Going into their shells
DECEMBER 9 marks the centenary of the first publication, by Thomas Seltzer in America, of six magical, meandering tortoise poems which DH Lawrence composed when he met these creatures wandering freely in the garden of Rosalind Baynes’ ancient Villa Canovaia, San Gervasio, in Italy.
A slim volume. No dust jacket. but boards wrapped in glassine depicting an enigmatic print by Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige of a tortoise (or turtle?) suspended aloft, cord around its middle, head raised, legs dangling, looking over sea and sailing boats towards land – Mount Fuji vaguely visible in the distance. Lawrence found it a “handsome” book.
These Whitman-like cumulative verses attract much comment. Frances Wilson (Burning Man) observes they have “no precursor”. Only Lawrence could write this way about tortoise recognition – “Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins” – and their struggle with life: “What a huge vast inanimate it is that you must row against/what an incalculable inertia.” Who else would be so engrossed “with the martyrdom of tortoise sex, the female being so much larger than the male”. RE Pritchard (DHL: Body Of Darkness) says: “The female is literally the Magna Mater.” Wilson wickedly depicts Lawrence and Frieda “carting their homes around on their backs” like a “naked pair of tortoises”.
John Worthen (Life Of An Outsider) suggests, “for all their brilliant descriptiveness”, Lawrence’s Tortoises are less “studies of the natural world” than “comic revelations of human beings”. Lawrence’s rather farcical male is “Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself”.
Keith Sagar says Lawrence mocks himself good-humouredly as the belittled male wooing the matronly female. He is “dapper beside her, And ridiculously small... And how he feels it! The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos... Now look at him!”
In Women In Love Birkins says: “Nothing is so detestable as the maudlin attributing of human feelings and consciousness to animals.” Ursula adds: “They are really unknown to us. They are of another world. How stupid anthropomorphism is.”
Lawrence respected animals’ “otherness”. We now know they’re less “other”. We’ve much in common. Hence the demand to end a disrespectful lucrative cruel trade in sentient wild reptiles.
■■ 100 years ago, on November 18, 1921, Lawrence tells Robert Mountsier he intends travelling to Taos “through the Panama Canal to Los Angeles or San Francisco” despite the cost. He’s “put a long tail” on his novella The Fox.