“But they know joy, they know pure joy!” he said to himself in amazement. “This is the most laughing joy I have ever seen, pure and unmixed. I always thought flowers had brought themselves to the most beautiful perfection in nature. But these fish, these fleshy, warm-bodied fish achieve more than flowers, heading along. This is the purest achievement of joy I have seen in all life: these strong, careless fish. Men have not got in them that secret to be alive together and make one like a single laugh, yet each fish going his own gait. This is sheer joy — and men have lost it, or never accomplished is. The cleverest sportsmen in the world are owls beside these fish. And the togetherness of love is nothing to the spinning unison of dolphins playing under-sea. It would be wonderful to know joy as these fish know it. The life of the deep waters is ahead of us, it contains sheer togetherness and sheer joy. We have never got there.”
There as he leaned over the bowsprit he was mesmerized by one thing only, by joy, by joy of life, fish speeding in water with playful joy. No wonder Ocean was still mysterious, when such red hearts beat in it! No wonder man, with his tragedy, was a pale and sickly thing in comparison! What civilization will bring us to such a pitch of swift laughing togetherness, as these fish have reached?
3. THE ATLANTIC
The ship came in the night to Cuba, to Havana. When she became still, Gethin Day looked out of his port-hole and saw litde lights on upreared darkness. Havanal They went on shore next morning, through the narrow dock- streets near the wharf, to the great boulevard. It was a lovely warm morning, already early December, and the town was in the streets, going to mass, or coming out of the big, unpleasant old churches. The Englishman wandered with the two Danes for an hour or so, in the not very exciting city. Many Americans were wandering around, and nearly all wore badges of some sort. The city seemed, on the surface at least, very American. And underneath, it did not seem to have any very deep character of its own left.
The three men hired a car to drive out and about. The elder of the Danes, a man of about forty-five, spoke fluent colloquial Spanish, learned on the oil-fields of Tampico. “Tell me,” he said to the chauffeur, “why do all these americanos, these Yankees, wear badges on themselves?”
He spoke, as foreigners nearly always do speak of the Yankees, in a tone of half-spiteful jeering.
“Ah, Senor,” said the driver, with a Cuban grin. “You know they all come here to drink. They drink so much that they all get lost at night, so they all wear a badge: name, name of hotel, place where it is. Then our policemen find them in the night, turn them over as they lie on the pavement, read name, name of hotel, and place, and so they are put on a cart and carted to home. Ah, the season is only just beginning. Wait a week or two, and they will lie in the streets at night like a battle, and the police doing Red Cross work, carting them to their hotels. Ah, los americanos! They are so good. You know they own us now. Yes, they own us. They own Havana. We are a Republic owned by the Americans. Muy bien, we give them drink, they give us money. Bali!”
And he grinned with a kind of acrid indifference. He sneered at the whole show, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
The car drove out to the famous beer-gardens, where all drank beer — then to the inevitable cemetery, which almost rivalled that of New Orleans. “Every person buried in this cemetery guarantees to put up a tomb-monument costing not less than fifty-thousand dollars.” Then they drove past the new suburb of villas, springing up neat and tidy, spick-and-span, same all the world over. Then the) drove out into the country, past the old sugar hacicndas and to the hills.
And to Gethin Day it was all merely depressing and void of real interest. The Yankees owned it all. It had not much character of its own. And what character it had was the peculiar, dreary character of all America wherever it is a little abandoned. The peculiar gloom of Connecticut or New Jersey, Louisiana or Georgia, a sort of dreariness in the very bones of the land, that shows through immediately the human effort sinks. How quickly the gloom and the inner dreariness of Cuba must have affected the spirit of the Con- quistadores, even Columbus!
They drove back to town and ate a really good meal, and watched a stout American couple, apparently man and wife, lunching with a bottle of champagne, a bottle of hock, and a bottle of Burgundy for the two of them, and apparently drinking them all at once. It made one’s head reel.
The bright, sunny afternoon they spent on the esplanade by the sea. There the great hotels were still shut. But they had, so to speak, half an eye open: a tea-room going, for example.
And Day thought again, how tedious the little day can be! How difficult to spend even one Sunday looking at a city like Havana, even if one has spent the morning driving into the country. The infinite tedium of looking at things! the infinite boredom of things anyhow. Only the rippling, bright, pale-blue sea, and the old fort, gave one the feeling of life. The rest, the great esplanade, the great boulevard, the great hotels, all seemed what they were, dead, dried concrete, concrete, dried deadness.
Everybody was thankful to be back on the ship for dinner, in the dark loneliness of the wharves. See Naples and die. Go seeing any place, and you’ll be half dead of exhaustion and tedium by dinner time.
So! good-bye, Havana! The engines were going before breakfast time. It was a bright blue morning. Wharves and harbour slid past, the high bows moved backwards. Then the ship deliberately turned her back on Cuba and the sombre shore, and began to move north, through the blue day, which passed like a sleep. They were moving now into wide space.
The next morning they woke to greyness, grey low sky, and hideous low grey water, and a still air. Sandwiched between two grey- nesses, the long, wicked old ship sped on, as unto death.
“What has happened?” Day asked of one of the officers.
“We have come north, to get into the current running east. We come north about the latitude of New York, then we run due east with the stream.”
“What a wicked shame!”
And indeed it was. The sun was gone, the blueness was gone, life was gone. The Atlantic was like a cemetery, an endless, infinite cemetery of greyness, where the bright, lost world of Atlantis is buried. It was December, grey, dark December on a waste of ugly, dead-grey water, under a dead-grey sky.
And so they ran into a swell, a long swell whose oily, sickly waves seemed hundreds of miles long, and travelling in the same direction as the ship’s course. The narrow cigar of a ship heaved up the up- slope with a nauseating heave, up, up, up, till she righted for a second sickeningly on the top, then tilted, and her screw raced like a dentist’s burr in a hollow tooth. Then down she slid, down the long, shivering downslope, leaving all her guts behind her, and the guts of all the passengers too. In an hour, everybody was deathly white, and sicklily grinning, thinking it a sort of joke that would soon be over. Then everybody disappeared, and the game went on: up, up, up, heavingly up, till a pause, ahl — then burr-rr-rr! as the screw came out of water and shattered every nerve. Then whoo- ooshl the long and awful downrush, leaving the entrails behind.
She was like a plague-ship, everybody disappeared, stewards and everybody. Gethin Day felt as if he had taken poison: and he slept — slept, slept, slept, and yet was all the time aware of the ghastly motion — up, up, up, heavingly up, then ah! one moment, followed by the shattering burr-rr-rr! and the unspeakable ghaslliness of the downhill slither, where death seemed inside the entrails, and water chattered like the after-death. He was aware of the hour-long moaning, moaning of the Spanish doctor’s fat, pale Mexican wife, two cabins away. It went on for ever. Everything went on for ever. Everything was like this for ever, for ever. And he slept, slept, slept, for thirty hours, yet knowing it all, registering just the endless repetition of the motion, the ship’s loud squeaking and chirruping, and the ceaseless moaning of the woman.
Suddenly at tea-time the second day he felt better. He got up. The “Ship was empty. A ghastly steward gave him a ghastly cup of tea, then disappeared. He dozed again, but came to dinner.
The third evening it began to rain, and the motion was subsiding. They were running out of the swell. But it was an experience to remember.
ACCUMULATED MAIL
If there is one thing I don’t look forward to it’s my mail.
Look out! Look out! Look out!
Look out! The postman comes!
His double knocking makes us start,
It rouses echoes in the heart,
It wakens expectation, and hope and agitation, etc., etc.
So we used to sing, in school.
Now, the postman is no knocker. He pitches the mail-bag into a box on a tree, and kicks his horse forward.
And when one has been away, and a heap of letters and printed stuff slithers out under one’s eyes, there is neither hope nor expectation in the heart, but only repulsion, as if it were something nauseous one had to eat.
Business letters — all rather dreary. Bank letters, with the nasty green used-up checks, and a dwindling small balance. Family letters: We are so disappointed you are not coming to England. We wanted you to see the baby, he is so bonny: the new house, it is awfully nice: the show of the daffodils and crocuses down the garden. Friends’ letters: The winter has been very trying. And then the unknown correspondents. They are the worst. ... If you saw my little blue-eyed darling, you could not refuse her anything — not even an autograph. . . . The high-school students somewhere in Massachusetts or in Maryland are in the habit of choosing by name some unknown man, whom they accept as a sort of guide. A group has chosen me — will I send them a letter of encouragement or of help in the battle of life? Well, I would willingly, but what on earth am I to say to them? My dear young people: I daren’t advise you to do as I do, for it’s no fun, writing unpopular books. And I won’t advise you, for your own sakes, to do as I say. For in details I’m sure I’m wrong. My dear young people, perhaps I need your encouragement more than you need mine. . . . Well, that’s no message!
Then there’s the letter signed “A Mother” — from Lenton, Nottingham: telling me she has been reading Sons~and Lovers, and is there not misery enough in Nottingham (my home town) without my indicating where vice can be found, and (to cut short) how it can be practised? She saw a young woman reading Sons and Lovers, but was successful in preventing her from finishing the book. And the book was so well written, it was a pity the author could not have kept it clean. “As it is, although so interesting, it cannot be mentioned in polite society.” Signed “A Mother.” (Let us hope the young woman who was saved from finishing Soils and Lovers may also be saved from becoming, in her turn, A Motherl)
Then the letter from some gentleman in New York beginning: I am afraid you may consider this letter an impertinence. If he was afraid, then what colossal impertinence to carry on to two sheets, and then post his impudence to me. The substance was: I should like to know, in the controversy between you and Norman Douglas (I didn’t know myself that there was a controversy), how it was the Magnus manuscript came into your hands, and you came to publish it, when clearly it was left to Douglas? In this case, why should you be making a lot of money out of another man’s work? — Of course, I know it is your Introduction which sells the book. Magnus’s manuscript is trash, and not worth reading. Still, for the satisfaction of myself and many of my readers, I wish you could make it clear how you come to be profiting by a work that is not your own.
Apparently this gentleman’s sense of his own impertinence only drove him deeper in. He has obviously read neither Magnus’s work nor my Introduction — else he would plainly have seen that this MS. was detained by Magnus’s creditors, at his death, and handed by them to me, in the poor hope of recovering some of the money lost with that little adventurer. Moreover, if I wrote the only part of the book that is worth reading (/ don’t say so) — the only part for which people buy the book (they’re not my words) — then it is my work they buyl This out of my genteel correspondent’s own mouth — because I do not consider Magnus’s work trash. Finally, if I get half proceeds for a book of which practically half was written by me and the other half sells on my account, who in heaven’s name is going to be impertinent to me? Nobody, without a kick in the pants. As for Douglas, if he could have paid the dead man’s debts, he might have “executed” the dead man’s literary works to his heart’s content. Why doesn’t he do something with the rest of the remains? Was this poor Foreign Legion MS. the only egg in the nest? Anyhow, let us hope that those particular debts for which this MS. was detained, will now be paid. And R.I.P. Anyhow, I shan’t be a rich man on the half profits.
But this is not all my precious mail. . . . From a London editor and a friend (soi-disant): Perhaps you would understand other people better if you did not think that you were always right. How one learns things about oneself! Or is it really about the other person? I always find that my critics pretending to criticize me, are analysing themselves. My own private opinion is that I have been, as fai as people go, almost every time wrong! Anyhow, my desire to “understand other people better” is turning to dread of finding out any more about them. This “friend” goes on to say, will I ask my literary agent to let him have some articles of mine at a considerably cheaper figure than the agent puts on them?
It is not done yet. There is Mr. Muir’s article about me in the Nation. Never did I feel so baffled, confronting myself in my worst moments, as I feel when I read this “elucidation” of myself. I hope it isn’t my fault that Mr. Muir plays such havoc between two stools. I think I read that he is a young man, and younger critic. It seems a pity he hasn’t “A Mother” to take the books from him before he can do himself any more harm. Truly, I don’t want him to read them. “There remain his gifts, splendid in their imperfection,” — this is Mr. Muir about me — ”thrown recklessly into a dozen books, fulfilling themselves in none. His chief title to greatness is that he has brought a new mode of seeing into literature, a new beauty which is also one of the oldest things in the world. It is the beauty of the ancient instinctive life which civilized man has almost forgotten. Mr. Lawrence has picked up a thread of life left behind by mankind; and at some time it will be woven in with the others, making human life more complete, as all art tends to. . . . Life has come to him fresh from the minting at a time when it seemed to everyone soiled and banal. He has many faults, and many of these are wilful. He has not fulfilled the promise shown in Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. He has not submitted himself to any discipline. The will (in Mr. Lawrence’s characters) is not merely weak and inarticulate, it is in abeyance; it does not come into action. To this tremendous extent the tragedy in Mr. Lawrence’s novels fails in significance. We remember the scenes in his novels; we forget the names of his men and women. We should not know any of them if we met them in the street, as we should know Anna Karenina, or Crevel, or Soames Forsyte. . . .” (Who is Crevel?)
Now listen, you, Mr. Muir, and my dear readers. You read me for your own sakes, not for mine. You do me no favour by reading me. I am not indebted to you in the least if you spend two dollars on a book. You do it entirely for your own delectation. Spend the dollars on chewing-gum, it keeps the mouth busy and doesn’t fly to the brain. I shall live just as blithly, unbought and unsold. When you buy chewing-gum, do you feel you acquire divine rights over the mind and soul of Mr. Wrigley? If you do, it’s like your impudence. Therefore get it out of your heads that you are throned aloft 4ike the gods, called upon to utter divine judgment. Your lofty seats, after all, are more like tall baby-chairs than thrones of the gods of judgment. . . . But here goes, for an answer.
1. I have lunched with Mr. Banality, and I’m sure I should know him if I met him in the street. ... Is that my fault, or his?
— Alas, that I should recognize people in the street, by their noses bonnets, or beauty. I don’t care about their noses, bonnets, or beauty. Does nothing exist beyond that which is recognizable in the street? — How does my cat recognize me in the dark? — Ugh, thank God there are more and other sorts of vision than the kodak sort which Mr. Muir esteems above all others.
2. “The will is not merely weak and inarticulate, it is in abeyance.” — Ah, my dear Mr. Muir, the will of the modern young gentleman may not be in your opinion weak and inarticulate, but certainly it is as mechanical as a Ford car engine. To this extent is the tragedy of modern young men insignificant. Oh, you little gods in the machine, stop the engine for a bit, do!
3. “He has not submitted himself to any discipline.” — Try, Mr. Muir et al., putting your little iron will into abeyance for one hour daily, and see if it doesn’t need a harder discipline than this doing of your “daily dozen” and all your other mechanical repetitions. Believe me, today, the little god in a Ford machine cannot get at the thing worth having, not even with the most praiseworthy little engine of a will.
4. “He has not fulfilled the promise of Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow.” — Just after The Rainbow was published, the most eminent figure in English letters told me to my nose that this work was a failure. Now, after ten years, Mr. Muir finds it “promising.” Go ahead, O Youth. But whatever promise you read into The Rainbow, remember it’s like the little boy who “promised” his mother to be good if she’d “promise” to take him to the pantomime. I promise nothing, inside or out of The Rainbow.
5. “Life has come to him fresh from the minting at a time when it seemed to everyone stale and banal.” — Come! Come! Mr. Muir! With all that “spirit” of yours, and all that “intellect,” and with all that “will,” and all that “discipline,” do you dare to confess that (I suppose you lump yourself in among everyone) life seemed to you stale and banal? — If so, something must be badly wrong with you and your psychic equipment, and Mr. Lawrence wouldn’t be in your shoes for all the money and the “cleverness” in the world.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1073