The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Among the ranks and classes of the world he finds himself in, Bourne is a free-ranging consciousness – he is welcome everywhere, belongs nowhere, has no preconceptions or previous commitments. The NCOs are happy to use him as a go-between to the officers above and the men below them, and since he is fluent in French to the villages behind the lines, where he acts as their master of revels in organising ‘bon times’. With the officers he is sufficiently sensitive to the nuances of caste to feel embarrassed, as they do, when he has to deal with one of them in the presence of an NCO. By nature egalitarian (or is this an aspect of his phantom Australianness?), he never condescends to his fellow privates, and nothing in them disconcerts him: neither their ‘Westshire’ dialect and obscenities, their opinions, or their exuberant nakedness when one man’s throwing off of his uniform in pursuit of an itch sets off a general stripping and a frenetic hunt after lice. His ‘bed-chums’ are Shem, a Jew (though nothing is made of this: it is a fact that is of no interest to Bourne, or to Manning either) and a larky sixteen-year-old, Martlow, who is somewhat dependent on him.

  His sympathy for these men springs from their shared predicament: ‘the desolation and hopelessness of the lunatic world’ they are in, the subterranean limbo they move through ‘as so many unhouseled ghosts’. It is the absoluteness of this, and the piercing emotion behind it, that makes him, as Hemingway saw, the finest witness we have to that world.

  His fellow privates think of themselves as a ‘fucken fine mob’. As they prepare quietly for an attack, Bourne makes his own assessment:

  The men … came from farms, and, in a lesser measure, from mining villages of no great importance. The simplicity of their outlook on life gave them a certain dignity, because it was free from irrelevances. Certainly they had all the appetites of men, and, in the aggregate, probably embodied most of the vices to which flesh is prone; but they were not preoccupied with their vices and appetites, they could master them with rather a splendid indifference; and even sensuality has its aspect of tenderness. These apparently rude and brutal natures comforted, encouraged, and reconciled each other to fate, with a tenderness and tact which was more moving than anything in life … They had been brought to the last extremity of hope, and yet they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and said with a passionate conviction that it would be all right, though they had faith in nothing, but in themselves and in each other.

  What Bourne finds here is the same essentially sane view that he has learned to admire in the local peasants: that there is nothing in war which is not in human nature; that the violence and passion it embodies is ‘an impersonal and incalculable force … which one cannot control, which one cannot understand, and which one can only endure’.

  The scenes in which Manning takes us behind the lines, into a world of ordinary domestic life in the presence of women, are among the most appealing and richly comic in the book. When Corporal Greenstreet decides to show off his French and an otherwise obliging housekeeper mistakes his ‘cushy’ for ‘coucher’, Bourne has to save his superior from a good box on the ears. Later he is called up in front of the whole brigade to deal with an infuriated woman, ‘a very stubborn piece of reality’, who storms out ‘with her red petticoat kilted up to her knees, her grey stockings, and her ploughman’s boots’, to defend her clover-patch against a battalion on exercise across her yard.

  The appearance of these lone women, including one girl whom Bourne rejects and another to whom he is tenderly drawn, in an all-male world of drinking, swearing, grouching, and ‘a state of privation in which men swing between the extremes of sickly sentimentality and a rank obscenity’, keeps before us a suspended but unforgotten normality that they all cling to, and a body, all live nerves, that is both innocent and subject to ever-present if inconvenient needs.

  When The Middle Parts of Fortune first appeared it was read as a war novel like any other, an attempt, a decade on, to confront a catastrophe in which citizens in great numbers, some in uniform, many not, had been caught up in a war that was organised in a modern way; that is, on industrial lines. The consensus was that it must never happen again. Close to a century later we have a different perspective.

  The Great War was not the ‘war to end all wars’ but the first in a century of horrors in which untold millions, men, women and children – in battle, in air-raids, in mass executions and eugenic programs, in work-camps, extermination camps and organised famines – would be sacrificed to a murderous abstraction, one or another version of ‘History’. This was beyond the comprehension of most First World War writers.

  When Sassoon and Owen denounced the war, it was as a sociopolitical phenomenon, a criminal folly. Anger and pity are what Owen is driven to. Manning lacks neither – Bourne’s rage over the death of Martlow is Homeric – but war for him is existential; it is simply ‘the ultimate problem of all human life stated barely’, as he had already faced it, two decades earlier, in the imaginary conversations of Scenes and Portraits. How to live nobly if possible, with dignity if possible, in the shadow of imminent extinction. That The Middle Parts of Fortune formulates the case in this way, and so clearly, should alert us to something. That as Manning sees it, this is essentially a book about the human predicament.

  Still, its context is war and it distinguishes itself as a masterpiece of the genre by leaving nothing unconsidered.

  Bourne sees everything he looks at from all sides. The Army is a machine. Within its own terms it is right: it makes plans, promulgates orders, demands discipline. But the men it commands, though they are under arms and accept the fact, are at heart civilians. They see themselves as victims: of injustice, humiliation, institutional blindness, misuse. They too are right. Each man, Bourne observes, sees his own personality as ‘something very hard, and sharply defined against a background of other men’, who remain ‘merely generalised as “the others”’. This too is right; it is one of the strategies for survival, and Bourne recognises it as his own. But Manning is a writer. It is his business to bring these others in out of the realm of the generalised and make them as actual to Bourne, and to us, as they are to themselves.

  Each of the battalion officers in the book – Mr Clinton, Mr Malet, Mr Marsden, Mr Finch – has his unique temperament and style, and the same is true of the NCOs – Corporal (later Sergeant) Tozer, Lance Corporal Johnson, Corporals Greenstreet and Hamley – and the men: Shem, Martlow, ‘Weeper’ Smart.

  Bourne too is seen from all sides; judged in the light of each man’s specialist concern. ‘When ’e first came to us,’ Sergeant Tozer tells Mr Malet, ‘we took ’im for a dud, but after a few days ’e seemed quite able to take care of ’imself; fact I thought ’e might be gettin’ a bit fresh an’ decided to keep an eye on ’im. I couldn’t find any fault with ’im.’ Mr Malet thinks he has too much influence over the men, ‘and has no business to’. ‘Weeper’ Smart, seeing Mr Marsden intimidate Bourne into volunteering for a raid, and recalling an occasion when Bourne insisted he take a fair share of the champagne he was doling out, though he himself had ‘nowt to share’, tells him angrily: ‘When ’a seed that fucken’ slave-driver look at ’ee, ’a said, A’m comin’. A’ll always say this for thee, th’ll share all th’ast got wi’ us’uns, and don’t call a man by any foolish nick-names.’

  Again and again here, ‘men are bound together more closely by the trivial experiences they have shared than by the most sacred obligations’. This takes Manning immediately to the heart of things.

  A man called Pritchard’s bed-chum is killed.

  ‘’E were dyin’ so quick you could see it … “’Elp me up,” he sez, “’elp me up.” “You lie still, chum,” I sez to ’im, “you’ll be right presently.” “An he jes gives me one look, like ’e were puzzled, an ’e died.’

  ‘Well anyway,’ said Martlow, desperately comforting, ‘’e couldn’t ’ave felt much, could ’e, if ’e said that?’

  ‘I don’t know what ’e felt,’ said Pritchard, with slowly filling bitterness, ‘I know what I f
elt.’

  Manning has been to school with Tolstoy and Shakespeare, who provides, in a collaboration that does honour to both, an epigraph for each chapter of Manning’s book. No man here is denied his moment on the page.

  When Bourne hears that a man called Bates has been killed ‘he tried to remember who Bates was; and at the effort of memory to recover him, he seemed to hear a high excited voice suddenly cry out, as though actually audible to the whole dugout. “What’s ’e want to drag me into ’t for!” And it was as though Bates were bodily present there … He knew no more of Bill Bates than that phrase, passionately innocent: “What’s ’e want to drag me into ’t for!”’

  In a late moment with Martlow, Bourne realises that if he were to become an officer he would have ‘to forget a lot; and even as he was thinking how impossible it would be to forget, Martlow looked up at him with a grin on his puckish face … and already his memory was haunted by outstretched hands seeking rescue from oblivion, and faces half-submerged to which he could give no name.’ Then, on the next word, Manning supplies the name: ‘Martlow only grinned more broadly’.

  Earlier, dropping off to sleep between Martlow and Shem, Bourne had wondered ‘what was the spiritual thing in them which lived, and seemed to grow stronger, in beastliness?’

  It is this spiritual thing that Manning is after, and which shines out in even the darkest pages of his book. To bear witness to the brutality and tenderness of war is only part of it. ‘There is,’ he tells us, ‘an extraordinary veracity in war that strips man of every conventional covering he has, and leaves him to face a fact as naked and inexorable as himself.’

  It is that naked, inexorable fact, and the power with which Manning in page after page makes it real, that sets The Middle Parts of Fortune beside the best of Mann, Kafka, Hamsun, Camus, Beckett, among the indisputable classics of its century.

  Introduction to The Middle Parts of Fortune,

  Folio Society, 2012

  THE QUICK OF THINGS: LAWRENCE AND WALT WHITMAN

  A GOOD MANY WRITERS of fiction have also in the course of a busy writing life produced memorable poems, George Meredith for one, Thackeray for another, and several poets have produced single novels that stand as undisputed masterpieces: one thinks immediately of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Mörike’s novella, Mozart’s Journey to Prague. But few writers have an equal reputation in both fields: Goethe in Germany, Pushkin in Russia, Hugo in France; in England Hardy, maybe Kipling.

  D. H. Lawrence is surely one of the few. In a frenetic publishing life, and during many moves – from England to Germany in 1912, and on to Italy; to Australia, Mexico and the United States in the 1920s, and finally to Spain and the south of France – he worked simultaneously, and always at the highest intensity, on novels, poems, travel books, criticism, reviews. There is no time after he began in 1909 when his notebooks are not filled with poems, and no time in his publishing life when he is not, between novels and volumes of short stories, either preparing collections of poems or seeing them through the press.

  This needs careful tracking. Postage, because of his travels, forms part of the story, and so does accident. So does interference or confiscation by the customs authorities in the cause of public decency. There are multiple typescripts and the fact that Lawrence was seldom at hand when the poems were being edited means that many of the publications are corrupt. They may also differ for another reason.

  Because of Lawrence’s subjects, and the language he uses, many of the poems were at the last moment expurgated by the publisher or withdrawn, not always after consultation with Lawrence himself (again the matter of distance) and not always with his consent.

  All this is thoroughly dealt with in the new Cambridge Edition in two volumes, edited by Christopher Pollnitz: one for the poems and Lawrence’s prefaces to the various collections (this is the first complete and corrected edition of the poems), a second for the vast critical apparatus such an undertaking involves: the variant versions, notes on each poem and on the publication of each book and its reception – even a note on pounds, shillings and pence.

  Each lover of Lawrence’s poems will have his own story of first contact with a new and unique consciousness.

  Lawrence was the first entirely modern poet I was presented with, and except for what I had picked up from films – the accidental influence, in Hollywood movies of the late thirties and early forties, of German Expressionist theatre and décor and, on the soundtrack, German contemporary music – the first modernist sensibility. I was twelve, going on thirteen, in my first months at Brisbane Grammar.

  As the bright Latin form, we were already skilled at the sort of analysis and parsing that was the regular drill in Queensland primary schools, so we did nothing in our English class but read. The Lawrence poem in our class anthology was ‘Snake’, and it was like no other poem I had ever heard – I say heard because poetry always began in those days as a reading aloud. I did with it immediately what I had been encouraged to do with any poem that in some way struck me, or which puzzled or eluded me. I got its music into my head (prima la musica), and its logic, or lack of logic, by learning it off by heart. Like many poems learned by heart at that time, it is still with me.

  What mesmerised me was the poem’s rhythms, and the perfect ease with which the lines, long or short, contained each thought and added it to the ‘story’. And the openness of that story as confession, Lawrence’s readiness, with no hint of self-consciousness or posing, to give himself away. I had never come across anything like that either. I took it as a kind of lesson in how I might deal with my own feelings, even the ones I was ashamed of.

  In learning the poem by heart, what it had to tell – the experience it embodied but also the rhythm of its discoveries, each one as it arrived – became mine; I had made it mine, along with the voice that expressed it. This might have robbed the thing, through easy familiarity, of its challenges. Instead, odd lines, in my head as they now were, stood out suddenly and confronted me so that I had to confront them.

  ‘The voices of my education said to me / He must be killed.’ But Lawrence did not want to kill the creature. Could the voices of our education be wrong? – I had never been presented with that idea. And clearly, in this case, they were wrong. In attacking the snake Lawrence had sinned. But wasn’t the serpent the very embodiment of sin? This serpent, in opposition to what the Bible asserted, was holy, because it was another creature like us, part of a Creation that was also holy – was that it? So the Bible was mistaken on that score also. Everything in the poem seemed to question and reverse what I had till now been told. There was a new sort of pleasure in this. Each line as it turned was full of surprise and discovery.

  There is a good deal in that schoolboy response that I would stand by still, and re-reading the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), I experienced again, in their simple-seeming but complex statements, line after line, the same discomfort and release of that twelve-year-old. But what strikes me now is how carefully prepared I had been to meet this challenge by all those long afternoons with our State School Readers; through the three weeks we had spent on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Grade Seven, and our explorations, in Grade Six, in the story of Pluto and Persephone (along with Lord Leighton’s vivid illustration), of the pagan underworld that Lawrence was evoking, and inviting me, if I was daring enough, to recognise as my world also and share:

  And I thought of the albatross

  And I wished he would come back, my snake.

  For he had seemed to me again like a king,

  Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

  Now due to be crowned again.

  And so I had missed my chance with one of the lords of Life.

  Lawrence’s move – between September 1920, when he writes the first poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and the completion of the manuscript in February 1923 – from a strictly human and personal world into the world of the creatures, is an extraordina
ry liberation.

  These winged, beaked, taloned creatures, these slow-moving earth-creatures with carapace shells, and fish, bats, snakes, mosquitos – nature’s fantastic work of invention and play; these infinite variations on a life force that responds, with every condition of large and small, of quick and slow, in designs of so much surprise and utility and grace, call up in Lawrence a similar spirit of playful and inventive making. In his own version of creative fantasy, and with the liveliest humour and wit, he becomes a psalmist and celebrant of the animist creed – lyric, parodic, lightly critical; a master of reflexive attention; an imitator of nature’s own utilitarian caprice.

  No more brooding on whether or not he is loved. No more stewing over the smallness of human needs and views, or the way ‘mind’ perverts and desecrates the purities of sensation. The creatures are above or beyond all that. Their world is all instinct and immediacy, but clean, and since they know nothing of the moralities, it is also guiltless. The joy Lawrence takes in their otherness is childlike, as Blake’s was; of a kind where innocence is a state beyond experience, but where one needs to come through experience to reach it. He never puts a foot wrong. Rhythm and cadence both follow and preclude sense, and contain and fix it. Entering into becomes a form of reflection, but also of self-reflection, each encounter producing its own tone and truth:

  When did you start your tricks,

  Monsieur?

  … Are you one too many for me

  Winged Victory?

  Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?