Lawrence and Frieda

by Philip Gambone

"Mexico—like Gauguin's Tahiti—has probably been the favored place of the dreams of paradise lost," wrote Nobel laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio. Mexico certainly held that paradisial allure for the English novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence, who visited the country three times during the 1920s.

Lawrence's first trip was a sightseeing expedition with his wife Frieda and two friends in the spring of 1923. His initial impression was that the country was free, easy, and very pleasant, "like Palermo or Naples." Within days, however, the perennially disappointed vagabond writer found cause to complain. He found Mexico City "slummy, a mongrel town, noisy and ramshackle." He didn't like the "gruesome Aztec carvings" and hated a bull fight he attended. The overall spirit of the place struck him as "sub-cruel, a bit ghastly." In June and July, eager to settle in a quieter locale than the capital, Lawrence moved to Lake Chapala, where he worked on the first version of his novel The Plumed Serpent.

Lake Chapala
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After returning to the States, where he spent four weeks in California, Lawrence returned to Mexico in September, traveling down the west coast with his friend, the Danish painter Kai Gøtzsche. Although it was a grueling journey—via train, a battered Ford, and muleback—Lawrence's tune had changed. He delightedly reported that the country had "a certain mystery of beauty for me, as if the gods were here. The days are so pure and lovely, like an enchantment, as if some dark-faced gods were still young."

Despite his newfound pleasure in Mexico, which could open "the floodgates of one's soul," post-revolution political turmoil was rattling the country. Feeling "threatened by hostile forces," Lawrence stayed less than two months. "Everything a bit heavier," he reported in a letter. "They expect more revolution." Late that November, he sailed for England, hoping the rebellion would not last long. "I want, when Mexico is quiet, to go down to Oaxaca," he wrote to his friend in Taos, Mabel Luhan.

Mabel Luhan
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Luhan was a bohemian patron of the arts: "aristocrat, wealthy, imperious and irritating," says Lawrence's biographer Jeffrey Meyers. Despite her faults, she generously supported Lawrence. When he and Frieda visited her in the spring of 1924, she gave them a 160-acre ranch north of Taos in exchange for the manuscript of one of Lawrence's masterpieces, Sons and Lovers.

Lawrence rebuilt the cabin that sat on the property. The solitude of the ranch and the beauty of the wilderness setting greatly appealed to him. "There is something savage, unbreakable in the spirit of the place out here," he said. "The Indians drumming and yelling at our camp-fire in the evening."

Lawrence and friends in Mexico
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From Taos, Lawrence embarked on his third trip to Mexico in October 1924. Once again, he was disappointed in Mexico City, which he found "shabby, depressed and unpleasant." In
November, he and Frieda moved on to Oaxaca, taking the Ferrocarril Mexicano: "a wild queer lovely journey" through the Tomellín Canyon.

With their friend Dorothy Brett, the Lawrences checked into the Francia Hotel, which Lawrence deemed "very pleasant" with "good amusing food" and all for four pesos a day. He found Oaxaca "a very quiet little town." "The climate is perfect—cotton dresses, yet not too hot. It is very peaceful and has a remote beauty of its own."

Hotel Francia
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By the end of the month, they had moved into a villa with large rooms, a veranda and an enclosed garden. Oaxaca's charms continued to work their magic: "This country is so lovely," Lawrence wrote in another letter, "the sky is perfect, blue and hot every day, and flowers rapidly following flowers. They are cutting sugar-cane, and hauling it in in the old ox-wagons, slowly. But the grass-slopes are already dry and fawn-coloured, the unventured hills are already like an illusion."

In Oaxaca, the Lawrences lived among the Zapotec people—"small men with lifted chests and quick, lifted knees," he wrote in a letter. "Quiet, small, round-headed women running barefoot, tightening their blue rebozos round their shoulders, so often with a baby in the fold." Lawrence's impression of the Indians "focused on sounds," writes Ross Parmenter in his book Lawrence in Oaxaca. He noted the "queer hissing murmurs of the Zapotec idioma, among the sounds of Spanish, the quiet, aside-voices of the Mextecas."

Market - Oaxaca
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While completing his novel, Lawrence also wrote the first four chapters of a book of essays, Mornings in Mexico. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers calls it "a minor but representative travel book." The intangible allure of Mexico is what he was after in these essays.

In the first essay, "Corasmin and the Parrots," Lawrence set out his working principle: to eschew grand generalizations about Mexico and focus on the telling detail, on "one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees." Lawrence's talent for detail is evident throughout. A clean, slim snake has a beauty "like soft, quiescent lightning." An Indian pueblo is a collection of "mud-pie houses, all squatting in a jumble, prepared to crumble into dust and be invisible." Poinsettias are "like red birds ruffling in the wind of dawn as if going to bathe, all their feathers alert." And, because he is D.H. Lawrence, his eye is always on beautiful bodies, both male and female: "wild heavy hair," "shapely flesh," "archaic slim waists," "sensuous heaviness."

Cazahuate tree - Oaxaca
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Another chapter celebrates "the great stream of men flowing to a centre," a Mexican market. "Here they have felt life concentrate upon them, they have been jammed between the soft hot bodies of strange men come from afar, they have had the sound of strangers' voices in their ears, they have asked and been answered in unaccustomed ways."

Lawrence was prone to being gloomy, peevish, even self-righteous. In the market, he becomes querulous when he can't find fresh fruit. When a fruit vendor, who is standing near orange trees, tell him she has no oranges, he quips, "It is a choice between killing her and hurrying away." And he has no patience for the tourist in Mexico—the "great white monkey"—whom he deems "on the whole, a dreary spectacle."

Corn Dance
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Two major essays in Mornings in Mexico—"Dance of the Sprouting Corn" and "The Hopi Snake Dance"—are not set in Mexico, but in the Southwest of the United States, where he was most moved by the Indigenous population. Here again, Lawrence's powers of description come to the fore. He gives us the "ripple of bells on the knee-garters," the "sudden wild, whooping yells," the "seed-like shudder of the gourd-rattles," and the "rhythmic, hopping leap" of the dancers' breasts.

For the Southwest Indians, "creation is a great flood, forever flowing, in lovely and terrible waves. In everything the shimmer of creation, and never the finality of the created. Never the distinction between God and God's creation, or between Spirit and Matter. Everything, everything is the wonderful shimmer of creation…. All is godly."

Hopi Snake Dance
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At its best, Lawrence's language in these essays rises to the level of poetry. But he can also get carried away. Take this sentence, for example: "How deep the men are in the mystery they are practicing, how sunk deep below our world, to the world of snakes, and dark ways in the earth, where are the roots of corn, and where the little rivers of unchanneled, uncreated life-passion run like dark, trickling lightening, to the roots of the corn and to the feet and loins of the men, from the earth's innermost dark sun." Word-passion run amuck!

In his essays on the dances of the Indigenous people of the Southwest, I was reminded of the festival of El Señor de la Conquista in San Miguel. Lawrence writes: "The Indian accepts Jesus on the Cross amid all the rest of the wonders. The presence of Jesus on the Cross, or the pitiful Mary Mother, does not in the least prevent the savage intensity of the war-dance. The brave comes home with a scalp. In the morning he goes to Mass. Two mysteries!"

At times, Lawrence's take on Indigenous people comes close to Buddhism: "The mind is there merely as a servant, to keep a man pure and true to the mystery, which is always present. The mind bows down before the creative mystery, even of the atrocious Apache warrior." For Lawrence, the Indian's one commandment was "Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder."

Mornings In Mexico (1st edition)
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Again, Lawrence presses his main point: that one can look upon Indian rituals as an aspect of culture, as public entertainment—"as one looks on while Anna Pavlova dances with the Russian Ballet"—or one can take the religious point of view, seeing, for example, the Hopi snake dance, as communion with the mysterious life-spirit. "This is," Lawrence writes, "the religion of all aboriginal America, Peruvian, Aztec, Athabascan: perhaps the aboriginal religion of all the world.

In the long run, Mornings in Mexico amounts to a critique of the West. "Instead of our destiny of Mind and Spirit," he says, "we have undertaken the scientific conquest of forces." We are "gods of the machine only. It is our highest. Our cosmos is a great engine." In contrast, for Indigenous people like the Hopi, their conquest is not scientific, but "by means of the mystic, living will that is in man."

D. H. Lawrence
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Wyndham Lewis criticized Lawrence for "repeatedly telling his White readers that they are poor specimens compared to his energetic and ‘mysterious' Indians…. If we followed Mr. Lawrence to the ultimate conclusion of his romantic teaching, we should allow our ‘consciousness' to be overpowered by the alien ‘consciousness' of the Indian." Lewis' mandarin outlook has a certain validity. Still, I admire Lawrence for trying to penetrate the culture of Mexico and of Native American peoples. And for finding in his travels through Indigenous America an inspiring significance.

At the end of one essay, Lawrence wrote, "Only that which is utterly intangible matters. The contact, the spark of exchange. That which can never be fastened upon, forever gone, forever coming, never to be detained: the spark of contact." I think this is what makes Lawrence, who could sometimes be a truly god-awful writer, great: his exuberant celebration of the wonderful, mysterious, numinous "shimmer of creation." He found it in Mexico.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. For over a decade, his book reviews appeared regularly in The New York Times. Phil is the author of seven books. His memoir, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, was published last year by Rattling Good Yarns Press. His books are available through Amazon and at "Tesoros," the bookshop at the Biblioteca.

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