There are all sorts and sizes of commissions, every sort and size and condition of commission. But oil predominates. Usually, I can smell oil down the telephone.
There are others — Railway Commissions, Mines Commissions, American Women’s Christian Missions, American Bankers’ Missions, American Bootleggers’ Missions, American Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Mormon, and Jewish Missions, American Tramps’ Missions . . .
I, however, in my little office, am Mohammed. If you would like to see Mexico summed up into one unique figure, see me, a la Mohammed, in my little office, saying: Let these mountains come to me.
And they come. They come in whole ranges, in sierras, in cordil- leras. I smell oil, and I see the backbone of America walking up the stair-case (no elevator). I hear the chink of silver, and behold the entire Sierra Madre marching me-wards. Ask me if [sic] leave Mohammed with cold feet! Oh, I am muy Mejicano, I am!
I feel I am SEEING AMERICA FIRST, and they are seeing Mexico after. I feel myself getting starrier and stripyer every day, I see such a lot of America first.
But what happens to them, when they see Mexico after?
Quien sabe!
I am always murmuring: You see, Mexico and America are not in the same boat.
I want to add: They’re not even floating on the same ocean. I doubt if they’re gyrating in the same cosmos.
But superlatives are not well-mannered.
Still, it is hard on a young man like me to be merely Mexican, when my father, merely by moving up the map a little while he was still strong and lusty, might have left me hundred-per-cent American. I’m sure I should have been plus.
It is hard on me, I say. As it is hard on Popo. He might have been Mount Brown or Mount Abraham. How can any mountain, when you come to think of it, be Popocatepetl? — and iay-petl at that!
There, there! let me soothe myself.
In fact, I am always a little sorry for the Americans who come seeing Mexico after. “I am left such a long way behind!” as the burro said when he fell down an abandoned mine.
Still, the commissioners and missioners often stay quite brisk. They really do wonders. They put up chimneys and they make all sorts of wheels go round. The Mexicans are simply enraptured. But after a while, being nothing but naughty boys and greasers, they are pining to put their spokes in those wheels. Mischief, I tell you. Brummmm! go the spokes! And the wheels pause to wonder, while the bits fly. That’s fun!
Other gentlemen who are very sharp-eyed, seeing Mexico after, are the political see-ers. America is too hot for them, as a rule, so they move into cool, cool Mexico. They are some boys, they are! At least, so they tell me. And they belong to weird things that only exist as initials, such I.W.W.’s and A.F.L.’s and P.J.P.’s. Give me a job, say these gentlemen, and I’ll take the rest.
Why certainly, what could be more accommodating! Whereupon instantly, these gentlemen acquire the gift of Spanish, with an almost Pentecostal suddenness; they pat you on the shoulder and tell you sulphureous Mexican stories which certainly you would never have heard but for them. Oh, hot stuff! Hot dog! They even cry aloud Perro caliente! — and the walls of the city quake.
Moreover they proceed to organize our labour, after having so firmly insisted that we haven’t any. But we produce some, for their sakes. And they proceed to organize it: without music. And in throes of self-esteem they cry: Ah, Mexico’s the place. America can’t touch it! God bless Mexico!
Whereupon all the Mexicans present burst into tears.
You want no darn gringoes and gringo capital down here! they say.
We cross ourselves rapidly! Absit omen.
But alas, these thrilling gentlemen always leave us. They return with luggage, having come without, to AMERICA.
Well, adios! eh, boy? Come up there one day. Show you something.
Tears; the train moves out.
No, I am Mexican. I might as well be Jonah in the whale’s belly, so perfectly, so mysteriously am I nowhere.
But they come. They come as tourists, for example, looking round the whale’s interior.
“My wife’s a college graduate,” says the he-man.
She looks it. And she may thank her lucky stars — Rudolph Valentino is the first-magnitude — she will go on looking it all her days.
Ah, the first time she felt Rudolfino’s Italianino-Argentino-swoon- between-o kisses! On the screen, of course — Ah, that first time!
On the back porch, afterwards: Bill, I’m so tired of clean, hygienic kisses.
Poor Bill spits away his still-good, five-cent, mint-covered Wrigley’s chewing-gum gag, and with it, the last straw he had to cling to.
Now, aged thirty-four, and never quite a Valentino, he’s brought her to see Mexico after — she’d seen Ramon Novarro’s face, with the skin-you-love-to-touch. On the screen, of course.
Bill has brought her south. She has crossed the border with Bill. Ah, her eyes at the Pullman window! Where is the skin I would love to touch? they cry. And a dirty Indian pushes his black face and glaring eyes towards her, offering to sell her enchiladas.
It is no use my being sorry for her. Bill is better-looking than I am. So she re-falls in love with Bill; the dark-eyed flour-faced creatures make such eyes at him, down here. Call them women! Downtrodden things!
The escaped husband is another one. He drinks, swears, looks at all the women meaningly over a red nose, and lives with a prostitute. Hot dog!
Then the young lady collecting information! Golly! Quite nice- looking too. And the things she does! One would think the invisible unicorn that protects virgins was ramping round her every moment. But it’s not that. Not even the toughest bandit, not even Pancho Villa, could carry off all that information, though she as good as typed out her temptation to him.
Then the home-town aristocrats, of Little Bull, Arizona, or of Old Hat, Illinois. They are just looking round for something: seeing Mexico after: and very rarely finding it. It really is extraordinary the things there are in Little Bull and in Old Hat, that there aren’t in Mexico. Cold slaw, for example! Why, in Little Bull — !
San Juan Teotihuacan! Hey, boy, why don’t you get the parson to sprinkle him with a new tag? Never stand a name like that for half a day, in Little Bull, Illinois. Or was it Arizona?
Such a pity, to have to see Mexico after you’ve seen America first: or at least, Little Bull, which is probably more so.
The ends won’t meet. America isn’t just a civilization, it is civilization. So what is Mexico? Beside Little Bull, what is Mexico?
Of course Mexico went in for civilization long, long, long ago. But it got left. The snake crawled on, leaving the tail behind him.
The snake crawled, lap by lap, all round the globe, till it got back to America. And by that time he was some snake, was civilization. But where was his tail? He’d forgotten it?
Hey, boyl What’s that?
Mexico!
Mexico! — the snake didn’t know his own tail. Mexico! Gam!
That’s nothing. It’s mere nothing, but the darn silly emptiness where I’m not. Not yet.
So he opens his mouth, and Mexico, his old tail, shivers. But before civilization swallows its own tail, that tail will buzz. For civilization’s a rattler: anyhow Mexico is.
EUROPE V. AMERICA
A young American said to me: “I am not very keen on Europe, but should like to see it, and have done with it.” He is an ass. How can one “see” Europe and have done with it? One might as well say: I want to see the moon next week and have done with it. If one doesn’t want to see the moon, he doesn’t look. And if he doesn’t want to see Europe, he doesn’t look either. But neither of ‘em will go away because he’s not looking.
There’s no “having done with it.” Europe is here, and will be here, long after he has added a bit of dust to America. To me, I simply don’t see the point of that American trick of saying one is “through with a thing,” when the thing is a good deal better than oneself.
I can hear that young man sayin
g: “Oh, I’m through with the moon, she’s played out. She’s a dead old planet anyhow, and was never more than a side issue.” So was Eve only a side issue. But when a man is through with her, he’s through with most of his life.
It’s the same with Europe. One may be sick of certain aspects of European civilization. But they’re in ourselves, rather than in Europe. As a matter of fact, coming back to Europe, I realize how much more tense the European civilization is, in the Americans, than in the Europeans. The Europeans still have a vague idea that the universe is greater than they are, and isn’t going to change very radically, not for all the telling of all men put together. But the Americans are tense, somewhere inside themselves, as if they felt that once they slackened, the world would really collapse. It wouldn’t. If the American tension snapped tomorrow, only that bit of the world which is tense and American would come to an end. Nothing more.
How could I say: I am through with America? America is a great continent; it won’t suddenly cease to be. Some part of me will always be conscious of America. But probably some part greater still in me will always be conscious of Europe, since I am a European.
As for Europe’s being old, I find it much younger than America. Even these countries of the Mediterranean, which have known quite a bit of history, seem to me much, much younger even than Taos, not to mention Long Island, or Coney Island.
In the people here there is still, at the bottom, the old, young insouciance. It isn’t that the young don’t care: it is merely that, at the bottom of them there isn’t care. Instead there is a sort of bubbling-in of life. It isn’t till we grow old that we grip the very sources of our life with care, and strangle them.
And that seems to me the rough distinction between an American and a European. They are both of the same civilization, and all that. But the American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn’t got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.
That phrase again of wanting to see Europe and have done with it shows that strangle hold so many Americans have got on themselves. Why don’t they say: I’d like to see Europe, and then, if it means something to me, good! and if it doesn’t mean much to me, so much the worse for both of us. Vogue la galere!
I’ve been a fool myself, saying: Europe is finished for me. It wasn’t Europe at all, it was myself, keeping a strangle-hold on myself. Anil that strangle-hold I carried over to America; as many a man — and woman, worse still — has done before me.
Now, back in Europe, I feel a real relief. The past is too big, and too intimate, for one generation of men to get a strangle hold on it. Europe is squeezing the life out of herself, with her mental education and fixed ideas. But she hasn’t got her hands round her own throat not half so far as America has hers; here the grip is already falling slack; and if the system collapses, it’ll only be another system collapsed, of which there have been plenty. But in America, where men grip themselves so much more intensely and suicidally — the women worse — the system has its hold on the very sources of consciousness, so God knows what would happen, if the system broke.
No, it’s a relief to be by the Mediterranean, and gradually let the tight coils inside oneself come slack. There is much more life in a deep insouciance, which really is the clue to faith, than in this frenzied, keyed-up care, which is characteristic of our civilization, but which is at its worst, or at least its intensest, in America.
PARIS LETTER
I promised to write a letter to you from Paris. Probably I should have forgotten, but I saw a little picture — or sculpture — in the Tuileries, of Hercules slaying the Centaur, and that reminded me. I had so much rather the Centaur had slain Hercules, and men had never developed souls. Seems to me they’re the greatest ailment humanity ever had. However, they’ve got it.
Paris is still monumental and handsome. Along the river where its splendours are, there’s no denying its man-made beauty. The poor, pale little Seine runs rapidly north to the sea, the sky is pale, pale jade overhead, greenish and Parisian, the trees of black wire stand in rows, and flourish their black wire brushes against a low sky of jade-pale cobwebs, and the huge dark-grey palaces rear up their masses of stone and slope off towards the sky still with a massive, satisfying suggestion of pyramids. There is something noble and man-made about it all.
My wife says she wishes that grandeur still squared its shoulders on the earth. She wishes she could sit sumptuously in the river windows of the Tuileries, and see a royal spouse — who wouldn’t be me — cross the bridge at the head of a tossing, silk and silver cavalcade. She wishes she had a bevy of ladies-in-waiting around her, as a peacock has its tail, as she crossed the weary expanses of pavement in the Champs Elysees.
Well, she can have it. At least, she can’t. The world has lost its faculty for splendour, and Paris is like an old, weary peacock that sports a bunch of dirty twigs at its rump, where it used to have a tail. Democracy has collapsed into more and more democracy, and men, particularly Frenchmen, have collapsed into little, rather insignificant, rather wistful, rather nice and helplessly commonplace little fellows who rouse one’s mother-instinct and make one feel they should be tucked away in bed and left to sleep, like Rip Van Winkle, till the rest of the storms rolled by.
It’s a queer thing to sit in the Tuileries on a Sunday afternoon and watch the crowd drag through the galleries. Instead of a gay and wicked court, the weary, weary crowd, that looks as if it had nothing at heart to keep it going. As if the human creature had been dwindling and dwindling through the processes of democracy, amid the ponderous ridicule of the aristocratic setting, till soon he will dwindle right away.
Oh, those galleries. Oh, those pictures and those statues of nude, nude women: nude, nude, insistently and hopelessly nude. At last the eyes fall in absolute weariness, the moment they catch sight of a bit of pink-and-white painting, or a pair of white marble jesses. It becomes an inquisition; like being forced to go on eating pink marzipan icing. And yet there is a fat and very undistinguished bourgeois with a little beard and a fat and hopelessly petit-bourgeoise wife and awful little girl, standing in front of a huge heap of twisting marble, while he, with a goose-grease unctuous simper, strokes the marble hip of the huge marble female, and points out its niceness to his wife. She is not in the least jealous. She knows, no doubt, that her own hip and the marble hip are the only ones he will stroke without paying prices, one of which, and the last he could pay, would be the price of spunk.
It seems to me the French are just worn out. And not nearly so much with the late great war as with the pink nudities of women. The men are just worn out, making offerings on the shrine of Aphrodite in elastic garters. And the women are worn out, keeping the men up to it. The rest is all nervous exasperation.
And the table. One shouldn’t forget that other, four-legged mistress of man, more unwitherable than Cleopatra. The table. The good kindly tables of Paris, with Coquilles Saint Martin, and escar- gots and oysters and Chateaubriands and the good red wine. If they can afford it, the men sit and eat themselves pink. And no wonder. But the Aphrodite in a hard black hat opposite, when she has eaten herself also pink, is going to insist on further delights, to which somebody has got to play up. Weariness isn’t the word for it.
May the Lord deliver us from our own enjoyments, we gasp at last. And he won’t. We actually have to deliver ourselves.
One goes out again from the restaurant comfortably fed and soothed with a food and drink, to find the pale-jade sky of Paris crumbling in a wet dust of rain; motor-cars skidding till they turn clean around, and are facing south when they were going north: a boy on a bicycle coming smack, and picking himself up with his bicycle pump between his legs: and the men still fishing, as if it were a Sisyphus penalty, with long sticks fishing for invisible fishes in the Seine: and the huge buildings of the Louvre and the Tuileries standing ponderously, with their Parisian suggestion of
pyramids.
And no, in the old style of grandeur I never want to be grand.
That sort of regality, that builds itself up in piles of stone and masonry, and prides itself on living inside the monstrous heaps, once they’re built, is not for me. My wife asks why she can’t live in the Petit Palais, while she’s in Paris. Well, even if she might, she’d live alone.
I don’t believe any more in democracy. But I can’t believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside the man, and he lived in a simple wooden house. Then, the men that were grand inside themselves, like Ulysses, were the chieftains and the aristocrats by instinct and by choice. At least we’ll hope so. And the Red Indians only knew the aristocrat by instinct. The leader was leader in his own being, not because he was somebody’s son or had so much money It’s got to be so again. They say it won’t work. I say, why not? If men could once recognize the natural aristocrat when they set eyes on him, they can still. They can still choose him if they would.
But this business of dynasties is weariness. House of Valois, House of Tudor! Who would want to be a House, or a bit of a House! Let a man be a man, and damn the House business. I’m absolutely a democrat as far as that goes.
But that men are all brothers and all equal is a greater lie than the other. Some men are always aristocrats. But it doesn’t go by birth. A always contains B, but B is not contained in C.
Democracy, however, says that there is no such thing as an aristocrat. All men have two legs and one nose, ergo, they are all alike. Nosily and leggily, maybe. But otherwise, very different.
Democracy says that B is not contained in C, and neither is it contained in A. B, that is, the aristocrat, does not exist.
Now this is palpably a greater lie than the old dynastic life. Aristocracy truly does not go by birth. But it still goes. And the tradition of aristocracy will help it a lot.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1006