Back to the Classics #15

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Set in the Americas. With Mexico so much in the news, I wanted to read about it and my favorite genre of nonfiction is travel narratives, especially from between the wars (see my review of Greene's The Lawless Roads). However, the attraction was mainly Lawrence, whom I've not read for a long time.

Mornings in Mexico – D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence is known as a novelist, but he is also the author of travel narratives such as Twilight in Italy and Other Essays and Sea and Sardinia. Travel writing was so hot between the wars all major writers like E.M. Foster and Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh went somewhere and churned one or two out. Plus, Lawrence and his wife Frieda were sick of Europe, needing freer air to breathe and having doors closed in their faces because of how they got together.

Lawrence chose rugged terrain such as the Umbria region in Italy, the states of Jalisco and Oaxaca in Mexico, and Arizona and New Mexico in the US. I think the idea was that these climates would be good or at least not bad for his health, which was never robust. Not to mention, it was cheap living in those places once they arrived and they had to watch the pounds and pence.

This collection has eight essays about the Mixtec, Koshare and Hopi Indians. The nature writing is brilliant. A nature lover from childhood and a poet, Lawrence observed plants and animals closely, perhaps assuming he wasn’t going to enjoy them for many years in this world. Furthermore, one can see why beats and hippies saw Lawrence as hero railing against the deadening tendencies of industrialization and mass consumption and mindless nationalism and urging us to keep it real, get in touch with our sensations and emotions, and build a more humane society.

However – there’s always a “however” with Lawrence. He liked to generalize too much. His generalizations about Mexican Indians – that they are all sad, stupid, and empty in mind – are based on, well, hours and hours of examination of the local culture. Where does one start with observations on the order of “Among the Indians it is not becoming to know anything, not even one's own name . . The Americans would call him to dumb-bell.” Plus, there’s the stuff about the Race Ghost that makes me hope that Lawrence wasn’t a racist in our sense but his Jungianesque notions – like the indigenous psyche and only the white man having a consciousness of time - would probably give food for what they mistake as thought to our racists today.

Middle-aged myself, and growing closer to the end than the beginning as each day passes, I wonder how close Lawrence felt to the end of his life. He wrote this narrative in 1923-25 and he was to die in 1930 at 44 years of age. As the other old coots would say, “Only 44! Just a kid.”  

Anthony Burgess’ biography of Lawrence is called Flame into Being. I wonder if Lawrence had lived longer and felt in better health, he would have gotten past that fire, burning, blaze metaphor to which he seemed so attached. Living every day on fire and air is one thing before 50, but after 50 the attractions of water and earth become more obvious. And soothing, to be honest. Alluring. Maybe if Lawrence had had more time and read in the Tao, he would have seen that other thinkers wrestled with the idea of God as a kind of living heat or seed from which things grow (a belief that Lawrence ascribed to Mexican Indians, without the benefit, I think, of interviewing them about it).