Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  And in the only fertile area so far—his writing—he had become sterile too. Here he was, stranded on the threshold of middle age, with three unfinished novels in his hands. He hadn’t touched Arctic Summer in a year. His Indian book was in trouble, stalled somewhere in its deeper mechanism, and now Maurice also seemed to him a morally questionable exercise. Maybe he would never complete anything again. Maybe his power had left him.

  * * *

  In March of 1914 he went to stay with Meredith in Bangor. Hom had sunk so far into his married life that only his eyes showed. But there was still a spark and a freshness between him and Morgan, so that it seemed natural to hand over a batch of pages.

  “It’s my Uranian romance,” he said. “Some of it may seem familiar.”

  Hom grunted in vague alarm and carried the manuscript off with him. But he didn’t mention it again. Morgan was stopping for a fortnight and on his last morning he asked whether his friend had had a chance to read it.

  “Well, I glanced at it a little.” He pulled a face, which left no doubt about his feelings.

  “You didn’t care for it.”

  “Not much, to be honest. I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove, Morgan.”

  “I’m not trying to prove anything, I’m sure. Just to, to . . . tell the truth, I suppose.”

  “The truth? Well, perhaps there is some truth in it. What I don’t understand about your type is that you want to emulate the other side. You kick up such a commotion about being different, and all you want is to be the same.”

  “To be treated the same. Is that so terrible?”

  “Yes, it is, if you only knew it. What you want is to live with a man in a happy home. But you don’t know how trivial it is. Marriage is emblematic of modern life. The way men and women are together—it’s a silly business, it has no nobility. I wish you could see that, instead of romanticising it.”

  The remark hurt Morgan deeply. It was Hom’s indifference—or the idea that his indifference didn’t matter. He’d thought that the story belonged to both of them; now he saw that it might be his alone. Your type: he had been set aside, and could only accept his new place.

  The great friendship with Hom, which had once promised so much, had run into the sand. Too much time, too little nobility: it had grown between them like a barrier. He could be unmanned by thoughts like these, but it didn’t last long. He felt that he had changed in some profound sense. India had done it to him—had shifted him from one base to another, had angled him somehow differently. He didn’t depend so much on the good opinion of others to feel complete. Nor did he expect happiness as his right any longer; he knew it was only for the strong.

  * * *

  Goldie was his first and most frightening reader. After his reaction to the short story, Morgan expected judgement on a larger scale. But when Goldie responded, it was with warmth and admiration. For the first time, Morgan felt, he and the older man had become true comrades. His little book had done that for them.

  Morgan wondered whether Goldie wasn’t compensating for his harshness over the short story, but in the months that followed he kept mentioning Maurice again, and on one occasion his eyes filled with tears. “You may not have intended it,” he said. “But you spoke for me, as well as for yourself.”

  Encouraged by this reaction, Morgan showed the book to a few other friends. Forrest Reid, Sydney Waterlow, Florence Barger—all of them approved. With trepidation, he even gave it to Lytton Strachey to read. Amazingly, Strachey liked it—and he especially liked one aspect.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Do not dissemble. Risley, c’est moi. Yes? Confirm!”

  The character was not flattering, and Morgan had hoped the resemblance would pass unnoticed. But he had seen a certain gleam in Strachey’s eye and after a moment he nodded.

  “I knew it! I knew it!” The delight was unmistakable. It was Strachey’s voice, above all other signs, which conveyed most completely his feelings on any subject. You couldn’t mention Edward Carpenter’s name, for example, without eliciting a stream of high-pitched squeaks, like a bat in flight. Now his voice rose in a muted shriek of triumph: “My dear, immortality is mine! The title must obviously be changed. No more mention of Maurice. It is Risley, Risley, Risley! This is my only criticism.”

  Of course, Strachey didn’t have only the one criticism to offer. In a long, perceptive and pertinent letter that followed, he made it clear that in general he admired the parts dealing with the Cambridge set, but he remained unconvinced by Maurice and Alec Scudder. Nor did he think a relationship across classes like that had any chance of lasting. Six months at the most, he gave them. But his most memorable comments had been those about sex. The whole attitude to male copulation, he said, struck him as diseased. The matter of Maurice’s tortured chastity, followed by the elaborate internal contortions he went through before going to bed with Scudder: there was something very wrong, he felt, with how the book treated intimacy between men.

  Morgan was given pause by this idea. Writing revealed one to oneself, of course, more damningly than any confession, but he hadn’t considered this particular question till now. Worse, the comment made something else clear: namely, that Lytton knew about these things first-hand. It was bothersome that this unattractive, bizarre-looking man, with his undisciplined limbs and his extraordinary voice, should have engaged in love and carnality when Morgan didn’t dare to.

  * * *

  If he had imagined that writing Maurice would free him elsewhere too and that he would go back to his Indian novel with fresh vision and enthusiasm, he discovered now that it wasn’t the case. Reading over the pages of green ink, they looked stale to him, without blood or breath. He was still stuck in the caves, still vexed by what did or didn’t happen there, and what it meant. Now that he had written so much more personally, he felt suddenly very far from India and he didn’t think he could return to it.

  And in the meanwhile other happenings had unfolded which made India seem not just distant, but unreachable. The very idea of war seemed impossible, outrageous. And yet the word was coming up suddenly in every conversation, growing and thickening till there was no other topic. Nor was it often mentioned without fervour.

  When England officially joined the conflict, Lily became restive. “I think you ought to do something, Poppy,” she told him. “Everybody else is volunteering.”

  He would not join up; he would not fight. He knew this with calm certainty, in the same way that one knew one’s own character. Just the day before he had seen some white-faced boys guarding the railway line, as if it might be in danger—he could do something meaningless like that, or perhaps there might be work in a hospital somewhere. He was happy to mop up blood, just not to shed it.

  Only a few days later, there was a solution. One of his Weybridge acquaintances, Sir Charles Holroyd, was Director of the National Gallery. He sent a message that Morgan should come to see him, and then offered him a post as a cataloguer at the Gallery.

  “It’s only four days a week,” Sir Charles told him. “And a night of fire-watching here and there. Nothing very taxing, I can assure you. In any case, we are putting the more important paintings in storage, until this unpleasantness is over. One never knows—bombs and whatnot.”

  “So if I die there, it’ll be among second-rate masterpieces. How fitting.”

  Sir Charles stared at him with open mouth for a moment, then guffawed when he understood the joke. “You won’t die there,” he said, then spluttered. “I mean to say, I hope you won’t die anywhere.”

  His mother agreed completely. “Now you will be able to do your bit,” she told him, “and still come home for dinner in the evenings.”

  So life continued in a semblance of its old form for a while. One didn’t have to consider the War too closely, although it ran through everything like the vibration of a distant earthquake. Perceived from home, it was a great concentration of c
alamity, but out of sight, over the horizon somewhere. He secretly suspected that it existed merely on his account, to teach him some kind of moral lesson. If he died, it would cease to be there, it would be cancelled.

  But in his normal life it showed mostly as a deep change in the attitudes around him, very alarming to a sensitive disposition. The Defence of the Realm Act, for one thing, with all that it allowed, including censorship—though what bothered him much more was the acceptance of these changes by everybody. People believed it was necessary and somehow good to be altering their priorities in radical ways. A new mentality was taking hold, a mentality of crowds and slogans and mass emotions, in which he felt queasy and afraid.

  He visited the Morisons more frequently than he wanted to, in order to get news of Masood. Theodore Morison had been knighted a few years before and—though he remained humble about it—his wife had taken on great airs. He was startled one afternoon to hear from Lady Morison the sentiment that war lifted people to a higher plane.

  “A transfiguration takes place,” she told him, “when a man picks up a gun. A spiritual renewal, very mysterious. It is almost like a light, shining from within. Do you not agree?”

  So surprising was this idea that he believed, for an instant, she was being ironic. Then he saw that her face had its own shining light, and set down his teacup.

  “No, I’m afraid I do not,” he said firmly.

  “You must have observed it. Surely.”

  “I have observed a base instinct take charge,” he said. “I have observed European civilisation being set back by thirty years. That is all.”

  “Indeed.” The light had switched off in her now, to be replaced by coldness. “Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, though you mustn’t expect patriotic people to agree. But is that the time? I hadn’t realised it was so late, I’m afraid you will have to excuse me.”

  These little clarities didn’t last. He couldn’t rest too smugly in his own convictions, not when doubt continually gnawed at the extremities. Morgan wasn’t immovable. Though the idea of killing was awful, he found something distasteful, too, about the lofty isolation of those who refused to fight.

  Was he a conscientious objector? The description didn’t fit comfortably. The principle of abstaining didn’t ennoble him, any more than bloodshed would. Both sides had their idealism, which he heard everywhere he went, till he felt that he might choke. What was most distressing was the ability to understand both viewpoints while being able to follow neither.

  * * *

  At the start of 1915, his spirits were briefly lifted by a new acquaintanceship. He had known Lady Ottoline Morrell for a few years, though he had always resisted being drawn too fully into her social stratagems. Many people in his circle, especially Lytton, were regular visitors at her Bedford Square soirées, but she alarmed Morgan slightly, with her jutting jaw and her horsey teeth, to say nothing of her outlandish outfits when the eccentric mood struck. But now Lady O had taken it into her head that he, Morgan, would get on extremely well with her new protégé, a young novelist by the name of David Herbert Lawrence.

  Nor was she wrong at first. Morgan was seated next to Lawrence at the dinner party held in his honour, and they took warmly to one another. Lawrence did hold forth somewhat emphatically, it was true, and his new German wife was afraid of being overlooked, but the impression they left behind was of passion rather than egotism. The very next day, however, at Duncan Grant’s studio, the mood was decidedly different. When Lawrence launched into a heated diatribe against the evil he detected in Duncan’s paintings, Morgan thought it best to make his excuses and slip away.

  An exchange of letters followed. He found himself accepting an invitation to Greatham in Sussex, where the Lawrences were living. The visit was pleasant to begin with. He was stopping for three days, and on the first afternoon he and Lawrence went for a long walk on the Downs. While they walked, they talked of a topic Lawrence had already raised in his letter—namely Rananim, his projected Utopia.

  “And you will always have a place there, Forster,” his host assured him. “You and your woman.”

  “Well, that is very generous.” Not keen to linger on this topic, he asked quickly, “What exactly does your Utopia consist in?”

  “It is an island. Not part of the existing world. That is all you need to know.”

  “But how does one live in it?”

  At this, Lawrence became so voluble that he lost coherence. It seemed to be a place without class or division or money, where people who were already fulfilled might fulfil themselves further.

  “Not unlike Edward Carpenter’s little cottage,” Morgan ventured to suggest.

  “Carpenter? That old outdated mystical fraud! No, Rananim will be nothing like that.”

  Morgan laughed uncomfortably, but the remark about Carpenter would stay with him. It would take on an extra sharpness the very next afternoon, when Lawrence suddenly, without any apparent reason, launched a ferocious attack on the English political system. A revolution was needed! The land, industry and the press should immediately be nationalised! Morgan murmured mildly that he couldn’t quite agree and suddenly the mood changed. Like the hot beam of a lighthouse, he felt Lawrence’s angry attention swing round upon him.

  It began quietly, though the tone was earnest, and soon became an unfettered rage. It was astonishing to realise that he was the object of so much displeasure: his person, his lifestyle and his writing. All of it, apparently, was unacceptable. Why was Morgan content to live in such a cloistered, limp, ineffectual way? Why did he shelter himself from his own primal being? He should act, he should engage his basic appetites and live them out! He should find a female counterpart and dig down to his volcanic base material, instead of fossicking about with love stories set in Italy, in between his knitting and visits to the opera. His books were proof enough of his sterile preoccupations. The characters that interested Morgan were all, without a single exception, types that belonged to a suffocating and futureless world, which he, Lawrence, longed to tear open like a placenta and emerge from, newly born and bloodied and crying . . .

  Morgan interrupted this tirade to say primly: “I don’t knit.”

  Lawrence scowled and flung a stone at a tree. “In your soul, you do,” he said. “If you want to come to life, you must change your whole existence. All of it!”

  “How do you know I’m not dead already?”

  “You see, that is precisely the kind of remark I mean. Your idea of the future is a return to the Greeks. Your idea of God is Pan. But Pan is the source, not the end. No plant grows down to its roots! We must struggle upwards, we must put out shoots, even if they have thorns on them! Do you not see?”

  “Perhaps I don’t.”

  Lawrence, who had just begun to calm, became excited again. On and on, quite literally for hours, until he was hoarse, he called his guest to account for all his multitudinous shortcomings. When eventually a silence fell, Morgan ventured to ask:

  “And really—nothing in my books interests you? Not one of them is worthwhile? Or, not even that . . . nothing in them is worthwhile?”

  “Well, I speak harshly. I speak in absolutes, because I . . . all right, yes. Leonard Bast. I give you Leonard Bast. That was courageous.”

  Frieda Lawrence, who was seated nearby, tossed her head and laughed. “Ja,” she said. “Leonard Bast.”

  It was by now fully dark and they hadn’t eaten, but Morgan decided that he was indignant. “The two of you,” he said, his voice sounding even to his own ears like that of a maiden aunt, “I’m not sure you’re both not just playing around my knees.” Then he stalked off to bed without saying good night, feeling sure for some reason that his hosts would soon be rutting like rabbits.

  It was all so big, so final—surely the horrible demise of a friendship. But the next morning Lawrence was in an equable mood again. When they said goodbye, he told Morgan, �
��I hope you know I like you very much. And I also hope you will visit us again soon.”

  But Morgan didn’t ever go back. He was attracted to the man as much as repelled by him—all the hot, sandy-coloured, working-class vehemence of him—but there were only certain intimacies one could hope to survive. He would never inhabit Rananim, and in the meanwhile even Greatham seemed beyond him.

  In the end, it wasn’t Lawrence’s fanatical certainties—either in conversation or committed to paper—that put Morgan off. Finally, when he reflected on it, the remark about Edward Carpenter had done for their friendship. An outdated mystical fraud? No, no, no—anybody who saw the old man that way was on the other side of some deep divide. Whatever his shortcomings, Carpenter was the future, and nobody could speak against him.

  * * *

  On a visit to Goldie in Cambridge, an incident occurred which made it clear how English life had broken into two. A group of Welsh soldiers, upon encountering the sight of an undergraduate in cap and gown, had collapsed in wild laughter—they had never seen a creature so outlandish. But the outlandish creature was a tradition that had given rise to Morgan, and he was appalled to have it laughed at.

  When it was suggested to him that he might join an ambulance unit in Italy, the idea of trying to staunch wounds, repair broken bodies, pulled powerfully at him. George Trevelyan was working there and would take him on immediately. But Lily became querulous and morose. “It sounds dangerous,” she told him.