(Photo by Leslie Mitchner)

By Stuart Mitchner

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

—William Blake

On Britannica’s website “This Day in History: September 11,” an image of the World Trade Center in flames sits beside a photograph of D.H. Lawrence, who was born on that date in 1885. Lawrence is not listed, however, among Wikipedia’s notable September 11 events between 1601 and 1900, such as the the theft of the Hope Diamond (1792), the Battle of Tampico (1829), the anti-Masonic Party convention (1830), or the capture of Gaki Sherocho, the last king of the Kaffa (1897).

You may wonder why the birth of a mere author rates a place on that list. In fact, Britannica has it right. The author of The Rainbow is an event unto himself. Diamonds, battles, conventions, and kings are trivia next to what he produced, not to mention what he was: the Lawrence experience. As his friend Cynthia Asquith once said, Lawrence could make washing dishes an adventure. Imagine standing side by side with Lorenzo, he doing the scrubbing with his sleeves rolled up, holding forth on the American soul while you do the drying. In the Lawrentian overflow, there’s a clarity to everything, the cups and saucers gleaming like porcelain hallucinations.

Seizing the Soul

I started planning for something on Lawrence and Whitman for Wednesday, September 11, while cleaning up after dinner on Wednesday, September 4. Because the first Doors album was playing on the kitchen CD player at the time and because, as is often the case, the key word in my Lawrentian musings was “soul,” the song of the defining moment was “Soul Kitchen,” which Jim Morrison wrote to celebrate a Venice Beach soul food restaurant where he’s said to have stayed, too often, past closing time, thus the lines “let me sleep all night, in your soul kitchen.”

“Soul” is repeated almost 50 times in the closing pages of Lawrence’s tough-love essay on Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Walt being another of those rare writers who qualifies as an event. Lawrence considers Whitman “the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of a man is something ‘superior’ and ‘above’ the flesh,” thus “the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds.”

Surely no one else, not even Whitman, could get away with seizing the soul by the “scruff of her neck” and telling it “Stay there! Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh, Soul, where you belong.”

If you think that Lawrence doesn’t get away with it, fine, you might as well toss the book out the window, or remove it from the shelves as the British did with the thousand copies of The Rainbow that were seized and burned after a November 1915 “obscenity trial.” Obviously they didn’t know you can’t burn rainbows, least of all D.H. Lawrence’s.

Witnessing a Rainbow

When I set out on this week’s adventure, I had no way of knowing that my wife and I would be witness to a once-in-a-lifetime event driving home from Lambertville last Saturday evening. What we saw sent me to the last page of Lawrence’s martyred novel, where, after being nauseated by “a dry, brittle corruption spreading over the face of the land,” Ursula Brangwen sees “a rainbow forming itself….Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous …, its arch the top of heaven…. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”

So ends the novel that was banned in Britain for a decade after its publication.

The Open Road

Lawrence was in Taos, New Mexico, when he finished Studies in Classic American Literature, which he’d begun in 1917 around the time of his voluntary exile from England. Before Taos, the open road took him to Taormina, Florence, and Rome, to Capri and Sardinia, to Ceylon and Australia. Writing about Whitman’s Open Road, Lawrence calls it the “great home of the Soul …. Not heaven, not paradise. … The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within.’ It is a wayfarer down the open road.” After saying you won’t find the soul by meditating or fasting, or by exploring “heaven after heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics,” Lawrence insists that the soul comes “into her own — only by taking the open road.”

Amid this talk of souls, I’m thinking about what happened on Saturday evening, September 7, on the open road of Route 518. We’d just departed Lambertville, ascending the last hill, the road had leveled out, and a lightly falling sunlit rain — you could almost count the drops — was tapping at the windshield when a perfect rainbow began forming in front of us. It began with what Lawrence called a “luminous” pedestal, so vivid, so striking, and seemingly so near, that it made driving potentially hazardous. Soon there was no room in my mind for anything but the wonder spanning the sky, all the more when we watched a second, much fainter rainbow forming around the main event. At Blawenburg we turned right and drove less than a mile to a small open park, where we could get a clear, uncluttered view, so that my wife could take photographs unimpeded by telephone lines. Back on 518, the rainbow remained complete, beyond and above and ahead of us all the way home.

Aftereffects

Meanwhile I’ve just taken down my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s magnum opus Gravity’s Rainbow, which aproaches its conclusion with language as resonant, if not as plot-pointed, as Lawrence’s in The Rainbow — “here’s a Brocken-specter, someone’s, something’s shadow projected from out here in the bright sun and darkening sky into regions of gold, of whitening, of growing still as underwater as Gravity dips away briefly.”

The next day while I was suffering the inevitable letdown, my son suggested that I listen to Rainbow’s song “Star Gazer” because “it might help with the column.” While the lyrics are appropriate (“Where is your star? Is it far, is it far, is it far?”), what really resonates in the context of a narrative that began with the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” is that Richie Blackmore’s group was named for the Rainbow Bar and Grill ten miles away in West Hollywood.

Finally, the rainbow marked the anniversary of the day my wife and I first met some six decades ago, September 7, around the same hour, 7 to 7:30, Pacific Coast time. The idea of Lawrence’s listed place in history reminded me of the fun Herman Melville has in the first chapter of Moby Dick, when Ishmael places his voyage in “the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.”
“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

If I could fit what happened last Saturday into the latest edition of the grand programme it might say:

Princeton Couple Pursue Perfect Rainbow.

About the Doors

The quote the Doors were named for is from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Quoted by Geoffrey Keynes, Blake referred to the light he’d enjoyed in his youth and “which has for exactly 20 years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.”

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Note: The Walt Whitman Initiative’s 21st live “Song of Myself” Marathon will take place on Sunday, September 15, from 3 to 6:30 p.m. EST., at the Granite Prospect in Brooklyn Bridge Park. For more information, visit waltwhitmaninitiative.org.