ravenous brand of physical absorption that Mabel demanded. Not long after arriving in Taos, Lawrence wrote his agent that he thought he could be happy there—if they had more time to themselves. Tony’s house was, as he knew it would be, too much Mabel Sterne’s “ground,” and whether she was ravenous or generous made little difference in the end. He wouldn’t be bullied, “even by kindness,” which created a debt more costly than money and more insidious than “if one had been left to make one’s way alone.”

  Lawrence was of two minds (as he was about most things) about Mabel and Tony. He was at ease with them—Tony “a big fellow—nice—they have been together several years”—but judged more harshly the pretension of Mabel’s performance of the grande dame liberated from convention. “Mabel Sterne has an Indian lover [who] lives with her,” he wrote a friend. “She has had two white husbands and one Jew: now this. She is pretty rich.”

  Mabel fancied herself Lawrence’s muse, and she was sure that if it weren’t for Frieda’s opposition, she would have been, for misperceiving Lawrence she thought he “had no will of his own … Frieda tried to stand with a flaming sword between him and all others.” But settling in at Taos, and with access to his American money, including $1,000 from Hearst for the rights to “The Captain’s Doll,” he was intent on paying off old debts, not incurring new ones. (This was the most he ever had received for a story, or ever would. Hearst never actually published it, a bit of American profligacy of which he could perhaps approve.) Very soon after he arrived, he sent £15 to Ottoline, thanking her for the money she had kindly lent “during the hard days” of the war, exorcising the aftermath of the suppression of The Rainbow and the rough times in Cornwall as he had done in the chapter “The Nightmare” of Kangaroo. Now free of that debt and other small obligations to other friends, he did not want to mortgage whatever he would write in Taos to Mabel. That was at least one promise the New World had kept—he had his money.

  * * *

  Nevertheless Lawrence tried to play his part, and after his first morning’s visit Lawrence began to write something that grew out of his conversation with Mabel and from his own first impressions of Taos. Whether it would be the novel Mabel dreamed of is doubtful, and Lawrence wrote to his agent, Mountsier, that he was working on an “M. Sterne novel of here,” pointedly emphasizing “here” rather than “M. Sterne.” Either to placate her or because he would take inspiration where he could find it, and would as happily use her as a foundation as he had used Frieda, or Jessie Chambers in Sons and Lovers or Heseltine in Women in Love, Lawrence obligingly asked Mabel to write out some notes about particular crossroads in her life, listing eleven to begin with, including her marriage to Sterne, her feelings about Tony, and her arrival in New Mexico. “You’ve got to remember also things you don’t want to remember,” he warned her, perhaps aware that the more difficult he made her task, the less likely she would undertake it. Perhaps to flatter her that it really was their work “together,” he told her he might eventually incorporate her own writing—a story she’d written about her marriage to Maurice Sterne, some poems she had written about Tony—so that “your own indubitable voice [be] heard sometimes.” He would not show her what he wrote until the end, he told her.

  Frieda supposedly put a conditional stop to Mabel and Lawrence’s collaboration. He and Frieda “had had it out,” Lawrence told Mabel. Their work on the novel, if it were to proceed, would have to take place not at Mabel’s house, where they would have the privacy Mabel required, but at the Lawrences’, where Frieda could, he said, keep a watchful eye. In the event, Frieda did all she could to distract them, stamping around the house, “sweeping noisily, and singing with a loud defiance.” But this stratagem seems more of Lawrence’s design than Frieda’s own.

  It is impossible to believe that if Lawrence had wanted to write a story or a novel with Mabel in it, he would have compromised his vision for Frieda’s sake, for he rarely if ever did anything on her behalf solely, which was why, despite her desire to stay put anywhere, they were actually in Taos in the first place. She had chosen him over her children, long ago, and, as Mabel was to put it, with great sympathy, suffered “loneliness that was like a terrible hunger.” Lawrence was contemptuous of that loneliness. “He couldn’t admit any rivals,” Mabel wrote. Lawrence had long bristled at practically any menti
on of Frieda’s children; this may have been guilt as much as egotism. But, as Frieda knew, Lawrence’s true egotism was that he would not admit any rivals to the work he must do. His writing came first, before his wife, and certainly before any other distractions that children, or affection, might be. And about this he felt no guilt. Nor did Frieda ever want him to, believing in his work as fiercely as he did, and perhaps all the more so for the sacrifices she had made to be his wife.

  For Mabel it was more satisfying to find grand psychological forces at work in why Lawrence could not proceed with the novel, easier to resent Frieda than to blame herself or Lawrence for the dead end his little sketch met. “I never even saw the chapter he did; I presume she tore it up,” Mabel was to remember, referring to Frieda. But it was not a chapter so much as notes for a chapter. And Frieda had not torn it up. She actually was quite pleased with Lawrence’s work. “It’s very clever at the beginning, it will be rather sardonic!” she wrote to Mountsier.

  * * *

  And it was. In the letter Lawrence wrote Forster after he arrived in Taos, he had complained of Forster’s “nearly deadly mistake glorifying those business people”—Henry Wilcox and his son—in Howards End. Perhaps because that continued to bother him, or perhaps because after venting his spleen Lawrence recalled a little of what he had first felt about the book—that it was “exceedingly good and very discussable”—Forster’s novel was on his mind when he began to work on whatever it was he was going to write about Mabel.

  The character based on Mabel is called Sybil Mund. On her father’s side she is descended from the Hamnetts, from whom she has inherited her “force.” But all her “push” comes from her mother’s family—the Wilcoxes. This family heritage has “culminated” in Sybil, “this one highly-explosive daughter.” The “push” of the business people in Howards End was what still angered Lawrence, after all these years—or perhaps after thinking about the novel again, he realized that Forster, too, had derided the “push” and that he and Forster were more on the same side than in opposition. In the novel, Forster had written that the Wilcoxes “avoided the personal note in life” and, as one of the Schlegel sisters realized, “All Wilcoxes did. It did not seem to them of supreme importance. Or it may be as Helen supposed: they realized its importance, but were afraid of it.” Mabel was afraid of the personal, Lawrence saw. She lived too much from theory and was too insulated by her money to interest him very much, or for him to tolerate her even as a specimen he might observe in fascination or disgust. He had most certainly not come to America to merge with the highly explosive daughter of the Wilcox tradition.