In Ceylon: Chekhov & Lawrence

The government of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) fought a twenty-six-year civil war against the Tamil Tigers that lasted until 2006, and as I write in April 2019 three hundred people have just been killed there in terrorist explosions. But in 1890 when Anton Chekhov visited Ceylon, and in 1922 when D. H. Lawrence traveled there, that island seemed like a tropical paradise.

Both Chekhov (1860-1904) and Lawrence (1885-1930) came from poor backgrounds, had brutal fathers (one a freed serf, the other a coal miner) and oppressed mothers, and tense marriages with unfaithful German wives. Fierce social critics and restless travelers, struggling against near-fatal tubercular hemorrhages and desperately seeking a cure, they fled to foreign sanatoria. Chekhov died in Badenweiler in the Black Forest of Germany, Lawrence died in Vence in the Maritime Alps of France, both at the age of forty-four. With astonishing objectivity, Dr. Chekhov described his own hemorrhage, which must have frightened Lawrence when he read it in a translation by his friends in 1914: ‘There is something ominous in blood running from the mouth; it’s like the reflection of a fire.’

For eighty-one dangerous days, from late April to mid-July 1890, Chekhov had traveled from Moscow through Siberia to investigate medical conditions in the penal colony of Sakhalin, an island off the Far East coast of Russia. He journeyed for the first 1,300 miles by railroad, for the last 4,200 miles by horse-drawn cart and small boat through treacherous blizzards and floods. The road (Donald Rayfield writes) was ‘a rutted belt of mud, snow or dust. . . interrupted by ferry crossings over wide, dangerous rivers’. At one perilous point he was flung out of the cart and barely escaped a concussion and fracture.

To avoid repeating this unbearable Siberian land journey, Chekhov returned

to European Russia by ship. From mid-October to early December 1890, he sailed slowly and comfortably home on the Scottish-built 300-foot Russian steamer St. Petersburg, which carried 364 sailors, soldiers and prison guards released from duties in the Far East. The ship took him to Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Ceylon, through the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Suez Canal (recently opened in 1869). He steamed past Mount Sinai in Egypt, into the Mediterranean, to the Greek islands and through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. When he finally reached Odessa on the Black Sea, not far from his birthplace, he took a train to Moscow.

Chekhov didn’t remember much about Singapore which, for unknown reasons, almost made him burst into tears. On a stopover in India (Ernest Simmons notes) ‘he saw wild elephants and cobras and remarkable Indian conjurors “who literally perform miracles”’. The highlight of his voyage was Ceylon, a peaceful and prosperous British Crown Colony with golden Buddhist temples and rolling hills filled with tea plantations. ‘I have been in Hell’, Chekhov told a friend, ‘represented by Sakhalin, and in heaven, that is to say, on the island of Ceylon’ – a paradise on earth in a fairy-tale setting.

Chekhov stayed at the Grand Hotel in Colombo and for company bought a supposedly tame but actually quite wild mongoose. Rayfield notes that the ‘fifty-eight hours spent in Ceylon, the legendary Eden, revived Anton’s spirits. He took a train to Kandy in the mountains, and watched the Salvation Army’, which tried to convert the heathens through dance and music. Chekhov wrote there were ‘girls in Indian dresses and glasses, drum, harmonicas, guitars, a flag, a crowd of bare-arsed little boys. . . Virgins sing something wild, and the drum goes boom boom! And all that in the dark, on the shores of a lake’.

Chekhov recalled that he liked the scenery and sex in Kandy, a holy town that attracted many pilgrims, more than the bombastic entertainment: ‘I travelled more than seventy miles by train, and enjoyed my fill of palm groves and bronze-skinned women. When I have children of my own, I shall be able to boast to them: “Well, you little sons of bitches, once upon

a time I had intercourse with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and where do you think that was? In a coconut grove, by the light of the moon!”’ Though Chekhov never had children of his own, his boast of sleeping with a Tamil girl on that Buddhist-majority island was not a fantasy. He was attracted to exotic women and en route to Sakhalin he visited a brothel, slept with a talented Japanese prostitute and reported: ‘She is amazingly skilled at her job, so that you feel you are not having intercourse but taking part in a top level equitation class’.

A good sailor, Chekhov gave a lively account of the comparatively chaste voyage home from Ceylon: ‘I saw Mount Sinai, I was in Port Said, I saw the islands of the Greek Archipelago, from where we got olives, Santorini wine and long-nosed Greeks. . . . I saw Constantinople. I got tossed about in boats, battered by every kind of monsoon and north-easterly wind, but I was never seasick, and had as good an appetite when we were rolling and pitching about as when it was flat calm’.

The ever critical Lawrence disliked the good-humored Chekhov for both personal and literary reasons. He reacted against the adoration of Russian authors by his close friends Edward Garnett, S.S. Koteliansky, Katherine Mansfield, and the weak and muddled Middleton Murry. After they had translated Chekhov’s works into English and inflated his reputation, Lawrence exclaimed, ‘I’m really rather tired of Tchekov and Dostoevsky people: they’re so Murryish’. Joseph Conrad, a Pole who hated the Russian oppressors of his country, agreed with Lawrence about their blind infatuation and told Garnett: ‘You are so russianised my dear that you don’t know the truth when you see it –unless it smells of cabbage-soup when it at once secures your profoundest respect’.

Lawrence also thought Chekhov’s characters were sluggish and nearly paralysed by indecision, and called Chekhov himself a feeble weakling, ‘a second-rate writer and a Willy wet-leg’. He unfavorably compared Chekhov’s stories to Giovanni Verga’s Cavalleria Rusticana, which he had translated: ‘The Chekhovian after-influenza effect of inertia and will-lessness is wearing off, all over Europe. We realize we’ve had about

enough of being null. Chekhov represents the human being driven into an extremity of self-consciousness and faintly-wriggling inertia’.

For six weeks in 1922 Lawrence visited Earl and Achsah Brewster, his American expatriate friends, who became Buddhists, studied Pali scriptures and lived in Kandy. Reversing Chekhov’s course, Lawrence and Frieda sailed from Naples on the P&O liner Osterley on February 26, passed Sicily and Crete, went through the Suez Canal and entered the Red Sea. In the clear desert air he saw Mount Sinai, symbol of the cruel Old Testament God, which stood up ‘like a vengeful dagger that was dipped in blood many ages ago, so sharp and defined and old pink-red in colour’. He ate bountifully, felt well and (for once) never quarreled with Frieda. He translated Verga aboard ship and reached Colombo on March 13.

In 1969 I visited Kandy, a hill town in the centre of Ceylon about fifty miles northeast of Colombo, and one of the most beautiful places in Asia. The views are magnificent, the foliage luxuriant; the town has a large lake in the centre and is dominated by an exotic temple that is said to hold a tooth of the Buddha. Leonard Woolf, who served as a colonial official in Ceylon from 1904 to 1911 and visited Kandy fifteen years before Lawrence arrived, remarked that the town had 30,000 inhabitants and was full of white men. Like Chekhov, he was extremely enthusiastic about the atmosphere, the scenery and the early-morning climate:

Everything in Kandy sparkles, including the air; it is wonderfully soft and cool before the sun gets up high overhead. . . . In 1907 Kandy and its surroundings were entrancingly beautiful. It was halfway between the low country and the high mountains and enjoyed the best of every climate and every world. The great lake, which was the centre of the European part of town, lay in a hollow with the hills gently rising up all round it.

The Brewsters had leased an old bungalow with a broad veranda and many servants, about a mile and a half from the center of town. It was isolated in the midst of the jungle, stood on top of a high hill, and overlooked Kandy

Lake and the Great Elephant River. Lawrence led a peaceful life with the gentle Brewsters. He walked through the jungle, watched the animals, boated on the river, bought sapphires and visited the temples in this holy place of southern Buddhism. He translated Verga for four hours in the morning and in the afternoon read the work aloud to his friends.

The outstanding event of his visit was the Perahera ceremony. Buddha’s sacred tooth was taken out of the temple, placed on the back of an elephant and carried in a colorful religious procession before great crowds of people who had swarmed into Kandy for the festival. Lawrence sent his sister a breathless, excited account of the lavish spectacle:

The Perahera was wonderful: it was night, and flaming torches of coconut blazing, and the great elephants in their trappings, about a hundred, and the dancers with tomtoms and bagpipes, and half naked and jeweled, then the Kandyan chiefs in their costumes, and more dancers, and more elephants, and more chiefs, and more dancers, so wild and strange and perfectly fascinating, heaving along by the flames of torches in the hot, still, starry night. Afterwards fireworks over the lake, and thousands and thousands of natives, so that it looked like some queer dream when the fire flared up and showed their thousands of dark faces and white wraps packed on the banks.

Lawrence also expressed his excitement about the dazzling midnight procession under the bright tropical stars in his long, incantatory, satiric poem, ‘Elephant’, whose theme is the transformation and expression of power. The poem begins as he goes down to the river, past paddy fields where water buffalo are idling and half-naked men are threshing rice, and meets a working elephant carrying a heavy log. Elephants reappear that night in the Perahera and provide a strong contrast to the guest of honor, the wispy, diffident Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor). Lawrence responds to the hot dark blood of the energetic devil dancers. But as he dodges ‘under the hanging, hairy pigs’ tails / And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing haunches’, he feels dejected and frustrated by the pale nervous prince. The royal guest also disappoints the

Ceylonese, who expect and deserve an impressive show of power.

The extreme heat and steamy humidity of Ceylon, which would not have bothered a healthy man, had a terrible effect on Lawrence. He found it difficult to breathe in that debilitating climate, the antithesis of the dry Alpine air recommended for lung disease. He could scarcely drag himself around, but always refused to be pulled in a rickshaw. Achsah Brewster explained that ‘as the rainy season continued we felt as mildewed as our garments in the recesses of the rooms where there was waged a continual battle against mould. Lawrence sat disconsolately, his voice reduced to a minor key, reiterating that he felt his “heart’s blood oozing away, but literally ebbing out drop by drop.”’ He later told Earl that he hated most of his time in Ceylon and had never felt so sick in his entire life. He suffered from dysentery and, though he did not know it at the time, had also contracted malaria.

Lawrence shifted, quite dramatically and characteristically, from fascination with the spectacular beauty to disenchantment with the teeming masses of Ceylon. Only two weeks after the Perahera he was repelled by the ‘barbaric substratum of Buddhism’ as well as by the overpowering heat, the oleaginous people, the sickening smells, the claustrophobic jungle, the screeching of birds and animals, the nastiness of the monks and tawdriness of the temples. His mood of disgust was a striking contrast to his sense of well-being on the ship, and in two cathartic letters he exploded with anger about all the things he loathed:

Here the heat is terrific – and I hate the tropics. It is beautiful, in a lush, tangled, towsled, lousy sort of way. The natives too are quite good-looking, dark-skinned and erect. But something about it all just makes me sick. . . . My inside has never hurt me so much in all my 36 years as in these three weeks. – I’m going away. . . .

The East doesn’t get me at all. Its boneless suavity, and the thick, choky feel of the tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrific noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and

clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night: and the scents that make me feel sick, the perpetual nauseous overtone of cocoanut and cocoanut fibre and oil, the sort of tropical sweetness, which to me suggests an undertang of blood, hot blood, and thin sweat; the undertaste of blood and sweat in the nauseous tropical fruits; the nasty faces and yellow robes of the Buddhist monks, the little vulgar dens of temples: all this makes up Ceylon to me, and all this I cannot bear.

The ‘boneless suavity’ of the Ceylonese recalls Lawrence’s criticism of Chekhov’s spineless characters, the ‘undertaste of blood’ recalls his description of Mount Sinai.

As usual, he blamed his illness on the climate and told Earl, ‘My being requires a different physical and psychic environment: the white man is not for this region’. He was glad to have seen that corner of the East, where he’d once foolishly planned to settle, so he would have no more illusions about it. In 1928, when he was living in France, he recalled the menacing jungle of Ceylon and told Brigit Patmore: ‘The nights were black, oh black. The jungle was just outside the bungalow and it seemed to step closer and bend over us when the darkness came. Sounds boomed, some animal shot a cry at you’. In Ceylon, cut off for the first time in his life from Western culture, he felt physically ill and psychologically threatened.

The gentle Chekhov came from Siberia in the East, the irascible Lawrence came from Sicily in the West, and they were on their first trip to the Orient. Both traveled by sea halfway around the world: Chekhov from Sakhalin to Odessa and Moscow, Lawrence from Taormina and Naples to Australia, the South Seas, San Francisco and Taos, New Mexico. Chekhov, a healthy bachelor aged thirty, traveled alone, free from the constraints of Russian society. He behaved like an ordinary tourist for three days, had a delightful sexual adventure and did not have time to become disillusioned. After the horrors of the penal colony, he enjoyed the brief escape from his long sea voyage and was reluctant to leave the island, but had to sail on with his ship. Lawrence, aged thirty-six, accompanied by his wife and visiting

knowledgeable friends for six weeks, was looking for fictional material, became intensely aware of life in Ceylon and was savagely satirical about the Buddhist religion. In poor health, he was badly affected by the heat and humidity on that torrid island. After his initial enthusiasm quickly changed to extreme, almost comically hysterical revulsion, he was eager to escape and to search for a healthy climate that would cure his illness and save his life.