St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

D.H. Lawrence St. Mawr and The Man Who Died (1928)
I've been working my way through Dave's back catalogue in roughly chronological order, and this one comes as a massive relief after The Plumed Serpent and Moanings in Mexico - although I probably mean this pair given that it's a couple of novellas in one book. Of course, they do the same thing as most of his fiction did at this point, but the grimacing, clenching, and general xenophobia has reduced, and digestion is less problematic. Our man wasn't long for the world by the time he wrote these, and began coughing up tubercular blood before he'd finished St. Mawr - marking the beginning of a decline from which he never recovered.

St. Mawr is the story of a vaguely familiar and entirely self-contained woman of wealth who is more or less Mabel Dodge Luhan - Lawrence's landlady during his time at the artists colony in Taos, New Mexico - possibly with some Frieda in the mix too. St. Mawr is a stallion of the kind about which Sexton Ming sang in Muscle Horse.

High on a hill, I stand erect,
My flanks are sweaty.
I am Muscle Horse!
I am Muscle Horse!

Lawrence drew a lot of his fiction from his own life, and the central character is nearly always himself to a greater or lesser degree. I've seen it suggested that Dave is actually St. Mawr in this one, but it seems unlikely beyond the horse representing his ideas about blood consciousness - and doing a frankly better job than anyone in The Plumed Serpent. Beyond the woman based on Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Phoenix who is clearly intended to be her Native American husband, Tony, where St. Mawr draws from Lawrence's existence, it doesn't draw so much as to constitute autobiography.

Anyway, the tale is that our gal purchases the horse, they all move to America, and the character of Phoenix in particular allows the author to explain why he never liked Tony Lujan. The horse represents Lawrence's conception of the most fundamental spiritual truths of nature at its most primal. He's a sort of Platonic ideal of how the world looked before we all started drowning everything in ceremony and bullshit - something priapic to which we should aspire but can't because we're full of shit. He's a horse, and unlike Mr. Ed, is therefore unable to convey specific meaning beyond general truculence, and yet everyone in the novel is directed by his silent power, even when they sail to America to live on a ranch.

Most surprising to me was that none of the inhabitants of the novella are painted with quite the same scowl as Lawrence tended to deploy when basing characters on people he regarded as arseholes. This makes a pleasant change from the grimacing and muttering of The Plumed Serpent, presenting a breezier narrative, and certainly one which doesn't feel quite such an uphill struggle with so little reward for one's efforts. Even Phoenix appears relatively amiable up until the end, as marked by several pages of malicious sneering which feel as though they may have been written immediately in the wake of a coughing fit - malicious and actually sort of racist, although at least without a significant suggestion of the character assassination applying too far beyond its unfortunate target.

The Man Who Died, on the other hand, is essentially a missing adventure in the Jesus canon, retelling the resurrection of Himself after his having come back to life in a cave, followed by a number of encounters which probably weren't in the Bible. Firstly there's the incident with the rooster equivalent of Houdini which gave the story its original title, The Escaped Cock. Naturally, the publisher suggested this made it sound like a story about a penis, to which Lawrence expressed unconvincing astonishment followed by testy denial, but the title was changed anyway. Jesus ends up making sweet lurve with a priestess dedicated to the Goddess Isis, establishing the sacrificial link between Jesus and Osiris while also bringing us:

He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.

'I am risen!

No, it's not about erections as a matter of fact, Lawrence tersely explained to his publisher, although I don't think anyone bought it. As with St. Mawr, the story is approximately about the fundamentals which contemporary religion has been misinterpreting, getting wrong, or ignoring altogether - following a theme which has permeated almost all of Lawrence's writing; and here adding understandable ruminations on mortality and its attendant promise of everlasting loneliness.

Although far from Lawrence's greatest, it - or rather they - make up for the previous couple, indicating that he hadn't lost it after all, and possibly also that growing awareness of his own mortality restored a sense of perspective which had been lost to him at least since the end of the war.