‘Harmless Eden’: Revisiting D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo
In the short story ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ (1927), the writer sets out in the first paragraph ‘to make… a world of his own’ as the master of a small island. Lawrence, like Somers, fantasized about this kind of escape. But he also saw the perils. Soon — driven by his growing disenchantment with human society in any form — the man moves to an even smaller island. Before long he finds that even this island feels like ‘a suburb’ and he moves farther out to settle on a third, almost uninhabitable island; ‘a few acres of rock away in the north’. What started as a hopeful utopia ends badly, and he goes mad on his desolate rock, shouting: ‘The elements! The elements! You can’t win against the elements!’
Julian Hanna on D. H. Lawrence‘s Kangaroo.