It would be easy enough to rise, in critical superiority, as a critic always feels he must, superior to his author, and find fault. The modernist style is sometimes irritating. Was Tenochtitlan really so wonderful? (See Adolf Bandelier’s The Golden Man.) Does not Mr. Williams mistake Poe’s agony of destructive penetration, through all the horrible bastard-Europe alluvium of his 1840 America, for the positive America itself?
But if an author rouses my deeper sympathy he can have as many faults as he likes, I don’t care. And if I disagree with him a bit, heaven save me from feeling superior just because I have a chance to snarl. I am only too thankful that Mr. Williams wrote his book.
Heat, by Isa Glenn
Heat is the title of a novel by an American authoress, Isa Glenn, a name quite unfamiliar. The cover-notice says “Miss Glenn,” but the book is, in the life sense, mature, and seems at least like the work of a married woman. I don’t think any married woman would have written Jane Eyre, nor either The Constant Nymph. In those books there is a certain naive attitude to men which would hardly survive a year of married life. But the authoress of Heat is not naive about her men. She is kindly, rather sisterly and motherly, and a trifle contemptuous. Affectionate contempt, coupled with yearning, is the note of the feeling towards the officers in the American army out there in the Philippines, and to the American fortune-hunting business men. The authoress, or rather, let us say the heroine, Charlotte, is evidently quite a good sport, from the man’s point of view. She doesn’t let you down. And so the men are quite good sports to her. They like her; and she likes them. But she feels a little contempt for them, amid her liking: and at the same time a yearning after some man who will call her his own. The men, for their part, feel very honourable and kindly towards Miss Charlotte, but they are a little afraid of her. They have to respect her just a bit too much. No man could feel tenderly possessive towards the Statue of Liberty. And Charlotte is, in the way of independence and honesty and thinking for herself, just a bit of a Statue of Liberty.
She is not so liberal, though, about the women, the wives of the officers out there in Manila. They are to her just repellent, even if not repulsive. She sees them with that utter cold antipathy with which women often regard other women — especially when the other women are elderly, physically unattractive, and full of flirtatious grimaces. To a man, there is something strange and disconcerting in the attitude of a woman like Charlotte towards other women, in particular her married seniors. She seems to be able to eye them with such complete cold understanding, that it takes one into quite another world of life. It is how a slim silvery fish in a great tank may eye the shapeless, greyish, groping-fishes that float heavily past her.
The story is laid in the Philippines, those islands belonging to the United States far away in the steaming hot Pacific, towards China: islands bought from Spain with good American dollars. A forlorn, unholily hot, lost remnant of the world belonging, really, to the age of the ichthyosaurus, not to our day.
To Manila, then, goes Charlotte, to be a school-teacher to the brown native children: a school-teacher, of course, with high missionary fervour. On the same boat, a transport, goes Tom Vernay, young lieutenant in the American army, fresh from the military school of West Point. There is also a big blond heavy American, Saulsbury, out to make a fortune in cement: modern cement buildings for the Philippines.
This is before the war: twenty years ago, or so. The whole of the first half of the book, at least, is written with the pre-war outlook. Maybe it was actually written before the war.
Charlotte, of course, loves Tom Vernay. But “loves” can mean so many things. She is thrilled by a certain purity in him, and by his intense, but vague, romantic yearning. He is an American who is “different”: he has poetry in him. So Charlotte can feel intensely practical and “wise,” hence a little protective and superior. She adores him. But at the same time, she feels a little protectively superior.
And he? At moments he adores her. At moments, he falls within her spell. He always likes her. He always, unconsciously, relies on her in the background. But! There is always a but! She is beautiful, with her fine gold hair and her girl’s boyish figure. But!
But what, then?
Well, she is not exactly romantic. Going out to be a schoolteacher, to “uplift” brown Filipinos! Going out alone, unprotected too, very capable of looking after herself, and looking after him too! Going out with a great idea that natives and niggers are as good as you are, if they are only educated up to your level. We’re all alike under the skin, only our education is unequal. So let’s level up the education. That kind of thing!
Yes! It was generous and democratic, and he approved of it in an admiring sort of way. But!
Another but! What is it this time?
This time, it is that his music simply won’t play. With the key of her fine democratic spirit she only locks up the flow of her passion tighter, locks it up dead. It needs another key altogether to release the music of his desire.
He is romantic. Manila, shut up tight and tortuous, steaming hot and smelly within the ponderous Spanish fortifications, fascinates him with the allure of the haughty and passionate past. Let it steam and smell! so long as the powerfully sweet flower, the Dama de la Noche, also perfumes the nights, and guitars tinkle in unseen patios, and the love-song scrapes and yearns and sinks in the Spanish throat. Romance! he wants romance.
And as the months pass by, and the heat soaks into his brain, and the strange reptilian moisture of heat goes through his very bones, he wants romance more and more.
Charlotte, poor thing, in a cheap, half-breed lodging-house, spending her days trying to teach insolent brown native children whose heads are rancid with coconut oil, and whose nauseating sexual knowingness seems to be born with them, as a substitute for any other kind of knowledge, does not get so much romance out of it. She is kind to her pupils, she goes to the huts of their parents, and is purely charitable. For which reason, the lizard-like natives jeer at her with a subtle but fathomless contempt. She is only the “ticher,” she is, to put it orientally, their servant, their white bondwoman. And as such they treat her, with infinite subtle disresprect, and that indescribable derision of the East.
Poor Charlotte doesn’t like it at all. A well-born, well-educated American girl, she is accustomed to all the respect in the world. It is she who feels privileged to hold a little contempt for others, not quite as clear and sure as herself. And now, these dirty little sexual natives give off silent and sometimes audible mockery at her, because she is kind instead of bullying, and clean instead of impure. Her sort of sexual cleanness makes the little brown women scream with derision: to them it is raw, gawky, incredible incompetence, if not a sort of impotence; the ridiculous female eunuch.
And there must be a grain of truth in it: for she cannot keep her Vernay in her spell. He has fallen wildly, romantically in love with a mysterious Spanish beauty. Romance, this time laid on with a trowel. The oldest, haughtiest family on the island, selling out to retire to Spain, from under the authority of these dogs of Americans! — a fat, waddling, insolent, black-moustached Spanish mother, with her rasping Castilian speech! and a daughter, ah! a Dolores! small and dusky and hidden in a mantilla! — about to be carried off to Spain to be married to some elderly Spaniard who will throw his hands in the air when he is excited! — Dolores, who has a fancy for the blue eyes and the white uniform of the American officers!
Tom Vernay has blue eyes and a white uniform, and is tall. One glimpse of the nose-tip of Dolores, from under her mantilla, does what all the intimacy with Charlotte could not do: it starts his music wildly playing. He is enamoured, and enamoured of Dolores. Through a little brother, a meeting is brought about. Then there is the daily clandestine stroll upon the unfrequented wall. In all the heat! Dolores Ayala! Ah, heaven of romance! Ah, Tom! He feels himself a Don at last! Don Tomas!
And Charlotte, very much in the background, losing her good looks and the fine brightness of her hair, going thin an
d raky and bitter in the heat and insult of the islands where already she has sweated for three years, must even now defend Vernay from the officers’ wives.
The love-affair works up. The Ayalas are about to depart. Tom Vernay must marry Dolores. Against her parents’ will, he must marry her clandestinely, in the American church. But he must resign his commission in the army first, for there will be a great scandal, and he must not expose his country to odium.
So, he resigns his commission. The Ayalas are almost ready to sail. A great buzz goes up among the officers’ wives, when the news comes out that Tom Vernay has sent in his resignation. The colonel’s wife is giving a dinner-party at the Army Club: one of the endless perspiring parties. Charlotte is there, because they want to pump her; otherwise they don’t ask her: she is merely the “ticher” of the natives, the school-teacher, shrivelling in the heat, becoming an old maid. Vernay is not present.
As the party moves from the table to go to dance, Vernay, white and strained, appears and murmurs to Charlotte that she must come to his room for a moment. Resentfully, she goes. To find — ah, to find the mousy, muffled-up Dolores there, all thrilled with herself for having escaped the family vigilance and arranged a rendezvous.
Tom Vernay, the romantic, is absolutely unequal to the occasion. Dolores, laughing, throws herself on Tom’s breast, kissing his mouth. Tom, who has honourable intentions, can’t stand it, holds her off and turns her to Charlotte — poor Charlotte! “Listen, dear, you must go home tonight with Miss Carson. And tomorrow morning we can get the chaplain to marry us.” — ”Why?” cries Dolores. “I can never marry you! Didn’t you understand?” — ”We will talk about that in the morning. Go home now with Miss Carson, like a good girl.” Dolores, instead of being the “good girl,” looks at poor Charlotte. And Dolores refuses to be taken off. “I got here so easily,” she laughed. “I can do this wicked thing often and often, before we sail for Spain. I shall have to crawl on my knees to the Stations in penance. But is it not worth it — your eyes are so blue!”
It isn’t what Dolores would say in real Spanish, but the gist is all right. Tom insists that she go home with poor Charlotte, who by no means enjoys this scene in his bedroom at the Club. He gives Dolores to understand that he has resigned his commission in order to marry her: marry her in the morning.
This is too much for Dolores. She loathes being put off. She loathes the other woman, the very school-teacher, dragged in on her. She never intended to marry him, and have heretic babies, and be carted off to the United States. Not she! But this wicked thing! Ah! But now, without a uniform, she doesn’t intend even to love him. Adios!
The faithful Charlotte smuggles her out of the Club, unseen, as she smuggled herself in. Home goes Dolores. The book, the biggest, romantic part, is finished.
The second part opens some years later. Vernay, his commission gone, has deteriorated rapidly in civilian life, till now he is a mere whisky-lapper, a derelict in smelly clothes, gone native. Charlotte, who has still been teaching school, but far away in a lonely island, returns and determines to find him, to rescue him.
She finds him: but he is beyond rescue. She finds him in a squalid native quarter, down by the ill-smelling river, in a region of broken bottles. He is vague and corrupted, and his reptilian little native wife is big with his second child. It is enough. The book ends.
Poor Charlotte! There is nothing more to be done.
What was there ever to be done? The kind of attraction he wanted in a woman she hadn’t got, and would have despised herself for having. She shuddered at the sexual little beasts of native women, working men up with snaky caresses. Ah, yes, she had to admit it, poor thing, that these native women had a power, a strange and hideous power over men. But it was a power she would loathe to possess.
And lacking it, she lost her Vernay, and went on being a faded school-teacher. We can call it the man’s fault: the man’s imbecility and perversity. But in the long run, a man will succumb to the touch of the woman who, touching him, will start his music playing. And the woman whom he esteems and even cherishes, but who, touching him, leaves him musicless and passionless, he will ultimately abandon. That is, if he gets the chance.
Gifts of Fortune, by H. M. Tomlinson
Gifts of Fortune is not a travel-book. It is not even, as the jacket describes it, a book of travel memories. Travel in this case is a stream of reflections, where images intertwine with dark thoughts and obscure emotion, and the whole flows on turbulent and deep and transitory. It is reflection, thinking back on travel and on life, and in the mirror sense, throwing back snatches of image.
Mr. Tomlinson’s own title: Gifts of Fortune: With Some Hints to Those About to Travel is a little grimly misleading. Those about to travel, in the quite commonplace sense of the word, will find very few encouraging hints in the long essay which occupies a third of this book, and is entitled, “Hints to Those About to Travel.” The chief hint they would hear would be, perhaps, the sinister suggestion that they had better stay at home.
There are travellers and travellers, as Mr. Tomlinson himself makes plain. There are scientific ones, game-shooting ones, Thomas Cook ones, thrilled ones, and bored ones. And none of these, as such, will find a single “hint” in all the sixty-six hinting pages, which will be of any use to them.
Mr. Tomlinson is travelling in retrospect, in soul rather than in the flesh, and his hints are to other souls. To travelling bodies he says little.
The sea tempts one to travel. But what is the nature of the temptation? To what are we tempted? Mr. Tomlinson gives us the hint, for his own case. “What draws us to the sea is the light over it,” etc.
There you have the key to this book. Coasts of illusion! “There are other worlds.” A man who has travelled this world in the flesh travels again, sails once more wilfully along coasts of illusion, and wilfully steers into other worlds. Take then the illusion, accept the gifts of fortune, “that passes as a shadow on the wall.”
“My journeys have all been the fault of books, though Lamb would never have called them that.” Mr. Tomlinson is a little weary of books, though he has here written another. A talk with seamen in the forecastle of a ship has meant more to him than any book. So he says. But that is how a man feels, at times. As a matter of fact, from these essays it is obvious that books like Bates’s Amazon, Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcisstis, and Melville’s Moby Dick have gone deeper into him than any talk with seamen in forecastles of steamers.
How could it be otherwise? Seamen see few coasts of illusion. They see very little of anything. And what is Mr. Tomlinson after? What are we all after, if it comes to that? It is our yearning to land on the coasts of illusion, it is our passion for other worlds that carries us on. And with Bates or Conrad or Melville we are already away over the intangible seas. As Mr. Tomlinson makes very plain, a P. & O. liner will only take us from one hotel to another. Which isn’t what we set out for, at all. That is not crossing seas.
And this is the theme of the Hints to Those. We travel in order to cross seas and land on other coasts. We do not travel in order to go from one hotel to another, and see a few side-shows. We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hes- perides, of running our boat up a little creek and landing in the Garden of Eden.
This hope is always defeated. There is no Garden of Eden, and the Hesperides never were. Yet, in our very search for them, we touch the coasts of illusion, and come into contact with other worlds.
This world remains the same, wherever we go. Every ship is a money-investment, and must be made to pay. The earth exists to be exploited, and is exploited. Malay head-hunters are now playing football instead of hunting heads. The voice of the gramophone is heard in the deepest jungle.
That is the world of disillusion. Travel, and you’ll know it. It is just as well to know it. Our world is a world of disillusion, whether it’s Siam or Kamchatka or Athabaska: the same exploitation, the same mechanical lifelessness.
But travelling throu
gh our world of disillusion until we are finally and bitterly disillusioned, we come home at last, after the long voyage, home to the rain and the dismalness of England. And how marvellously well Mr. Tomlinson gives the feeling of a ship at the end of the voyage, coming in at night, in the rain, the engines slowed down, then stopped: and in the unspeakable emptiness and blankness of silent engines and rain and nothingness, the passengers wait for the tug, staring out upon utter emptiness, from a ship that has gone suddenly quite dead! It is the end of the voyage of disillusion.
But behold, in the morning, England, England, in her own wan sun, her strange, quiet Englishmen, so silent and intent and self- resourceful! It is the coast of illusion, the other world itself.
This is the gist of the Hints to Those About to Travel. You’ll never find what you look for. There are no happy lands. But you’ll come upon coasts of illusion when you’re not expecting them.
Following the Hints come three sketches which are true travel memories, one on the Amazon, one in the Malay States, one in Borneo. They are old memories, and they gleam with illusion, with the iridescence of illusion and disillusion at once. Far off, we are in the midst of exploitation and mechanical civilization, just the same. Far off, in the elysium of a beautiful spot in Borneo, the missionary’s wife sits and weeps for home, when she sees an outgoing ship. Far off, there is the mad Rajah, whom we turned out, with all kinds of medals and number-plates on his breast, thinking himself grander than ever, though he is a beggar.
And all the same, far off, there is that other world, or one of those other worlds, that give the lie to those realities we are supposed to accept.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1032