The Best Australian Essays 2014 (22 page)
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Authors: Robert Manne
And yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are.
Yet I am glad.
I am glad there is always you beyond my scope.
What Lawrence rejects in Whitman is the insistence on âmerging', on âfusion'. Lawrence himself aims at something different. He calls it a âdelicately adjusted polarity'.
There is a final polarisation, a final current of vital being impossible(e) between man and woman. Whitman found this empirically. Empirically he found that the last current of vital polarisation goes between man and man. Whitman is the first in modern life, truly, from sheer empirical necessity, to reassert this truth ⦠It is his most wistful theme â the love of comrades â manly love ⦠The vast mysterious power of sexual love and of marriage is not for Whitman ⦠He believes in fusion. Not fusion, but delicately adjusted polarity is life. Fusion is death.
Still, there is, beyond all this, Whitman's verse. There, at its best, âthe whole soul follows its own free, spontaneous, inexplicable course, the contractions and pulsations dictated from nowhere save from the quick itself ⦠There is nothing measured or mechanical. This is the greatest poetry.'
But even this statement of the case is not satisfactory and in 1921â22 Lawrence sets out to resolve his own contradictory views in yet another version. âWhitman,' he begins, âis the last and greatest of the Americans. One of the greatest poets in the world, in him an element of falsity troubles us still. Something is wrong; we cannot be quite at ease with his greatness. Let us get over our quarrel with him first.' He then goes on to make a distinction between:
all the transcendentalists, including Whitman, and men like Balzac and Dickens, Tolstoy and Hardy, who still act direct from passional motives and non inversely, from mental provocations. But the aesthetes and symbolists, from Baudelaire and Maeterlick, and Oscar Wilde onwards, and nearly all the later Russian and French and English novelists, set up their reactions in the mind and reflect them by a secondary process down on the body. It is the madness of the world today. Europe and America are all alike, all the nations self-consciously provoking their passional reactions from the mind, and
nothing
spontaneous.
The last part of this version then moves into the murky area of mystical fascism. Whitman, Lawrence tells us,
shows us the last step of the old great way. But he does not show us the first step of the new. His great Democracy is to be established upon the love of comrades. Well and good. But in what direction shall this love flow? More
en masse
? As a matter of fact the love of comrades is always a love between a leader and a follower filled with âthe joy of liege adherence'.
What Lawrence ends up saluting, in a move away from âen masse democracy' to âthe grand culmination of soul-chosen leaders', is âthe final leader ⦠the sacred
tyrannus.
This is the true democracy.' âOnward,' he urges, âalways following the leader, who when he looks back has a flame of love in his face, but a still brighter flame of purpose. This is the true democracy.'
Whitman in this is largely forgotten. The best Lawrence can do is to repeat his earlier endorsement:
Whitman. The last of the very great poets. And the ultimate. How lovely a poet he is. His verse at its best spontaneous like a bird. For a bird doesn't rhyme or scan â the miracle of spontaneity. The whole soul speaks at once, in a naked spontaneity so unutterably lovely, so far beyond rhyme and scansion.
Then, in November 1922, a new version in an entirely different style: demotic, staccato, âModernist'; all capitals, expletives and ironic or dismissive side-swipes; a parody of Whitman's own âstridency' and splenetic exuberance:
Post mortem effects?
But what of Walt Whitman?
The âgood grey poet'
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet
Post mortem effects. Ghosts.
A certain ghoulishness. A certain horrible potage of human parts.
A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes â¦
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE
CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!
CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFFF
Reminds me of a steam engine. A locomotive â¦
Your Self
Oh Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done with yourself? With your individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you when you made water, leaked into the universe when you peed. Oh Walt, you're a leaky vesselâ¦
And so on, via a piece of scurrilous gossip about Whitman in old age dancing naked in his yard and showing himself off in an excited state to schoolgirls, to
Only we know this much. Death is not the goal. And Love, and merging are now only part of the death process. Comradeship â part of the death process. The new Democracy â the brink of death. One identity â death itself.
We have died, and we are still disintegrating.
But IT is finished.
Consumatum est.
âbefore the whole essay degenerates into incoherent rambling about Jesus and the Holy Ghost. Barely a word in this version about Whitman the poet. Only Whitman, the leaky vessel, as thinker and man.
The 1923 version, the one that at last makes it all the way to publication as the final chapter of
Studies in Classic American Literature,
takes up the 1922 version and uses it â expurgated of its scurrilous slander and a few turns of phrase that would at the time have been seen as âindecent' â as far as âBut IT is finished.
Consumatum est
.' It then drops its aggressive, expletive tone and embarks on something more sober and considered, more warmly personal:
Whitman, the great poet, has meant much to me. Whitman the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman the one pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no French. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere improvisers.
He recognises Whitman as âthe first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something “superior” and “above” the flesh'.
âThere,' he said to the soul, âstay there! Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and legs and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb and phallus. Stay there, o soul, where you belong.'
There is praise too for Whitman's enunciation of âa morality of actual living, not of salvation':
The soul is not to put up defences round herself. She is not to withdraw inwardly, in mystical ecstasies, she is not to cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She is to go down the open road, as the road opens into the unknown, keeping company with those whose soul draws them near to her, accomplishing nothing save the journey â¦
The Open Road. The great home of the soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not âabove', not even âwithin'. The soul is neither âabove' nor âwithin'. It is a wayfarer down the open road ⦠The soul is herself when she is going on foot down the open road.
He even forgives Whitman at this point his great error, of mistaking âsympathy' for Jesus' Love or St Paul's Charity. But he has come now to a more doctrinaire vision of what art itself is, what poetry is, that will determine from this point his own life as a poet:
The function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral ⦠But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. Changes the blood rather than the mind, changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.
This looks ahead to the various prefaces Lawrence would write, between Christmas 1928 and April 1929, to
Pansies
(1929) â Pensées â the second of which tells us:
Each little piece is a thought: not an idea, or an opinion, or a didactic statement, but a true thought, which comes as much from the heart and genitals as from the head ⦠Live and let live, and each pansy will tip you its separate wink.
Between 1923 and 17 November 1928, when
Pansies
was begun, Lawrence was continually on the move, in Mexico, England, France, Italy; at work preparing (âwhat a sweat'), and in the case of the earlier poems rewriting, his
Collected Poems
(1928). âI do bits of things,' he writes on 14 November 1927, ââ darn my underclothes, try to type up poems.'
The
Pansies,
written at Bandol on the French Riviera between 17 November 1928 and 10 March 1929, and the âstinging pansies' or
Nettles
(1930), which he began in February 1929 and took up again between 17 April and 18 June in Mallorca, start out as insights into the quick of things â sensory moments, the lives of elephants in a circus â but end up in disgruntlement and general contempt for âthe dirty drab world': its hypocrisy, cowardice, snobbery, money-grubbing; its blindness and vanity â âthe whole damn swindle'. Then, on 10 October 1929, just five months before his death, he writes the first poem in the
Last Poems
(1932) notebook, âThe Greeks are coming', and we might recall what he had written of Whitman: âWhitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last step and looked over into Death.'
There are hints, towards the end of the
Nettles
notebook of Lawrence's last great poems; in âButterfly'(I) and (II), in âThe State of Grace', âGlory of Darkness' (I), which is in fact an early version of âBavarian Gentians', and âShip of Death':
Blue and dark
the Bavarian Gentians, tall ones
make a magnificent dark-blue gloom
in the sunny room â¦
How deep I have gone
dark gentians
in your marvellous dark-blue godhead
How deep, how deep, how happy
How happy to sink my soul
in the blue dark gloom
of gentian here in the sunny room!
âGlory of Darkness' (I)
But it is Glory of Darkness (III) that takes the last step and finds its way back to the Greeks, to the old dark underworld of âSnake':
Blue and dark
Oh Bavarian gentians, tall ones â¦
They have added blueness to blueness, until
it is dark beauty, it is dark
and the door is open
to the depths
It is so blue, it is so dark
in the dark doorway
and the door is open
to Hades.
Oh I know â
Persephone has just gone back
down the thickening thickening gloom
of dark blue gentians
to Pluto
to her bridegroom
in the dark â¦
âGlory of Darkness' (III)
And with the simplicity, the spontaneity of this, what he called, in Whitman's case, its âthrobs and pulses', Lawrence finds his way to the last poems on which his own greatness rests.
God is older than the sun and moon
and the eye cannot behold him
nor voice describe him.
But a naked man, a stranger, leaned on the gate
with his cloak over his arm waiting to be asked in.
So I called him: Come in, if you will â
He came in slowly, and sat down by the hearth.
I said to him: And what is your name? â
He looked at me without answer, but such a loveliness
entered me, I smiled to myself, saying: he is God!
So he said: Hermes!
God is older than the sun and moon
and the eye cannot behold him
nor the voice describe him:
and still, this is the god Hermes, sitting by my hearth.
âMaximus'
Lawrence is a difficult poet to come to terms with; it is easy to quarrel with him as he quarrelled with Whitman. He is various, contradictory, irascible, over-insistent; he too easily takes offence and insists again. It is easy, as well, to be put off by his preachiness. He begins in the tone of a non-conformist Bible-banger, develops his own religion and bangs away at that. He is most easy with his soul when he embraces the dark gods and goes quietly underground, and best of all when he stops protesting and lets the world in, in the form of a snake, a baby tortoise, the smoking dark blue of gentians, or in the form of the psychopomp Hermes, and breathes easy again. Lets the breath and the energy of its natural rhythms create the poem.
As he puts it in the Note to
Collected Poems
of 12 May 1928, excusing his rewriting of the early poems, âA young man is afraid of his demon, and puts his hand over his demon's mouth and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are rarely poetry. So I have tried to let the demon say his say.'
Lawrence makes it difficult for the reader, as well as for himself, by speaking up too soon; by insisting, performing, working out his questions, his quarrels, in public. We too, in seeking out the best in him, have to choose between the âdemon' and the man. We should be grateful to these two volumes from the Cambridge Press, and to its editor, for making this easier than it might otherwise be in the muddle of so much material; the byproduct of so much passionate energy and engagement, and of a life that was seldom orderly or still.
At his best, Lawrence is one of the finest poets in the world. There is no poet, at his best, who gets closer to what he calls the âquick' of things, or brings us closer with him; and when he is at ease with his own spirit, his own extraordinary energy, his rare demon, there is no poet we find it so easy to love. It is all here in these two hefty volumes: the muddle, but also the magic of the man's greatness; the pathos, the wonderful coincidence of language and feeling; a sensibility almost too actively aware of the tension between singularity and oneness that is at the heart of being.