Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson

Author:Frances Wilson [Wilson, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biography
ISBN: 9780374717971
Google: _7jiDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

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Aaron’s Rod was still mired and so, on 28 November, Lawrence began instead a comic novel about his marriage which he called Mr Noon, where he returned to his courting days with Frieda and his anxiety about Otto Gross. It was an act of release, abandon even, and there is magic in Mr Noon; had he finished the novel it would have presented an entirely different Lawrence to the world. But by 9 December, the book came to ‘a sudden stop’, and in early January 1921 he and Frieda went on a nine-day visit to Sardinia, his fourth island in a year.

‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move’: Sea and Sardinia has the finest opening line of any travel book.95 Presented in a clipped, cinematic shot-by-shot present tense similar to that of ‘David’ (the other titles Lawrence considered for the book were ‘Sardinian Films’ and ‘Films of Sicily and Sardinia’), Sea and Sardinia is self-parody in technicolour. The mood, like that of Mr Noon, is joyful and unbuttoned, but also edgy and ominous. Lawrence’s best self is at the wheel in these pages and beside him, her hair blowing back, sits the ‘Queen Bee’, as he refers to Frieda. Husband and wife are his new comic couple, with Lawrence playing the surly worker-bee for all he’s worth, while Frieda has replaced Magnus as the self-pampering Frau.

He and the ‘q-b’ leave Fontana Vecchia at dawn, as the sea and the sky are parting ‘like an oyster shell, with a low red gape’. Closing the gate on the sloping garden where Magnus once appeared like a revenant, they slink between the rosemary hedges and make their way beneath the eucalyptus trees to the station. On the train to Palermo a child vomits twice on the floor and no one bothers to clean it up, while on the stomach-churning passage to Sardinia, the q-b remains horizontal. Lawrence now has his first sight of Mount Eryx on Sicily’s western coast, and his ‘darkness’ quivers. ‘But why in the name of heaven should my heart stand still as I watch that hill which rises above the sea … To men it must have had a magic even greater than Etna’s.’ All high lands, he concludes, are ‘magic’ when ‘seen from the sea’.96

Then ‘suddenly’ there is Cagliari, ‘a naked town rising steep, steep, golden-looking, piled naked to the sky … like a town in a monkish illuminated missal’. It rises before them like ‘some vision, some memory, something that has passed away’. It is fiesta-time: the men are dressed as women and the women are in masques; one couple is dressed as Dante and Beatrice, ‘in Paradise apparently, all in white sheet-robes, and with silver wreaths on their heads, arm in arm, and prancing very slowly and majestically, yet with the long lilt as if hitched along by wires from above’. Dante, with his long nose, high cheekbones and ‘stupid wooden look,’ has ‘come to life’, offering ‘a modern criticism on the Inferno’.97 The whole town is a marionette show.

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