Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts

23 Apr 2022

Tropics Not Really My Line: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Ceylon

So long Ceylon - and tell the Buddha to stand up!
 
I. 
 
On or about this day in 1922, D. H. Lawrence set sail for Australia, having spent six weeks in Ceylon - a place which he was glad to have seen, but which, due to the heat, a tummy bug, the unbearable sense of the prehistoric past, and the fact that the Buddha sat cross-legged in front of temples that reminded him of decked up pigsties, he really didn't care for, as the following passage from a letter written to Lady Cynthia Asquith makes clear:
 
"Here we are on ship again [...] I did not like Ceylon - at least I liked looking at it - but not to live in. The east is not for me - the sensusous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes - and the heads of elephants and buffaloes poking out of primeval mud - the queer noise of the tall metallic palm-trees: ach! - altogether the tropics have something of the world before the flood - hot dark mud and the life inherent in it: makes me feel rather sick." [1]

Watching a native festival and night-time procession attended by the Prince of Wales certainly made an impression on Lawrence, with its "huge elephants, great flares of coconut torches [...] savage music and devil dancers" [2], but it was entirely alien to him and, mostly, he was conscious of the fact that it was impossible as a white European to ever truly return to a dark, far-off past wherein insects and people swarmed. 
 
Similarly, he was aware that eastern religion wasn't his cup of tea either: "I don't believe in Buddha - hate him in fact - his rat-hole temples and his rat-hole religion." [3] 
 
 
II.
 
Funny enough, the trip to Ceylon had started so well. After an excellent 15-day voyage with perfect weather, Lawrence and Frieda landed at Colombo on the 13th of March, where they were met by their American friend Earl Brewster - then an ardent student of Buddhism - and travelled the next day to Kandy. 
 
Despite the soaring temperature and high humidity, Lawrence was hopeful of learning to love the tropics. Ten days after arrival, he wrote to his sister Emily:
 
"We have been in the bungalow a week. It is about a mile or mile and a half from Kandy, looking down on the lake: very lovely. It stands uphill among a sort of half wild estate [...] almost like the jungle. We sit on the verandahs and watch the chipmunks and chameleons and lizards and tropical birds among the trees and bamboos [...] It is very hot in the sun - we have sun helmets and white suits - but quite pleasant sitting still. If one moves one sweats. [...] It is rather fascinating, but I don't now how long we shall stay." [4]
 
He closes the letter:   
 
"One doesn't do much here, I tell you - though Brewster goes every day to the Temple to learn the sacred language of the Buddhists - Pali. I wish you could see it all - it is most strange and fascinating. But even at night you sweat if you walk a few yards." [5]
 
 
III. 
 
The heat - my God the heat! - was clearly problematic for Lawrence; as was the sense of malaise and his inability to work. It quickly dawned on him that he would never feel at home - or even himself - in Ceylon and his hostility towards the natives, the local wildlife, tropical fruit, and Buddhism intensified by the day, as these extracts from seven of his letters written from Ceylon demonstrate:
  
"One realises how very barbaric the substratum of Buddhism is. I shrewdly suspect that high-flownness of Buddhism altogether exists mostly on paper: and that its denial of the soul makes it always rather barren, even if philosophically etc. more perfect. In short, after a slight contact, I draw back and don't like it." [6]
 
"Here it is monstrous hot, like being in a hot bell-glass. I don't like it a bit. I don't like the east. It makes me feel sick in my stomach: seems sort of unmanly." [7]

"This is the hottest month in Ceylon - and the heavens are white hot from 10 till 6. The bungalow is outside Kandy on a hill among trees [...] birds shriek and pop and cackle out of the jungle, creatures jerk and bounce about. [...] The east, the bit I've seen, seems silly. I don't like it one bit. I don't like the silly dark people [...] or their hideous little Buddha temples, like decked up pigsties - nor anything. I just don't like it. It's better to see it on the cinema: you get the whole effect, without the effort and the sense of nausea." [8]
 
"Here the heat is terrific - and I hate the tropics. It is beautiful, in a lush, tangled, towsled, lousy sort of way. The natives too are quite good looking, dark-skinned and erect. But something about it all just makes me sick - there is something smooth and boneless, and a smell of cocoanut oil and sickly fruits - that I can't bear. I loathe the tropical fruits, except pineapples, and those I can't digest: because my inside has never hurt me so much in all my 36 years as in these three weeks." [9]  
 
"No, the east doesn't get me at all. Its boneless suavity, and the thick, choky feel of tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrid noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night; and the scents that make me feel sick, the perpetual nauseous overtone of cocoanut and cocoanut fibre and oil, the sort of tropical sweetness which to me suggests an undertang of blood, hot blood, and thin sweat: the undertaste of blood and sweat in the nauseous tropical fruits; the nasty faces and yellow robes of the Buddhist monks, the little vulgar dens of the temples: all this makes up Ceylon to me, and all this I cannot bear. [10]
 
"Ceylon is very interesting to look at, but would be deadly to live in [...] I nearly sweated myself into the grave [...] I am glad I came. I am glad I looked at this corner of the east. Then one has no more illusions about it. From a cinematograph point of view it can be fascinating: the dark, tangled jungle, the terrific sun that makes like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you: the palm-trees and the noise and the sullenness of the forest: and then the natives, naked, dark, in all shades of darkness [...] suave, smooth, in their way beautiful. But curiously enough, the magnetism is all negative, everything seems magnetically to be repelling one. You never for a second feel at one with anything: always this curious black tropical hostileness, this underneath gloom [...] the sense of apathy, black, dark empty apathy, as if nothing ever could matter, not really, not in our sense of the word: and the feeling that there is a lid down over everything. [...] Queer it is, so different from what I expected. I am glad to have experienced it: but would die if I had to stay. I am glad to have seen something at least of these Oriental millions, and of this vaunted Buddhism. The last is to me a barren, dead affair: and the teeming millions don't seem to me as if they would ever do much, unless it were something wicked." [11]
 
"It has been lovely to see Ceylon. But I feel the east is not for me. It seems to me the life drains away from one here. [...] One could quite easily sink into a kind of apathy, like a lotus on a muddy pond, indifferent to anything. And that apparently is the lure of the east: this peculiar stagnant apathy where one doesn't bother about a thing, but drifts on from minute to minute. [...]
     By the way I detest Buddha, upon slight contact: affects me like a mud pool that has no bottom to it. One learns to value what one actually knows and possesses, and to have a wholesome indifference to strange gods. Anyhow these little rat-hole Buddhist temples turn my stomach." [12]
 

IV.

There are many things that one might comment on here: for example, Lawrence's sense of white privilege and cultural superiority. As John Worthen notes, the letters from Ceylon illustrate how quickly Lawrence could turn to "colonial and racist explanations" [13] to justify his own feelings of bitter disappointment and estrangement - or even make sense of a stomach upset.
 
More surprising, perhaps, is Lawrence's suggesting that, rather than travel to faraway and profoundly foreign lands, one is better off staying in Blighty and watching a travel film at the local cinema - or that dark gods and exotic creatures aren't all that he thought they were. As Worthen says, such a "fantastic reversal of almost everything he had been saying and thinking for the last seven years [...] is a useful reminder not only of his contradictoriness, but of how divided he was" [14].    

What I really want to discuss, however, is Lawrence's hatred of Buddhism, a religion which, in his view - typical of the period in which he wrote - was a form of ascetic idealism; one that encouraged an introspective quietism, or non-engagement with the world (as perfectly illustrated by the representation of the Buddha as a fat seated figure) ... [15]
 
 
V.
 
By his own admission, Lawrence much prefered Hinduism to Buddhism and thought more highly of Jesus on his Cross than Buddha seated beneath his Bo Tree. But how much he actually knew about Buddhism is debatable; there is no evidence that he ever studied its central texts with the same enthusiasm that he read works of theosophy, for example. 
 
According to Gerald Doherty, Lawrence probably acquired his knowledge of Buddhism indirectly from three sources: the philosophical musings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the esoteric teachings of Mme. Blavatsky, and from semi-popular 19th-century books on the subject [16]
 
From Nietzsche, Lawrence would have picked up the idea of Buddhism as ultimately a form of decadence. It might be a religion beyond good and evil, but it's also a religion of fatigue and decline. From the studies written by English colonial types who had spent a good deal of time in India or Ceylon, Lawrence would have absorbed the belief that underneath its ethical sophistication, Buddhism was a primitive (and inferior) form of religion compared to Christianity. 
 
But it was only when in Ceylon that Lawrence really seems to have developed a visceral (and aesthetic) hostility towards Buddhism: now the latter is holy nihilism pure and simple; "a vulgar temple of serenity built over an empty hole in space" [17].     
 
In one of his final essays, Lawrence places the Buddha alongside Plato and Christ as one of the grand idealists responsible for destroying the vital relationship between men and women, as well as the (equally vital) relationship mankind has with other forms of life and, indeed, the cosmos itself:
 
"Buddha, Plato, Jesus, they were all three utter pessimists as regards life, teaching that the only happiness lay in abstracting oneself from life, the daily, yearly, seasonal life of birth and death and fruition, and in living in the 'immutable' or eternal spirit. But now, after almost three thousand years, now [...] we realise that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia. And the great saviours and teachers only cut us off from life. It was the tragic excursus." [18]
 
I think this is a profound insight on Lawrences part - one which can be placed alongside his more humorous conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion ... [19] 
 
 
Notes
 
[1-3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith  (30 April 1922), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 233-34.
 
[4-5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Emily King (24 March 1922), Letters, IV 215, 216.
 
[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Pratt Barlow (30 March 1922), Letters, IV 218.  

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier (3 April 1922), Letters, IV 220.

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mary Cannan (3 April 1922), Letters IV 221.

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mary Canaan (5 April 1922), Letters IV 224.

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne (10 April 1922), Letters IV 225.
     
[11] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier (16 April 1922), Letters IV 227. 
 
[12] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky (17 April 1922), Letters IV 228.
 
[13-14] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 265. 

[15] David Ellis warns us that it would be dangerous to "place too much emphasis on any one statement" made by Lawrence in his letters, "when his attitudes were always so highly volatile and full of contradictions". But, on the other and, he admits that it would be mistaken to "ignore how extreme Lawrence could be in the declaration of his opinions" or fail to take him seriously. 
      See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 18.

[16] Gerald Doherty, 'The Nirvana Dimension: D. H. Lawrence's Quarrel with Buddhism', D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1982), pp. 51-2. Click here to access on JSTOR. 

[17] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne (10 April 1922), Letters IV 226. 

[18] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 330-31. 

[19] I have discussed this remark (also from one of Lawrence's letters) in an earlier post: click here 
 
 

27 Oct 2020

On Travel/Writing (with a Deleuzian Punchline)

 Have monogrammed trunk will travel 

 
To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...
 
For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space. 
 
Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including: 
 
(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ... 
 
(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...
 
(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]     
 
Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]
 
Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place
 
For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...   
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.  
 
[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.  

This post is for Adam Peter Lang.
 
 

2 Aug 2017

Comes Over One An Absolute Necessity to Move ... (A Lesson in Disillusion)

D. H Lawrence's passport photograph 
(Florence, 19 Sept. 1921)


One of the sentences that I've always admired in Lawrence was written in a letter to Mary Cannan, composed whilst on board a ship taking him around the South Sea Islands: Travel seems to me a splendid lesson in disillusion - chiefly that.

This perfectly displays Lawrence's fierce and uncompromising intellectual integrity, rather than cynicism, world-weariness, or a Socratic borrowing as some critics mistakenly assume. For despite desperately wanting to believe in the hope and promise of new lands and new people, Lawrence wasn't prepared to lie to himself or to others; he would always give a brutally honest account of what he found on the other side of the fence, or, for that matter, the other side of the world ...

Lawrence left Europe in February 1922. He was thirty-six and keen to make a symbolic break with the past - to come unstuck from his old life, as he put it - despite the pain of such a process (he admitted to weeping inside himself as the ship sailed through the Strait of Messina). He was, as one sympathetic commentator points out, probably only too aware of the futility of any attempt to make a clean getaway and conscious also that he would doubtless suffer disappointments and set backs on his travels.

And, sure enough, arriving in Ceylon, Lawrence quickly discovered it wasn't for him. Lovely to look at, certainly, but hot - very hot - and full of noisy birds and creatures and the nauseating sweet smell of the tropics (coconut oil mixed with hot blood and thin sweat). Being so far from England suddenly made him feel very English - in the teeth of all the world. After only six weeks, he'd had enough.

His next stop, Australia, Lawrence found rather more congenial. And he spent a little over three months there before deciding - having begun his savage pilgrimage - to move on once more; determined to experience as many new things and places as possible, if only so as to discover how hateful they were.

On August 11th, Lawrence set sail for San Francisco, via Rarotonga and Tahiti. As indicated, the supposedly glamorous islands left him less than impressed, particularly the latter. In the letter to Mary Cannan quoted earlier, he concluded: "These are supposed to be the earthly paradises ... You can have 'em."        

However, several years later, in a review of H. M. Tomlinson's Gifts of Fortune (1926), Lawrence sought to subtly - but significantly - qualify his position. Thus, whilst confirming his conviction that disillusion and disappointment were inevitable, he nevertheless stressed that the search for some unknown land, or some strange people who could transform one's own inner life, remained valid and of vital importance:

"We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hesperides, of running our boat up a little creek and landing in the Garden of Eden. This hope is always defeated. There is no Garden of Eden, and the Hesperides never were. Yet, in our very search for them, we touch the coasts of illusion, and come into contact with other worlds."    


See:

D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Mary Cannan (31 Aug 1922), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume IV, June 1921 - March 1924, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Gifts of Fortune, by H. M. Tomlinson', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 

For further details of Lawrence's time in Ceylon, Australia, and the South Seas, see one or more of the following works:

David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, Volume III of the Cambridge Biography, (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 

Andrew Harrison, The Life of D. H. Lawrence, (Wiley / Blackwell, 2016).

John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005).