Oh, and I know that feeling; I’ve experienced it in New Orleans, in Algiers, even, at odd moments, in Sweden where the temperature only climbed above zero once in the six frozen weeks I spent there — but there is no chance of ever feeling it in Dullford, in England. .
One of Rilke’s last important poems was written in August 1926, a few months before his death. Here is part of it in Jeremy Reed’s free adaptation:
To know serenity the dove must fly
far from its dovecote, its trajectory
informs it, distance, fear, the racing sky
are only understood in the return.
The one that stayed at home, never tested
the boundaries of loss, remained secure,
only those who win back are ever free
to contemplate a newer, surer flight.
But when do you return? For a long time I thought that the contentment I experienced when I did finally settle would be the more intense — if contentment can become more intense without becoming something less contented; perhaps contentment is precisely a lack of intensity — for having been postponed so long. Only to discover that there was no contentment, that there was in fact no change at all, at best there was a temporary muffling of discontent which was soon making itself felt as powerfully as before.
Rilke’s poem also ignores a possibility that it cannot but suggest: that after a while one acquires a resistance to returning, that one’s capacity for contentment is diminished by the flight into adventure. Perhaps the further you fly from home the more stifling home becomes. One returns not to serenity but to a sensation of suffocation which can only be alleviated by further wrenching departures. Seen in this light, Lawrence became a prisoner of departures, his capacity for contentment diminished by constant travelling. Hence the increasingly desperate tone in which he ended up asking various friends where he might live.
Bear in mind also that although Rilke’s poem ends with the idea of return, its emotional trajectory inexorably suggests a realm of contentment which can be enjoyed only by those who abandon any idea of returning, who keep going, who make their home in flight. If the dove that ‘ventures outside’ returns to ‘know serenity’, what does the bird experience who keeps going? This leads to the imperative, beyond Rilke, suggested by that admonition of Neruda’s: ‘He who returns has never left.’ Lawrence had a premonition of this idea at the Gotthard Pass and at moments he surrendered to it as if to a destiny. ‘I feel I shall wander for the rest of my days. But I don’t care.’
There is a moment in Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time when, asked by his young son why the railway lines ‘grew together as they got further away’, the father ‘squinted into the distance where question and answer converged’. In a similar, light-hearted way Lawrence saw that there was a point where Rilke and Neruda converged: ‘Oh Schwiegermutter it must be so,’ he wrote from Australia, ‘it is my destiny, to wander. But the world is round, brings us again back to Baden.’
He is an extremely complex case, Lawrence. Traces of all the potentialities and ambiguities of Rilke’s poem can be found in his life. What is certain, though, is that his restlessness, his desire to move on stayed with him to the last. ‘This place no good’: these were the final words of what, in many editions, is printed as his last letter. He was referring to the sanatorium, where he died, the aptly-named ‘Ad Astra’. What better corrective to the concealed assumption within Rilke’s poem — to the commonly held belief — that there will at some point be some serenity, some contentment?
The essence of Lawrence’s life and writing is away from the notion of achieving some permanent state of unruffled serenity. Never content simply to record his transitory feelings and surges of emotion, Lawrence was always wanting to turn them into some permanent testimony, into a ‘philosophy’ — and no writer was temperamentally less suited to do so. Lawrence is at his best when he is recording his fleeting moods and impressions without trying to fit them into any kind of design, even the artistic one of a novel. The endless fascination of the letters lies in his bottomless capacity for change — from blazing anger to good humour in the space of a few hours or minutes — his capacity to recover from any setback, to always give life, to always give himself, one more chance.
Films and books urge us to think that there will come certain moments in our lives when, if we can make some grand, once-in-a-lifetime gesture of relinquishment, or of standing up for a certain principle — if we can throw in our job and head off, leave the safe life with a woman that we do not love and, as it were, come out — then we will be liberated, free. Moments — crises — like these are crucial to the cinema or theatre where psychological turmoil has to be externalised and compressed. Dramatically speaking what happens after moments such as these is unimportant even though the drama continues afterwards, with the consequences of these sudden lurches beyond the quotidian. Up until then the question is what you are freeing yourself from; the real question, however, as Nietzsche points out — and Lawrence repeats in his Nietzschean Study of Thomas Hardy — is free for what?
Unless, like Thelma and Louise, you plunge off the side of a canyon, there is no escaping the everyday. What Lawrence’s life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free. To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed. More than anything else, freedom requires tenaciousness. There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious. That is what Rilke, who dogs these pages like a shadow, meant when he wrote of falling back into a life we never wanted. Lawrence warned John Middleton Murry of the same thing: ‘Either you go on wheeling a wheelbarrow and lecturing at Cambridge and going softer and softer inside, or you make a hard fight with yourself, pull yourself up, harden yourself, throw your feelings down the drain and face the world as a fighter. — You won’t though.’ And now I won’t either.
‘Freedom is a gift inside one’s soul,’ Lawrence declared. ‘You can’t have it if it isn’t in you.’ A gift it may be but it is not there for the taking. To realise this capacity in yourself is a struggle. Of what, then, did Lawrence’s hard-won freedom consist?