Page 17 - WTP Vol. X #5

the antelope plains of New Mexico, then over the mountains to Taos, the route Lawrence would have taken. We slept in the Mabel Dodge Luhan house, in Tony Luhan’s bedroom, and she even took a bath in a tub surrounded by Lawrence’s paintings. We drove up to the ranch Mabel signed over to Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, a home they called Kiowa, at 8500 feet altitude. The gate was closed, bar- ring entrance up the road, but we stepped around it and went up to the ranch by ourselves and lay
on the pine-needled ground under the tall pon- derosa pine. You can see it in “The Lawrence Tree,” a painting by Georgia O’Keefe, who must also
have been lying on the ground looking up into the branches and the sky. We walked up the trail to the Lawrence shrine where his ashes may or may not be interred. And there my wife wept, because Law- rence had meant so much to her as a young scholar and writer in Australia, and she had witnessed his cancellation by righteous academic critics who had obviously not read him with care or were simply intolerant of his complexity, his multitudes and rages and loves.
Toward the end of his life, Lawrence published an essay called “Pornography and Obscenity.” You can find it in Life with a Capital L, essays chosen and introduced by Geoff Dyer (Penguin, 2019). Those who have dismissed Lawrence as some kind of pornographer should at least read what he has to
say about pornography, which is extremely reason- able and valuable. He is brilliant on the deadly limits of self-consciousness, and seems in many ways to predict our culture of selfies and scrolling thumbs. Dismissals of Lawrence are unwise because they are rigid in the face of something that is against rigid-
ity, a writer deeply aware of flow and flux. “Man is a changeable beast,” Lawrence wrote in the essay, “and words change their meanings with him, and things are not what they seemed, and what’s what becomes what isn’t, and if we think we know where we are it’s only because we are so rapidly being translated to somewhere else.”
Among writers, I bless the contrarians, the ones who do not conform to their times but resist with every decency their imaginations allow. Lawrence resisted in everything he wrote. He called the novel “the one bright book of life,” and its vitality was his moral compass more than any perception of societal abso- lutes. Readers like Geoff Dyer and Frances Wilson, whose excellent book on Lawrence, Burning Man, has recently been published, have been making the case that his essays are the foundation of his greatness more than his novels. Perhaps. His beautiful essay,
“Pan in America,” distills the environmentalist point of view as well as anything I have ever read, without succumbing to sentimental notions of a return to some Edenic past. A case can also be made for his short stories and his best poems, and I see no rea- son why Kangaroo and The Rainbow and a few other novels should be dismissed or neglected. He wrote so much, with such intensity and variety, that no critical thesis could outflank him.
So here I am in Tasmania, thinking of Lawrence, who continues to teach me, out of his personal anguish, his clear and troubled spirit, what it means to be translated. I have spent much of my life on the move, living in different places, driven by my own motives and demons (or daimon, as the case may be), and here I reside, on a piece of land like the prow of a ship heading out to sea. I never want to leave.
~
I grew up in the far northwest of America, closer to Vancouver B.C. than to Seattle, and never felt my American identity was a solid or knowable thing. My identity was always falling off into the Pacific or the Mediterranean or the Tasman. I was in my late forties when I first visited my country’s capital city. I had been invited to Washington D.C. for the National Book Festival. George W. Bush was president, and a friend of mine, the poet Dana Gioia, was running the Na- tional Endowment for the Arts. I remember a dinner in a great hall of the Library of Congress. “Hail to the Chief” rang out from a brass band when the Bushes walked to their table, and I stood far away with a group of arts administrators and writers. At the table next to ours, Colin Powell stood alone, leaning on the back of his chair as if he could not quite bear his own weight, and I remember wishing I had walked over to
(continued on next page)
10