Kangaroo Read online

  DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE was born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885. He worked as a teacher before the publication of his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1911. His early writing was championed by Ford Madox Ford.

  Lawrence and Frieda Weekley eloped to Germany in 1912, returning to England and marrying in 1914. They lived in Cornwall under intense scrutiny for Lawrence’s opposition to the war and his wife’s German parentage.

  During and after the war Lawrence produced some of his most notable novels: Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920). He maintained a prodigious output of short stories, plays, poems, essays, criticism, travel writing and correspondence across his life, as well as translating half a dozen literary works; he was also a painter.

  Kangaroo (1923) was published the year after Lawrence and Frieda spent three months in Australia. Opinion is still divided about its free-form narrative and depiction of political insurrection. Nonetheless, Clive James observed: ‘The settings in Kangaroo have small trouble in being the most acutely observed and evocative writing about Australia that there has so far been.’

  Lawrence and Frieda left England permanently in 1919, visiting Italy, Sri Lanka, Mexico and the United States of America. By the time Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was published, Lawrence’s health was failing. He died in southern France in 1930.

  While the subsequent furore over Lady Chatterley’s Lover overshadowed his reputation for decades, D. H. Lawrence remains one of the most important figures in literary modernism.

  NICOLAS ROTHWELL is the award-winning author of Heaven and Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway, Journeys to the Interior and Belomor. His most recent book, Quicksilver, won the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. He was a senior writer for the Australian.

  ALSO BY D. H. LAWRENCE

  The White Peacock The Trespasser

  Sons and Lovers

  The Rainbow

  Women in Love

  The Lost Girl

  Aaron’s Rod

  The Plumed Serpent

  Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Into the Continent’s Heart by Nicolas Rothwell

  Kangaroo

  Chapter I: Torestin

  Chapter II: Neighbours

  Chapter III: Larboard Watch Ahoy!

  Chapter IV: Jack and Jaz

  Chapter V: COO - EE

  Chapter VI: Kangaroo

  Chapter VII: The Battle of Tongues

  Chapter VIII: Volcanic Evidence

  Chapter IX: Harriet and Lovat at Sea in Marriage

  Chapter X: Diggers

  Chapter XI: Willie Struthers and Kangaroo

  Chapter XII: The Nightmare

  Chapter XIII: ‘Revenge!’ Timotheus Cries

  Chapter XIV: Bits

  Chapter XV: Jack Slaps Back

  Chapter XVI: A Row in Town

  Chapter XVII: Kangaroo is Killed

  Chapter XVIII: A Dieu Australia

  Into the Continent’s Heart

  by Nicolas Rothwell

  D. H. LAWRENCE disembarked at Fremantle, together with his German-born wife, Frieda, on 4 May 1922, after a ten-day voyage across the Indian Ocean from Ceylon. He was just thirty-six, and his most enduring works were already behind him: he had only eight years left to live. The pair were nomads once more, in exile from England, without a home. A long period of torrential creativity, in which Lawrence was able to write several novels and a set of short stories as well as poetry and travel sketches, had just come to an end. Fierce controversy had greeted the publication of a book he set great store by, Women in Love. He had tried repeatedly to start work on a new novel, and stalled. He needed a retreat, a place to write in silence. Accordingly he had accepted an invitation to Taos, New Mexico, where the heiress Mabel Dodge Sterne had offered him a house on her estate. Australia was a way-stage for the Lawrences on their long round-the-world journey, nothing more: the destination of the first ship they could find leaving Colombo port.

  Things went smoothly on arrival. A woman who had befriended the couple on shipboard found them lodgings at a guesthouse high up in the Perth Hills. It was a quiet, lonely landscape. Lawrence was struck. He had never seen such country. His reactions are described in his most incantatory prose early in the first chapter of Kangaroo.

  The vast, uninhabited land frightened him. It seemed so hoary and lost, so unapproachable. The sky was pure, crystal pure and blue, of a lovely pale blue colour: the air was wonderful, new and unbreathed: and there were great distances. But the bush, the grey, charred bush. It scared him…It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting—the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he could not penetrate into its secret.

  He resolves to plunge in, and walk out alone by the light of the full moon. How still the landscape seemed. No life, not a single sign of life:

  Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude, dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his hair began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence.

  It must be the spirit of the place, he decides, a watching spirit that could have reached out ‘a long black arm and gripped him’—but it was waiting, ‘biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men’.

  This is one of the more extraordinary passages in Australian literature, and one that repays close attention. A mere week after his arrival, Lawrence had not only seen and felt the bush in all its potency, he had tuned himself to its inner wavelengths, he had caught something of its essence, and had also caught what lay beyond him: the timeless, Aboriginal element in the country—something very few mainstream Australians of a literary bent dared appreciate or confront in those days, nearly a century ago. There are several passages of this kind spread through Kangaroo—great resonant chords that punctuate and shape the narrative.

  What, though, is the nature of that narrative, a book of hundreds of pages thrown off at white heat in just over a month of writing while Lawrence was immured with Frieda in their little east-coast hideaway at Thirroul, south of Sydney? What is Kangaroo, exactly? A conventional novel, as it was badged on publication? An ill-disguised piece of memoir? A study of political ideas and charisma? An outsider’s investigation of a strange new country? All these things, in varying degrees, of course, and all run together—but above everything it is a work of grand, heroic cast, among the most marvellous and most infuriating of all Australian ‘classics’, a tale that peers deep into the continent’s heart.

  The plot is quickly summarised: indeed, it is often only lightly, glancingly sketched in, and routinely interrupted by long digressive musings, vast islands of free association, with grammar and syntax fraying away. Lawrence’s central character and fictive alter ego, Richard Lovat Somers, is a writer: a man of philosophical inclinations who has given up on old, decayed Europe, ravaged and destroyed as it is in the wake of the Great War, and seeks inspiration in a new country. Somers makes his way; he forms friendships. Soon he finds himself enmeshed in the debates and contentions of Australian politics. His neighbour introduces him to a new movement backed by war veterans disenchanted with the condition of Australia. This movement, viewed from today’s vantage point, appears to have distinctly fascistic accents—the mass of ordinary men r
equire strong leadership; a crisis and challenge from the ‘red’ left impends—but Lawrence was in fact writing before Mussolini’s March on Rome, and in prophetic mode. The movement is a cover for a fledgling secret army of adherents. Its leader is the charismatic Kangaroo of the title, Benjamin Cooley, a Sydney lawyer of Jewish background. Somers meets him, and feels the strength of Kangaroo’s spell. Their exchanges are the centre of the novel, and remain suggestive and disquieting to this day. Cooley’s doctrine is expounded to his true believers. Man ‘needs to be relieved from this terrible responsibility of governing himself’. Command and direction are vital to ensure the correct management of social progress.

  There is a sweet, seductive appeal in Kangaroo’s charismatic personality; Somers almost ‘loves’ him—but he senses a darkness in the air. He pulls back. The book’s longest chapter, ‘The Nightmare’, explains his misgivings. It is a detailed recollection of Lawrence’s ordeal in Cornwall during the war years, when he was a reviled pacifist with a wife from an enemy country, shunned, spied on and isolated, subject to the hostility of an inchoate, envenomed crowd. Lawrence gave serious thought to dropping the entire chapter from the completed novel, but kept it in the end—and, despite its interruption of the narrative, it provides the moral backbone of the work.

  Somers is drawn further into the circle of the movement. Tensions build in Sydney. At last they boil over, in a violent clash between Kangaroo’s militiamen and trade-union demonstrators. There is an assassination, and a final exchange between the writer and the would-be dictator. Somers then prepares to leave the lovely, mysterious country where he had hoped to find refuge and a tranquil home.

  For many years after the publication of Kangaroo this elaborately managed high-drama plot was regarded as pure fancy—until the prominent journalist and Lawrence enthusiast Robert Darroch outlined the striking similarities between the storyline and a sequence of upheavals in Sydney in the 1920s. There was, in fact, a secret rightist movement active in the city. Lawrence had informants for his narrative: Kangaroo is only partly fantastical. The Australian bush was one target for Lawrence’s intuitions, the clandestine energies pulsing beneath the surface of Australian society another.

  Ever since that first publication, in 1923, the lion’s share of critical appraisal of the book, and of Lawrence’s three-month sojourn in Australia, has focused on this political element in the text: what Lawrence may have known and what he made up, what he suspected and what he divined. There is, though, another avenue down which today’s reader can approach Kangaroo. For all the conventional guise of the story, it is a work written at the apogee of literary modernism. Nineteen twenty-two was the year of publication of both T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses—landmark texts by writers Lawrence kept in the forefront of his thoughts. He, too, had his modernist procedures. The shallow, scurrying storyline, the intermingling of genres, the intense confessional passages—all these reflect Lawrence’s willingness to experiment and his sense that old forms were played out.

  Kangaroo thus stakes out new terrain not just in geography but in authorial stance: Lawrence was well on the way to making himself into a transparent medium through which racing ideas and impressions passed onto the page. His vision and receptiveness to his surrounds, his constant theory-building, his capacity to see and cut through the dross of life, these were his special gifts: intensity of feeling, clarity of understanding, not gloomy fragmentations, not the idle wordplay of the encyclopaedist.

  But if the respective reputations of these three male masters of English-language modernism are weighed in the balance, it is clear that Lawrence’s star has fallen furthest. His standing has undergone a series of baffling mutations. His initial fame depended on his depictions of working-class life in Northern England, and his vivid cast of strong-willed heroines. Then, in 1960, thirty years after his death, the publication of the full, unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the subsequent obscenity trial recast Lawrence’s image: he became notorious anew; he was portrayed more and more as a quasi-pornographic champion of candour in sexual description. Film and television adaptations of his novels and stories followed apace. But in our time both the discovery of the working class and the cause of sexual liberation have been consigned to ancient history. If Lawrence is remembered and admired today, it is for his later, speculative writings on place and religion almost as much as for the novels that first made his name.

  Kangaroo fits into none of these categories. It has had a mixed afterlife in the years since its first appearance. British critics tend to see it as a minor work, an eccentric project, strange tidings from a far-off land. Australians, entrapped by the riddle of its political plotline, have been reluctant to grant the book the primacy it deserves. Yet even a casual reading makes plain the startling truth: Lawrence was the first modern writer of world stature to lay eyes on Australia and spend himself upon its mysteries.

  Legions of authors have placed the bush and outback at the centre of their stories since Lawrence’s day. None have come close to him in capturing its austere and solemn atmospherics. It was his own strangeness, his own outsider status that led him in; his refusal to accept limits to what man could write, too. Everyone who seeks to find words that match the Australian landscape is, in this regard, an inheritor of Lawrence. He made the bush a serious subject for literary endeavour. We can take the feelings he gave his hero in the following brief, lovely passage as his own: ‘Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos.’

  In the book’s final chapter this response to the country rises to a nostalgic crescendo. Lawrence summons up his sense of Europe, ancient Europe, with its great temples of culture wrecked and damaged, their weight seeming to press down upon him, while Australia, free and unburdening, shimmers in his mind like a pure and makeshift heaven: ‘the remote gum trees running their white nerves into the air, the random streets of flimsy bungalows, all loose from one another, and temporary-seeming’. This intense, idealising vision of the landscape, both natural and human, leads him to his startling final judgement of the country as ‘the land that as yet has made no great mistake, humanly’—a sentiment that many of his Australian readers now may pause over, but one that chiefly serves to highlight Lawrence’s sheer horror in the face of Europe’s Great War. His world had dissolved. He had fled: he needed a new one, or more precisely he needed always to be in search of a new one. And so he sailed on, over a sea that ‘seemed dark and cold and inhospitable’, leaving his last portrait of a forsaken, half-imagined paradise in the closing pages of Kangaroo—a paradise without man’s visible presence, a memory of the east-coast ranges above Thirroul, as they were then and always will be in his evocation:

  By the stream the mimosa was all gold, great gold bushes full of spring fire rising over your head, and the scent of the Australian spring, and the most ethereal of all golden bloom, the plumy, many-balled wattle, and the utter loneliness, the manlessness, the untouched blue sky overhead, the gaunt, lightless gum trees rearing a little way off, and sound of strange birds, vivid ones of strange, brilliant birds that flit round. Save for that, and for some weird frog-like sound, indescribable, the age-unbroken silence of the Australian bush.

  But it is wonderful, out of the sombreness of gum trees, that seem the same, hoary forever, and that are said to begin to wither from the centre the moment they are mature—out of the hollow bush of gum trees and silent heaths, all at once, in spring, the most delicate feathery yellow of plumes and plumes and plumes and trees and bushes of wattle, as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven to settle here, in the Australian bush.

  Words written by a stranger to the landscape, after a stay of barely three months, lush words, romantic words—yet they capture something of the inner magic of the bush; and they are an invitation, a very Lawrentian invitation to those who come after
him. They say to us: go further, look further, see further, bring back more in your words, more, always more.

  Kangaroo

  CHAPTER I

  TORESTIN

  A BUNCH of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie Street, in the dinner hour. It was winter, the end of May, but the sun was warm, and they lay there in shirtsleeves, talking. Some were eating food from paper packages. They were a mixed lot—taxi drivers, a group of builders who were putting a new inside into one of the big houses opposite, and then two men in blue overalls, some sort of mechanics. Squatting and lying on the grassy bank beside the broad tarred road where taxis and hansom cabs passed continually, they had that air of owning the city which belongs to a good Australian.

  Sometimes, from the distance behind them, came the faintest squeal of singing from out of the ‘fortified’ Conservatorium of Music. Perhaps it was one of these faintly wafted squeals that made a blue-overalled fellow look round, lifting his thick eyebrows vacantly. His eyes immediately rested on two figures approaching from the direction of the conservatorium, across the grass lawn. One was a mature, handsome, fresh-faced woman, who might have been Russian. Her companion was a smallish man, pale-faced, with a dark beard. Both were well-dressed, and quiet, with that quiet self-possession which is almost unnatural nowadays. They looked different from other people.

  A smile flitted over the face of the man in the overalls—or rather a grin. Seeing the strange, foreign-looking little man with the beard and the absent air of self-possession walking unheeding over the grass, the workman instinctively grinned. A comical-looking bloke! Perhaps a Bolshy.

  The foreign-looking little stranger turned his eyes and caught the workman grinning. Half-sheepishly, the mechanic had eased round to nudge his mate to look also at the comical-looking bloke. And the bloke caught them both. They wiped the grin off their faces. Because the little bloke looked at them quite straight, so observant, and so indifferent. He saw that the mechanic had a fine face, and pleasant eyes, and that the grin was hardly more than a city habit. The man in the blue overalls looked into the distance, recovering his dignity after the encounter.