D. H. Lawrence: A case of not being in love with Ceylon
Like many young people in England during the early 1960s, I became interested in D. H. Lawrence due to the lurid publicity surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Disenchanted: D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence
Fifty-five years ago, in October 1960, the case of the Crown versus Penguin Books, accused of breaking the Obscene Publications Act by publishing Lawrence’s book, began at the Old Bailey.
The jury – nine men and three women – were asked to read the banned book but were unable to take their copy out of the jury room.
An eyewitness claimed the trial was a “circus so hilarious, fascinating, tense and satisfying that none who sat through all its six days will ever forget them”.
Circus it may have been, but it changed Britain forever. Philip Larkin quipped in his 1967 verse Annus Mirabilis (“Year of Miracles”) that “sexual intercourse began/in 1963/between the end of the Chatterley ban/and the Beatles’ first LP”.
But as Simon Sandbrook comments in the 50th anniversary of the acquittal of Penguin in The Telegraph (October 17, 2010): “Now that public obscenity has become commonplace, it is hard to recapture the atmosphere of a society that saw fit to ban books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover because it was likely to ‘deprave and corrupt’ its readers.”
The defence team brought in E. M. Foster, Cecil Day-Lewis, Rebecca West and others to provide their opinion on the book’s literary merits.
The Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, even told the court that Lawrence showed sex as “an act of Holy Communion” and agreed when asked if it was a book that “Christians ought to read”.
The prosecution failed miserably, unable to find a credible person to substantiate Lawrence’s supposed obscenity. Prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked the jury “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
After just three hours’ deliberation, the jury acquitted Penguin Books on November 2, 1960.
The book became an almost instant bestseller in London: in 15 minutes, Foyles sold 300 copies and took orders for 3,000 more. And so the Lady Chatterley fever spread.
“In the long run, the end of the Chatterley ban was an enormously symbolic moment, representing the end of an era in which the state had regulated private morality as well as public behaviour,” Sandbrook states.
“Other obscenity cases followed in the next two decades, but they all tended to have the same result: a triumph for liberation, a defeat for censorship.”
* * * * * *
Nearly 40 years earlier, D. H. Lawrence and wife Frieda (Freiin Baroness von Richthofen), docked at Colombo on March 13, 1922, during a voyage to Australia. (The character of Lady Chatterley is supposedly based on Frieda).
“One morning I woke up and the ship stopped and we were in Colombo,” Frieda describes her arrival in Rosie Jackson’s Frieda Lawrence (1994). “It struck me: ‘I know it all, I know it all.’ It was just as I expected it.
The tropics, so marvellous these black people, this violent quick growth and yet a little terrifying, a little repulsive, as Lawrence would say.”
Lawrence remarked, “I shall not leave it”.
Jackson quotes Frieda: “An American friend gave me the side of a Sicilian cart I had always longed for. It had a joust painted on one panel, on the other St Genevieve.
It was very gay and hard in colour. I loved it.” Frieda wished to travel with this curious object to Ceylon. Lawrence was not enthusiastic but relented to his wife’s wishes.
Did the side of her Sicilian cart remain in Ceylon or end up in Australia?
Lawrence had been persuaded to visit Ceylon by his friends Earl and Achsah Brewster at their rambling bungalow in Kandy, “Ardnaree”.
Earl, a painter from Ohio, was a student of Oriental philosophy and religion, “subjects which might have been expected to appeal to Lawrence the perennial searcher after pre-industrial wisdom but did not,” as Anthony Burgess asserts in his biography of Lawrence, Flame into Being (1984).
Earl and Achsah (Hebrew for “anklet”) wrote of Lawrence’s encounter with the island in Lawrence; Reminiscences and Correspondence (1934).
The Brewsters remained good friends of Lawrence even when he satirised them in the story “Things” about wandering Americans who study “Indian thought” and collect bric-a-brac all over the world.
The Lawrences settled in Ardnaree overlooking the Kandy Lake “amidst a great grove of trees and surrounding jungle. It was a magnificent spot, with resplendent views from every side of the broad verandahs,” according to H. A. I. Goonetileke in Images of Sri Lanka through American Eyes (1975).
“We stayed with the Brewsters in a huge bungalow with all those black servants in the background,” Frieda reminisces. “In the morning the sun rose and we got up and I always felt terrified at the day and its heat.
The sun rose higher and the heat would rise.” With the Lawrences, the heat was a debilitating problem: unfortunately, their visit straddled April, the hottest month of the year in Kandy, and that year, 1922, was hotter than usual according to reports.
Another problem common to both was nocturnal fauna activity.
In 1926, Lawrence asked a friend if he had “ever heard the night noises of a tropical jungle, and then instantly emitted a frightening series of yells, squawks, trills, howls and animal ‘help-murder shrieks’’’, David Ellis, Mark Kinkead-Weekes and John Worthen report in D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (1997).
To quote Frieda: “Noises from the jungle; those primeval cries and howls and the brain-fever bird and the sliding noises on the roof and the jumps in the darkness outside.
How could one rest under such a darkness that was so terribly alive!”
Moreover, “Every room had a skylight so that the Lawrences could lie in bed not only listening to the wild-cats fighting on their roof but seeing them too,” Ellis et al. inform readers.
The highpoint of the Lawrences’ visit was viewing the special perahera with over two hundred elephants staged for the Prince of Wales, the doomed future King Edward VIII.
The Prince viewed the procession from the balcony of the Dalada Maligawa, where the former kings of Kandy had traditionally received the homage of their subjects.
To his sister Emily Lawrence wrote: “Poor devil . . . all twitchy. And seems worn out and disheartened. No wonder, badgered about like a doll among a mob of children.
A woman threw a bouquet, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.”
Yet as Ellis et al. show, “there are vivid and appreciative descriptions of the perahera in Lawrence’s letters: it was “wonderful”, he “loved it”, and the impression it made on him was “enormous”.
Much later he would claim that as he watched near-naked villagers from remote jungle areas performing the so-called ‘devil dances’ at midnight “under the torches” with their bodies glistening with sweat “as if they have been gilded”, he had come to understand as he had never done before quite what it meant to feel religion.”
The perahera experience led to the creation of a significant poem, “Elephant”, which was included in his collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).
“It says more about the Laurentian concept of power than about wicked-eyed pachyderms,” Burgess concludes. “Lawrence saw a ‘pale fragment’ of a prince to whom elephants salaamed under the torches and reflected that his motto was Ich dien – I serve. Supposing the elephants knew that motto? They were all foiled says Lawrence.
For they had come to see royalty and, and all they found was a “weary, diffident boy whose motto is Ich dien – Drudge to the public”:
But the best is the Pera-hera at midnight, under the tropical stars/With a pale little wisp of a Prince of Wales, diffident, up in a small pagoda on the temple side
And:
Pale dispirited Prince, with his chin in his hands, his nerves tired out/Watching and hardly seeing the trunk curl approach and clumsy, knee-lifting salaam/of the hugest, oldest of beasts, in the night and the fire-flare below.
Generally:
More elephants, tong, tong, tong, loom up/Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new cocoa-nut cressets/High, high, flambeaux, smoking of the east/And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets/among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in the dark.
A journey to Nuwara Eliya was undertaken on April 15, but Lawrence found that he did not like the place: “With one glance [I] discovered the treasure there among the tawdry array . . . fine red lacquer candlesticks from Cashmere painted with flowers”.
He claimed that “all Ceylon has a lid down over it” and although there was hoar frost on the ground, there was no getting through the lid even at 6,000 feet – “no, it presses tighter there”.
It was not all misery for the Lawrences, however. Shopping in Kandy was a popular pursuit throughout their stay. Frieda was particularly enthused with a well-known jeweller.
“It was like living in a fairy-tale. We would go to Casa Lebbes, a little jewelshop at Number 1, Trincomalee Street in Kandy, and look at his jewels.
He would pull out a soft leather bundle, undo it, and put before our eyes coloured wonders of sapphires, blue and lovely yellow ones, and rubies and emeralds.” Lawrence bought her sapphires and moonstones.
Despite his prophesy “I shall not leave it”, he left it with loathing in six weeks. Before he embarked from London, Lawrence had spoken of staying in Ceylon “at least a year” and “at least six months” as Ellis et al. quote from correspondence.
But his itchiness had begun early. “Five days from Colombo he had begun to think ‘If we don’t want to go on living in Ceylon I shall go to Australia if we can manage it’”.
Brenda Maddox maintains in The Married Man: A Life of D. H. Lawrence (1994). “He had had enough – of the heat, the heavy, sweet smell of fruit, coconut and coconut oil.
He never felt so sick in his life. He found the little temples vulgar, the faces of the yellow-robed, shaven-headed monks nasty.
As for the birds and the beasts of which he was usually so fond, they ‘hammer and clang and rattle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night’. In sum the East was ‘too boneless and negative . . . I don’t like it one bit’.
Lawrence’s aversion to Ceylon was unfortunate. As Ellis et al. point out, “The paradise he had told friends he was setting out to rediscover in Ceylon had failed to materialise, even though in many ways the circumstances could scarcely have been more promising”.
Other factors probably influenced his decision. He was on the verge of pulmonary thrombosis and could not take the overheated climate.
He had no interest in Buddhism. Perhaps most importantly, he had the feeling that it was a place where he could never do any proper work.
He had told his English publisher, Martin Secker, that he hoped to do a “Ceylon novel”, but on the day of the perahera, ten days after his arrival, he wrote that he did not believe he would ever write a line there, and later, “I’m not working. I don’t think I should work in the East.”
Thus the country lost the chance of becoming the setting for one of his novels. Instead Lawrence used Australia as the location for Kangaroo (1923) – although he became disillusioned with Oz too.
Eventually Ardnaree became the residence of the principal of Dharmaraja College, although the colonial name was lost. In 1991 a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society of Australia located it: “There was a large sitting-room, rectangular, with a lovely vaulted wooden ceiling.
The floors were cement and the verandahs covered in, but from the front a view over the lake was afforded . . . It was a colonial architectural masterpiece, sadly neglected now.”
Tissa Devendra discovered that he had lived at Ardnaree in his youth. It’s a story he tells in “Quest for Shangri-La” (The Island, November 7, 2007).
Lawrence’s ultimate letter from “Ardnaree” on April 30 to Lady Cynthia Asquith, which Devendra quotes, epitomizes Lawrence’s disenchantment with Ceylon and, as Devendra suggests, foreshadows “Elephant”:
“I didn’t like Ceylon – at least I liked looking at it – but not to live in. The East is not for me – the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black bottomless, hopeless eyes – and the heads of buffaloes and elephants poking out of primeval mud – the queer noise of 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 sick. But wonderful to have known.
We saw the [Prince of Wales] at the [Perahera] a lonely little glum white fish he was sitting up there at the Temple of the Tooth with his chin on his hands gazing blankly down on all the swirl of the East, like a sort of Narcissus waiting to commit black suicide.
The Perahera was wonderful – midnight – huge elephants, great flares of coconut torches, princes like peg-tops swathed round and round with muslin – and then tom-toms and savage music and devil dances – phase after phase – and that lonely little white fish – up aloft the black eyes and the black bright sweating bodies of the naked dancers – and the clanging of great mud-born elephants roaring past – made an enormous impression on me – a glimpse into the world before the Flood.
I can’t quite get back into history. The soft, moist elephantine prehistoric has sort of swamped in over my known world – and one drifts.”