The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-47996-8 - Quetzalcoatl: D. H. Lawrenc Edited by N. H. Reeve Frontmatter More information

THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

THE WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

EDITORIAL BOARD general editors James T. Boulton

M. H. Black Paul Poplawski John Worthen

QUETZALCOATL

D. H. LAWRENCE

edited by N. H. REEVE

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107479968 © Cambridge University Press 2011 Th is, the Cambridge edition of Quetzalcoatl, is established from the original sources and fi rst published in 2011 © the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 2011. Introduction and notes © Cambridge University Press 2011. Permission to reproduce this text entire or in part, or to quote from it, can be granted only by the Literary Executor of the Estate, Pollinger Limited, 9 Staple Inn, Holborn, London WC1V 7QH. Permission to reproduce the introduction and notes entire or in part should be requested from Cambridge University Press. Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 First paperback edition 2014 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930. [Plumed serpent] Quetzalcoatl / D. H. Lawrence, N. H. Reeve. p. cm. – (Th e Cambridge edition of the works of D. H. Lawrence) Originally published as Th e plumed serpent in 1926. isbn 978-1-107-00407-8 (hardback) 1. British – Mexico – Fiction. 2. Mexico – Fiction. 3. Cults – Mexico – Fiction. 4. Serpent worship – Fiction. 5. Quetzalcoatl (Aztec deity) – Fiction. 6. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930. Plumed serpent. I. Reeve, N. H., 1953– II. Title. III. Series. pr6023.a93p53 2011 823´.912 – dc22 2010053213 isbn 978-1-107-00407-8 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-47996-8 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

General editor’s preface page vii Acknowledgements ix Chronology x Cue-titles xv Introduction xvii ‘The ﬁrst complete sketch’ xvii America xix Literary preparations xxiii Mexico City xxvii Chapala and after xxxi The manuscript and typescript of Quetzalcoatl xxxviii The 1995 Louis Martz edition xli Texts xliii

QUETZALCOATL 1

Appendices 309 I Deleted MS passage from Chapter III, 58:7–61:18 311 II Deleted MS passage from Chapter VI, 130:1–135:7 313 III Deleted MS passage from Chapter VII, 155:5–158:23 316 IV Deleted MS passage from Chapter VII, 163:6–172:13 319 Explanatory notes 325 Textual apparatus 363 Line-end hyphenation 407

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

D. H. Lawrence is one of the great writers of the twentieth century – yet the texts of his writings, whether published during his lifetime or since, are, for the most part, textually corrupt. The extent of the corruption is remarkable; it can derive from every stage of composition and publication. We know from study of his MSS that Lawrence was a careful writer, though not rigidly consistent in matters of minor convention. We know also that he revised at every possible stage. Yet he rarely if ever compared one stage with the previous one, and overlooked the errors of typists or copyists. He was forced to accept, as most authors are, the often stringent house-styling of his printers, which overrode his punctuation and even his sentence-structure and paragraphing. He sometimes overlooked plausible printing errors. More important, as a professional author living by his pen, he had to accept, with more or less good will, stringent editing by a publisher’s reader in his early days, and at all times the results of his publishers’ timidity. So the fear of Grundyish disapproval, or actual legal action, led to bowdlerisation or censorship from the very beginning of his career. Threats of libel suits produced other changes. Sometimes a publisher made more changes than he admitted to Lawrence. On a number of occasions, in dealing with American and British publishers, Lawrence produced texts for both which were not identical. Then there were extraordinary lapses like the occasion when a typist turned over two pages of MS at once, and the result happened to make sense. This whole story can be reconstructed from the introductions to the volumes in this edition; cumulatively they will form a history of Lawrence’s writing career. The Cambridge Edition aims to provide texts which are as close as can now be determined to those he would have wished to see printed. They have been established by a rigorous collation of extant manuscripts and typescripts, proofs and early printed versions; they restore the words, sentences, even whole pages omitted or falsiﬁed by editors or compositors; they are freed from printing-house conventions which were imposed on Lawrence’s style; and interference on the part of frightened publishers has been eliminated. Far from doing violence to the texts Lawrence would have wished to see published, editorial intervention is essential to recover them. Though we have to accept that some cannot now be recovered in their entirety because vii

viii General editor’s preface early states have not survived, we must be glad that so much evidence remains. Paradoxical as it may seem, the outcome of this recension will be texts which differ, often radically and certainly frequently, from those seen by the author himself. Editors have adopted the principle that the most authoritative form of the text is to be followed, even if this leads sometimes to a ‘spoken’ or a ‘manuscript’ rather than a ‘printed’ style. We have not wanted to strip off one house-styling in order to impose another. Editorial discretion may be allowed in order to regularise Lawrence’s sometimes wayward spelling and punctuation in accordance with his most frequent practice in a particular text. A detailed record of these and other decisions on textual matters, together with the evidence on which they are based, will be found in the Textual apparatus which records variant readings in manuscripts, typescripts and proofs and printed variants in forms of the text published in Lawrence’s lifetime. We do not record posthumous corruptions, except where first publication was posthumous. Significant MS readings may be found in the occasional Explanatory note. In each volume, the editor’s Introduction relates the contents to Lawrence’s life and to his other writings; it gives the history of composition of the text in some detail, for its intrinsic interest, and because this history is essential to the statement of editorial principles followed. It provides an account of publication and reception which will be found to contain a good deal of hith- erto unknown information. Where appropriate, Appendices make available extended draft manuscript readings of significance, or important material, sometimes unpublished, associated with a particular work. Though Lawrence is a twentieth-century writer and in many respects remains our contemporary, the idiom of his day is not invariably intelligible now, especially to the many readers who are not native speakers of British English. His use of dialect is another difficulty, and further barriers to full understanding are created by now obscure literary, historical, political or other references and allusions. On these occasions Explanatory notes are supplied by the editor; it is assumed that the reader has access to a good general dictionary and that the editor need not gloss words or expressions that may be found in it. Where Lawrence’s letters are quoted in editorial matter, the reader should assume that his manuscript alone is the source of eccentricities of phrase or spelling.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The award of an Andrew Mellon fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, made possible the completion of this edition. I am grateful to the Director, Thomas F. Staley, his colleagues Patricia Fox and Richard Workman, the staff of the Center’s Reading Room, and especially Gregory Curtis. I am grateful also to the following: Linda Bree, Maartje Scheltens and the staff of Cambridge University Press; Jennie Rathbun and the staff of the Houghton Library, University of Harvard; Ian Glen and the staff of the Library and Information Centre, Swansea University. I wish to thank the following for their particular contributions, and for their advice, encouragement and support: Bill Brockman, James T. Boulton, Martha Campbell, Stevie Davies, Helen Fulton, Andrew Harrison, Brian Lewis, Paul Poplawski, Glyn Pursglove, M. Wynn Thomas, and especially John Worthen.

CHRONOLOGY

11 September 1885 Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire September 1898–July 1901 Pupil at Nottingham High School 1902–1908 Pupil teacher; student at Nottingham University College 7 December 1907 First publication: ‘A Prelude’, in Nottinghamshire Guardian October 1908 Appointed as teacher at Davidson Road School, Croydon November 1909 Publishes ﬁve poems in English Review 3 December 1910 Engagement to Louie Burrows; broken off on 4 February 1912 9 December 1910 Death of his mother, Lydia Lawrence 19 January 1911 The White Peacock published in New York (20 January in London) 19 November 1911 Ill with pneumonia; resigns his teaching post on 28 February 1912 March 1912 Meets Frieda Weekley; they travel to Germany on 3 May 23 May 1912 The Trespasser September 1912–March 1913 At Gargnano, Lago di Garda, Italy February 1913 Love Poems and Others 29 May 1913 Sons and Lovers June–August 1913 In England August 1913–June 1914 In Germany, Switzerland and Italy 1 April 1914 The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (New York) July 1914–December 1915 In London, Buckinghamshire and Sussex 13 July 1914 Marries Frieda Weekley in London 26 November 1914 The Prussian Ofﬁcer and Other Stories 30 September 1915 The Rainbow; suppressed by court order on 13 November 30 December 1915–15 October 1917 In Cornwall February 1916 Begins reading American literature: Melville, Dana, Crevecoeur,ˆ Cooper and others June 1916 Twilight in Italy July 1916 Amores

Chronology xi

by 24 August 1917 Reads Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and Pryse’s The Apocalypse Unsealed August 1917–October 1918 Works on early versions of essays on American literature 15 October 1917 Ordered to leave Cornwall by military authorities October 1917–November 1919 In London, Berkshire and Derbyshire 26 November 1917 Look! We Have Come Through! October 1918 New Poems November 1918–June 1919 Eight essays on American literature published in English Review September–October 1919 Revises American essays November 1919–February 1922 In Italy, Capri and Sicily 20 November 1919 Bay January 1920 Writes Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious May 1920 Touch and Go June 1920 Further revision of American essays September 1920 Writes ‘Foreword’ to Studies in Classic American Literature; published as ‘America, Listen to your Own’, in New Republic, 15 December 1920 9 November 1920 Women in Love published in New York (10 June 1921 in England) 25 November 1920 The Lost Girl February 1921 Movements in European History 10 May 1921 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (New York) 5 November 1921 Receives letter from Mabel Dodge Sterne inviting him to Taos, New Mexico by 18 November 1921 Begins writing Memoir of Maurice Magnus 12 December 1921 Sea and Sardinia (New York) 26 February 1922 Sails from Naples for Ceylon March–April 1922 In Ceylon 14 April 1922 Aaron’s Rod (New York) 4 May–11 August 1922 In Australia Late May–early July 1922 Writes Kangaroo 11 August 1922 Sails from Australia to USA, via New Zealand and Tahiti 4 September 1922 Lands at San Francisco 10 September 1922 Meets Witter Bynner and Willard Johnson in Santa Fe 11 September 1922 Arrives in Taos 14–18 September 1922 Observes the Jicarilla Apache ceremonies

xii Chronology

20 September 1922 Starts writing the ‘Mabel novel’, ‘The Wilful Woman’; abandoned soon after 6 October October 1922 Writes ‘Pueblos and an Englishman’, later split into three shorter essays and revised, as ‘Indians and an Englishman’, ‘Certain Americans and an Englishman’, and ‘Taos’ October 1922 Revises Kangaroo October 1922–January 1923 Extensive revisions of Studies in Classic American Literature 23 October 1922 Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York) 24 October 1922 England, My England and Other Stories (New York) 1 December 1922 Moves with Frieda to Del Monte ranch; joined there by Kai Gøtzsche and Knud Merrild 31 December 1922 First correspondence with Frederick Carter 1 January 1923 ‘I think of going in a few weeks’ time down into Mexico’ 10 February 1923 Asks Seltzer to send a copy of Terry’s Guide to Mexico March 1923 The Ladybird, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll 8 March 1923 Invites Bynner and Johnson to join the Mexican trip 19 March 1923 Leaves Taos for Mexico via Santa Fe 23 March 1923 Arrives in Mexico City; stays first night in Hotel Regis, then moves to Hotel Monte Carlo until 27 April 30 March 1923 Meets Bynner and Johnson in Mexico City 1 April 1923 Attends bullfight in Mexico City 3 April 1923 Visits pyramids at Teotihuacan´ 5 April 1923 Visits Cuernavaca April 1923 Writes ‘Au Revoir, U.S.A.’; published in December issue of Laughing Horse 13–21 April 1923 Visits Puebla, Cholula and Orizaba 27 April 1923 Travels to Chapala 2 May–9 July 1923 At Calle Zaragoza no. 4, Chapala 10 May 1923 Begins work on Quetzalcoatl 26 May 1923 Hopes to finish Quetzalcoatl ‘in first rough form’ by end of June 31 May 1923 ‘I have already written ten chapters’ of Quetzalcoatl 8 June 1923 Quetzalcoatl ‘more than half done’

Chronology xiii

15 June 1923 Acknowledges receipt of Carter’s manuscript of The Dragon of the Alchemists and accompanying drawings 15 June 1923 Writes to his American publisher Thomas Seltzer: ‘The novel has gone well. Shall I call it “Quetzalcoatl”? . . . I’ve done 415 MS. pages – expect about another 100’ 18 June 1923 Letter to Carter responding to the manuscript of The Dragon of the Alchemists 22 June 1923 ‘Novel done, save for last three chapters’ 27 June 1923 ‘The novel is nearly ﬁnished – near enough to leave’ 9 July 1923 Leaves Chapala for New York 19 July–22 August 1923 In New York; gives manuscript of Quetzalcoatl to Seltzer for typing 22 August 1923 Leaves New York after Frieda sails alone for England; visits Buffalo, California and (with Gøtzsche) Mexico again 27 August 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature (New York) September 1923 Kangaroo 9 October 1923 Birds, Beasts and Flowers (New York) 13 October 1923 Mastro-don Gesualdo (New York) 17 October 1923 Arrives in Guadalajara 21 October–November 1923 In Guadalajara and later Mexico City 22 November 1923 Sails from Vera Cruz for England December 1923–March 1924 In England, France and Germany 11 March 1924 Arrives in New York; collects MS of Quetzalcoatl from Seltzer March–May 1924 At Taos May–October 1924 At Lobo Ranch 28 August 1924 TheBoyintheBush(with Mollie Skinner) 10 September 1924 Death of his father, Arthur John Lawrence 1 October 1924 Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, by ‘M. M.’ (Maurice Magnus) published, with DHL’s Memoir of Maurice Magnus as introduction 16 October 1924 Leaves Taos for Mexico City, taking MS of Quetzalcoatl; stays again in Hotel Monte Carlo 9 November 1924–February 1925 In Oaxaca 19 November 1924 Begins complete rewriting of Quetzalcoatl; ﬁnishes by 2 February 1925; gravely ill afterwards 26 February–25 March 1925 In Mexico City 29 March 1925 Arrives back in New Mexico

xiv Chronology

14 May 1925 St. Mawr together with The Princess June–July 1925 Revises typescript of rewritten Quetzalcoatl (The Plumed Serpent) September 1925–June 1928 In England and, principally, in Italy 7 December 1925 Reﬂections on the Death of a Porcupine (Philadelphia) 21 January 1926 The Plumed Serpent published in London (5 February in New York) 25 March 1926 David June 1927 Mornings in Mexico 24 May 1928 The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories June 1928–March 1930 In Switzerland and, principally, in France Late June 1928 Lady Chatterley’s Lover privately published in Florence September 1928 Collected Poems July 1929 Pansies 5 July 1929 Exhibition of paintings in London raided by police September 1929 The Escaped Cock (Paris) 2 March 1930 Dies at Vence, Alpes Maritimes, France 1 September 1995 Quetzalcoatl, ed. Louis Martz (Redding Ridge, Connecticut)

CUE-TITLES

Apocalypse Mara Kalnins, ed. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Barca Frances Erskine Calderon´ de la Barca. Life in Mexico. London: Dent, 1913. Carter Frederick Carter. The Dragon of the Alchemists. London: Elkin Mathews, Ltd, 1926. DHLR xxii The D. H. Lawrence Review, Volume XXII, Fall, 1990. Dying Game David Ellis. D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Frieda Frieda Lawrence. ‘Not I, But the Wind ...’Santa Fe: Rydal Press, 1934. IR N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, eds. Introductions and Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Journey with Genius Witter Bynner. Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reﬂections concerning the D. H. Lawrences. London: Peter Nevill, 1953. Letters, iii. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, eds. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Letters, iv. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansﬁeld, eds. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Letters, v. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, eds. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume V. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Letters, viii. James T. Boulton, ed. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

xvi Cue-titles Martz Louis L. Martz, ed. Quetzalcoatl: The Early Version of The Plumed Serpent, by D. H. Lawrence. Redding Ridge, Connecticut: Black Swan Books, 1995. MinM Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, ed. Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. PS L. D. Clark, ed. The Plumed Serpent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Poems Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, eds. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1964. Roberts Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski. A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. SCAL Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, eds. Studies in Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Terry T. Philip Terry. Terry’s Guide to Mexico. New York:HoughtonMifﬂinandCo.,1923.

INTRODUCTION

‘The ﬁrst complete sketch’ On 31 May 1923, Lawrence wrote to his mother-in-law, Anna von Richthofen:

IalwayshadtheideaIshouldliketowriteanovelhereinAmerica.IntheUnitedStates I couldn’t begin anything. But here it will probably go well. I have already written ten chapters, and if only the good Lord helps me, I shall have the ﬁrst complete sketch done by the end of June.1

The novel that was now making such good progress was Quetzalcoatl,the name Lawrence gave to the first version of what would later become The Plumed Serpent. ‘Here’ was the village of Chapala, by the shore of the lake of that name, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, about thirty miles south of the state capital, Guadalajara. He predicted his schedule accurately; after seven weeks’ work, on 27 June, while he and his wife Frieda were packing to leave Chapala, he wrote to Bessie Freeman: ‘The novel is nearly finished – near enough to leave.’2 The expression ‘nearly finished’ is open to interpretation: it could imply that the narrative still had a little way to go, or that the end had been reached, but the work as a whole needed polishing. It is not possible to be certain; there is some evidence on both sides. In a letter dated 22 June, to his American publisher, Thomas Seltzer,3 Lawrence had said: ‘Novel done, save for last three chapters – me got a cold so postponing finishing it.’4 Was he thinking that three further chapters would be needed, in addition to the

1 Letters,iv.451. Baroness Anna von Richthofen, nee´ Marquier (1851–1930). Lawrence enjoyed excellent relations with her, and wrote to her frequently. His German original reads as follows: ‘Nur hatte ich immer die Idee, ich mochte¨ einen Roman hier in Amerika schreiben. In den Ver. Staaten konnte¨ ich nichts anfangen. Hier aber es geht wahrscheinlich gut. Ich habe zehn Kapitel schon geschrieben, und wenn der Herr Gott nur mich hilft, habe ich die erste volle Skizze schon fertig bei dem Ende Juni.’ Subsequent references in the Introduction to Letters volumes appear in the form (iv. 435), etc. 2 Letters,iv.462. Elizabeth (Bessie) Wilkeson Freeman (1876–1951), whom the Lawrences met in Taos in the autumn of 1922, was a childhood friend of Mabel Dodge Sterne (see n. 22 below). 3 Thomas Seltzer (1875–1943), DHL’s American publisher between 1920 and 1925. 4 Letters, viii. 81.

xvii

xviii Introduction nineteen the manuscript contains, or was it that the ‘last three’ of the nineteen were drafted quickly, in the final few days of his stay in Chapala, once his cold had cleared up? On 15 June he had told Seltzer ‘I’ve done 415 MS pages – expect about another 100’(iv.457): at page 415 he would have been nearing the end of the sixteenth chapter, and the three remaining chapters in the manuscript take up another sixty-four pages, rather than the 100 he was expecting (there are 479 pages in all). Chapters XVII and XIX are the two shortest in the novel, and Chapter XIX does break off rather abruptly, in a manner which might suggest that more was to come; on the other hand, the ending as it stands could just as readily be regarded as an appropriate conclusion to a fully coherent work.5 But whichever sense is adopted of ‘nearly finished’, or ‘last three chapters’, Lawrence’s earlier phrase, ‘the first complete sketch’, suggests that he recognised from the beginning that he would want to return to what he had written and revise it, even if only to the moderate extent implied by the comment ‘near enough to leave’. In the event, he did not resume work on the novel for fully seventeen months, and by that time his sense of what he wanted from it had considerably altered. Already in July 1924 he was describing it to his friend Earl Brewster6 as ‘half finished’ (v. 75), rather than ‘nearly finished’, and when he finally settled to it again, in the southern Mexican town of Oaxaca, on 19 November 1924,7 he realised that his new conception required not a revision of the original manuscript, but a wholesale rewriting. L. D. Clark gives a detailed account of this process in his introduction to the Cambridge edition of The Plumed Serpent.8 The result of the 1924–5 rewriting was a work sufficiently changed from the 1923 Quetzalcoatl as to make the relationship between the two similar to that between, say, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the works known as The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels; in such cases Lawrence’s early versions can stand as significant and substantially achieved creations in their own right, as well as the base materials from which something very different would evolve. The publication here of the 1923 Quetzalcoatl makes it possible to trace that evolution, and ensures that all Lawrence’s fictional work,

5 The ending as it stands is not unlike that of Kangaroo, with the heroine about to resume her travels, their outcome uncertain. Meanwhile, in a neatly comic reversal of Quetzalcoatl’s earlier mood, the native Mexicans gaze in amused wonder at an example of elaborately coloured English textile-work, a knitted tea-cosy. 6 Earl Brewster (1878–1957), American painter. DHL had met Brewster and his wife Achsah (1878–1945) on the island of Capri in 1921, and visited them in Ceylon in 1922. 7 The date is written on the top of the ﬁrst new page of manuscript. 8 PS xxiv–xxxii. DHL did not, however, make the ‘scattered revisions in the typescript’ of Quetzalcoatl (PS xxxi); these were done by Seltzer, or by a typist in Seltzer’s ofﬁce. See xli below.

Introduction xix in its ﬁrst, last and intermediate stages, is now available in the Cambridge edition.

America ‘I always had the idea I should like to write a novel here in America’ (iv. 451). Lawrence’s fascination with America had begun far back, with his childhood reading, and in the autumn of 1922, as he was revising his essays on classic American literature, he remembered the powerfully romantic impression made on him long before: ‘I think this wild and noble America is the thing that I have pined for most ever since I read Fenimore Cooper as a boy.’9 But it was after the outbreak of the First World War, an event that ‘damaged his very belief in his country and his age’, as John Worthen has put it,10 that the idea of actually going to America began to take possession of him. The banning of The Rainbow, in November 1915, further intensiﬁed his disillusionment with England, while having in addition a disastrous effect on his earning power as a professional writer. But even before this, he had been imagining an alternative environment in which human society and culture might be reborn, and creative life ﬂourish. In October 1915 he wrote to the American poet and editor Harriet Monroe:11

I must see America. I think one can feel hope there. I think that there the life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld. I must see America. I believe it is beginning, not ending.12

Lawrence and Frieda spent a good part of that autumn raising money in order to go to Florida, with a view to establishing a kind of expatriate colony of the like-minded (an idea that never lost its attraction for him), but the scheme fell through when he realised he could not bring himself to ‘attest’ his willingness to serve in the armed forces, and thus obtain the additional military exemption necessary for him to leave the country. He continued nonetheless to mull over various travel plans throughout the following year, and by November 1916 was indicating to his friend Catherine Carswell13 how the desire to remove

9 SCAL 32:30–1. 10 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (London, 2005), p. 150. 11 Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), the founder of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, in Chicago in 1912. 12 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge, 1981), p. 417. 13 Catherine Carswell, nee´ MacFarlane (1879–1946), novelist and reviewer, loyal friend of DHL since June 1914. She had been an occasional contributor to the Glasgow Herald, which dispensed with her services after she wrote a favourable review of The Rainbow.

xx Introduction himself had gathered strength, the desire to commit himself psychologically and emotionally to a homeland of the future, across the Atlantic:

I know now, ﬁnally: a. That I want to go away from England for ever. b. That I want ultimately to go to a country of which I have hope, in which I feel the new unknown.

In short, I want, immediately or at length, to transfer all my life to America. Because there, I know, the skies are not so old, the air is newer, the earth is not tired. Don’t think I have any illusions about the people, the life. The people and the life are monstrous. I want, at length, to get a place in the far west mountains, from which one can see the distant Paciﬁc Ocean, and there live facing the bright west.14

He was immersing himself in American fiction, poetry and prose, and in 1917 began work on the project that would eventually become Studies in Classic American Literature.15 Further plans for making the journey were mooted, dropped, revived and baulked; his attempt to obtain fresh passports was refused in February 1917: ‘It is a bitter blow, because I must go to America. But I will try again in a little time.’16 America’s entry into the war that April dampened his enthusiasm for a while, and even after the war had ended, passport restrictions were not lifted until late in 1919,whenother more manageable journeys would take priority (Frieda was anxious to see her family in Germany for the first time in five years). By March 1920 the Lawrences had settled in Sicily, with the American project again deferred, even though by this time it was becoming clear that the move could bring immediate practical benefits as well as more theoretical ones. Lawrence’s reputation, his readership, and the prospects for his income were all on the rise in the USA, while in Britain they were only slowly recovering from the calamities of 1915. More plans were discussed and abandoned, to the point where his American friend, the journalist Robert Mountsier,17 who began working as his US agent in 1920, openly complained in April 1921 about the protracted irresolution: ‘Your chief publishing field is here, and the nearer

14 Letters, iii. 25. 15 As the editors of SCAL point out, by the end of 1916 DHL had read a good deal of Melville, Dana, Crevecoeurˆ and Cooper, and early the following year Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson and Franklin had been added to the list (SCAL xxviii–xxx). 16 Letters, iii. 90. Detailed accounts of the development of DHL’s interest in America can be found in the introductions to PS, SCAL and MinM; see also Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 276–82, 438–57. 17 Robert Mountsier (1888–1972), journalist and DHL’s ﬁrst literary agent in the USA. By the time DHL travelled to Mexico in 1923 he was no longer employing Mountsier; see Letters, iv. 376.

Introduction xxi youaretoitthebetter...AmInowtogoonwithafeelingthateverydecision you arrive at is . . . to be considered as one that isn’t definite at all’ (iii. 685 n. 1). Mountsier was right, insofar as Lawrence vacillated as often as he declared his mind to be made up, vacillated seemingly in reaction to his own declarations, as if the very act of making a definitive statement prompted its immediate counter; and it was not until the autumn of 1922 that the move was finally made. That it did at last happen was partly due to a strand in Lawrence’s thinking by no means common in the long tradition of European enthusiasm for the New World.18 Where others were variously stimulated by ideas of freedom, self-renewal, openness, emptiness, wonder or prospective riches, Lawrence stood apart by virtue of the interest he took in the native American peoples and their religions. When he thought of America, he thought of the potential for revitalising contact with an instinctual pagan life; he was concerned less with liberty, or expansiveness, than with traces and intimations of what was already there. In 1920, in the short ‘Foreword’ to his Studies in Classic American Literature, he had discussed what he called the ‘great aboriginal spirit’ of America.19 He felt that the first colonisers, Puritan and Catholic alike, had turned away from that spirit and tried to extirpate it:

That which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black Demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognize again, recognize and embrace . . . They must catch the pulse of the life which Cortes` and Columbus murdered . . . A great and lovely life- form, unperfected, fell with Montezuma. The responsibility for the producing and the perfecting of this life-form devolves upon the new American . . . It means a surpassing of the old European life-form. It means a departure from the old European morality, ethic. It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities.20

It was precisely the early settlers’ European-minded enthusiasms that had blinded them to other possibilities. Contemporary Americans, Lawrence argued, should stop trying to be imitation Europeans, discard their sense of inferiority in the face of Europe’s glorious past, and recognise instead that the ‘real continuity’ was ‘not between Europe and the new States, but between the murdered Red America and the seething White America . . . The old emotions are crystallised for ever among the European monuments of beauty. There we can leave them, along with the old creeds and the old

18 Commentaries upon European attitudes to the discovery and development of America include C. Van Woodward’s The Old World’s New World (Oxford, 1991), and Geoff Ward’s The Writing of America (Cambridge, 2002). 19 SCAL 384:31. 20 SCAL 384:29–385:7.

xxii Introduction ethicallaws...Montezumahadotheremotions,suchaswehavenotknown oradmitted...AsVeniceweddedtheAdriatic,letAmericansembracethe great, dusky continent of the Red Man.’21 This ‘Foreword’ was published separately, as an essay with the title ‘Amer- ica, Listen to your Own’, in New Republic, 15 December 1920. It seems highly likely that the wealthy, influential American heiress, social activist and patron of the arts, Mabel Dodge Sterne,22 had read it. Mabel Sterne, now in her forties, had presided over fashionable salons both in Florence and New York, but by 1917 she had moved to New Mexico, firstly Santa Fe, then Taos, energetically involving herself in the growing campaign to advance and pro- tect native American culture. She had certainly read other recent works by Lawrence, such as the extract from Sea and Sardinia printed in the October 1921 issue of The Dial, and had concluded that he was uniquely attuned to her current passion. In her first letter to him, which he received in Sicily on 5 November 1921, she seemed, in what was to become a characteristic manner, to have been both echoing the arguments of his essay and looking to appropriate them; Lawrence in his reply to her wrote: ‘I believe what you say – one must somehow bring together the two ends of humanity, our own thin end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era’ (iv. 111). But the crux of her letter was a generous invitation to join her in New Mexico; she offered the Lawrences the use of a furnished house near her own. This was by some way the most promising of the various possible entry- routes into America that Lawrence had so far contrived or met with. His initial response to Mabel’s proposal veered between the positive – ‘I had your letter this afternoon and read it going down Corso: and smelt the Indian scent, andnibbledthemedicine...IthinkwewillcometoTaos’(iv.110–11)–and the guarded: ‘Are you practical enough to tell me how much it would cost, permonth...isthereacolonyofratherdreadfulsub-artypeople...whatdo the sound, prosperous Americans do in your region? . . . I want to take the next step. Shall it be Taos?’ (iv. 111). This see-saw of eagerness and reluctance continued throughout the winter of 1921–2.Heexploredinsomedetailthe logistics of transportation from Sicily to the USA (he wanted if possible to avoid entering the country via New York, which limited his choice of sailings). At the same time, he was writing to virtually all his current correspondents, one after another, in tones that suggest he was both seeking an endorsement of his plan and preserving an escape-route from it: ‘Really, I want to go. I will

21 SCAL 384:37–385:14. 22 Mabel Dodge Sterne, nee´ Ganson (1879–1962), heiress of a wealthy family in Buffalo, New York.

Introduction xxiii gototheStates.Really,Ithinkthehourhasstruck,togo...Youwillsayitis just my winter influenza which makes me think of America. But finally I shall go. But don’t tell anybody.’23 By the end of January 1922, however, he had opted instead for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where his friends the Brewsters were currently living: ‘I shrink as yet from the States. Ultimately I shall go there, no doubt. But I want to go east before I go west: go west via the east.’24 His eastward journey began on 26 February; it took him to Ceylon, Australia, and briefly the South Sea Islands, and by the time he ‘ultimately’ made it to Taos, on 11 September 1922, it was a little over ten months since Mabel’s invitation.

Literary preparations A good deal of what Lawrence wrote during those ten months could be regarded in retrospect as forms of preparation for the American adventure still to come. As both L. D. Clark and Virginia Crosswhite Hyde have pointed out,25 the prospect of that adventure had already made its presence felt more or less surreptitiously in the work Lawrence had been producing since the end of the war – in The Lost Girl, ‘The Fox’ and Aaron’s Rod,withitsdreamof‘a lake-city, like Mexico’26 – but from November 1921 onwards his imagination increasingly began to hover over what he had called, in his letter to Mabel, the ‘dark strand’. In the December, for example, while he was engrossed in steamship timetables, he wrote ‘The Ladybird’. This short novel followed Aaron’s Rod in its concern for a radical break with current emotional and political conventions, a break involving a degree of submission to a charismatic leader; but Lawrence now added to the mix a hint of atavistic resurgence, of vengeful suppressed ‘dark’ forces rising up against an excessively ‘white’ consciousness. In a letter written on 26 May 1923 (iv. 447), while Quetzalcoatl was in full swing, he would suggest that ‘in the long run perhaps “The Ladybird” has more the quick of a new thing than the other two stories’ (i.e. ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Captain’s Doll’, which had been published that March with ‘The Ladybird’, in a single volume). In Kangaroo, written in

23 Letters,iv.114, 10 November 1921, to his friend S. S. Koteliansky (1880–1955), Russian-born translator. See also Letters,iv.121, 123, 125 and 142. 24 Letters,iv.175. Detailed accounts of DHL’s determination to leave Europe, and his disputes with himself and others during the winter of 1921–2 are given in Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, pp. 694–718, and John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, pp. 252–60. 25 In the introductions to PS xx–xxi, and MinM xxvii. 26 Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge, 1988), 288:11.

xxiv Introduction Australia between May and July 1922, he attempted for the first time to use fiction to imagine what shape might be taken by the political reorganisation of an entire country; but for Somers, the Lawrence-spokesman in the novel, the ideas of the Australian leader ‘Kangaroo’ were still over-dependent on European charity and ‘white’ consciousness, leaving insufficient room for ‘the dark God’.27 The novel closed with Somers abandoning Australia and setting out for the United States; and even while Kangaroo was only a quarter done, Lawrence was already indicating to Seltzer (and to Mabel on the same day, 9 June 1922), where he felt the current work was taking him: ‘I should very much like to write an American novel, after this Australian one: on something the same lines’ (iv. 259;cf.260). He had also, shortly after receiving Mabel’s invitation, started on his ‘Mem- oir of Maurice Magnus’, a work hinting more strongly than the others of this period at the emotional cost likely to be incurred by renouncing the familiar. In the ‘Memoir’, his only extended foray into biographical writing, Lawrence was reconstructing, through the eyes of November and December 1921,experiences which had occurred nearly two years earlier, when he visited Maurice Magnus in the monastery at Montecassino, in February 1920. This visit had not previously been discussed or even mentioned in any of Lawrence’s surviving writings, but he now presented it as having constituted an absolute watershed, a realisation of the deeply abiding pull of the old world upon him, and a clarification of the path to be taken nonetheless:

Below we could see the plain, the straight white road straight as a thought, and the more ﬂexible black railway with the railway station . . . And how bitter, how barren a world! Barren like the black cinder-track of the railway, with its two steel lines. And here above, sitting with the little stretch of pale, dry thistles around us, our back to a warm rock, we were in the middle ages. Both worlds were agony to me. But here, on the mountain top was worst. The past, the poignancy of the not-quite-dead past. ‘I think one’s got to go through with the life down there—get somewhere beyond it. One can’t go back,’ I said to him. [···] And Magnus and I walking across as the sun set yellow and the cold of the snow came into the air, back home to the monastery! And I feeling as if my heart had once more broken: I don’t know why.28

These themes and attitudes, with much of the accompanying imagery and vocabulary, would coalesce again in American and Mexican settings –

27 Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge, 1994), 327:38. 28 IR 33:14–34:30; see also xl–l.

Introduction xxv especially the emphasis on the ‘broken’, on an irreparable inner rupture, a tragic precondition of reaching ‘somewhere beyond’. Quetzalcoatl itself really begins as a novel about grief, and about how grief might be overcome, whether it could be turned into a kind of doorway to a different world. But the first break Lawrence experienced on the new continent was in his prior confidence that the two ‘ends of humanity’, his own and the native Indians’, could indeed join in productive meeting. No sooner had he arrived in Taos, on 11 September 1922, than Mabel arranged for him to be whisked off 100 miles north-west to the Jicarilla Reservation, to see the Apache ritual celebrations, and he found the experience bafflingly different from anything he had previously imagined:

The point is, what is the feeling that passes from an Indian to me, when we meet. We are both men, but how do we feel together? I shall never forget that first evening when I first came into contact with Red Men, away in the Apache country. It was not what I had thought it would be. It was something of a shock. Again something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses.29 The drumming and dancing still vibrated in his ‘darkest tissues’, reminding him of his ‘derivation’ as the child of such ‘tribal mysteries’. But his ‘con- scious me’ had moved too far away from these origins for any but the most attenuated sense of connection to remain: ‘I don’t want to go back to them, ah, never . . . Always onward, still further. The great devious onward-flowing streamofconscioushumanblood.Fromthemtome,andfrommeon...I can’t cluster at the drum any more.’30 Much of the writing Lawrence produced during that Taos autumn was preoccupied by this sense of estrangement from the ‘aboriginal spirit’ on which he had staked so much. As David Ellis has discussed,31 he was prepared to wait patiently for his responses to develop, rather than simply assume that the initial disappointment would be final: ‘The place is 6000 ft. high, and takes a bit of getting used to: makes me feel dazed’ (iv. 298); ‘I feel a great stranger, but have got used to that feeling . . . I’ve just come back from motoring five days into the Apache Country, to an Apache feast. These are Red Indians – so different – yet a bit chinesey. I haven’t got the hang of them yet’ (iv. 301). But more positive signals would prove frustratingly elusive. He soon began collaborating with Mabel herself, on a novel to be based on her recent life, as a middle-aged, representatively modern New York woman travelling into the South-West for the first time, and abandoning her white husband for an

29 ‘Indians and an Englishman’, MinM 116:27–34. 30 MinM 120:11–27. 31 Dying Game 63–4. DHL would come to ﬁnd the Mexican Indians ‘more alive’ than the pueblo Indians of the Taos area (Letters,iv.418).

xxvi Introduction Indian lover;32 this would have been Lawrence’s first fictional exploration of the kind of regenerative cross-racial contact that had so filled his imagination prior to his arrival. By the end of November, however, the project had ground to a halt – in part owing to Frieda’s disapproval of the required degree of intimacy with Mabel, and in part perhaps because Lawrence did not yet feel ready to pursue it: the surviving fragment, known as ‘The Wilful Woman’, stops well short of the crucial encounter.33 He commented in a letter of 28 November, ‘I think if I wrote the MS [i.e. Mabel Sterne] novel, and the Indian, it would be just too impossible. Might make me also too sick’ (iv. 344). This could refer simply to the breakdown in relations with the domineering Mabel that had led the Lawrences to move away from her territory to a ranch at Del Monte, some fifteen miles from Taos. But it could also be hinting at the difficulty the actual subject-matter was setting him; in the same letter, to Mountsier, he commented that the newly revised Studies in Classic American Literature represented ‘the first reaction on me of America itself’, as if to imply that the abandoned novel had been unable to register it effectively (iv. 343). He revised the Studies between October 1922 and the following January, using a much more spikily aggressive style, and incorporating some slightly mortified resentment at having allowed himself to be deluded about America in the first place. Numerous commentators have discussed this.34 At times there is more than a glimmer of sympathy for what he had excoriated in his ‘Foreword’ two years earlier, the first European settlers’ recoil from the native peoples and their landscapes. This is especially true of the revised essays on Cooper, whose writings had done most to tempt Lawrence across the Atlantic; in ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels’, for example:

When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disinte- grative inﬂuence upon the white psyche. It is full of girning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men like some Eumenides . . . America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common-sense of white Ameri- cans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical.35

As for bringing together the ‘two ends of humanity’ (iv. 111)toformthe ‘nucleus of a new society’,36 this now seemed a very distant prospect:

32 Mabel was living in Taos with Tony Lujan, a Pueblo Indian whom she married in April 1923 while the Lawrences were in Mexico. 33 The fragment is printed as ‘The Wilful Woman’, in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Cambridge, 1983) pp. 197–203; see also xix–xxi. 34 See e.g. Dying Game 66–9,andSCAL li–liii. 35 SCAL 55:33–40. 36 SCAL 58:20.

Introduction xxvii

And again, this perpetual blood-brother theme of the Leatherstocking novels, Natty and Chingachgook ...Atpresentitisasheermyth.TheRedManandtheWhiteMan are not blood-brothers . . . The red life flows in a different direction from the white life. You can’t make two streams that flow in opposite directions meet and mingle soothingly.37 A further six months were to elapse before Quetzalcoatl was written, but it would be marked by the same melancholy scepticism as to whether white people, men and women alike, could ever really depart from ‘the old range of emotions and sensibilities’, as Lawrence’s ‘Foreword’ had hoped; could ever really ‘catch the pulse of the life’ that predated European domination of the continent. Kate Burns, the Anglo-Irish heroine of Quetzalcoatl, cannot in the end commit herself to the resurgent Aztec Mexican culture surrounding her, however strongly she is attracted by many of its aspects. In particular, Quetzalcoatl backs away from the prospect of inter-racial marriage, the marriage which, a year and a half later, The Plumed Serpent will insist on seeing through; this is arguably the most significant difference between the two works. It is also notable in this connection that two of Quetzalcoatl’s most striking and emotionally charged episodes would disappear in the rewriting: Cipriano Viedma’s impassioned plea to Kate to ‘tie the new threads’ of her life in Mexico, a plea vibrant with the suppression of his own uncertainties (158–9); and the magically sudden and unexpected descent, towards the end of Chapter XVIII, from a high pitch of esoteric incantation to an affectionate nostalgia for English country-house life, affection coloured but not vitiated by sardonic comedy (294–8). But even in The Plumed Serpent itself, Lawrence’s ambivalence about America would never be fully resolved, for all his efforts to imagine his way through doubt and towards ‘evangelical fervour’, as Louis Martz described it.38

Mexico City All this lay in the future, but already by the end of 1922 Lawrence had come to feel that life in New Mexico was not just disillusioning but somehow inimical to his creativity. He decided to try his luck further south: ‘It seems tome,inAmerica,fortheinsidelife,thereisjustblanknothing...thereis

37 SCAL 56:7–20. 38 In the introduction to his 1995 edition of Quetzalcoatl (Martz xxxi). Tony Tanner, in his review of Dying Game (Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 1998), gave a succinct account of the momentum provided by this ambivalence for the American ﬁctions DHL wrote between the 1923 Quetzalcoatl and the 1924–5 The Plumed Serpent: ‘The Woman who Rode Away’, St. Mawr and ‘The Princess’.

xxviii Introduction no inside life-throb here – none – all empty’ (iv. 362); ‘It’s a barren country, humanly . . . I don’t want to write here. I think of going in a few weeks’ time down into Mexico – to Mexico City’ (iv. 366). He and Frieda spent the winter of 1922–3 in bracing conditions on the Del Monte ranch, together with two young Danish artists they had met in Taos, Kai Gøtzsche and Knud Merrild.39 The Danes were rarities in Lawrence’s life, two people with whom both he and Frieda could maintain completely untroubled friendships, and he was keen to include them in the Mexican expedition. As David Ellis has pointed out, the Lawrences were currently ‘in a phase of their relationship where they urgently needed some company other than their own’,40 to dilute their sense of isolation and their recurrent conflicts, and once it was clear that the Danes would not be able to afford to travel, Lawrence promptly invited in their place two American poets he had also become friendly with, Witter Bynner and Willard Johnson:41 ‘Why not come down to Mexico with us? It will be getting hot and rainy season coming, if you wait. We might have a good time together’ (iv. 388–9). This was effectively the renewal of a proposal Lawrence had first made some time in October 1922: ‘If we don’t like Taos, or find neighbours here oppressive, we can go to Mexico. Perhaps you and the Spoodle [i.e. Johnson] could come with us’ (iv. 316). They had all originally met on the Lawrences’ first night in New Mexico, 11 September, as Mabel’s accommodation arrangements in Santa Fe had gone awry, and she had to ask Bynner to put her guests up for the night instead; Bynner would later give an account not only of the ‘magnetism’ of their company, but of his astonishment at Lawrence’s domestic accomplishments at breakfast the following morning.42 Bynner, born in New York, four years older than Lawrence, and a well-established poet and translator, had been living in Santa Fe since February 1922. He had spent some time that summer in Taos with Mabel and her circle, feeling much the same ambivalence about it as Lawrence himself was to do, and he and Johnson were more than willing to respond to the Mexico invitation.43

39 Kai Gøtzsche (1886–1963) and Knud Merrild (1894–1954). 40 Dying Game 101. 41 Harold Witter Bynner (1881–1968), American poet and translator, and Willard Johnson (1897–1968), poet, journalist and editor; at the time Bynner’s partner and secretary. Many years later Bynner would write Journey with Genius, a memoir of his experiences with the Lawrences in New and Old Mexico. 42 Journey with Genius 1–7. 43 Bynner’s biographer, James Kraft, claimed that Mabel Sterne was so offended by Bynner’s acceptance of DHL’s invitation that she took revenge by persuading Johnson to leave him and become her own secretary; see James Kraft, Who Is Witter Bynner? (Albuquerque, 1995), pp. 52–5.

Introduction xxix The scheme almost foundered before it began. The Lawrences set off first, on 20 March, crossing the border at El Paso the following day and spending two further nights on the train, ‘an unkempt Pullman trailing through endless deserts’,44 before reaching Mexico City on 23 March. Bynner and Johnson arrived three days later, but by this time the Lawrences had abandoned their first hotel, the Regis – ‘the most modern hotel in Mexico’, according to Terry’s Guide to Mexico, the travel guide Lawrence brought with him45 – and had moved to the much more obscure and modest Hotel Monte Carlo, on the Avenida Uruguay, not far from the main square or Zocalo.´ A long delay to Bynner’s train meant that Lawrence could not send word to the station of their removal, and the two parties separately wandered the city for several days before fortuitously bumping into one another on a street corner, whereupon Bynner and Johnson promptly relocated to the Monte Carlo as well. Lawrence liked the Monte Carlo because of its Italian ambience – ‘It reminds me of Naples or Palermo’ (iv. 414). The owners were Italian, and he was delighted to be able to speak the language again, after more than a year away from Italy; his Spanish was still fairly rudimentary. Cheap Italian wine was an additional benefit, after months of Prohibition in the United States; ‘so good to have a flask of Chianti at one’s elbow again’ (iv. 414). In Bynner’s account, the Monte Carlo was for Lawrence rather a refuge from Mexico than a foothold in it,46 and within a few days of his arrival Lawrence was already voicing his dislike for what he was seeing outdoors: Well, we’ve been in this city five days. And it makes me feel I am tired of travelling. I don’t like the gruesome Aztec carvings. I don’t like the spirit of this continent. It seems to me sub-cruel, a bit ghastly. I’ll go round a bit, and look at Guadalajara and Orizaba and so on. Then I must go to New York. But I shan’t stay. By July I ought to be in England. (iv. 416) Two days later, however, after meeting Bynner, Lawrence was revising his view, as if in reaction to the other man’s: ‘Bynner has turned up, hating this city! I like it better than at first’ (iv. 416). The about-face is typical enough, while also putting one in mind of a remark in the Memoir of Maurice Magnus: ‘It is terrible to be agreed with . . . All that one says, and means, turns to nothing.’47 It was unlikely, though, that two such strong and distinctive characters as Lawrence and Bynner would agree on anything for long. Their relationship was combative and disputatious, but they were sufficiently drawn to each other for productive challenge. Bynner indeed would unwittingly

44 MinM 131:6–7. 45 Terry 235. The Regis had its own swimming pool, a rarity in Mexican hotels at that time. 46 Journey with Genius 21–2. 47 IR 31:28–9.

xxx Introduction provide Quetzalcoatl with its departure-point: the opening scene details the reactions of Bynner (‘Owen’) and Johnson (‘Villiers’) to the bull-fight they attended with the Lawrences on 1 April, reactions which Lawrence used, not at all fairly, to represent a certain kind of American sensation-seeking and visual hunger, the ‘white’ cast of mind from which his heroine could quickly separate herself.48 For a while after this, as Kate begins her tentative journey in the ‘dark’ direction, Owen (and to a lesser extent Villiers) continue to play significant roles, but once the novel is about half-way through they drop out of it almost completely, two American friends effaced by the two Mexican ones, Viedma and Ramon.´ Yet there is little doubt that much of Quetzalcoatl must have formed itself from the discussions and arguments between Lawrence and Bynner, about politics, mysticism, art, personal relations or the significance of the Mexican revolution, over dinners at the Monte Carlo, or during the long train journeys they took together in the weeks following that chance re-encounter in the crowded city. On 3 April the Lawrences, Bynner and Johnson visited the pre-Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacan,´ about twenty-five miles north-east of Mexico City, and soon afterwards Lawrence wrote the short essay ‘Au Revoir, U.S.A.’, in which he described his recoil from the malevolent appearance of the sculpted images on and around the pyramids, the ‘huge gnashing heads’ that ‘snarl at you from the wall, trying to bite you’.49 He had already been to see the extensive collection of Aztec artefacts in the National Museum in Mexico City – it was one of the first things he did upon arriving – and had found the same effect: the Aztec carvings ‘all twist and bite. That’s all they do. Twist and writhe and bite, or crouch in lumps.’50 Nonetheless, the essay expresses a preference for Mexico, where ‘the fangs are still obvious’, over the United States, where he felt the same fangs were hidden under a hypocritically mild exterior.51 ‘Au Revoir, U.S.A.’ was the only piece of writing Lawrence produced during his time in Mexico City; it was published in Johnson’s journal Laughing Horse in December of the same year.52 By Lawrence’s normal standards, the three months or more since he had finished revising

48 Bynner gave his own version of this event and the various reactions in Journey with Genius 48–60. 49 MinM 132:27, 31–2. 50 MinM 132:22–3. 51 MinM 133:17. 52 Laughing Horse no. 8; MinM 131–3. Johnson had co-founded Laughing Horse earlier in 1922. It printed a number of DHL’s works: the review of Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (Roberts C101), in Laughing Horse no. 4; ‘Dear Old Horse, A London Letter (Roberts C120), in no. 10; ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance’ (Roberts C124), in no. 11; ‘A Little Moonshine with Lemon’ (Roberts C139), in no. 13; and posthumously Altitude (Roberts C222), in no. 20 (1938). See IR 213–8; MinM 135–40, 183–8, 95–9; D. H. Lawrence: The Plays, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen (Cambridge, 1999), 539–44.