“YOU CAN FEEL SUCH FEAR, IN
By Robert Darroch
Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal - “Why do they call him Kangaroo?”
asked Somers. “Looks like one,” said
Jack.
This article is
the second part of a weekly blog which Robert Darroch sends out to members of
his Club and other friends)…
MY BLOG LAST
week, as I explained apologetically, was a bit self-indulgent
...being, as it
was, about my almost life-long obsession – DH Lawrence and Kangaroo
Yet,
serendipitously, it has led to something of considerable import
.,.and thereby
hangs an interesting sequel tale
Let me start by reminding
you of what I said
At the end of last
week’s blog, I wrote this:
Perhaps the novel’s most chilling quote
sums up
He is describing, towards the end of his
novel, the outward beauty of
But, then, he says, sometimes an icy,
primeval, wind can come off the land, then...
It is as if the
silvery freedom suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of the reptile, and
the horrible paws.
I was said that
this quote summed up the essence – the plot - of the novel
...the contrast
between the surface “silvery freedom”, and the underlying “horrible paws”
I went on to say
that the line “The Silvery Freedom, and the Horrible Paws” would be a good
title for a book on
I received, in response,
an email from from Bruce Thomas, one of our Friday group, remarking on that
quote:
Rob
Should it
not be
“ the scaly back of the reptile, and
the horrible claws.”
To which I
replied, somewhat off-handedly: “you could be right”
It was not, I at
first thought, a particularly important matter
I am getting older,
and perhaps a little careless, and maybe I got the quote wrong
(I fetched it out
of my memory of a text I have read, perhaps a hundred times)
Maybe
...anyway, what
did it matter - “paws”, “claws” – so what?
But, later in the
day, Sandra (Sandra Jobson Darroch) and I were discussing it
And she remarked
– very perceptively, as it turned out:
“Might it be
significant, if
Reptiles, of
course, have claws, not paws
And
For he was a keen
and accurate observer of animal – indeed, reptilian - life
Take, for
example, perhaps his best-known poem, “Snake”:
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade
of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.
He reached down from a fissure in
the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Now, we can take
it that
(in
and that he well knew
that reptiles did not have paws
So why did he
write, we must now assume deliberately, “paws” instead of “claws”?
Could it, as Sandra
suggested, signify something?
First, I went
back to the printed text, to check what
The published version,
in both the
Then I went back
to the holograph manuscript, to make absolutely sure
(for it could
have been a misprint)
And so now from
the MS let me quote, verbatim, what
(not in Thirroul,
where he wrote the first version of Kangaroo
in June-July, 1922, but three months later in Taos, New Mexico, when he heavily
revised the typescript of the original manuscript):
Then gradually, through the silver
glisten of the new freedom came a dull, sinister vibration. Sometimes from the interior came a wind that
seemed to her [his wife] evil. Out of the
silver paradisical freedom untamed, evil winds could come, cold, like a stone
hatchet murdering you. The freedom, like
everything else, had two sides to it.
Sometimes a heavy, reptile-hostility came off the sombre land, something
gruesome and infinitely repulsive. It
frightened her as a reptile would frighten her if it wound its cold folds
around her. For the past month now
So it definitely was
“paws”
But if they
weren’t the paws of a reptile, what paws did
those of a dog,
or cat, or wombat?
No – it is far
more likely that he was referring to the paws of a kangaroo
After all, that
is the title of his novel, derived from the nickname given to the main
Australian character in the novel, Benjamin Cooley – aka “Kangaroo” (see above)
Yet what did
For both in the
novel, and in a later poem (also called “Kangaroo”), he is most complimentary
about our national animal
In the book he
describes a visit to Taronga Park Zoo, where he sees several kangaroos:
The gentle kangaroos...it wasn’t love he
felt for them, but a dark, animal tenderness...
That encounter
led him later – in
Delicate mother
kangaroo
Sitting up there
rabbit-wise, but huge, plumb-weighted
And lifting her
beautiful slender face, oh! So much more gently
and finely lined than a rabbit’s, or than a
hare’s
Lifting her face
to nibble at a round white peppermint drop,
which she loves, sensitive mother kangaroo
Her sensitive,
long, pure-bred face,
Her full
antipodal eyes, so dark,
So big and quiet
and remote, having watched so many empty
dawns in silent
There is nothing
“horrible” or sinister about this description of the kangaroo
So where did
It is not hard to
find in the novel something frightening about the character Ben Cooley – “Kangaroo”
– the leader of the “Maggies” secret army that lurks behind its
front-organisation, “the Diggers Clubs”
Somers – the
They get into an
argument, after Cooley suddenly realises that Somers is trying to extract
information from him about the secret army
...in fact,
that’s why he’s called on him that night - he’s run out of material, and needs
some more information
...Kangaroo’s face had gone like an angry
wax mask...he seemed to be thinking hard...at last he lifted his head and
looked at Somers... “I am sorry to have made a mistake in you...the best thing
you can do is to leave
I do not think
there can be any question that the “horrible paws” in the quote above are those
of the secret army leader, Ben Cooley – “Kangaroo”
I, of course, am
convinced that
and that his
novel Kangaroo is a fictionalised
day-by-day record of that encounter
I am also sure
that the two main Australian characters in the novel – Cooley and Jack Callcott
– are in fact the two main figures in that real secret army, Major-General Sir
Charles Rosenthal and his deputy, Major Jack Scott
Scott, via a
shipboard acquaintance, apparently met
He had other fish
to fry
What he wanted to
do was to write a novel, set in
and he had
decided to string the two of them along in order to extract from them material to
put in his novel
Thus on that
Saturday night in
(almost certainly
the evening of Saturday, June 17, 1922)
when Rosenthal and Lawrence had their final
meeting
both of them suddenly
came to separate and disturbing realisations
...Rosenthal that
Lawrence was trying to milk him for information about his secret army
...and
but “something
gruesome and infinitely repulsive”
(
Rosenthal, for
his part, realised what a threat
...because what
he, and Scott, and their accomplices – most of them leading citizens of Sydney
and NSW – were doing was highly illegal, verging on treason
(”politics and
red-hot treason” Callcott calls it in the novel)
A week or so
after that traumatic meeting in Rosenthal’s chambers in
(Lawrence had
been due to spend that Saturday night at Scott’s residence in Neutral Bay, but
so shocked was he by his meeting with Rosenthal that he went instead to the
Carlton Hotel, where he had his famous nightmare)
In Kangaroo,
It makes chilling
reading
When Scott first
arrives,
...Somers was almost sure he [Callcott]
knew all about it, and that he [Somers] had come like a spy, to take soundings
Trying to
reassure them,
But Scott is
there for something more
Some of the fear he had felt for Kangaroo
he now felt for Jack. Jack was really
very malevolent. There was hell in his
reddened face, and in his black, inchoate eyes...He realised that Jack would
like to give him a thrashing...It was a bad moment.
Scott gets to the
point
“You’ve found out all you wanted to
know, I suppose?”
“You didn’t try drawing us out?...I
should have said you did. And you got
what you wanted, and now you’re clearing out with it. Exactly like a spy...”
Jack...sat there as if he had come
for some definite purpose, something menacing...
He asks Scott
“Then what do you want of me now?”
Scott replies
“...we want some sort of security that
you’ll keep quiet, before we let you leave
Apparently
In the novel
Somers, the
“You can be quite assured: nothing will
ever come out through me.”
The Scott-figure,
Callcott, responds
“And you think we shall be satisfied with
your bare word?”
Little did they
realise, however, that
(almost literally
behind their backs)
...into a novel
he was intending to publish, as soon as he left the country
Blithely unaware
of this, they apparently decided that he posed no danger to them
relying, perhaps,
on their (gravely mistaken) conviction that he would not dare, after their draconian
threats, to expose them
“The milk’s spilt,” says Jack’s naively, “we
won’t sulk over it.”
That meeting at
Wyewurk in Thirroul probably occurred on Saturday or Sunday, July 1-2, and it
was almost certainly his last contact with Scott, Rosenthal and the secret army
He wrote that
incident up in chapter 15 of the novel, “Jack Slaps Back”, probably on Monday,
July 3
(We know he went
up to Sydney the following day to get his steamer tickets and U.S. visas, for
he describes in a letter doing so, but found the consulate closed for American
Independence Day)
He finished the
Thirroul text – the final three chapters – two weeks later on July 15, and posted
the manuscript to his agent in
All he had to do
then was to wait for his boat to
When he did
revise the first typescript in
The novel was
published in
There is some
evidence that
For he certainly
retained, probably for the rest of his life, fears of what Scott and Rosenthal might
do when they read what he had written about them and their secret army
(“I could have
you killed,” Cooley had told Somers, at one point during their final encounter)
In fact,
However, in
(no doubt local
burglars)
But
And some years
later he was staying on an island off the Mediterranean coast when he suddenly
decided that they had to leave quickly, as he had a fear he was being tracked
down
Needless to say,
they didn’t come after him – as far as we know
and eventually he
felt safe enough to put both Rosenthal and Scott in subsequent works
(
Rosenthal he
portrayed again as a Danish artillery major in his novella, The Virgin and the Gypsy
(Rosenthal was an
artillery officer of Danish extraction)
And Scott he
portrayed as an impotent secret army aficionado in the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(entitled John Thomas and Lady Jane – the version
that the most recent film of the Lady Chatterley plot was based on)
The latter was a
particularly cruel portrayal
For Scott was
also impotent, due to a wartime trauma
(In Kangaroo, the Scott figure, Jack
Callcott, “can’t get his pecker up”)
In that version -
which was not published in
...and, indeed,
Jack Scott in real life had some most peculiar ways
R
PS – I am very
grateful to both Bruce and Sandra for this insight. I had, as I said above, read that quote many
times, and had never picked up Bruce’s point – and thus did not realise, as
Sandra last week did, that it was almost certainly a reference to Rosenthal,
and the secret army. It is a sobering
thought how much can turn on a single word of a manuscript – indeed, on three
letters: a “p’ instead of “cl”.
(Should anyone
should want to know why Scott was so strange, you can go to our DHLA website – http://www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl
- and click, first, on “Kangaroo”s
secret army plot”, then on “PART 1 – September 1972-March 1990”, then highlight
that text and go to your FIND tool and search for the date 17/5/76. That and
the subsequent diary entry for 9/6/76 will tell you more about William John
Rendell Scott – one of the most fascinating and significant people in
Australian history [he also has an entry, under his name, in the online Australian Dictionary of Biography, written
by my friend and colleague, Dr Andrew Moore].)