The Plumed Serpent

D.H. Lawrence The Plumed Serpent (1926)
In January 1925, responding to an article about him which had appeared in the Milanese Corriere della Sera written by Carlo Linati, Lawrence wrote:

Do you think that books should be sort of toys, nicely built up of observations and sensations, all finished and complete? - I don't. To me, even Synge, whom I admire very much indeed, is a bit too rounded off and, as it were, put on the shelf to be looked at. I can't bear art that you can walk around and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in a crowd. People should either run for their lives, or come under the colours, or say how do you do? I hate the actor-and-the-audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering on to some mischief or merriment. That rather cheap seat in the gods where one sits with fellows like Anatole France and benignly looks down on the foibles, follies, and frenzies of so-called fellow-men, just annoys me. After all the world is not a stage - not to me; nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches - like a god with a twenty-lira ticket - and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. - That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and so superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. You need not complain that I don't subject the intensity of my vision - or whatever it is - to some vast and imposing rhythm - by which you mean, isolate it on a stage, so that you can look down on it like a god who has got a ticket to the show. I never will: and you will never have that satisfaction from me. Stick to Synge, Anatole France, Sophocles: they will never kick the footlights even. But whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else.

Dave was in Oaxaca, Mexico, writing The Plumed Serpent, a novel which resolutely refuses to deliver foibles, follies, or frenzies. It was the first Lawrence I read and I thought it was great, but then I was listening to quite a lot of Death In June at the time. I recalled it as being Lawrence's greatest, which was also claimed by its author; but we'll come back to that in a moment.

The Plumed Serpent is set in Mexico, in and around Mexico City in the twenties, with much of the detail drawn from Lawrence having stayed there and not really enjoyed it very much. It describes an uprising of the common man, a popular movement with martial overtones aiming to replace both church and state with the pre-Hispanic faith of Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and all of those guys; and because the aims of this movement come to full fruition near the end of the book - although blink and you'll miss it - it could probably be argued that The Plumed Serpent counts as alternate history if not actually science-fiction.

The first fifty or so pages are, I would argue, among Lawrence's greatest - and possibly also his most unpleasant - after which, we settle into three hundred or so pages of Kate Leslie having conversations about blood in a variety of different settings which may as well be the same place. Lawrence had developed a fairly complex philosophy utilising blood as a metaphor for either the human will or possibly a sort of Platonic ideal humanity from which we seem to have strayed - which is why the world is knackered - and The Plumed Serpent was his most intensely rendered expression of this philosophy to date, which I suspect may be why he regarded it as his greatest, being so close to the enterprise as to be unable to tell the difference between what he wanted it to do and what it actually did. In April, 1925 he wrote to Mollie Skinner:

I got my Quetzalcoatl novel done in Mexico: at a tremendous cost to myself. Feel I don't want ever to see it again. Loathe the thought of having to go over it and prune and correct, in typescript.

See! Even without raging malaria having struck him down as he finished the thing, I suspect he knew but had worked so hard on the fucking thing that he was never going to admit the existence of a gap between what he'd tried to write and what he'd actually written. What he'd actually written was, in part, a sort of plea for spiritual honesty, a suggestion that modern man might perhaps shut the fuck up and listen to the eternal truths of his blood; or as Cipriano puts it:

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

So here we have one-hundred-and seventy thousand words on the subject of trusting some instinct more primal than a bunch of men yapping on about nothing. I can forgive the endless frowning and the complete absence of humour, but the lack of self-awareness becomes overpowering.

That said, once we're past the astonishing opening chapters and have accustomed ourselves to the drone, flashes of observational brilliance occur with reasonable frequency - enough so to have kept me reading back in 1997; but very little of the vague philosophical model to which these observations refer connects with what happens in The Plumed Serpent in any meaningful way. Lawrence has essentially decorated his own philosophical aspirations with a few names and places for the sake of local colour, and without any reference to the composition or tradition of that local colour. His desire to hurl the Catholic establishment down the cathedral steps and bring in the lads with the feather headresses is more than a little ridiculous, being based on an assumption of Catholicism and indigenous Mexican belief being at odds with one another. The inconvenient reality which Lawrence either missed or chose to ignore is that, for the most part, Mexico accepted Catholicism on its own terms, and the further you venture from the city, the more difficult it is to identify where one ends and the other begins; so borrowing Mexico for the sake of revising the rise of the mystically inclined far right across Europe as a variation on his own ideas about our relation to the land and its people was always going to be a bit of a non-starter.

The Plumed Serpent has been accused of racism, which seems a little strong, but then it is condescending, and you should maybe ask Mexicans what they think rather than me. Lawrence certainly captures the raging distrust of anything different which white people sometimes experience when surrounded entirely by brown people, and sure - maybe this is the character of Kate Leslie rather than Lawrence himself, but I'm not convinced. The Plumed Serpent aims high, if nothing else, and aims high with approximately noble intentions, but what little it gets right is too easily eclipsed by one own goal after another whilst the manager jumps up and down on the sideline screaming about how this is actually his strategy, and it's working, and if you don't see that then you're an idiot.