It was usually the same. He started by holding himself aloof, then gradually he let himself get mixed in, and then he had revulsions.
(Lawrence’s alter-ego Richard Somers, painfully aware of the trajectory all his relationships follow)
Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a far-awayness…
(One of many passages which vividly convey the strangeness of the Australian landscape)
In his critical biography of Lawrence, Anthony Burgess calls ‘Kangaroo’ ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It is a strange book, long and rambling, full of mad obsessions but also wonderful delights. I’d say it’s made up of about five elements.
Plot There’s a sort of plot in the sense that things happen, but that’s the least important element.
Dialogue There’s a lot of dialogue and conversations, which I think Lawrence was really bad at. Almost any other novelist I can think of writes better dialogue. Every Lawrence character sounds like Lawrence and their verbal duels are often painfully contrived and sometimes incomprehensible.
Australia There are lots of descriptions of Australia, the Australian countryside, sky, bush, towns and people, which are truly inspired, wonderfully vivid, put you right there, magical.
Politics At one point the novel rotates around the figure of a would-be political revolutionary, Ben Cooley, who runs a secret organisation of political radicals and whose codename is Kangaroo which gives the novel its title. With this figure and his acolyte Jack Callcott, Richard Lovat Somers, the character who is transparently Lawrence’s avatar within the novel, has numerous conversations on Big Topics of the Day. These include:
- the meaning of life (growth and change)
- the nature of love (mainly between men; the famous Australian mateship: ‘Men fight better when they’ve got a mate. They’ll stand anything when they’ve got a mate,’ says Jack)
- contemporary politics (static and inadequate)
These are all beguiling and the political discussions shed an oblique light on the history of the day (the Bolsheviks had been in power less than five years, in May 1922 Mussolini was barely heard of, hadn’t undertaken his famous march on Rome (October 1922)). Parallel to Cooley, is the figure of Willie Struthers, head of the Labour movement (described by the papers as communist, and he says he wants to establish a soviet of workers). Theoretically, Somers is caught in the force field between these two opposing political standpoints although, in practice, Kangaroo, the more prominent figure, has a weirdly under-developed ideology which mostly consists of vague spiritual uplift about love.
Portrait of a marriage The central couple, Richard Lovat Somers and his wife Harriet, are transparently based on Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. On a gossipy level, it’s fascinating to read such vivid descriptions of their humdrum domestic life, with plumping of cushions and laying of the venerable table cloth they’ve carried through all their travels. I was interested in the precise content of their meals, something which was irritatingly absent from all the previous Lawrence novels I’d read (‘They had tea and toast and quince jam’). On a more meaningful level, it’s fun to watch the interplay between the married couple, in particular the way the down-to-earth Harriet-Frieda is always puncturing Lovat-Lawrence’s pretensions, moods and high-falutin’ rhetoric:
‘You’re never happy unless you’re upsetting somebody’s apple-cart.’
‘Ah, why was I ever pestered with such a viperish husband as you!’
‘I’ve got one thing to tell you. Without me you’d be nowhere, you’d be nothing, you’d not be that,’ and she snapped her fingers under his nose.
‘I feel it’s my fate to go now.”
‘Ha, your fate!’ said Harriet. ‘It’s always your fate with you. If it was me it would be my foolish restlessness.’ (p.317)
‘It’s really shameful. Men are like impish children — you daren’t leave them together for a minute.’ (p.322)
‘He’s always breaking his heart over something—anything except me. To me he’s a nether millstone.’ (p.383)
So he had preached at her, like a dog barking, barking senselessly. And oh, how it had annoyed her. (p.387)
Self portrait It’s obvious from the start that the character of Richard Lovat Somers contains a good deal of introspective description of Lawrence himself but it’s still a big surprise when the second half of the book blossoms into a massive act of self revelation. The most important thing about the character is his wish to be utterly alone, solitary, not enmeshed in anyone else’s business. In fact the central theme or drama of the novel really derives from his inner conflict, between the invitation to join the secret organisation, which Jack and Cooley offer him and his great temptation to do so, to act in the world, to make a difference – conflicting with his profound need to keep himself pure, aloof, intact and separate. It’s only in the long revelatory chapter, ‘Nightmare’, that describes in unsparing detail the humiliations Lawrence was subjected to during the First World War, that the book completely changes tone and we realise the traumatic experiences which lie behind Lawrence’s wish to flee, to fly, to leave behind cloying, wretched, bullying humanity.
(Incidentally, the initials RLS seem like a deliberate homage to that other great British exile to the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson.)
Types of power
Alternatively, seen from a different angle, you could say it is a novel about power, about different types of power exercised in different arenas, from the individual, through relationships, to the political and then onto the geographical. From this point of view, the novel contains extended meditations on:
- the sources of life and agency in the individual, using Somers’ many ponderings on his own nature and wish for self control, mixed with…
- the power of change, evolution, the dying off of the old, birth of the new, as outlined by Cooley
- power in marriage, with chapter 9 being entirely dedicated to a fanciful, metaphor-laden analysis of Lawrence and Frieda’s marriage (marriage compared, at length, and with heavy humour, to an ocean-going vessel, ‘the good ship Harriet and Lovat)
- mateship i.e the very powerful bond between men, much deeper than the love between men and women, the love-hate relationship with Jack Callcott and then the really deep attraction-repulsion with Cooley – a subject Lawrence writes obsessively about in ‘Women in Love’, ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and here
- the sources of political power, exemplified in two figures:
- Ben Cooley, with his quasi-military, proto-fascist organisation of ex-servicemen, the Diggers
- Willie Struthers who, as far as I could tell, runs New South Wales’ socialist party
- chapter 11 is devoted to a detailed comparison between the two men and their philosophies of life, as explained in extended conversations with Somers, who compares Cooley to Napoleon and Struthers to Lenin
- the power of the British state as described at length in the long Nightmare chapter listing the suspicions, interrogations, searches and stripping Lawrence was subjected to by the agents of the wartime England he came to loathe
- the power of the land – behind puny human worries likes the landscape of Australia which Lawrence, like so many visitors to it, experiences as profoundly old, ancient, secret and impenetrable
Richard Aldington’s factual introduction
Richard Aldington was a poet and biographer, who knew Lawrence well during the latter’s London phase at the end of the Great War. Years later he contributed short introductions to the Penguin editions of the classic novels. In the introduction to ‘Kangaroo’ he gives the timeline behind the novel’s composition:
Lawrence and Frieda were living on Sicily when, at the end of 1921, they received an invitation from Mabel Dodge Luhan to join her artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico, in the south-western United States. Rather than cross the Atlantic they decided to go the long way, taking ship in February 1922 across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, stopping at Ceylon in March and staying just long enough not to like the tropics.
The arrived in Perth at the start of May 1922. On 15 May Lawrence wrote a letter saying they’d been staying for a fortnight at a place called Darlington, 15 miles south of Perth. Here he met local writer Mollie Skinner who showed him a manuscript of a novel she’d written. Lawrence recognised its amateur nature but was taken by its detailed knowledge of Australian flora, fauna and landscape and he agreed to help rewrite it. The result was the novel ‘The Boy in the Bush’, credited to both of them and part of Lawrence’s official oeuvre.
After a fortnight or so they took a boat round the coast to Sydney, arriving 26 May. Lawrence stayed here just two days, before removing to a rented cottage in the small mining town of Thirroul 30 miles south of Sydney. On June 3 he wrote a letter saying he’d commenced writing a new novel. Letters written to various correspondents throughout June indicate that he was racing on with it. By 3 July he wrote in his diary that he’d nearly finished it. In other words, he wrote some 150,000 words in a month!
Aldington makes the point that Lawrence’s great novels of the 1910s, like ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’, were worked over and over, written and rewritten, to create a greater and greater sense of depth and primordial power. By stark contrast, the novels of the 1920s like ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and ‘Kangaroo’ were what Aldington calls ‘improvisations’. Lawrence set off without any idea where he was going to end and busked it from chapter to chapter. They eventually have endings and a narrative arc of a sort but never acquire the primordial depth of the classics. Lawrence was in such a hurry that he delivered manuscripts of both novels to the printers without corrections, leading to errors which have been reproduced down the years.
All this sounds very ramshackle, almost amateurish and yet Aldington emphasises the benefits of the improvisation approach, namely that Lawrence wrote with tremendous spontaneity, giving the texts what he calls ‘magical freshness and immediacy’. And, as Anthony Burgess points out more than once in his critical biography of Lawrence, it often feels like you are in the workshop, watching Lawrence hammer out his phrases, sentences, paragraphs and pages. Lawrence’s prose is not so much to be analysed as jumped aboard and ridden.
What is weak about the novel in terms of character and structure is compensated for, so the argument goes, by the extraordinary vividness of the descriptions and the general atmosphere of Australia, which Lawrence captured with uncanny skill, seeing as he was there for such a short period of time.
The Australian landscape
The novel includes countless descriptions of Australia, its eerie loneliness and ‘manlessness’. Here’s a sample, describing what the protagonist Richard Lovat Somers sees looking out the window of a train he’s travelling in.
That curious sombreness of Australia, the sense of oldness, with the forms all worn down low and blunt, squat. The squat-seeming earth. And then they ran at last into real country rather rocky, dark old rocks, and sombre bush with its different pale-stemmed dull-leaved gum-trees standing graceful, and various healthy looking undergrowth, and great spikey things like zuccas. As they turned south they saw tree-ferns standing on one knobbly leg among the gums, and among the rocks ordinary ferns and small bushes spreading in glades and up sharp hill-slopes. It was virgin bush, and as if unvisited, lost, sombre, with plenty of space, yet spreading grey for miles and miles, in a hollow towards the west. Far in the west, the sky having suddenly cleared, they saw the magical range of the Blue Mountains. And all this hoary space of bush between. The strange, as it were, invisible beauty of Australia, which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range of our white vision. You feel you can’t see — as if your eyes hadn’t the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape. For the landscape is so unimpressive, like a face with little or no features, a dark face. It is so aboriginal, out of our ken, and it hangs back so aloof. Somers always felt he looked at it through a cleft in the atmosphere; as one looks at one of the ugly-faced, distorted aborigines with his wonderful dark eyes that have such a incomprehensible ancient shine in them, across gulfs of unbridged centuries.
And captures the shanty shallowness of Australian towns, in this case a place named Wolloona.
It was a wonderful Main Street, and, thank heaven, out of the wind. There were several large but rather scaring brown hotels, with balconies all round: there was a yellow stucco church with a red-painted tin steeple, like a weird toy: there were high roofs and low roofs, all corrugated iron: and you came to an opening, and there, behold, were one or two forlorn bungalows inside their wooden palings, and then the void. The naked bush, sinking in a hollow to a sort of marsh, and then down the coast some sort of ‘works’, brick-works or something, smoking. All as if it had tumbled haphazard off the pantechnicon of civilisation as it dragged round the edges of this wild land, and there lay, busy but not rooted in. As if none of the houses had any foundations.
Bright the sun, the air of marvellous clarity, tall stalks of cabbage palms rising in the hollow, and far off, tufted gum trees against a perfectly new sky, the tufts at the end of wire branches. And farther off, blue, blue hills. In the Main Street, large and expensive motor-cars and women in fuzzy fur coats; long, quiescent Australian men in tired-out-looking navy blue suits trotting on brown ponies, with a carpet-bag in one hand, doing the shopping; girls in very much-made hats, also flirtily shopping; three boys with big, magnificent bare legs, lying in a sunny corner in the dust; a lonely white pony hitched as if forever to a post at a street-corner.
And Harriet loves the half-built, half-abandoned, unfinished feel of these places.
Synopsis
The novel opens with Richard Lovat Somers and his wife, Harriet in Sydney, Australia. They are getting a hansom cab from their temporary digs to a house he’s rented for three months at number 51 Murdoch Street. Somers is transparently Lawrence (a writer and essayist), Harriet is Frieda. They are both dismayed that the house has a vulgar name, Torestin i.e. to-rest-in. Their neighbours are Jack Callcott and wife, Victoria.
Somers feels a long way from England and is madly homesick. He’s bursting with observations about Australians, the most salient of which is that the strong rule which is required in England seems quite unnecessary here. There is more genuine equality.
Somers for the first time felt himself immersed in real democracy — in spite of all disparity in wealth. The instinct of the place was absolutely and flatly democratic, à terre democratic. Demos was here his own master, undisputed, and therefore quite calm about it.
These thoughts about the political and social setup of Australia establish the importance of politics which is what the novel turns out to be about.
Harriet and Richard take a trip to Manly, one of Sydney’s bathing suburbs where they admire the youth sunbathing and splashing in the sea, before bumping into Jack and Victoria who invite them for tea with the latter’s sister and her husband, William James Trewhella (Cornish name). The Callcotts give the Somers a lift back to the house in their car, and Victoria and Harriet knock up a high tea.
Weeks pass. The couple get friendly. The woman play music – Victoria plays the piano and Harriet sings – while the men play chess, Jack treating it more like checkers. One night Jack Callcott buttonholes Somers about politics: does he want to see the power of capital smashed? So I think he’s some kind of socialist.
After a series of conversations establishing trust between the two men, Jack reveals that he’s part of a secret political organisation. They are concerned about the future of Australia. They want to overthrow the old rotten democracy and establish rule by strong men, men who know how to give and obey orders. Most of them are servicemen who served in the Great War, whose slang name is ‘diggers’. They are divided into small groups (Diggers’ clubs) and the overall leader is a man nicknamed Kangaroo = Benjamin ‘Ben’ Cooley:
Eyes set close together behind his pince-nez: and his body was stout but firm. He was a man of forty or so, hard to tell, swarthy, with short-cropped dark hair and a smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost shy body. He leaned forward in his walk, and seemed as if his hands didn’t quite belong to him. But he shook hands with a firm grip. He was really tall, but his way of dropping his head, and his sloping shoulders, took away from his height.
Somers has a bee in his bonnet that Cooley is Jewish.
Surely, thought Somers, it is Jewish blood. The very best that is in the Jewish blood: a faculty for pure disinterestedness, and warm, physically warm love, that seems to make the corpuscles of the blood glow. And after the smile his face went stupid and kangaroo-like, pendulous, with the eyes close together above the long, drooping nose. But the shape of the head was very beautiful, small, light, and fine. The man had surely Jewish blood. And he was almost purely kind, essential kindliness, embodied in an ancient, unscrupulous shrewdness. He was so shrewd, so clever. And with a rogue or a mean man, absolutely unscrupulous. But for any human being who showed himself sincere and vulnerable, his heart was pure in kindness. An extraordinary man. This pure kindliness had something Jehovah-like in it.
Cooley is characterised by a rarified type of love for his fellow men. Later Lawrence puts these words into Cooley’s mouth:
‘You are hopelessly facile, Lovat,’ he said gently. ‘In the first place, the greatest danger to the world to-day is anarchy, not bolshevism. It is anarchy and unrule that are coming on us — and that is what I, as an order-loving Jew and one of the half-chosen people, do not want. I want one central principle in the world: the principle of love, the maximum of individual liberty, the minimum of human distress…’ (p.230)
Cooley is a deep thinker, with the charisma of a prophet. His basic premise is to do with the life force. Life continually changes. Here he is explaining it to Somers:
‘The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations. It is a subtle and conflicting urge away from the thing we are. And there lies the pain. Because man builds himself in to his old house of life, builds his own blood into the roads he lays down, and to break from the old way, and to change his house of life, is almost like tearing him to pieces.’
Which is why people need help, need a leader who is like a father to help them into the new way of living.
‘Man needs to be reassured and suggested into his new issues. And he needs to be relieved from this terrible responsibility of governing himself when he doesn’t know what he wants, and has no aim towards which to govern himself. Man again needs a father — not a friend or a brother sufferer, a suffering Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his authority in the name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against anti-life. I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life, and to shelter mankind from the madness and the evil of anti-life.’
He is against any belief or form being set in stone. Beliefs must change and evolve, have their day and die. Those who try to trap, fix and petrify it are the enemies of life.
‘Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers — look at those hibiscus — they don’t want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned into stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy. But they won’t. They will quietly, gently wither. And I love them for it. And so should all creeds, all gods, quietly and gently curl up and wither as their evening approaches. That is the only way of true holiness, in my opinion… There is a principle of evil. The principle of resistance. Malignant resistance to the life principle.’
Fear of foreigners / xenophobia
BUT it isn’t all lovely veneration of the life force. On a more human, social level, Jack Callcott (not Cooley) also expresses fear about Australia’s future, the very specific fear of being overrun by non-white races. I’m going to quote at length so you get the full tone of xenophobia, of the paranoia about being invaded and conquered and enslaved by dark-skinned foreigners, which really fuels Jack’s politics. Here he is explaining it all to Somers who, caught up in this sudden impassioned friendship with Callcott, enthusiastically agrees:
‘Look at Australia. Absolutely fermenting rotten with politicians and the will of the people. Look at the country — going rottener every day, like an old pear.’
‘All the democratic world the same.’
‘Of course it’s the same. And you may well say Australian soil is waiting to be watered with blood. It’s waiting to be watered with our blood, once England’s got too soft to help herself, let alone us, and the Japs come down this way. They’d squash us like a soft pear.’
‘I think it’s quite likely.’
‘What?’
‘Likely.’
‘It’s pretty well a certainty. And would you blame them? If you was thirsty, wouldn’t you pick a ripe pear if it hung on nobody’s tree? Why, of course you would. And who’d blame you.’
‘Blame myself if I didn’t,’ said Somers.
‘And then their coloured labour. I tell you, this country’s too far from Europe to risk it. They’ll swallow us. As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’
‘Heaven knows.’
‘There’ll be the Labour Party, the Socialists, uniting with the workers of the world. They’ll be the workers, if ever it comes to it. Those black and yellow people’ll make ’em work — not half. It isn’t one side only that can keep slaves. Why, the fools, the coloured races don’t have any feeling for liberty. They only think you’re a fool when you give it to them, and if they got a chance, they’d drive you out to work in gangs, and fairly laugh at you. All this world’s-worker business is simply playing their game.’
‘Of course,’ said Somers. ‘What is Indian Nationalism but a strong bid for power — for tyranny. The Brahmins want their old absolute caste-power — the most absolute tyranny — back again, and the Mahommedans want their military tyranny. That’s what they are lusting for — to wield the rod again. Slavery for millions. Japan the same. And China, in part, the same. The niggers the same. The real sense of liberty only goes with white blood. And the ideal of democratic liberty is an exploded ideal. You’ve got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can’t get it out of any further democracy.’
‘There!’ said Jack. ‘That’s what I mean. We s’ll be wiped out, wiped out. And we know it. Look here, as man to man, you and me here: if you were an Australian, wouldn’t you do something if you could do something?’
‘I would.’
‘Whether you got shot or whether you didn’t! We went to France to get ourselves shot, for something that didn’t touch us very close either. Then why shouldn’t we run a bit of risk for what does touch us very close. Why, you know, with things as they are, I don’t want Victoria and me to have any children. I’d a jolly sight rather not — and I’ll watch it too.’
‘Same with me,’ yelled Somers.
Jack had come closer to him, and was now holding him by the arm.
‘What’s a man’s life for, anyhow? Is it just to save up like rotten pears on a shelf, in the hopes that one day it’ll rot into a pink canary or something of that?’
‘No,’ said Somers.
‘What we want in Australia,’ said Jack, ‘isn’t a statesman, not yet. It’s a set of chaps with some guts in them, who’ll obey orders when they find a man who’ll give the orders.’
Well, there’s the logic of the argument, Jack’s character and Somers’s enthusiastic agreement, in a nutshell.
Somers’ conflicted attitude
Jack of course had to talk about it to the people there, while Somers hung back and tried to make himself invisible, as he always did when there were strange onlookers.
For although, when he’s with him, Somers enthusiastically agrees with everything Jack says, and he is very swayed by Cooley’s talk about new forms of life, as soon as he’s alone again, Somers reverts to his core attitude of singleness, aloofness, separation.
He had all his life had this craving for an absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood-brother. All his life he had secretly grieved over his friendlessness. And now at last, when it really offered… he didn’t want it, and he realised that in his innermost soul he had never wanted it.
This is expressed over and over, scores of times. Here he is reflecting on a meeting with Cooley, as he looks out over the ocean. I’ll give an extended quote because it exemplifies 1) Somers’ deep wish for isolated self-sufficiency but also 2) is a good example of Lawrence’s brilliant nature description, which also exemplifies 3) his habit of repetition, of beating out and varying and exploring a handful of key words in varying combinations.
These days Somers, too, was filled with fury. As for loving mankind, or having a fire of love in his heart, it was all rot. He felt almost fierily cold. He liked the sea, the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning. He went out on to the low flat rocks at low tide, skirting the deep pock-holes that were full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells and tiny, crimson anemones. Strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock-floor, all wet and sea-savage. And standing at the edge looking at the waves rather terrifying rolling at him, where he stood low and exposed, far out from the sand-banks, and as he watched the gannets gleaming white, then falling with a splash like white sky-arrows into the waves, he wished as he had never wished before that he could be cold, as sea-things are cold, and murderously fierce. To have oneself exultantly ice-cold, not one spark of this wretched warm flesh left, and to have all the terrific, icy energy of a fish. To surge with that cold exultance and passion of a sea thing! Now he understood the yearning in the seal-woman’s croon, as she went back to the sea, leaving her husband and her children of warm flesh. No more cloying warmth. No more of this horrible stuffy heat of human beings. To be an isolated swift fish in the big seas, that are bigger than the earth; fierce with cold, cold life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created to clog us.
These were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and calling were invented. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, as if it had relapsed away from speech altogether.
He did not care a straw what Kangaroo said or felt, or what anybody said or felt, even himself. He had no feelings, and speech had gone out of him. He wanted to be cold, cold, and alone like a single fish, with no feeling in his heart at all except a certain icy exultance and wild, fish-like rapacity. ‘Homo sum!’ All right. Who sets a limit to what a man is? Man is also a fierce and fish-cold devil, in his hour, filled with cold fury of desire to get away from the cloy of human life altogether, not into death, but into that icily self-sufficient vigour of a fish. (p.140)
The ‘ice-fiery, fish-burning’ sea. Wow. There’s a plot but who cares, really. One way of reading Lawrence’s novels is to regard these psycho-descriptive as oases in the deserts of dialogue and to stop and read and savour them like beautiful pictures. Take, for example, the brilliant description of Somers stripping off on the beach on a grey louring day as it starts to rain and running into the icy cold sea in the rain and exulting, then returning to the shore, showering and, full of life, making love to Harriet (pages 162 to 164). Life! To be alive! So many paragraphs you want to stop and savour.
He left off kicking himself, and went down to the shore to get away from himself. After all, he knew the endless water would soon make him forget. It had a language which spoke utterly without concern of him, and this utter unconcern gradually soothed him of himself and his world. He began to forget. (p.171)
All E.M. Forster’s novels are littered with gaseous paragraphs invoking the Greek gods which I found bloviated and irritating. I learned to skip them in order to focus on the dialogue and what happens next. The experience with Lawrence is the exact opposite: I tended to skim the badly written dialogue and didn’t much care what happened next, but found myself mesmerised by his descriptions of the sky, sunset, the bush and, most of all, the unceasing sea.
The sky was tufted with cloud, and in the afternoon veils of rain swept here and there across the sea, in a changing wind. But then it cleared again, and Somers and Harriet walked along the sands, watching the blue sky mirror purple and the white clouds mirror warm on the wet sand. The sea talked and talked all the time, in its disintegrative, elemental language. And at last it talked its way into Somers’ soul, and he forgot the world again, the babel. The simplicity came back, and with it the inward peace. (p.172)
Harriet’s attitude
Harriet, meanwhile, and probably despite Lawrence’s intentions, is a great comic character, appalled by all this nonsense, and continually pouring cold water on Somers’ pretensions. Here’s one from hundreds of examples of her down-to-earth comments on his wild opinions.
It always seems to me,’ said Somers, that somebody will have to water Australia with their blood before it’s a real man’s country. The soil, the very plants seem to be waiting for it.’
‘You’ve got a lurid imagination, my dear man,’ said Jack.
‘Yes, he has,’ said Harriet. ‘He’s always so extreme.’
And Somers knows this about himself. He knows he’s continually jumping in the deep end. When, at the start of chapter 8, he vows not to take everything so damn seriously, to lighten up and not be so judgemental, we and Harriet know it can’t last. Somers (and Lawrence) are made to over-react, sometimes into absurd beliefs and statements:
Some men have to be bombs, to explode and make breaches in the walls that shut life in! (p.184)
But sometimes into perceptions and descriptions of breath-taking vividness.
More plot
After some weeks at Torestin, Somers and Harriet move to another house, at a place some distance (a train ride) south of Sydney called Mullumbimby. The cottage is right on the coast, with a sweep of beach washed by breakers and a jetty in the distance. The house is called Coo-Ee and they love it. Lots of warm domestic details.
Here Jack and Victoria come to visit them and from here Somers makes visits to Cooley’s offices (he is a successful lawyer) back in Sydney.
Chapter 11. Willie Struthers and Kangaroo
Jack Callcott has a friend, a man named William James, a Cornishman we meet early on. His workaday nickname is Jaz. He pops up from time to time. On a memorable day up in Sydney, Jaz takes Somers to see Willie Struthers, head of the New South Wales Socialists, who delivers a great long spiel about brotherly love. Then Jaz and Somers visit the Sydney zoo, where Lovat is very taken with some of the birds. And on the evening of the same day visits Cooley, with whom he has a big argument. Even after Cooley (a big man) has clasped weedy Somers to his bosom and told him he loves him, Somers finds himself, ultimately, unable to commit to his cause. And Cooley’s resulting hatred is so powerful Somers suddenly sees him as a horror, a monster.
Chapter 12. The nightmare
This chapter is famous. It is a long, detailed, barely fictionalised account of Lawrence’s experiences stuck in England during the First World War. For the first year or so living in Hampstead, over which he and Frieda memorably saw a zeppelin in the searchlights. Later, in midwinter 1915, they moved to Cornwall, from where he was called to attend a medical examination in Bodmin, which he convincingly failed. Sickly and frail, he was a non-starter as a soldier. In Lawrence’s opinion the war destroyed a man’s ‘manly isolation in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real’ for millions of. Even the survivors had been stripped of something, which all their wives and sweethearts noticed when they returned.
It was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter 1915-1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.
Many details but in amid them all, a mockery of the accusation thrown at him in Cornwall, that he was a German spy.
One of the most intensely English little men England ever produced, with a passion for his country – even if it were often a passion of hatred.
The chapter is surprisingly long at 53 pages, an eighth of the entire novel, more like a massive chunk of barely disguised and hugely aggrieved autobiography shoehorned into a novel about something completely different. And also, it is uncharacteristically lucid. Although lightly impressionistic in style, it makes more sense than most of the rest of the book, the little bits of dialogue with local police or soldiers or Harriet far more focused and to-the-point than the long, rambling, unfocused fictional dialogues with Jack Callcott or Ben Cooley.
Its realism, its earnestness, its seriousness, highlight the diffuseness and frequent absurdity of much of the rest of the book. there is some wonderful nature description, especially of the pagan landscape of Cornwall.
It was January, and there was a thin film of half-melted snow, like silver, on the fields and the path. A white, static, arrested morning, away there in the west of Cornwall, with the moors looking primeval, and the huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences. So easy to realise men worshipping stones. It is not the stone. It is the mystery of the powerful, pre-human earth, showing its might. And all, this morning, static, arrested in a cold, milky whiteness, like death, the west lost in the sea. (p.250)
And in Cornwall he spends a halcyon summer becoming friendly with a local farming family, helping them bring in the hay. Descriptions of building haystacks and lying around on them looking at the sky while he waits for the cart to return instantly reminded me of the novella ‘Love Among The Haystacks’.
But the police call round, they learn that locals are informing on them as spies, they realise that people are actually lying behind the garden walls listening to their conversations, the house is ransacked while they’re out, then legally searched by a soldier with a warrant and a troupe of local goons. Finally they are compelled by the authorities to leave Cornwall with just three days notice and no reason given, reducing Harriet to tears. They take refuge with friends in London and then another friend lets them a cottage near Oxford.
He is called for three different physical inspections. The final one is in Derby and the abusive, aggressive attitude of the military officials and doctors making the men strip naked and wait in humiliation, cupping their balls and making them cough, making them bend over so as to inspect their anus (for chancres, sores and signs of disease) reduces Lawrence to a seething rage.
The upshot of the Derby trip is it snaps his attachment to the Midlands, to his home territory, for good. He realises he much prefers the soft countryside of Oxford, and certainly the granite pagan landscape of Cornwall. But the real impact is bigger: he comes to hate England. He, a devout Englishman, a poet of England’s countryside, in verse and prose, comes to fear and hate ‘the base and malignant power of the mob-like authorities’. He is disgusted by the tone of shrieking patriotism he associates with the new Lloyd George government which came in in December 1916, epitomised by Horatio Bottomley’s jingoistic magazine John Bull.
So: Lawrence’s disgust at the vulgar jingoism of the media, his feeling for the millions of men whose independent spirit was crushed, and his own outrageous experiences of persecution, arbitrary search and expulsion, and the physically humiliating experiences of three strip searches, all combined to make him hate England, so different from the gentle bucolic England of Shakespeare and Hardy he grew up with. Now he couldn’t wait to get away.
Why, the fictional character Somers asks himself, does all this come flooding back to him in nauseating detail in Australia, on the other side of the world? Why not during his sojourns in Italy or Sicily, or on the ship across the Indian Ocean? Maybe it’s because the Australians are English speaking and of English descent, hearing and speaking English has triggered his traumatic memories. Also, maybe it’s because Australia has the same Anglo-Saxon form of ‘democracy’ which, in England, for all the reasons given, he now associates with crude and terrifying mob rule, baying snarling jingoism?
Antisemitism
I’ve made a point of calling out the casual antisemitism in all Lawrence’s novels. Here It’s important to put it in a broader context and understand that Lawrence, like everyone of his day, was given to making sweeping generalisations about all races – this book also contains insensitive generalisations about Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Africans. And people of the day made sweeping generalisations about the ‘races’ of Europe, stereotyping Italians, Germans and French, for example. And within England, Lawrence distinguishes between the Anglo-Saxon English and the Celts of Cornwall etc. So his writings and to a large extent his thinking about life as a whole, is based on a kind of methodology which confidently generalises about all races, nations, peoples and ethnicities. And Lawrence/Somers goes out of his way to emphasise not only that Cooley is Jewish but that he is gentle, kind, loving and loveable etc etc.
BUT in the mental recoil from the hurt and humiliation recorded in the long nightmare chapter there is one passage which leaps out at the reader.
Somers knew nothing about Lloyd George. A little Welsh lawyer, not an Englishman at all. He had no real significance in Richard Lovat’s soul. Only, Somers gradually came to believe that all Jews, and all Celts, even whilst they espoused the cause of England, subtly lived to bring about the last humiliation of the great old England. They could never do so if England would not be humiliated. But with an England fairly offering herself to ignominy, where was the help? Let the Celts work out their subtlety. If England wanted to be betrayed, in the deeper issues. Perhaps Jesus wanted to be betrayed. He did. He chose Judas. (p.251)
As you can see, even in this passage ‘the Celts’ are indicted more than the Jews. Still, it was the Jews who were the smaller and more vulnerable group as the history of the 1920s and 1930s was to show. I think the passage is more about indicting Lloyd George, widely judged to have initiated a step change in Britain’s war effort but who Lawrence associated with the new tone of hysterical war-mongering and paranoid jingoism from which he was to suffer so personally. In this respect the blaming of ‘the Celts’ has a glimmer of truth: Lloyd George was a Celt and oversaw what Lawrence saw as the breaking of the old English culture.
What doesn’t have any justification at all is blaming ‘all Jews’. This is a kind of mental giving-in to the kind of thinking which blames enormous sweeping historical changes on one particular group (in our time the same xenophobic small-mindedness blames immigrants, Muslims, refugees etc for social changes which have, in fact been supervised by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron et al, the whitest of white men). Unable to cope with the sheer scale and complexity of changes in an enormous society, the temptation is to give up the attempt and just blame X, where X stands for an easily identifiable and blameable social group, almost always numerically small and vulnerable.
It’s only one throwaway sentence in an enormous, verbose, 400-page novel, and a novel which deliberately makes its most charismatic and appealing character (Cooley) Jewish. Nonetheless it is a tiny fracture, a crack, which indicates the massive fault-line which lies beneath Lawrence’s entire position. He is emphatically not a thinker about anything: he is a feeler, a tremendously sensitive perceiver of people and places, hyper-sensitive to moods and atmospheres, extraordinarily expressive and over-articulate, but whose solid, isolatable opinions are often gibberish.
Like the flaw in an otherwise perfect diamond, Lawrence’s knee-jerk antisemitism, if you choose to notice or dwell on it, undermines otherwise magnificent works of art.
Chapter 13. ‘Revenge!’ Timotheus Cries
So chapter 13 commences with Somers back in Coo-ee cottage, puzzling over why his unconscious has chosen now to dredge up all his wartime humiliations in their full horror. Maybe the sound of English voices. Maybe the discussions about a very English form of democracy, with all the susceptibility to crude demagoguery that implies. Or maybe the inversion of the rhythm of the seasons, winter when it should be summer, the familiar constellations upside down, has jangled his nerves.
‘Aaron’s Rod’ referred repeatedly to the external changes the war made, to England where it starts and then to Italy where it continues. This book, this very long passage, makes explicit the personal, psychological impact.
He was full of a lava fire of rage and hate, at the bottom of his soul. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt desecrated. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt sold. And he knew most men felt the same. (p.290)
This is a new chapter but it’s as if writing the Nightmare chapter has snapped something in Lawrence. He can’t shut up about it. It transforms the tone of the novel. Previously it had been about events; now it turns into an extended essay, Lawrence in essay mode pontificating about human nature, and feelings and the deep rage within himself which he attributes to everyone else broken by the war, and which he broadens out into an attack on all worn-out creeds and ideas. Ideas and religions have a natural lifespan, grow, flower then fade and die. And using this impressionistic logic, Somers now dismisses both Cooley-Kangaroo and Struthers as labouring at a creed, the creed of humanistic love and equality, which has in fact had its day, is dead. All that lies behind both of them is the image of the vengeful mob, the thing that terrifies Lawrence most.
And so he repeats again and again the central theme of the novel, which is his desperate wish to be free, to free himself of wretched clinging humanity, to stand aloof.
That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. No—no. Kangaroo had been his last embrace with humanity. Now, all he wanted was to cut himself clear. To be clear of humanity altogether, to be alone. To be clear of love, and pity, and hate. To be alone from it all. To cut himself finally clear from the last encircling arm of the octopus humanity. To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark. Humanity could do as it liked: he did not care. So long as he could get his own soul clear. (p.294)
The chapter rises to a climax of swirling rhetorical declarations, explaining how Life makes no absolute statements, everything is a flux, but one must dig deep below the surface, and deep below a Christianity which has become mechanical, fossilised, and seek out the dark gods at the core of man’s being. Lots of sentences like that.
Chapter 14. Bits
After 50 pages of war reminiscence followed by 20 pages of increasingly delirious speculation about the human soul, the novel lands back on earth and we return to The Plot.
Next morning he wakes up in Sydney and reads the Bulletin, which has a section of entertaining trivia or ‘bits’. This bombardment of everyday silliness makes him see everything he’s just written about seem like pompous nonsense.
He could have kicked himself for wanting to help mankind, join in revolutions or reforms or any of that stuff. And he kicked himself still harder thinking of his frantic struggles with the ‘soul’ and the ‘dark god’ and the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer’. Blarney — blarney — blarney! He was a preacher and a blatherer, and he hated himself for it. Damn the ‘soul’, damn the ‘dark god’, damn the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer’, and above all, damn his own interfering, nosy self. (p.300)
That’s Lawrence for you. Ever-changing, never stationary, intensely experiencing one moment, one emotion, one set of thoughts and the next moment… dismissing it all as blather, moving onto the next thing, sights, scenes, people, arguments. As his wife Harriet continually tells him, he can’t stop jumping from one extreme to another. Later, in the same vein:
‘I am a fool,’ said Richard Lovat, which was the most frequent discovery he made. It came, moreover, every time with a new shock of surprise and chagrin. Every time he climbed a new mountain range and looked over, he saw, not only a new world, but a big anticipatory fool on this side of it, namely, himself. (p.308)
Anyway, puncturing all this blather, Somers takes Harriet along the coast to a half-built settlement named Wolloona which they stroll around, go to the sea and pick shells till they are caught in small waves, Somers’ hat blows off into the sea and he wades in to retrieve it while Harriet collapses on the sand in hysterical laughter. It is a wonderful couple of pages, not only describing the scene with godlike powers but capturing the profoundly same wavelength these two dissimilar people operated on. It’s a wonderful record of life and living!
Breaking the fourth wall
In fact this passage breaks the fourth wall, so to speak, and the author observes that the novel, this novel anyway, amounts to a a record of the author’s musings and preachings.
I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the brink of the ointment-pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage ground let me preach to myself. He preached, and the record was taken down for this gramophone of a novel.
And, having broken the wall once, Lawrence keeps on doing it, spilling into the next chapter which he begins in a thoroughly post-modern way, suddenly stepping back from his narrative and saying, yeah there’s all these characters yadda yadda yadda, doing stuff and there’s chapters, because a novel needs them, and if you don’t like the book chum, don’t read it.
Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing. But man is a thought-adventurer, and his falls into the Charybdis of ointment, and his shipwrecks on the rocks of ages, and his kisses across chasms, and his silhouette on a minaret: surely these are as thrilling as most things… To be brief, there was a Harriet, a Kangaroo, a Jack and a Jaz and a Vicky, let alone a number of mere Australians… We can’t be at a stretch of tension all the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t like the novel, don’t read it. (p.312)
Chapter 15. Jack Slaps Back
As to the plot, dear me the plot, if you’re still interested in such a thing after 90 or more pages of autobiography and preaching, well, Lawrence fumbles his way back to it, although it now feels completely different, almost irrelevant compared with the power of the autobiography and then the autobiographical ideas streaming from it.
Jack calls round and is deeply unpleasant. He’s heard that Somers and Cooley had a big argument, that Somers turned down the offer of joining the movement and was shown the door. With polite smiles he threatens Somers not to tell anyone about their plans. Somers replies that he’s planning to leave Australia now, in 6 weeks maybe, but Jack snarling says, only if they let him. Somers feels as threatened and bullied as he did in wartime England, the visit triggers that anger, resentment and humiliation.
Harriet arrives back at the veranda wondering what the two men have been arguing about. They part in angry silence.
Chapter 16. A Row in Town
This book feels like it’s really abandoning any pretence to be a novel. The first 11 pages of this chapter are a preposterous farrago of scientifically illiterate pontificating about the nature of ‘the mob’, starting with an attack on the human sciences and talk about the dark god knocking on the door of our souls before going on to develop the idea of telepathy, giving an ‘explanation’ based on the made-up notion of ‘vertebral-telegraphy’ whose power Lawrence then goes on to describe in ants, fish, reptiles, birds and sperm whales.
The narrative justifies this hogwash by coalescing to become a sort of backdrop to or explanation of Richard’s ‘thoughts’:
What Richard wanted was some sort of a new show: a new recognition of the life-mystery, a departure from the dreariness of money-making, money-having, and money-spending. It meant a new recognition of difference, of highness and of lowness, of one man meet for service and another man clean with glory, having majesty in himself, the innate majesty of the purest individual, not the strongest instrument, like Napoleon. Not the tuppenny trick-majesty of Kaisers. But the true majesty of the single soul which has all its own weaknesses, but its strength in spite of them, its own lovableness, as well as its might and dread. The single soul that stands naked between the dark God and the dark-blooded masses of men. (p.334)
And, finally, eventually, we descend back down to earth and the plot gets going again. There have been political developments. The Conservative Party is fighting back against Labour, passing laws to allow non-union labour to break strikes, protecting scab workers, and making union leaders responsible for any violence that breaks out.
Richard reads that the Labour Party will be holding meetings at its base, Canberra Hall in Sydney, and so catches a train up on the day of the meetings, a small discussion one in the morning, a big mass meeting in the evening.
In the evening Somers watches a long speech about class, demanding equality between the classes and ridiculing the ‘upper’ classes, from Willie Struthers. He demands the creation of a Soviet with a maximum daily pay for anyone, including millionaires, of one pound, and screw the ridiculous Empire with ‘its out-of-date Lords and its fat-arsed, hypocritical upper classes’. The speech, unfortunately, contains familiar antisemitic tropes about Hebrew financiers being among the exploiting class that must be overthrown, as well as racial terms describing Chinese, Indians and Africans which are unacceptable to us, a hundred years later.
Anyway, a cohort of diggers from Kangaroo’s movement are in the hall and they interrupt Struther’s speech with an impressive calling out of a countdown, in fact shouting slowly and in unison up to eight, and then the hall explodes into a fight, a riot. Fighting everywhere, Somers’ guide, Jaz, tries to pull him free, but not before he’s had his collar ripped and taken a nasty blow on the forehead. Outside in the streets is a huge riot with mounted police arriving, then a bang as of a bomb going off, then the lights of ambulances arriving, as Jaz pulls a dazed Somers away and down back streets to a quiet Diggers club where he lays him on a couch to recover before heading back to find out what’s going on.
Jaz returns with Jack who’s got a bloody chin but eyes are fiery from the fight. They tell him someone shot Kangaroo in the gut but was then torn to pieces by the diggers. From the club they go out into the night which is hushed and dark with mounted cops at every street corner and make their way unhindered back to Jack’s house by about 1am. Victoria calls out but he tells her to shut up. Jack pours whiskey. After a while Jaz goes to bed leaving the enemies Jack and Somers. Jack is exultant, convinced he killed at least three of Struther’s followers with an iron bar.
‘Having a woman’s something, isn’t it? But it’s a flea-bite, nothing, compared to killing your man when your blood comes up.’ (p.352)
After which Somers goes back to his house. Over the coming weeks the papers report it as a fight between Communists and Nationalists but remarkably few people are named or arrested. A couple are convicted and sentenced to prison but Jack, for example, is merely bound over, and nobody fingers the would-be assassin of Kangaroo.
Somers and Harriet go to visit him. There is a long and what I thought pointless conversation. I can’t credit that this nationalist leader, instead of a bullish Mussolini is depicted as a feeble Jewish lawyer who goes on and on about teaching the workers to love each other. It seems a completely mad, uninformed description of the authoritarian nationalist ideology. Kangaroo is obviously wounded and his room smells of faeces and infection. He clasps Somers’ hand and passionately begs him to join his crusade to bring love to the working man.
‘They have never known the full beauty of love, the working classes. They have never admitted it. Work, bread has always stood first. But we can take away that obstacle. Teach them the beauty of love between men, Richard, teach them the highest—greater love than this hath no man—teach them how to love their own mate, and you will solve the problem of work for ever. Richard, this is true, you know it is true. How beautiful it would be! How beautiful it would be!’ (p. 358)
The crux of whether Richard will join the movement is redirected to whether Richard can love Kangaroo, or whether he loves Kangaroo but doesn’t want to, or whether he wants to but can’t bring himself to. All this seems sublimely beside the point and is plain weird to have in a novel about ‘politics’. They leave the very sick Kangaroo whose last words are ‘Don’t let me die.’
Somers’ reaction to all this is more philosophising about God and love and the dark gods. He rejects both Kangaroo and Struthers’ insistence on love, strongly preferring that a man look to himself and be true to himself and his own dark god.
He believed in the God of fear, of darkness, of passion, and of silence, the God that made a man realise his own sacred aloneness…
And:
Man’s isolation was always a supreme truth and fact, not to be forsworn. And the mystery of apartness. And the greater mystery of the dark God beyond a man, the God that gives a man passion, and the dark, unexplained blood-tenderness that is deeper than love, but so much more obscure, impersonal, and the brave, silent blood-pride, knowing his own separateness, and the sword-strength of his derivation from the dark God. This dark, passionate religiousness and inward sense of an indwelling magnificence, direct flow from the unknowable God, this filled Richard’s heart first, and human love seemed such a fighting for candle-light, when the dark is so much better.
And:
he proceeded, as ever, to try to disentangle himself from the white octopus of love. Not that even now he dared quite deny love. Love is perhaps an eternal part of life. But it is only a part. And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease, a vast white strangling octopus. All things are relative, and have their sacredness in their true relation to all other things. And he felt the light of love dying out in his eyes, in his heart, in his soul, and a great, healing darkness taking its place, with a sweetness of everlasting aloneness, and a stirring of dark blood-tenderness, and a strange, soft iron of ruthlessness.
Somers goes walking by the seashore day after day until night falls which Lawrence describes with his usual wonder, and feels his soul is null, he has no soul. He has shed the world and meaning, he never wants to go back.
Harriet and he? It was time they both agreed that nothing has any meaning. Meaning is a dead letter when a man has no soul. And speech is like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air. Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like the animals, and cast off the clutter of words. Old dust and dirt of corpses: words and feelings. The decomposed body of the past whirling and choking us, language, love, and meaning. When a man loses his soul he knows what a small, weary bit of clock-work it was. Who dares to be soulless finds the new dimension of life. (p.367)
In this null mode he is asked to visit Kangaroo again. He is on his death bed, pale and weak. Once again he clutches Somers’ hand and begs him to say ‘I love you’ and once again Somers can’t quite bring himself to. So Kangaroo shouts out ‘you’ve killed me’ which shocks Somers and brings the nurse running, and Jack. Outside, walking in the daylight, Jack tells him what a selfish bastard he is not to say those three little words and fulfil a dying man’s wish. Is it because he’s from the Old Country where everyone’s so uptight and scared? Or just because he’s a heartless bastard?
They part and Somers spends the afternoon making arrangements at the Customs House and American consulate to take ship for San Francisco. Love Kangaroo? He hates him. He hates everyone. He wants to be left alone. In the end is that what this novel was about? Not about politics at all, but one man’s rejection of not just politics, but society as a whole with all its problems and culture and religion, and striking out utterly on his own with his own sense of the dark gods and the need for complete integrity.
He goes down to the sea at night as the moon rises for one last magnificent Laurentian hymn and paean and beyond-human perception of the natural world.
Chapter 17. Adieu Australia
Kangaroo dies and has a big funeral. Somers is beyond caring. His ship sails for America in six weeks. During that time he communes with the Australian spring. Pages of wonderful description of not just the sea, but the landscape inland and the scattered settlements. He hated the half built shanty bungalows, scattered randomly over the barren land when he first arrived; but now he’s learned to see them as entirely appropriate to the emptiness and unfinishedness of the Australian landscape. In fact he’s come to love the place, as he tells Jaz who calls by for a final chat and cup of tea out on the veranda. Lawrence describes Somers having a dream of a quaint old town in Europe, all gables and cobbled streets with a big Gothic cathedral looming over everything and waking in a panic, feeling stifled and strangled! How lovely they both feel to be free of old Europe, ruined old Europe with all its terrible history, and free to to wander the virgin bush where everything is ancient and new at the same time.
In the last act of the book the tail end of a typhoon comes down the east coast, hitting Sydney and then the town the Somers are staying in, and they’re trapped inside their little house by vicious winds and whipping rain, feeling like they’re in a submarine. The storm rages for four days and, when they emerge, has completely transformed the beach, turning it from soft sand into a warzone of mud and wreckage with a new deep stream cutting across it. They are discombobulated. Turning away from this wrecked area, in their last weeks the couple take to riding a little horse and cart into the bush, exploring its big vivid flowers and eerie emptiness.
The last days come, they close up the house and pack and travel to Sydney. Victoria Callcott and Jaz’s wife come to wave them off and to act the traditional Australian farewell whereby those on the wharf hold one end of long colourful streamers, the other end held by passengers on the ship, which finally weights anchor as the streamers slowly uncurl, pull tight and then snap. And so Frieda and Lawrence, I mean Somers and Harriet, set their faces towards America.
Apparently this final chapter was written entirely in Taos, New Mexico, after he arrived there in September 1922, which might explain the sense of nostalgia, the emotion behind the writing, a traditional sense of lovely loss you in which could possibly detect something like sentimentalism.
Summary
Chaotic and nonsensical as long tracts of the novel have been, somehow, as with all Lawrence, its emotional intensity and candour and the endless vividness of its countless descriptions leave you with an impression of uncanny magnificence.
Credit
‘Kangaroo’ by D. H. Lawrence was first published in the UK by Martin Secker in 1923. Page references are to the 1972 Penguin Classics paperback edition.
Books & Boots 