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WHY DID LAWRENCE MAKE THE CONNECTION? - KANGAROO AND R.L. STEVENSON John Lowe |
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From
Rananim December 1997, Vol 5, No 3
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IN the Summer 1992 issue of The D.H. Lawrence Review Keith Sagar discusses Lawrence’s clearly deliberate allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson in the initials of the protagonist of Kangaroo, Richard Lovat Somers. 1. He asks, "Why did Lawrence make the connection?"
The "connection" was possibly first noticed by Lawrence’s detractor, Hugh Kingsmill, in 1938, and he made extensive use of Lawrence’s self-projection as a Stevenson figure to develop his attack on him.2 Kingsmill did not altogether set up a straw man. As Sagar indicates, the points of similarity between the lives of Stevenson and Lawrence are remarkable. Meyers has also written on the subject.3 Eigner goes even further, and claims that Lawrence did model his life on the earlier writer’s.4
It has been said that in a less restrictive era, Stevenson might have become a writer in Lawrence’s vein: he himself hinted at something like this in a letter to his cousin.5 Graham has rightly commented on the Lawrencian ethos of Stevenson’s short novel Olalla.6
Catherine Carswell dissents, admiring the Lawrences’ contentious marriage, and contrasting it favourably with the complaisant relationship of the Stevensons.7 More recent biographers however suggest that this was less smooth than previously believed.
Sagar wonders if there may be more parallels. Correspondences can be found between Stevenson’s visits to Sydney in 1890, 1891 and 1893, and Lawrence’s in 1922, as well as certain details in Kangaroo. There has, however, been only one attempt at a comprehensive account of Stevenson’s visits, the short book by Mackaness, Robert Louis Stevenson, his Associations with Australia. Much of Mackaness’s information came to him by word of mouth in the nineteen thirties, from people who had met Stevenson; so that his sources are no longer available.
The following parallels can nevertheless be observed between Stevenson and Lawrence’s visits:
1. Mackaness records that Stevenson strolled about the city with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, and mentions "his strolls in the Domain and his trip down the South Coast."8
2. In 1893, Stevenson stayed in Macquarie Street, among other places.9 Lawrence in all probability, and Somers in fiction, also did so.
3. Stevenson on one of his visits took a sunrise trip by hansom cab to Mrs Macquarie’s Point.10 In Chapter 11 of Kangaroo Somers and Jaz take a hansom cab to "the spit" in the Botanic Gardens, "the promontory ... with blue water on either side."11 Nowhere but Mrs Macquarie’s Point fits this description.
4. In 1892 Stevenson and Osbourne published their jointly written novel The Wrecker. Essentially an adventure story, containing one or two unlikely coincidences, it ranges over several parts of the world. Chapter 21 is set in and near Sydney. An Englishman meets a local inhabitant at the Macquarrie (sic) Street entrance to the Domain, quite close to the opening scene of Kangaroo. He then works for a while at Clifton on the south coast, nine kilometres north of Thirroul.
These parallels, in addition to those set out by Sagar, are remarkable. Could they simply be coincidence? The answer probably lies in a remarkably undocumented fact: from just after Christmas 1919 until February 1920 both Lawrence and Lloyd Osbourne were on the island of Capri. In this time they formed close friendships with Compton Mackenzie, and planned with him a voyage to the South Pacific, which is mentioned by Sagar.
Lawrence’s interest in this proposed voyage is documented in his letters and in biographies. The evidence of Osbourne’s participation is more scattered. He came with his wife to Capri in 1919, apparently about August, and there became an "intimate" friend of Mackenzie.12 In his reminiscences, Mackenzie mentions that Osbourne once visited him when he was at work on the South Seas project; though apparently Lawrence was not present at the time. Recalling the plan, Mackenzie switches from Osbourne to Lawrence back to Osbourne in one short paragraph.13 In July 1920, while the correspondence with Lawrence was still continuing, Mackenzie considered making films in the South Pacific, and discussed this with Osbourne.14 Faith Mackenzie twenty years later mentions this plan, and Lawrence, in the same sentence:
A voyage to the South Seas had been in the air for some time; there was talk of taking a cinema outfit, and D.H. Lawrence was to be one of the party.15
A page later, she reiterates that Lawrence was a member of the proposed voyage. In his book on Stevenson, written much later, Compton remarks that reading and writing about Stevenson’s voyages reminded him of the plans he had made with Lawrence on Capri.16
Yet there seems to be no specific record that Lawrence and Osbourne met. There is no apparent mention in Lawrence’s letters. The evidence is all circumstantial, tantalisingly so. The University of Naples, in its investigations of Lawrence’s periods in Italy, has no explicit record that he met Osbourne.17 Knowing the nature of Lawrence’s relationships with friends and associates, one wonders if perhaps there had been a quarrel.
Mackenzie gave up his Pacific plans, and took a lease on the Channel Islands Herm and Jethou. Although Lawrence never visited these islands, he had by October 1920 "heard all about Herm"18 - including perhaps the fact that it contained blue gum trees and wallabies.19 In the following February, he was "so wondering what it is like: if it has that Celtic fascination."20 The nature of Celtic people is arguably a major theme of Kangaroo.
It would seem that a couple of years before reaching the Pacific and starting the novel, Lawrence had a concurrence of experiences involving a new society in the South Pacific, Stevenson, Osbourne (or at least a mutual friend), Australian flora and fauna, and a Celtic environment. His arrival in Sydney could have set off memories of this period. It would become clear why he alluded to Stevenson in the name of his protagonist.
This would also explain also the question that occupies biographers of Lawrence: what drew him to Macquarie Street and then the near south coast? If he knew of the Sydney area chiefly through the reminiscences of Osbourne, then these were to him the most meaningful places in the area, and he was drawn to them. Osbourne might even have advised him to stay in Macquarie Street. Lawrence did not go to a place without learning something about it beforehand.
There is one possible alternative. If Lawrence did not work with Osbourne on planning the proposed voyage, or fell out with him, he still could have remembered details from The Wrecker. The locales of the Domain, Macquarie Street and the south coast are there, and if the book suggested places to visit and settle, then life followed art. In any case, art followed life: Lawrence used Macquarie Street to get Kangaroo started, and "Mullumbimby" followed from Thirroul.
The Wrecker, though, is not specifically included in Burwell’s list of his reading. There are two known periods in his life when he did read Stevenson. Jessie Chambers records that in 1904 he read some titles,21 but does not mention The Wrecker. He also read "some of Stevenson,"22 as Sagar indicates, after Capri, while still discussing the proposed voyage with Mackenzie. His only comment is that quoted by Sagar, about "Scotch bogs and mosses." But he did not necessarily read only books with a Scottish setting. Indeed, with Mackenzie pressing him about the project, it would be strange if he did not seek out some of Stevenson’s work set in the South Seas. Much of the significant action of The Wrecker takes place in the Pacific. There is of course the question, where did Lawrence obtain texts of Stevenson at Fontana Vecchia? Might Mackenzie, or even Osbourne, have sent him some books?
One question remains. If Lawrence had Stevenson in mind when writing Kangaroo (and he wrote it in a great hurry), did any phrases emerge from his memory, to be echoed in the text? Stevenson was a memorable stylist, and phrases may linger in one’s mind from childhood reading. There are two possible cases. In Chapter 13, within a flow of volcanic imagery, there suddenly appears a physiological metaphor:
Once that disruption has taken place in a man’s soul, and ... something has broken in his tissue and the liquid fire has run out loose into his blood ... (K, 262)
This mixed metaphor could perhaps be an unconscious echo of a passage in Chapter 6 of The Master of Ballantrae:
It is like there was some destruction in those delicate tissues where the soul resides and does her earthly business ...
Stevenson’s passage, explaining the deviant behaviour of the Durisdeers, reflects an eighteenth-century medical theory, and is a simple, unmixed metaphor. Lawrence may have taken it up unconsciously, and tangled it with his volcanic imagery.
In his psychopathic gloating after the row in town, Jack Callcott uses first the phrase "killing a man", then "killing your man" (K, 319). This possessive has overtones of duty, or more probably destiny, reflecting his belief in fate. The phrase "killed one’s man" appears prominently near the beginning of Stevenson’s story "The Sire de Maletroit’s Door", where it has overtones of chivalry and a code of honour. In Callcott’s case, the code of behaviour has become extremely debased.
It would seem impossible for Lawrence and Osbourne not to have met on Capri. Whatever the reason for the lack of a record, they must have had some dealings through their close friendships with Mackenzie, and their participation in the plans for his proposed voyage. This would explain Lawrence’s conscious allusion to Stevenson in Kangaroo, and probably something subconscious as well.
ENDNOTES
1. Keith Sagar, "D.H. Lawrence and Robert Louis Stevenson." The D.H. Lawrence Review, 24 (1992), 161-165.
2. Hugh Kingsmill, D.H. Lawrence (London : Methuen, 1938), p. 140-177.
3. Geoffrey Meyers, D.H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy (Philadpelphia : Univ. of Pennsylvania Press), p. 13-17.
4. Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton : Univ. Press), p. 231.
5. Letter to R.A.M. Stevenson, Sept. 1894. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Parts 11-14 (London : Chatto & Windus, 1912), p. 439.
6. Kenneth Graham, "Stevenson and Henry James : a Crossing," Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Andrew Noble (London : Vision Press, 1983), p. 44.
7. Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage (N.Y. : Harcourt Brace, 1932), p. 69.
8. George Mackaness, Robert Louis Stevenson, his Association with Australia (Dubbo : Review Pubns, 1976), p. 11.
9. Ibid., p. 25.
10. W. Farmer Whyte, "In the 90’s, Leaves from an Old Magazine, II," Sydney Morning Herald, Dec. 16, 1933, p. 11.
11. Kangaroo, ed. by Bruce Steele (Cambridge : Univ. Press, 1994), p. 203f. Hereafter designated K.
12. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times, Octave 5, 1915-1923 (London : Chatto & Windus, 1966), p. 155.
13. Compton Mackenzie, Robert Louis Stevenson (London : Morgan-Grampian, 1969), p. 44.
14. My Life and Times, Octave 5, p. 187.
15. Faith Mackenzie, More Than I Should (London : Collins, 1940), p. 40.
16. Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 48. There are two other writings which suggest that both Lawrence and Mackenzie mentally linked Kangaroo with their association in 1920, and hence with Osbourne. In the letter where he told Secker that Kangaroo was finished, Lawrence asked for news, specifically mentioning Mackenzie (The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, v.4, Cambridge : Univ. Press, 1987, p. 298-299). Later came Mackenzie’s waspish attack on "Daniel Rayner" (Lawrence) in Book 2 of The West Wind of Love (London : Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 319-320. Rayner, as a result of his "wanderings through Australasia", is attracted, and then for a trivial reason repelled, by Italian Fascism. Having fallen out with Lawrence by this time, Mackenzie ridicules him.
17. Letter of Dr Simone de Filippis to the writer, October, 1985. She indicated that she would advise me if any evidence eventuated.
18. Letter to Mackenzie, Oct. 25, 1920, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, v.3 (Cambridge : Univ. Press, 1984), p. 616.
19. My Life and Times, Octave 5, p. 188.
20. Letter to Mackenzie, Feb. 7, 1921, Letters, v.3, p. 663.
21. Jessie Chambers, D.H. Lawrence, 2nd ed. (London : Cass, 1965), p. 96.
22. Letter to Mackenzie, June 11, 1920, Letters, v.3, p. 549.