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CHAPTER 1
BUNGALOW MODERNISM: D. H. LAWRENCE'S KANGAROO
And morality is that delicate, for ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness.
— D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel'
In Kangaroo (1923), protagonist Richard Lovatt Somers and his wife Harriett arrive in Sydney and take up temporary residence in Murdoch Street, in a bungalow playfully named Torestin or, as Somers soon learns, to-rest-in. The location is 'an old sort of suburb' of 'little squat bungalows with corrugated iron roofs, painted red':
Each little bungalow was set in its own hand-breadth of ground surrounded by a little wooden palisade fence. And there went the long street, like a child's drawing, the little square bungalows dot-dot-dot, close together and yet apart, like modern democracy, each one fenced around with a square rail fence. The street was wide, and strips of worn grass took the place of kerb stones. The stretch of macadam in the middle seemed as forsaken as a desert, as the hansom clock-clocked along it.
The street, 'forsaken as a desert', is filtered through anti-suburban discourse: the houses are ugly and rudimentary, and the regulated 'clock-clocked' monotony of Murdoch Street suggests the conformist rhythms of 'modern democracy'. Everything is uniformly 'close together yet apart', not a community but a collection of individual cells, identical and blindly self-absorbed. Somers deduces from the suburban streetscape all he needs to know about Australian democracy and social life. Its landscape of identikit bungalows forms a thin layer clinging to the fringe of the continent's natural environment, a place Somers apprehends as primordial, aboriginal, 'fern-age' Australia (339). The form of the bungalow – the vision of bungalows en masse – serves as the spatialized expression of Australian society and political culture. But what Somers and, by definition, Lawrence also apprehend in settler-colonial suburbia, filtered through the perspective of the sojourner, are both its divergence from and its mirroring of suburbanizing Britain. Lawrence's Kangaroo makes for an instructive and logical starting point for the study of Australian fictions of suburbia, signalling the inherently transnational provenance of both suburban modernity and the novel.
The placid conformism of Australian democracy at first gives rise to, but ultimately foils, the narrative's secret army of Diggers, a quasi-fascist paramilitary organization of returned servicemen led by Ben Cooley, the eponymous 'Kangaroo'. That Kangaroo's secret army plot stemmed from Lawrence's knowledge of a systematic conspiracy in Australia at the time is much disputed and yet to be satisfactorily proven. But his sense of Australian political discourse was at the very least prescient given the eruption of paramilitary activity by the New Guard in early 1930s Sydney. Lawrence's plot is on balance more likely to derive from his experiences in Italy when he travelled there with his wife Frieda in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and where he was appalled by Mussolini's 'Blackshirts'. For Bruce Steele, Richard Somers's dalliance with Cooley/ Kangaroo represents 'an important stage' in the rehearsal of 'Lawrence's argument with democracy, his response to both fascism and socialism and his search for a new lifeform'. Lawrence's grafting of a European plot onto Australian settings certainly disrupts the 'clock-clocked' monotony of Sydney's sprawling suburbs as these are envisaged in the novel's opening chapters. In Kangaroo, the narrative lets loose some strangely disjointed rhythms, an odd dynamic produced by the coupling of its suburban surface with continental depths. Its preoccupation with the primeval spirit of the pre-modern continent seems structurally connected to the quasi-fascist discourse in the novel's foreground. Yet, as David Game argues, Lawrence's quest for the 'spirit of place' – for the manifestation of an earth-based power particular to each continent – was not simply a reflection but an active reframing of contemporary imperial and eugenicist ideologies of primitivism and degeneration. Primeval continent and colonial degeneration represent Kangaroo's twin axes of nature and culture, depth and surface, yielding its experimental fusion of modernist primitivism and dystopian futurism.
The critical reception of a novel about Australia by D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), a brilliant English sojourner, has been ambivalent. Even so, Kangaroo has been of great consequence for many Australian writers, from Nettie Palmer to Christina Stead and Patrick White. Its lyrical capture of the environment, its observant, sensory detailing of Australian place and nature, is justly celebrated. But its mappings of built urban and suburban landscapes, and their significance for the novel, have tended on the whole to escape sustained notice, even though Somers's view of Australian nature and of its bungalow-filled environment shifts as the narrative progresses. On the one hand relaying vivid images of suburban Sydney amid the short-lived 1920s interwar housing boom, Lawrence's critique of the bungalow activates an anti-suburban rhetoric already circulating in England and the United States, a rhetoric aimed at the evils of industrialism, imperial invasion and colonial degeneration. On the other hand, as we will see, the built form of the bungalow –a housing style that boomed in England, America and Australia in the interwar years – becomes fundamentally implicated in Somers's 'thought adventure'.
Though the richness of Kangaroo's evocation of place is seen as its signal contribution to Australian literature, this same dimension constantly refracts, or points back to, northern hemisphere coordinates. Paul Giles, for example, reads Kangaroo from a transnational vantage point as a modernist exercise in defamiliarization. In this light, Lawrence's deployment of the antipodal perspective is 'designed [...] not to naturalize Australia but to denaturalize the northern world to which Somers has become accustomed'. Accordingly, Lawrence 'appropriates the geography of Australia for typically modernist purposes so as to defamiliarize what he calls "the horrible staleness of Europe"', representing Australia's 'primordial landscapes [...] as an objective correlative to the uncomfortable recesses of Somers' psyche', and projecting Australia 'in terms of a modernist depth model, whose surfaces constantly belie its hidden profundities'. This projected relation to place is clearly articulated by Somers himself: 'Poor Richard Lovatt wearied himself to death, struggling with the problem of himself, calling it Australia' (28). Kangaroo's modernist reflexivity stems in part from the way Somers's agonized consciousness contrasts with what Joseph Davis identifies as the third-person narrator's distinctively 'unconcerned and chatty' voice. Somers embodies an autobiographical self, albeit held at a partial, critical remove. In Stanley Sultan's useful phrase, Somers is a 'self-conscious authorial facsimile', an inventive copy or performance of self.
Kangaroo's antipodal modernism encodes a reflexive, subjective view of place that infuses southern with northern worlds. Australian locations mirror their English counterparts: Sydney doubles Birmingham, Manly doubles Margate. Yet it would be misleading to suggest, in consequence, that Kangaroo only exercises an antipodal relation to place, that it is only a projection or that its depictions of place are empty of local particularity. Jon Hegglund's 'metageographic modernism' offers a useful way to think about the mimetic effect of Kangaroo's topographical detail, and Hegglund's concept of 'ironic geography' highlights literary modernism's productive tension between its mimetic, realist representation of naturalized place and its more abstracted figuring of modernity's global, territorial space. For Hegglund, the ironic spatial dialectic produced by modernist fiction destabilizes the neatly nested hierarchy of the local within the national, and the national within the global. In Kangaroo the bi-location of landscapes engages and disrupts realism's 'mimetic contract' and the naturalized spatial hierarchies upon which realism depends. Its created world requires the specifics of topographic place even as its space-place dialectic yields dynamic force: 'space, landscape and location', as Hegglund writes, are not merely static settings in the background but 'become agents within the narrative economy of modernist fiction'. In Kangaroo, Somers is the vehicle of a place-gauging consciousness that involves movement between situated perspectives and more distant coordinates.
Kangaroo tends to be read by critics in terms either of its representation of space or of politics – or else as a reflection of Lawrence himself and his travel. The argument I will make here is that this novel involves all three dimensions, and that they interact formally and thematically to produce its complex of meanings. In the 1925 essay from which this chapter's epigraph is drawn, Lawrence suggests that morality – something he defines as a 'true relatedness' – should imbue the novel, and that this entails a careful, delicate balancing of relations between the observing self and the living, 'circumambient universe'. This correlates with Kangaroo's distinctly modernist harnessing of the observer engaged with the world's chaotic, living flux, and its integration of this process into the novel's meaning-making system. Kangaroo is about the process Somers goes through as he attunes himself to new surroundings. The narrative produces shifts in perspective that are both subtle and tectonic. The bungalow is the pivotal figure and base for these shifts: it is both an object of distant observation and an intimate locus for Somers's situated perspectivalism. The spreading suburban vista in Kangaroo occasions an anti-suburban rhetoric within which the bungalow is an estranging figure for the problems of modern democracy and society. And yet subsequently, as the narrative shifts from outside to inside, from far to near, the bungalow affords a space of retreat, of artistic freedom, sensuality and memory, forming an interior that hosts the writerly self and the creative workings of the unconscious or dreaming mind (238). The dialectic produced by distanced, alienated spectacle in tension with interior dwelling informs Lawrence's modernist poetics of the observing, experiencing self. The form of the bungalow in Kangaroo generates, in other words, perspectival contradictions that demand moral and aesthetic harmonizing. These contradictions are not just invented by Lawrence but integral to the bungalow's form, as this form is embedded in its history. The transnational traffic of modernist fiction and the bungalow alike is not entirely coincidental: both carry prefabricated forms that are readily adapted to local conditions in response to global modernity.
Prefabricated Forms: Bungalow Suburbia and the (Modernist) Novel
The bungalow is the centrepiece of Lawrence's portrait of interwar Sydney suburban sprawl. Like a contagion, the streets are filled with suburban bungalows that extend, barely interrupted, along the railway line to the coastal village of Mullumbimby, Lawrence's fictional version of Thirroul near Wollongong, the latter a coastal town (now city) south of Sydney in what is now known as the Illawarra region. Kangaroo traces the spreading contours of 1920s Sydney settlement, linking it to its adjoining region, via the movement of its characters through the developing urban transport grid that conditioned the pattern and spread of suburban subdivisions during the early twentieth century. Richard and Harriett Somers travel on ferries with Sydney's million inhabitants, 'slipping like fishes from one side of the harbor to the other' (11). They ride the tram from Manly to the northern beaches, noting the sandy, estuarine topography. They take the train (and sometimes motorcar, or even horse and cart) to various destinations in the city and along Sydney's coastline. Kangaroo catches this makeshift, emerging suburban landscape in its flux and chaos. The unpaved dirt roads, the houses assembled from kerosene tins, rubbish on the ground implying a lack of waste disposal services and ubiquitous red-roofed bungalows – these signs mark out the breadth and extent of the city.
The form of the bungalow evolved in the course of a complex itinerary, through the exchange of imported and local materials and the interaction of forms with new conditions. For Anthony D. King, the 'bungalow' began as an adapted local form, a hybrid that emerged from the Indo-European colonial contact zone to accommodate Europe's mercantile, governing classes. The earliest Indo-European bungalows afforded privacy and social distinction, sequestering colonial families from native servants. British army officers who had served in India were among the disseminators of early colonial bungalow-style dwellings in Australia. The Australian context suggests the difficulty, however, of specifying any singular point of origin for the bungalow's contemporary form. In Australia's Home (1952), Robin Boyd lists 'the bungalow' as one of the earliest types of dwelling in colonial Australia. Its rectangular floor plan shows a central passage with two or three rooms on either side, a 'high crowned' roof and verandah. Boyd's application of the word 'bungalow' to this structure seems anachronistic given that the word is not generally applied to Australian dwellings until 1876, after the first bungalows had arrived in England. Yet Boyd's recognition that the pre-1840s prototype was also a variation of the eighteenth-century English cottage complicates the form's origins. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Erika Esau shows, the Californian bungalow developed as a trans-Pacific phenomenon, its design, forms and manufacture disseminated via print media and architectural networks spanning US and Australian contexts.
As King shows, the initial repurposing of the Anglo-Indian bungalow for English consumption was a crucial historic development. The first English bungalows were built in 1869 on the Kentish coastline by an upper middle class with surplus capital. The spreading horizontal profile of the bungalow contrasted with the verticality of the multistoreyed English house. The English bungalow's function as 'purpose-built leisure or holiday dwelling' signalled a new tendency towards urbanization as a chief means of absorbing surplus capital. The bungalow opened the way to differentiated housing styles for an expanded range of social classes and budgets. The bungalow's initial hybridity, its capitalist repurposing and dynamically adaptive global proliferation suggest its properties align with those identified by Caroline Levine: portability, mutability, durability. The ambiguous possibilities yielded by the bungalow's form were not only spatial but – as King argues – embodied mental attitudes. The bungalow carried something of the colonial mindset and habit across the globe even as it adapted in its travels through India, England, North America, Europe and Asia. In Australia, the correlation of built form and colonial mindset recalls Philip Drew's discussion of the ubiquitous Australian veranda as half-way zone or buffered opening enabling adjustment of the colonizing culture to an unfamiliar, seemingly harsh and hostile environment. The enframing structure of the verandah, however, has also served in postcolonial discourse as a metaphor for the colonizer's power over colonial spaces, territories and subjects.
It is significant that the first English bungalows were oriented towards the sea in conformity with emerging aesthetic discourses of the sublime and with ideologies of hygiene. Sea air was considered salubrious, literally health-giving. The bungalow accommodated an increasing desire for individual privacy and pastoral retreat from the industrial city, unlike the public assembly encouraged by the older culture of the inland spa. Associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, post-1860s English bungalows were considered bohemian. Their horizontal spaces, informal design and private seaside orientation connoted freedom from formal constraints and even sexual license. This is exemplified in Lawrence's The Rainbow in which the nexus of the bungalow, modernity and bohemia becomes manifest in a scene of 'queer awareness' between Ursula and her class-mistress and swimming teacher Winifred Inger. Winifred invites Ursula to her bungalow on the coast where, in 'delicious privacy' and 'electric suspense', they bathe together in naked sensuality.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Brigid Rooney.
Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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