The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  No bigger than my thumb-nail,

  Buon viaggio.

  All animate creation on your shoulder,

  Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.

  ‘Baby Tortoise’

  Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.

  His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,

  Damned, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek

  His consummation beyond himself …

  Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself

  In his effort toward completion again.

  And so behold him following the tail

  Of that mud-hovel of his slowly rambling spouse.

  ‘Elle et Lui’

  Still, gallant, irascible, crooked-legged reptile,

  Little gentleman,

  Sorry plight,

  We ought to look the other way.

  ‘Tortoise Gallantry’

  Lawrence’s work on Birds, Beasts and Flowers, from the first free-verse notes of July 1920, through the Tortoise poems of September and ‘Snake’ in 1921, to the ‘new, “complete” MS’ of February 1923, coincided with his various attempts to produce the essay on Walt Whitman that was to form the final chapter of his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). It was because Whitman was so important to him that the essay gave him so much trouble, and it is in Lawrence’s attempts to get at the ‘quick’ of Whitman’s practice – what he sees as the origin and process, physical and psycho-sexual, of it – that we see what Lawrence was aiming at in his own: the process, but also, in moral and aesthetic terms (which increasingly for Lawrence became one), its justification.

  The first version from 1918 has not survived, and so far as we know, no one ever saw it. It was too controversial, perhaps, in its openness about the sensual life. The 1919 version immediately adopts a contradictory stance:

  Whitman is the last and greatest of the Americans. He is the fulfilment of the great old truth. But any truth, the moment it is fulfilled, accomplished, becomes ipso facto a lie, a deadly limitation of truth … In Whitman lies the greatest of all modern truths. And yet some really thoughtful men, in Europe at least, insist even today that he is the greatest of modern humbugs, the arch humbug. A great truth – or a great lie – which? A great prophet, or a great swindle.

  Both!

  Lawrence has no doubts about the quality and significance of Whitman’s verse. ‘The primal soul,’ he tells us,

  utters itself in strange pulsations, gushes and strokes of sound. At his best Whitman gives these throbs naked and vibrating as they emerge from the quick. They follow, pulse after pulse, line after line, each one new and unforeseeable. They are lambent. They are life itself. But in the whole, the whole soul speaks at once, sensual impulse instant with spiritual impulse, and the mind serving, giving pure attention.

  This is also, we may assume, how Lawrence hopes that his own verse, at its best, may work. It is a matter of the relationship between the lower or sensual body and the mind, with the mind serving, and in it here that he sees Whitman, in that he chooses finally the way of ‘sensual negation’, failing to take ‘the next step’. The language in which he describes Whitman’s failure to complete the process is drawn from Fantasia of the Unconscious, a book already completed but not to be published until October 1922.

  Whitman, singing of the mystery of touch, tells us of the process. He tells of the mystery of the touch of the hands and fingers, those living tendrils of the upper spiritual centres, upon the lower body. But the touch of the hands is only the beginning of a great involved process. Not only the fingers reap the deep forces, but the mouth and tongue in kissing and so on … All this Whitman minutely and continually describes. It is the transferring to the upper centres, the thorasic and cervical ganglia, of the control of the deep lumbar and sacral ganglia, it is the transferring to the upper sympathetic centres, breast, hands, mouth, face, of the dark vital secrets of the lower self. The lower sacral centres are explored and known by the upper self.

  It is this transferring of everything into the upper self and the ‘mental consciousness’ that makes Whitman, for Lawrence, ‘a shattering half-truth, a devastating half-lie’.

  Whitman also falls short in another respect. ‘Every soul,’ Lawrence insists, ‘before it can be free, and whole in itself, spontaneously blossom[ing] from itself, must know this accession into Allness, into infinitude. Thus far Whitman is a great prophet. And he shows us the process of oneing; he is a true prophet.’ The falseness creeps in when we accept this ‘oneing’ as a goal, and not as a process, a means to a different end, which in Lawrence’s terms, as he has been working towards it in Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) – in ‘New Heaven and Earth’ and ‘Manifest’ and ‘Wedlock’ – is ‘the human soul’s integral singleness’:

  And yet all the while you are you, you are not me.

  And I am I, I am never you.

  How awfully distinct and far off from each other’s being we are.

  Yet I am glad.

  I am glad there is always you beyond my scope.

  What Lawrence rejects in Whitman is the insistence on ‘merging’, on ‘fusion’. Lawrence himself aims at something different. He calls it a ‘delicately adjusted polarity’.

  There is a final polarisation, a final current of vital being impossible(e) between man and woman. Whitman found this empirically. Empirically he found that the last current of vital polarisation goes between man and man. Whitman is the first in modern life, truly, from sheer empirical necessity, to reassert this truth … It is his most wistful theme – the love of comrades – manly love … The vast mysterious power of sexual love and of marriage is not for Whitman … He believes in fusion. Not fusion, but delicately adjusted polarity is life. Fusion is death.

  Still, there is, beyond all this, Whitman’s verse. There, at its best, ‘the whole soul follows its own free, spontaneous, inexplicable course, the contractions and pulsations dictated from nowhere save from the quick itself … There is nothing measured or mechanical. This is the greatest poetry.’

  But even this statement of the case is not satisfactory and in 1921–22 Lawrence sets out to resolve his own contradictory views in yet another version. ‘Whitman,’ he begins, ‘is the last and greatest of the Americans. One of the greatest poets in the world, in him an element of falsity troubles us still. Something is wrong; we cannot be quite at ease with his greatness. Let us get over our quarrel with him first.’ He then goes on to make a distinction between:

  all the transcendentalists, including Whitman, and men like Balzac and Dickens, Tolstoy and Hardy, who still act direct from passional motives and non inversely, from mental provocations. But the aesthetes and symbolists, from Baudelaire and Maeterlick, and Oscar Wilde onwards, and nearly all the later Russian and French and English novelists, set up their reactions in the mind and reflect them by a secondary process down on the body. It is the madness of the world today. Europe and America are all alike, all the nations self-consciously provoking their passional reactions from the mind, and nothing spontaneous.

  The last part of this version then moves into the murky area of mystical fascism. Whitman, Lawrence tells us,

  shows us the last step of the old great way. But he does not show us the first step of the new. His great Democracy is to be established upon the love of comrades. Well and good. But in what direction shall this love flow? More en masse? As a matter of fact the love of comrades is always a love between a leader and a follower filled with ‘the joy of liege adherence’.

  What Lawrence ends up saluting, in a move away from ‘en masse democracy’ to ‘the grand culmination of soul-chosen leaders’, is ‘the final leader … the sacred tyrannus. This is the true democracy.’ ‘Onward,’ he urges, ‘always following the leader, who when he looks back has a flame of love in his face, but a still brighter flame of purpose. This is the true democracy.’

  Whitman in this is largely forgotten. The best Lawrence can do is to repeat his earlier endorsement
:

  Whitman. The last of the very great poets. And the ultimate. How lovely a poet he is. His verse at its best spontaneous like a bird. For a bird doesn’t rhyme or scan – the miracle of spontaneity. The whole soul speaks at once, in a naked spontaneity so unutterably lovely, so far beyond rhyme and scansion.

  Then, in November 1922, a new version in an entirely different style: demotic, staccato, ‘Modernist’; all capitals, expletives and ironic or dismissive side-swipes; a parody of Whitman’s own ‘stridency’ and splenetic exuberance:

  Post mortem effects?

  But what of Walt Whitman?

  The ‘good grey poet’

  Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?

  The good grey poet

  Post mortem effects. Ghosts.

  A certain ghoulishness. A certain horrible potage of human parts.

  A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes …

  I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE

  CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!

  CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFFF

  Reminds me of a steam engine. A locomotive …

  Your Self

  Oh Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done with yourself? With your individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you when you made water, leaked into the universe when you peed. Oh Walt, you’re a leaky vessel…

  And so on, via a piece of scurrilous gossip about Whitman in old age dancing naked in his yard and showing himself off in an excited state to schoolgirls, to

  Only we know this much. Death is not the goal. And Love, and merging are now only part of the death process. Comradeship – part of the death process. The new Democracy – the brink of death. One identity – death itself.

  We have died, and we are still disintegrating.

  But IT is finished.

  Consumatum est.

  –before the whole essay degenerates into incoherent rambling about Jesus and the Holy Ghost. Barely a word in this version about Whitman the poet. Only Whitman, the leaky vessel, as thinker and man.

  The 1923 version, the one that at last makes it all the way to publication as the final chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature, takes up the 1922 version and uses it – expurgated of its scurrilous slander and a few turns of phrase that would at the time have been seen as ‘indecent’ – as far as ‘But IT is finished. Consumatum est.’ It then drops its aggressive, expletive tone and embarks on something more sober and considered, more warmly personal:

  Whitman, the great poet, has meant much to me. Whitman the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman the one pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no French. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere improvisers.

  He recognises Whitman as ‘the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something “superior” and “above” the flesh’.

  ‘There,’ he said to the soul, ‘stay there! Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and legs and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb and phallus. Stay there, o soul, where you belong.’

  There is praise too for Whitman’s enunciation of ‘a morality of actual living, not of salvation’:

  The soul is not to put up defences round herself. She is not to withdraw inwardly, in mystical ecstasies, she is not to cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She is to go down the open road, as the road opens into the unknown, keeping company with those whose soul draws them near to her, accomplishing nothing save the journey …

  The Open Road. The great home of the soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above’, not even ‘within’. The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within’. It is a wayfarer down the open road … The soul is herself when she is going on foot down the open road.

  He even forgives Whitman at this point his great error, of mistaking ‘sympathy’ for Jesus’ Love or St Paul’s Charity. But he has come now to a more doctrinaire vision of what art itself is, what poetry is, that will determine from this point his own life as a poet:

  The function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral … But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. Changes the blood rather than the mind, changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.

  This looks ahead to the various prefaces Lawrence would write, between Christmas 1928 and April 1929, to Pansies (1929) – Pensées – the second of which tells us:

  Each little piece is a thought: not an idea, or an opinion, or a didactic statement, but a true thought, which comes as much from the heart and genitals as from the head … Live and let live, and each pansy will tip you its separate wink.

  Between 1923 and 17 November 1928, when Pansies was begun, Lawrence was continually on the move, in Mexico, England, France, Italy; at work preparing (‘what a sweat’), and in the case of the earlier poems rewriting, his Collected Poems (1928). ‘I do bits of things,’ he writes on 14 November 1927, ‘– darn my underclothes, try to type up poems.’

  The Pansies, written at Bandol on the French Riviera between 17 November 1928 and 10 March 1929, and the ‘stinging pansies’ or Nettles (1930), which he began in February 1929 and took up again between 17 April and 18 June in Mallorca, start out as insights into the quick of things – sensory moments, the lives of elephants in a circus – but end up in disgruntlement and general contempt for ‘the dirty drab world’: its hypocrisy, cowardice, snobbery, money-grubbing; its blindness and vanity – ‘the whole damn swindle’. Then, on 10 October 1929, just five months before his death, he writes the first poem in the Last Poems (1932) notebook, ‘The Greeks are coming’, and we might recall what he had written of Whitman: ‘Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last step and looked over into Death.’

  There are hints, towards the end of the Nettles notebook of Lawrence’s last great poems; in ‘Butterfly’(I) and (II), in ‘The State of Grace’, ‘Glory of Darkness’ (I), which is in fact an early version of ‘Bavarian Gentians’, and ‘Ship of Death’:

  Blue and dark

  the Bavarian Gentians, tall ones

  make a magnificent dark-blue gloom

  in the sunny room …

  How deep I have gone

  dark gentians

  in your marvellous dark-blue godhead

  How deep, how deep, how happy

  How happy to sink my soul

  in the blue dark gloom

  of gentian here in the sunny room!

  ‘Glory of Darkness’ (I)

  But it is Glory of Darkness (III) that takes the last step and finds its way back to the Greeks, to the old dark underworld of ‘Snake’:

  Blue and dark

  Oh Bavarian gentians, tall ones …

  They have added blueness to blueness, until

  it is dark beauty, it is dark

  and the door is open

  to the depths

  It is so blue, it is so dark

  in the dark doorway

  and the door is open

  to Hades.

  Oh I know –

  Persephone has just gone back

  down the thickening thickening gloom

  of dark blue gentians

  to Pluto

  to her bridegroom

  in the dark …

  ‘Glory of Darkness’ (III)

  And with the simplicity, the spontaneity of this, what he called, in Whitman’s case, its ‘throbs and pulses’, Lawrence finds his way to the last poems on which his own greatness rests.

  God is older than the sun and moon

  and the eye cannot behold him

  nor voice describe him.

  But a naked man, a stranger, leaned on the gate

  with his cloak over his arm waiting to be asked in.

  So I called him: Come in, if you will –

  He came in slowly, and sat down by the hearth.

  I said to him: And what is your name? –

  He looked at me without answer, but such a l
oveliness

  entered me, I smiled to myself, saying: he is God!

  So he said: Hermes!

  God is older than the sun and moon

  and the eye cannot behold him

  nor the voice describe him:

  and still, this is the god Hermes, sitting by my hearth.

  ‘Maximus’

  Lawrence is a difficult poet to come to terms with; it is easy to quarrel with him as he quarrelled with Whitman. He is various, contradictory, irascible, over-insistent; he too easily takes offence and insists again. It is easy, as well, to be put off by his preachiness. He begins in the tone of a non-conformist Bible-banger, develops his own religion and bangs away at that. He is most easy with his soul when he embraces the dark gods and goes quietly underground, and best of all when he stops protesting and lets the world in, in the form of a snake, a baby tortoise, the smoking dark blue of gentians, or in the form of the psychopomp Hermes, and breathes easy again. Lets the breath and the energy of its natural rhythms create the poem.

  As he puts it in the Note to Collected Poems of 12 May 1928, excusing his rewriting of the early poems, ‘A young man is afraid of his demon, and puts his hand over his demon’s mouth and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are rarely poetry. So I have tried to let the demon say his say.’

  Lawrence makes it difficult for the reader, as well as for himself, by speaking up too soon; by insisting, performing, working out his questions, his quarrels, in public. We too, in seeking out the best in him, have to choose between the ‘demon’ and the man. We should be grateful to these two volumes from the Cambridge Press, and to its editor, for making this easier than it might otherwise be in the muddle of so much material; the byproduct of so much passionate energy and engagement, and of a life that was seldom orderly or still.

  At his best, Lawrence is one of the finest poets in the world. There is no poet, at his best, who gets closer to what he calls the ‘quick’ of things, or brings us closer with him; and when he is at ease with his own spirit, his own extraordinary energy, his rare demon, there is no poet we find it so easy to love. It is all here in these two hefty volumes: the muddle, but also the magic of the man’s greatness; the pathos, the wonderful coincidence of language and feeling; a sensibility almost too actively aware of the tension between singularity and oneness that is at the heart of being.