Page 16 - WTP Vol. X #5

Translated to Somewhere Else: An American Writer in Australia
At home now in Tasmania, I have been thinking a lot about D. H. Lawrence, who wrote so well about Australia in the 1920s. He only spent 100 days in this country and wrote the final chapter of his novel Kangaroo in America, yet even as that book wrestled with democratic ideals versus a cult of the strong, notions of society and leadership that first occurred to him in Europe, he seems to have taken
in through his pores a powerful dose of Australian- ness, including an awareness of Aboriginality and the soul of the continent. Lawrence, who never stopped moving, is one of the great writers about place, the physical and psychic life of location and the rough unsettled species, humanity, colliding with itself on all Earth’s surfaces.
Lawrence isn’t my guide to Australia. I have Austra- lians and Australian writers, including my wife, for that. Yet he is an unsurpassable guide to the life of change and movement, rootedness and rootlessness in all their ramifications, and what it means to be a living person at odds with the world. I first visited Australia in 2013, my fifty-ninth year, and have
lived here only about four years. My Tasmanian wife and I sold up what we had in America and bought a small home on a block of land shaped like the prow of a ship, water on three sides of us, aiming out of the bush toward the Southern Ocean. Previously we owned a house on a wooded dune in Oregon, facing Australia and Asia from the other side of the Pacific. We loved that house and the wild shore below our windows, but it was located in the United States, a country that seemed in the Trump years ever more inhospitable, so we looked at properties online and planned our escape, and in 2018 we leapt. I dropped my wife at the San Francisco airport so she could fly home and buy this place, while I drove to Colorado to wrap up my life as a college professor.
She had lived with me in America for eight years, and had felt from the beginning what a sad country it was, with its mad car disease and guns and legalized brib- ery and penchant for unnecessary wars, its inability to work out basic social issues like healthcare, its alienated states and class warfare. She was express- ing the way it had always felt to me. In my childhood the three most inspiring political and social leaders
I could name were all assassinated. I grew up in the era of Vietnam, watched Watergate unfold on the
evening news while a college student. I knew that America had produced Nixon, but had also produced the people who brought him down. We were not one-sided in our feelings about the country, which we loved mainly for its astonishing landscapes and animal life. When we drove away from that house in Oregon, both of us shed tears.
Americans did not invent intolerance. It is a human quality, available anywhere, even in Australia. Per- haps in America it feels especially poisonous because it is coupled with such idealism and the ridiculous
lie of American exceptionalism. The bright light of America has its shadow side that Americans are too often unwilling or unable to acknowledge. Lawrence was at least partly right when he wrote, “The essen- tial American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Yet Lawrence also loved America, especially New Mexico, and would have continued living there if his TB diagnosis had not made extending his visa impos- sible. So he died in Europe in 1930, age forty-four, “a man,” in the words of the late Tony Hoagland, “who burned like an acetylene torch / from one end to the other of his life.” Think of that for a moment. Forty- four. Think of the breadth of what he produced. He is not easy to summarize, and can only be dismissed by the smug and single-minded.
Likewise, America is hard to dismiss. My wife and I love the country, and often miss its astonishing land- scapes, from the western deserts to the Pacific coast. In our first month as a couple I drove her through Trinidad, Colorado, where my father was born, into
9
DaviD maSon