No man is an island entire of itself ...
In a much admired - and much discussed - short story, first published in the Dial in July 1927, Lawrence writes of a man who dreams of living on an island - "not necessarily to be alone on it, but to make it a world of his own" - and who, by the time he reaches the age of thirty-five, had actually managed to acquire such (on a 99-year lease).
The First Island
Initially, the man loved his new life as an islander. But then mysterious feelings came upon him; feelings that he wasn't used to and which made him uneasy. For once you isolate yourself on a little island, writes Lawrence, then your "naked dark soul finds herself out in the timeless world" and the spirits of the dead return to haunt you. Of course, it's easy to dismiss such thoughts and feelings as nonsense in the daytime. But at night, when the world is transformed by darkness ... well, then it's not so easy.
In an attempt to counter these feelings, the man spent huge sums trying to transform the island into a gay little community over which he could be the Master. However, despite all his best efforts to create a utopia in his own image, an invisible hand would always strike "malevolently out of the silence", causing sickness, bad weather, and misfortune - even one of the cows falls off a cliff (and that, as Sgt. Wells and his men will tell you, is never a good omen).
Lawrence delights in describing - in an almost Gnostic manner - the wickedness and cruelty that emanate from the world in its materiality: "Out of the very air came a stony, heavy malevolence. The island itself seemed malicious. It would go on being hurtful and evil for weeks at a time." Not surprisingly, therefore, everyone comes to hate everyone else upon the island and the man continued to be disturbed by the "strange violent feelings [...] and lustful desires" that it provoked within his breast.
At the end of the second year, some of the islanders decide to leave. But still the bills kept arriving: "Thousands and thousands of pounds [...] the island swallowed into nothingness." Things clearly couldn't continue as they were; the man was facing bankruptcy, no matter what attempts he made to reduce expenses. The island seemed to actually pick the money out of his pocket, "as if it were an octopus with invisible arms stealing [...] in every direction".
In the middle of the fifth year, he finally sells the island.
The Second Island
Despite making a considerable loss on the sale, the man who loved islands still loved islands and had no intention of returning to the mainland. Instead, he moves to an even smaller hump of rock in the middle of the sea, with a much reduced retinue. And on this second island there were thankfully no ghosts of long lost inhabitants: "The sea, and the spume and the wind and the weather, had washed them all out ..."
Thus the second island was completely inhuman in its elemental otherness and was no longer a world - merely a queer sort of refuge. Was he any happier? In a sense. But it was that strange kind of happiness that exists beyond desire:
"His soul at last was still in him, his spirit was like a dim-lit cave under water, where strange sea-foliage expands upon the watery atmosphere, and scarcely sways, and a mute fish shadowily slips in and slips away again. All still and soft and uncrying, yet alive as rooted sea-weed is alive."
As the man who loved islands becomes increasingly inhuman, he ceases to care even about his own writing and it seemed to him that "only the soft evanescence of gossamy things" was permanent; that cobwebs mattered more than stone cathedrals, or books - or even love.
Nevertheless, he can't resist fucking Flora, his housekeeper's daughter, and thereby falling back into what Lawrence terms the automatism of sex. Naturally, he's eaten up with post-coital regret, for it leaves him "shattered and full of self-contempt". Worse, the very island now seemed tainted: "He had lost his place in the rare, desireless levels of Time to which he had at last arrived", and had fallen right back into wilfulness - and the paternity trap; because Flora is pregnant with his child.
Horrified at the thought of clocks and nappies and home, sweet home, the man does what a lot of men have done in his position; he scarpers - to another island bought at auction for very little money:
"It was just a few acres of rock [...] There was not even a building, not even a tree on it. Only northern sea-turf, a pool of rain-water, a bit of sedge, rock, and sea-birds. Nothing else. Under the weeping wet western sky."
Quickly realising just how desolate the third island was and what effect it was likely to have on him, the man reluctantly decides to return to Flora and make an honest woman of her. Lawrence, however, isn't the sort of writer who affords his readers the opportunity to enjoy a conventional happy ending.
Thus, the new husband and father-to-be soon experiences the death of all desire for his wife. And the island became as hateful as a vulgar London suburb; a sort of prison. Even the birth of the child, a daughter, doesn't lift his spirits. Just looking at the baby made him feel depressed, "almost more than he could bear". He tried not to show his unhappiness. But all the while he was planning his return to the third isle ...
The Third Island
The man who loved islands had himself a little stone hut built, roofed with corrugated iron. Inside, he had a bed, a table, three chairs, a cupboard, and a few books along with supplies of fuel and food. There were also half-a-dozen sheep for company; "and he had a cat to rub against his legs". But soon, even the presence of the cat begins to irritate him and he starts to hate the sheep, forever breaking the silence with their ridiculous bleating:
"He wanted only to hear the whispering sound of the sea, and the sharp cries of the gulls, cries that came out of another world to him. And best of all, the great silence."
It rained. In fact, it rained a lot. But, fortunately, he also liked the sound of the rain.
As the days shortened "and the world grew eerie", the man began to find all human contact impossible. When local fishermen brought him his mail and supplies, he found it painful to talk to them: "The air of familiarity around them was very repugnant to him." And he didn't much care either for the clumsy way they dressed. In fact, it's hard to tell which he hates more: the sheep, the men, or the repulsive god who made them: "To his nostrils, the fisherman and the sheep alike smelled foul; an uncleanness on the fresh earth."
As winter arrives, the man who loved islands sheds himself of his last vestiges of humanity and passes into the material world of things and elemental chaos, effectively becoming-island in a manner unimaginable to John Donne - as, indeed, it seems to be to many commentators on this story, who fail to grasp that a becoming often involves a fatal affirmation of difference, not only in its positivity, but in its demonic and self-destructive otherness.
Opening oneself up to alien forces is never easy and often deeply unpleasant; it's not a question of the man identifying with the island; nor is he merely engaging in an imaginative exercise. It's a real process at the molecular level of forces. As Deleuze and Guattari write, Lawrence is one of those rare few authors - a master of the dark arts - able to tie his writings to unheard of becomings that are often profoundly troubling and do not end well.
That's why, I suppose, many readers of this tale fail to recognise its importance and think it's simply an attempt to demonstrate that no man is - or can be - an island and that we need human company in order to secure our own humanity - as if that were the great desideratum or exclusive concern of man. Those who read the story in such human, all too human terms don't understand how our haecceity consists entirely of impersonal elements, unformed particles, and non-subjectified effects (or what Lawrence terms vibrations).
Anyway, let us return to the man who loved islands ...
"He felt ill, as if he were dissolving, as if dissolution had already set in inside him. Everything was twilight, outside, and in his mind and soul. [...]
Only he still derived his single satisfaction from being alone, absolutely alone, with the space soaking into him. The grey sea alone, and the footing of his sea-washed island. No other contact. Nothing human to bring its horror into contact with him. Only space, damp, twilit, sea-washed space!"
Lawrence continues, in a series of passages that surely number among his finest and which are philosophically of great interest for what they tell us about time and language in relation to human being:
"He was most glad when there was a storm, or when the sea was high. Then nothing could get at him. Nothing could come through to him from the outer world. True, the terrific violence of the wind made him suffer badly. At the same time, it swept the world utterly out of existence for him. [...]
He kept no track of time, and no longer thought of opening a book. The print, the printed letters, so like the depravity of speech, looked obscene. He tore the brass label from his paraffin stove. He obliterated any bit of lettering in his cabin. [...]
He prowled about his island in the rain [...] not knowing what he was looking at, nor what he went out to see. Time had ceased to pass."
Sometimes, the man staggers and falls down from fatigue, or illness, or both. But he doesn't really care, as he had long "ceased to register his own feelings". Only the "dull, deathly cold" still made him fearful for his wellbeing and unlike Gerald Crich, he refuses to lie down and die beneath the heavy whiteness of the snow which had "accumulated against him".
But, of course, ultimately, you can't defeat the mechanical power of the elements and one has to surrender completely if one is to push becoming towards what Deleuze and Guattari call its cosmic formula or immanent end point: a becoming-imperceptible. The man climbed to the top of a hill and looked blankly over the whiteness of his now unrecognisable island:
"As he looked, the sky mysteriously darkened and chilled. From far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the snow rolling over the sea. He turned, and felt its breath on him."
And that's the last Lawrence tells us of him. We are left to assume that the man who loved islands has accepted his mortal destiny; i.e, that all being is ultimately a being towards death and that death is that inanimate realm of bliss into which every straight line curves (or what Nietzsche terms the actual).
'The Man Who Loved Islands' matters because it teaches the Heideggerean truth that Dasein can come to grasp its own nature only when it confronts the void and affirms the possibility of its no-longer-being-there - not because it reaffirms the importance of human community and/or family life.
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'The Man Who Loved Islands', The Woman Who Rode away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 151- 173. All lines quoted are from this edition. For those who don't have the book to hand but would like to read the tale, it can be found, in full, online by clicking here.
The photo is of the Anglo-Scottish writer Compton Mackenzie, aspects of whose life Lawrence used in his tale of the man who loved islands. Mackenzie, who had been up until that point on friendly terms with Lawrence, wasn't amused at being made into a preposterous Lawrentian figure and at one point attempted to get an injunction against what he described as a lunatic story. This, of course, didn't go down very well with Lawrence, who in a letter to his publisher Martin Secker wrote:
"I'm disgusted at Compton Mackenzie taking upon himself to feel injured. What idiotic self-importance! If it's like him, he ought to feel flattered, for its very much nicer than he is - and if it's not like him, then what's the odds? [...] But as a matter of fact, though the circumstances are some of them his, the man is no more he than I am. It's all an imbecile sort of vanity."
See: D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Letter 4196, (3 Nov 1927), pp. 205-06.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).
John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), see Meditation XXVII for the famous phrase 'No man is an island'.
Readers interested in a sister post to this one on leading a solitary life (with reference to the case of Elsie Eiler), should click here.
And for an alternative reading of 'The Man Who Loved Islands', see Stefania Michelucci, 'D. H. Lawrence's (Un)happy Islands', Études Lawrenciennes, 46 (2015): click here for the online text.
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