D.H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A study of influence 9789042011953, 9042011955

Citation preview

TEXPS

Studies in comparative literature 42 Series Editors C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen

AND

D.H. LAWRENCE ITALIAN FUTURISM A StTupy

OF INFLUENCE

ANDREW

Amsterdam

- New 2003

York, NY

HARRISON

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. ISBN 90-420-1195-5 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003 Printed in The Netherlands

Cred

2226/4 Cn

lol contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations (Primary Sources) List of Illustrations Introduction

Vii xi xiii

Chapter One

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

Chapter Two

“Something Of What I Am After”: Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

31

Chapter Three The Emergence of a New Vision: From the “Burns Novel” Fragments to The Rainbow

71

Chapter Four Futurist Articulacy and the Narrative of Fate in Women in Love

126

Chapter Five “Futurist Long Before Futurism Found Paint”: The

Allusions to Italian Futurism in Studies in Classic American Literature Conclusion

Select Bibliography Index

176 212 215 229

Acknowledgements

I must first acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the British Academy. Without the aid of a postgraduate studentship award for PhD research this book would never have been written. Four people were instrumental in bringing the project to completion. Professor George Hyde read the early chapters with great care and provided valuable notes on my work. Professor Michael Bell read the later chapters, and I am indebted to him for his extremely helpful comments and suggestions. Dr Tim Marshall provided sound advice on my research, together with academic support, for which I am very grateful. And Professor John Worthen read my work and responded to it with characteristic enthusiasm, kindness and rigour. Shortcomings in my work remain, of course, my own. Other debts of gratitude are due. I must thank Dr Cedric Barfoot, my Series Editor at Rodopi, for the care he took during the process of copy-editing, and Marieke Schilling at Rodopi for her help with technical matters. The librarians at the University of East Anglia were very helpful and friendly throughout my time there. Dr Dorothy Johnston, of the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at the Hallward Library, University of Nottingham, kindly arranged for me to refer to

Lawrence

manuscripts.

In

addition,

staff

from

the

Cambridge

University Library and the British Library were helpful on the occasions when I had to consult their holdings. My debt to Dr Tatiani Rapatzikou is great — ] thank her for her help, support, and much more besides. And finally, nothing would have been possible without the love and support of my family. I therefore dedicate this book to my family, in memory of my grandmother, Edith Adams (1909-1998).

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

A revised and shortened version of my reading of The Rainbow was published in Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality, ed. Paul Poplawski (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001). Likewise, an early and shorter version of my reading of Women in Love appeared in The D. H. Lawrence Review, XXIX/2 (2000). I would like to thank the editors of The D. H. Lawrence Review and Greenwood Press for permission to reprint materials in this book. In several places, I quote from, and draw upon, findings which I first published in two notes in the journal Notes and Queries for December 1996 and June 1998. My thanks go to Oxford University Press for allowing me to re-use this material in the book. I am grateful to Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli for permission to quote from the letters and works of D. H. Lawrence.

vi

Abbreviations (Primary Sources)

To avoid overburdening the notes in this book, sources for quotations from works by D. H. Lawrence will be indicated in parentheses in the main body of the text. The parentheses will contain an abbreviation followed by a page number. Abbreviations for these primary sources are listed below and follow the conventions for abbreviations set out in the standard Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s works. Letters of Lawrence

(D

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

(1)

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, eds George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1981). (uD)

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, III, eds James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

(IV)

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, IV, eds James T. Boulton, Warren Roberts and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism Works of Lawrence

(AR)

Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara University Press, 1988).

(EmyE)

England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

(Fox)

The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl

(FWL)

The First ‘Women

Kalnins

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

in Love’, eds John Worthen and Lindeth

Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

(Hardy)

Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

(LAH)

Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

(LCL)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

(LG)

The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: University Press, 1981).

(P)

Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1967).

(Plays)

The Plays, eds Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen

(PO)

Cambridge

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Viil

Abbreviations

(Poems)

The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, eds Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1977).

(R)

The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes Cambridge University Press, 1989).

(RDP)

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University

(Cambridge:

Press, 1988).

(SCAL)

Studies in Classic American Penguin, 1977).

(SL)

Sons and Lovers, eds Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

(SM)

St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

(1)

The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

(71)

Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

(TSM)

The Symbolic Meaning, ed. Armin Amold (Arundel: Centaur Press, 1952).

(WL)

Women in Love, eds David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John

(WP)

Literature

(Harmondsworth:

Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson Cambridge University Press, 1983).

ix

(Cambridge:

List of Illustrations

Between pages 70 and 71 Figure 1 The two Futurist volumes Lawrence definitely consulted in summer 1914: J Poeti Futuristi (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1912) and Ardengo Soffici, Cubismo e Futurismo (Florence: Libreria Della Voce, 1914). Figure 2 The contents page of the “Futurist” number of Harold Monro’s journal Poetry and Drama for September 1913. Figure 3 Umberto Boccioni “Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio (Natura morta)”. 1912. Source:

Soffici.

Figure 4 Carlo Carra “Donna + bottiglia + casa (Espansione plastico nello spazio)”. 1913. Source: Soffici. Figure 5 Gino Severini “Treno in un paesaggio”. Source: Soffici. Figure 6 Carlo Carra “Forze centrifughe”. 1913. Source: Soffici. Figure 7 The first page of Arundel Del Re’s translation of a Marinetti manifesto in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama for September 1913.

Introduction

In a letter to Edward Garnett of 19 May 1913, D. H. Lawrence celebrated the arrival of an advance copy of Sons and Lovers: The copy of Sons and Lovers has just come — I am fearfully proud of it. I reckon it is quite a great book. I shall not write quite in that style any more. It’s the end of my youthful period. (I, 551) The months between the conception of Sons and Lovers in autumn 1910 and the final correction of proofs in spring 1913 were crucial in Lawrence’s development as a writer. By the autumn of 1910 he had had three sequences of poems published in the English Review and two stories published (one in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, the other in the English Review’), and he was waiting for Heinemann to publish The White Peacock; by spring 1913 two novels had been published (The White Peacock and The Trespasser) to a largely favourable reception, he had turned out a steady flow of published stories, poems, essays and reviews, he had written a number of plays, and he could

look forward to Duckworth’s publication of Sons and Lovers. He had

also, in the wake of Sons and Lovers, begun and then shelved a novel based on the life of Robert Burns, written a substantial section of a ‘The Nottinghamshire Guardian ran a short story competition for Christmas 1907, inviting contributions in three categories. Lawrence submitted one story in each category, submitting two of the stories under the names of female friends (Jessie Chambers and Louie Burrows). “A Prelude”

won in the category of best story of an enjoyable Christmas, and was published under Jessie Chambers’ name on 7 December 1907. The second

story, “Goose Fair’, a collaboration with Louie Burrows, was published in the English Review for February 1910.

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

new novel (later to be rewritten as The Lost Girl), and conceived the project which would produce his major novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love.

Lawrence’s bracketing of the work up to and including Sons and Lovers as that of his youthful period is helpful to the critic. The White Peacock and The Trespasser are consciously literary novels, apprenticeship pieces with which he swiftly grew dissatisfied. Sons and

Lovers

men

and

Lawrence

considered

a more

permanent

achievement,

“quite a great book”, which he thought would achieve a new kind of relation to its audience. Moving away from its more placatory predecessors, he feared that this novel might “bring the ceiling down on [his] head” (I, 512) because of its central message concerning male-female relations, “that only through a re-adjustment between women,

and a making

free

and

healthy

of the

sex,

will

[England] get out of her present atrophy” (I, 544). The intensely personal working out of this message, Lawrence’s shedding of sicknesses,’ may be said to mark the end of an apprenticeship to literature and the beginning of a phase in the writer’s career when he sought to develop his hard-won vision. It was

more

than

his

sicknesses,

then,

that

Lawrence

shed

on

completion of Sons and Lovers. He was cognizant of a whole new phase to follow in his subsequent writing, which would involve a radical subversion of his works to date, and a mental battle with the masters of his literary apprenticeship. In December 1912, in a letter to Emest Collings, he anticipated this upheaval: January sees my poems published [Love Poems and Others], February my novel Sons and Lovers [over-optimistic projected dates]. Of course I admire both works immensely. I am a great admirer of my own stuff while it’s new, but after a

2 See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 90, where Lawrence writes, with reference to Sons and Lovers, that “one sheds ones [sic] sicknesses in books —

repeats and presents again ones [sic] emotions, to be master of them”.

Xiv

Introduction while I’m not so gone on it — like the true maternal instinct,

that kicks off an offspring as soon as it can go on its own legs. It all sounds very egoistic, but you don’t tell me enough about yourself. It’s good of you to be only thirty. These damned old stagers want to train up a child in the way it should grow, whereas if it’s destined to have a snub nose, it’s

sheer waste of time to harass the poor brat into Romannosedness. They want me to have form: that means, they want me to have their pernicious ossiferous skin-and-grief form, and I won’t. (I, 491-92)

The struggle to move on from Sons and Lovers (a struggle reflected in the restless period when Lawrence was making final corrections to its proofs) is a struggle to envision a new form of fiction which will enable him to explore his developing metaphysics. The process of envisioning takes place in relation to other works, and particularly in relation to the works of his immediate predecessors. Searching for a new

idea

of

form,

Lawrence

seeks

to

define

for

himself

the

inadequacies of the conventional forms upon which they based their work, and which lay behind his own youthful works. In this period, formal innovation will rest upon an oppositional reading of these other works. Lawrence will now externalize the forms of writing that he had learnt to master in his youthful phase, and, in an act of revisionary egoism, assert the primacy of his own vision in developing new notions of form out of the old. This process recalls Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic revisionism in The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Here, Bloom names D. H. Lawrence among a select list of “great deniers of influence”.’ According to his model, an ingenuity at swerving away from literary predecessors (at proclaiming a discontinuity with previous works of literature) is essential if the individual is to retain the illusion of autonomy as author against the anxiety of the awareness of other 3

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1973), 56.

XV

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

works. Influence (root meaning: inflow‘) is experienced as a severe threat to a writer’s autonomy: a threat which promises to engulf the individual, and to reduce potential authors to readers. Bloom suggests that there are certain mechanisms of defence through which writers clear creative space for their work and preserve the illusion of autonomy. Writers intellectually revise their predecessors by wilfully misreading them. To read in this way is to appropriate the predecessor to oneself (to see the predecessor’s work as a prelude to one’s own); conversely, to see oneself in the predecessor is to suffer a loss of vocation as author, and to locate authority outside oneself.” The dynamics of appropriation are particularly evident in the deniers of influence, since their energies, directed at retaining a sense of autonomy in the face of powerful predecessors, make them ‘“‘enormous fields of the anxiety of influence”.® Bloom’s thesis received early commentary by Paul de Man, who reviewed The Anxiety of Influence for Comparative Literature in 1974.’ In his review, de Man emphasized that Bloom’s model of misreading appeared to confuse psychological and linguistic modes of substitution.

The

terms

Bloom

used

(ephebe,

precursor,

anxiety,

influence) all seemed relevant to a description of psychological conflict, but the critic expressed a desire to discard the whole range of external circumstantial details of this psychological struggle (biographical and otherwise) in order to generate an antithetical textual criticism: to consider how the poems of a poet and his precursor are separated by a misreading. Speculations concerning the conditions for a particular misreading are excluded in favour of a focus on the misreading itself. Bloom states that his sole interest is Ibid., 26. In a letter to Edward Garnett of 1 February 1913, Lawrence writes that “we have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their

authority” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1, 509).

° 7

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 56. See Paul de Man, “Review of The Anxiety of Influence by

Bloom”, Comparative Literature, 26 (1974), 269-75.

XVi

Harold

Introduction

with the “aboriginal poetic self,’ and he wants to define a poem as the anxiety of influence per se. De Man, taking Bloom at his word, perceives a deconstructive concern beneath the vocabulary of psychological conflict: We

can forget about the temporal

scheme

and

about the

pathos of the oedipal son; underneath, the book deals with the

difficulty or, rather, the impossibility of reading and, by inference, with the indeterminacy of literary meaning. If we are willing to set aside the trappings of psychology, Bloom’s essay has much to say on the encounter between latecomer and precursor as a displaced version of the paradigmatic encounter between reader and text.”

The potential paradox invoked by Bloom’s model may thus be articulated in the following way: whilst Bloom’s anxious drama takes place between texts, and not between poets, he is most interested in the works of those poets “whose sense of this internalized anxiety is

very strong indeed”.'°

The potential paradox that de Man’s review of The Anxiety of Influence uncovers is very pertinent to the application of Bloom’s model in the case of D. H. Lawrence’s works. To exclude reference to all external psychological factors which may contribute to our understanding of the way texts enter into a creative dialogue with each other seems to me to reduce the possibilities for this form of antithetical criticism. In the case of strong poets who have awareness of the internalized struggle for priority, psychological struggles may well be said to have partially shaped a text’s misreading of a specific precursor text. To admit that the critic can claim no complete knowledge of the entire seamless nexus of such external factors is not 8

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 11.

° Paul de Man, Comparative Literature, 26 (1974), 273. '° Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics Routledge, 1988), 21.

XVii

(London:

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

to condemn the project of speculation. It merely allows the critic to see more clearly how his own critical discourse may contribute to an overall understanding of how a text came to be written. In D. H. Lawrence’s case, I would argue that the struggle with his immediate predecessors was significantly shaped by his awareness of these key figures (particularly Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy) as influential personalities in their own right. That is to say, the nature of the intertextual substitutions is at a certain point indistinguishable from his ongoing argument against their influence as wealthy and powerful authors. This confluence of the psychological and the linguistic is made explicit in, for instance, Lawrence’s argument against Thomas Mann in an essay of May 1913, which rests upon a mistranslation of Mann’s German text.'! Criticism of Lawrence’s major war-time fiction seems to me to be enriched rather than limited by well-informed and documented speculation concerning the nature of certain crucial psychological factors in shaping his response to other literature and, through that, to his own work. The vast majority of Lawrence scholarship has been based on this critical assumption. At this time, however, the unprecedented access to Lawrence’s letters and works provided by the Cambridge Lawrence project establishes recent studies of influence as valuable contributions to a broader picture of the author’s development as a writer. These studies also act as correctives to a version of Lawrence which would alienate him from the major English and mainland European artistic movements of his time. They inevitably point up the extent of his readings in English and mainland European writings and help to contextualize his innovations in ways which challenge received versions of the writer. This book seeks, in a specific way, to contribute to such studies. It

looks at Lawrence’s departure from his earlier work and contextualizes his innovations in relation to Italian Futurism and to a broader picture of the avant-gardes. Lawrence’s engagement with the "See Andrew Harrison and Richard Hibbitt, “D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann”, Notes and Queries, 241 (December 1996), 443, and my discussion of

Lawrence’s review of Mann’s novella in Chapter One.

XVili

Introduction

Futurist manifestos was decisive in the innovation of his own style, and the movement away from the realism of his earlier fiction and that

of his literary models. Bloom’s thesis, coloured by de Man’s review of

it, enables us to study the manner of this engagement and so to trace the process of innovation in the period after Sons and Lovers.

Marinetti’s Futurism, with its limitless facility for assimilation, acted

as a focus of ideas for Lawrence, satisfying a youthful desire for the sloughing off of pessimism and dead tradition whilst allowing him indirect access to the assimilated artistic energies. It enabled him to engage in a creative way with tradition, whilst avoiding the anxieties associated with a direct reading of weighty literary forebears at this time. As I will argue, Lawrence’s direct engagement with Italian Futurism facilitated an indirect engagement with the important artistic movements upon which Marinetti drew, and most pertinently with continental Naturalism. Lawrence’s productive reading of Marinetti has received comparatively minimal critical coverage. Mary Freeman’s 1955 discussion of “Lawrence and Futurism” found that the Lawrence who wrote Women in Love shared in common with the Futurists an outlook in which he “tries to raise death and pain to an ecstasy”;'* she pointed to a shared tendency in Lawrence and the Futurists to “accept pain as pleasure,

ugliness as beauty, death as life”.'® In an essay of 1964, Jack Lindsay

wrote quite differently of Lawrence’s relation to the Italian Futurists: “What he drew from them was a new unified perspective enabling him to become fully aware of his own moral and artistic aims. Where they opposed mechanism to humanity — the laws of physics to the emotions expressed in a tear — he set himself to find the comprehensive vision that brought the laws of matter and the experience of the psyche into a

"2

Mary Freeman, D. H. Lawrence: A Basic Study of His Ideas (Gainesville:

University of Florida Press, 1955), 73.

3 [bid., 74.

xix

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

single focus.”'* Kim Herzinger took the same approach in 1982 and

argued that, in Women in Love, Lawrence’s “impulse to find the “unchangeable” — the “carbon” — which is the elemental force prior to character [...] was an impulse which derived, in great part, from his

assimilation of Futurism”.'* Paul Eggert’s 1982 “Identification of Lawrence’s Futurist Reading”’® left the way open for more informed

treatments of the subject, but since his “Lawrence and the Futurists:

The Breakthrough in his Art”'’ only a couple of notable articles have

been published on the subject. Giovanni Cianci’s essay of 1983, “D.

H. Lawrence and Futurism / Vorticism”,'® is a useful revisionary piece

but its focus is too local. It concentrates on Lawrence’s professed take on Futurism without studying the factors which lay behind this. Emile

Delavenay’s 1987 article, “Lawrence and the Futurists”,'® suffers from

similar limitations, and it concludes with a call for further work to be done in the field. Neither Marianna Torgovnick’s The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf,° Nancy 4

D.

Jack Lindsay, “The Impact of Modernism on Lawrence”, in Paintings of

H.

Lawrence,

ed.

Mervyn

Levy

(London:

Cory,

1964), 52. 'S Kim Herzinger, D. H. Lawrence in His Time:

Bucknell University Press, 1982), 140.

Adams

1908-1915

and

Mackay,

(Lewisburg:

'© Paul Eggert, “Identification of Lawrence’s Futurist Reading”, Notes and Queries, 227 (August 1982), 342-44. "Paul

Eggert, “Lawrence and the Futurists: The Breakthrough in his Art”,

Meridian, | (1982), 21-32.

18 Giovanni Cianci, “D. H. Lawrence and Futurism/Vorticism”, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, VIII/1 (1983), 41-53. 9 Emile Delavenay, “Lawrence and the Futurists”, in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, eds L. B. Gamache and I. S. MacNiven (London: Associated University Press, 1987), 140-62. 20 Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

This book proposes a model for reading the interaction of the linguistic and

the

visual

through

four

modes:

the

decorative,

the

biographical,

the

ideological, and the interpretive. Torgovnick’s comments on Lawrence and XX

Introduction

Kushigian’s Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the PreWar Novels of D. H. Lawrence,’' nor Jack Stewart’s The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression” fully meets this challenge. In addition to the comparatively minimal critical coverage of the topic, there has been widespread disagreement concerning the extent of the Futurist influence on Lawrence. In a book published in 1976, Jennifer Michaels-Tonks asserted that “it is unlikely that Lawrence

was

influenced by the Futurists

in any way”,”?

and yet Emile

Delavenay, a distinguished Lawrence scholar, could write in 1987 of “the extent and depth of the fascination that the young Italians of 1909-14

exercised

Futurism,

however,

over

Lawrence’s

active,

agile

mind,

and

the

considerable importance of Marinetti and his group in the process of self-discovery of the greatest English writer of this century’. Such critical disagreement is compounded by a confusion concerning the throughout

the

are

study,

limited

and,

to a small

in the

few

number

places

of references

where

she

spread

suggests

the

importance of Futurism to The Rainbow and Women in Love, she tends to take a broadly comparative approach. 21 Nancy Kushigian, Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the PreWar Novels of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). In the chapter entitled “Italian Futurism and Preparation for The Rainbow”, Kushigian explores Lawrence’s interest in the Futurists as it is revealed in the letters of summer 1914 and the “Study of Thomas Hardy”, but she does not move on to textual analysis of the novel, and her study does not extend to cover Women

in Love and the post-war writings.

22 Jack Stewart, The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). The

references in this book to Futurism in The Rainbow are suggestive but abbreviated and, whilst the chapter on “Futurism and Mechanism in Women in Love” raises a number of interesting points, its brevity likewise precludes a full treatment of their wider implications. 23 Jennifer Michaels-Tonks, D. H. Lawrence: The Polarity of North and

South — Germany and Italy in His Prose Works (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1976), 56. 4 Emile Delavenay, “Lawrence and the Futurists”, in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, 161.

xxl

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

exact books Lawrence referred to in summer 1914. He had access to Marinetti’s J Poeti Futuristi and to Ardengo Soffici’s Cubismo e

Futurismo,

but

it has

been

suggested

that

he

also

read

Umberto

Boccioni’s Pittura, Scultura Futuriste (Dinamismo Plastico).> Faced with these complications, I would argue that the emphasis Delavenay places on the agility of Lawrence’s mind is crucial to any consideration of his engagement with the movement. The few articles which treat the subject tend to look at specific examples of a confluence of outlook in Marinetti and Lawrence (or specific manifestos and Lawrence) and at Lawrence’s conscious use of the manifestos in his work. Suggesting a quite definite, historicallyspecific period of engagement with the manifestos, they fail to account for the significance of Futurism to Lawrence’s development as a writer and so retain too local a focus.”° My work seeks to redress

5

T Poeti Futuristi, con un proclama di F. T. Marinetti e uno studio sul

Verso libero di Paolo Buzzi (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, Ardengo Soffici, Cubismo e Futurismo, con 32 illustrazioni di

Boccioni,

Braque,

Carra,

Cézanne,

Picasso,

Russolo,

Severini,

1912); Balla,

Soffici

(Florence: Pubblicato Dalla Libreria Della Voce, 2a edizione, 1914); Umberto Boccioni, Pittura, Scultura Futuriste (Dinamismo Plastico) (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1914). Keith Alldritt identified the first two books in The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence (London: Edward

Arnold, 1971). letters (1981) “Identification in “Lawrence

The second volume of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s goes along with his findings, as does Paul Eggert in his of Lawrence’s Futurist Reading”. Emile Delavenay, however, and the Futurists”, suggests that Lawrence also consulted the

Boccioni volume. In addition, Lawrence may have read translation in Poetry and Drama, \/3 (September 1913).

the

Futurists

in

26 Letters made available in the Cambridge edition suggest the limitations even of the historical evidence for Lawrence’s conscious engagement with Futurism. In “Lawrence and the Futurists: The Breakthrough in his Art”, 22,

Paul Eggert asserted that Lawrence “first came across the Futurists when reading Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual in October 1913”. This assertion is questionable. Beside Lawrence’s possible reading of the Futurists in translation in Poetry and Drama

for September

1913, there is evidence

that he knew of the Futurists through other reading and through his circle of

XXil

Introduction

this deficiency, and also to put right certain documentary inaccuracies concerning Lawrence and Futurism in footnotes in the Cambridge letters.”’ I have chosen to scrutinize Lawrence’s prose fiction and prose writings from the period immediately following Sons and Lovers through to Studies in Classic American Literature since the early works of this period anticipate Lawrence’s interest in Italian Futurism, while subsequent works reveal the influence of the movement on Lawrence either implicitly or through direct allusion. In the first place, it will clarify matters if I relate my first four chapters to the argument of the only existing article to take a broad and speculative view concerning the significance of Lawrence’s Futurist reading to the development of his writing. This article is Paul Eggert’s “Lawrence and the Futurists: The Breakthrough in his Art”.

friends. In a letter of 3 April

1912, for instance, Lawrence writes to Edward

Garnett concerning a notice in the Daily News of Walter Sickert’s article, “The Futurist ‘Devil-among-the-Tailors’””, English Review, 11 (April 1912), 147-53.

He writes, “Isn’t the D.N.

enough

to break one’s heart nowadays.

Did you read its notice of the English Review, and its emphasis of Sickert’s dislike

of the nude?”

(The Letters

of D.

H.

Lawrence,

1, 380).

Sickert’s

mention of nudes is a minor comment in an important and celebratory review

of the recent Futurist exhibition in the Sackville Galleries, which contains a

fairly judicious appraisal of the Futurist manifestos and the artists behind

them. Lawrence subscribed to the English Review and his comment strongly

suggests some familiarity with the more general topic of Sickert’s article. Similarly, in a letter of 17 December

1913

Lawrence

asks Edward

Marsh,

“How did you look, futuristically?”, making cryptic reference to the “Picture

Ball” that Marsh attended around this time at the Albert Hall, dressed (under

Wyndham Lewis’ guidance) as a figure from a Futurist painting (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 121).

77 See Andrew Harrison, “D. H. Lawrence’s Futurist Reading: Two Errors in Footnotes from the Second Volume of the Cambridge Letters”, Notes and Queries, 243 (June 1998), 231-32. These errors have now been noted in the eighth and final volume of Lawrence’s letters published by Cambridge

University Press in 2000.

Xxiil

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

In it, Eggert argues that the Futurists suggested to Lawrence “a new way of organizing and propelling his art”: the way of “polarization”. According to his reading, the Futurists initiated a “daunting kind of clarity”? in Lawrence’s work, in which “the living” is set off against “the deadening” in his portrayal of characters. My own approach agrees with Eggert’s argument on a number of points. My first chapter shows how, as Eggert writes, “the Futurists made Lawrence fully conscious

of,

and

articulate

about,

something

that

his

own

artistic

development had made him ready to accept the truth of: the tendency of received artistic conventions to strait-jacket perception; the necessity to supercede them”.*' In the opening of my third chapter I demonstrate how the works prior to his summer 1914 reading of the Futurist manifestos already suggest a style in sympathy with the dynamic aesthetics of Imagism, Vorticism and Futurism; I go on to show that, when Lawrence incorporated a Futurist vocabulary into the final draft of The Rainbow, this resulted in a celebration of Ursula’s

breaking away from Anton Skrebensky’s deadening mode of life. Yet, after these significant points of agreement, my argument takes a different path. What interests me in Lawrence’s letters concerning Futurism is the way he appears to uncover an impersonality in Futurism that brings his tentative pronouncements into close relation to continental Naturalist theories of character. The presence of a Naturalist impersonality behind the Futurist one is a historical link, since Marinetti drew upon Emile Zola’s works for the formation of Italian Futurism. My second chapter traces the connections between Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism. My fourth chapter, on Women in Love, then seeks to account for the polarization of the

relationships of Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich by showing how the former attains a Futurist articulacy in his relationship with Ursula Brangwen, whilst the latter’s inarticulacy leaves him subject to a

8 2 39 3!

Paul Eggert, Meridian, 1 (1982), 21. Tbid., 22. Tbid., 27. [bid., 26. XXIV

Introduction

tragic Naturalist determinism. Through this polarization, I argue, Lawrence portrays Gerald as a wounded character, whose death reflects the protraction of war and the processes of sensational reduction outlined in “The Crown”.” One of the challenges of writing this book has been to balance the presentation of the argument in the first two chapters with the chronology of the readings in the third and fourth chapters. I have chosen to contextualize Lawrence’s reading of the Italian Futurists and to establish the connections between Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism before tracing the chronological progression of the prose works from the “Burns Novel” fragments to Women in Love. It is hoped that the material of the first two chapters will resonate with the critical explications of chapters three and four. In Chapter Five I consider the way Lawrence alludes to Futurism in his “Foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature” and in various versions of his essay on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick from the

same

critical

work.

Here,

Lawrence

externalizes

the

form

of

Women in Love by locating a disintegrative Naturalism in Edgar Allan Poe, and discovering a Futurist impulse in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and in Moby-Dick. In his subsequent fictional and non-fictional writings, therefore, Futurism itself comes to occupy a less central place. My book, then, traces two connected developments in Lawrence’s

relation to the Italian Futurist movement. It initially considers the use he makes of Italian Futurism in overcoming the anxiety associated with his immediate predecessors, and in indirectly tapping into the movement’s assimilated artistic energies. It goes on to show how the Futurist movement itself is incorporated thematically into Lawrence’s own

concerns,

demonstrating

how,

in the

fiction

after

Sons

and

Lovers, the author asserts the primacy of his own work and sets out to deny direct influence through the assimilation of his sources. 2 Ina letter of 1908, Lawrence wrote that Zola would “inevitably light on a wound” in his characters (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1, 92). See Chapter Two. XXV

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

I hope in this way to illustrate that Lawrence’s fruitful engagement with Marinetti was far more complex than most previous treatments of the topic have suggested. Dispensing with a simplistic model which attempts to discover Lawrence’s technical and thematic borrowings from Marinetti,’ this book seeks to locate Lawrence’s developing technical and thematic concerns in relation not only to his local readings in the Futurist manifestos but also to a credible model of his use of external sources through direct or implicit allusion. I wish the book to preserve a sense of Lawrence’s idiosyncrasies, which may be said to account for the vividness of his response to the manifestos and to other writings against which he measured his own progress and gained an understanding of his innovations.

3

.

wg

:

te

In “D. H. Lawrence and Futurism/Vorticism”, 43, Giovanni Cianci writes:

“Borrowing from Futurism, Lawrence props up his technical innovations.”

XXVi

Chapter One Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

My decision to put quotation marks around “Edwardian Novelists” in the title of this opening chapter emphasizes, of course, that this term will be used here as a quotation from Virginia Woolf: referring to Amold

Bennett,

H.

G. Wells,

and John

Galsworthy.

I wish

to re-

examine Woolf’s now canonical rejection of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy by placing her appropriation of them alongside the appropriations of D. H. Lawrence. I hope that this will help to define between Woolf and Lawrence a common form of engagement with English realism. This engagement will stress the importance of a confrontation with Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence to their quite distinct projects of innovation. The trio of writers was important for both Woolf and Lawrence in their movements away from tradition. For Woolf they embodied a materialistic, patriarchal outlook on life and fiction which she reacted against in order to create a sympathetic space for her own work, whereas for Lawrence they represented, though in differing degrees, an English version of a Flaubertian addiction to form and mastery in outlook that he reacted against in his work after the final draft of Sons and Lovers, as well as an outmoded style of realism connected with nineteenth-century materialism and utilitarianism. They provided important points of departure for Woolf and Lawrence precisely because their commercially-successful works appeared to pose but then evade crucial questions concerning the self’s relation to the modern social world. In reacting to these perceived evasions the younger writers opened up vital new outlooks on materialism, moving the emphasis from an anachronistic social pessimism to the

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

iconoclasm of the new art: Woolf’s interest in Impressionist materialism and Lawrence’s pursuit of a futuristic impersonality. Looking closely at the areas of contention I will suggest the importance of these revisionary gestures to the projects of both Woolf and Lawrence. Virginia Woolf and the “Edwardian novelists” Virginia Woolf's engagements with Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy are now so central to the modernist sense of innovation that the processes of her readings and rejections are liable to be overlooked. In accepting her conclusions we are likely to lose sight of their significance for her writing and for her general enterprise of renewal. In recent years essays by Samuel Hynes and Beth Rigel Daugherty have been influential in bringing the quarrel back into focus, and allowing us a fresh look behind the scenes of the debate over the nature of fiction and the responsibilities of the author. ' The critical exchange began with the publication in the Times Literary Supplement for April 1919 of Woolf’s essay entitled “Modern

Novels”,

excluding

the

later,

like

many

of

her

essays,

revised

and

published as “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader in 1925. It is the latter version with which we are most familiar and through which students of modernism inevitably read (or fail to read) Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy. In this essay Woolf considered their fictional approaches too conventional in their attention to material description, nuances

of modern

consciousness:

“Mr

Wells,

Mr

' The essays are collected in Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, ed. Eleanor McNees (Sussex: Helm Information, 1994), 52-81. Hynes’ essay is entitled “The Whole Contention Between Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf”. Daugherty’s piece is entitled “The Whole Contention Between Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf, Revisited”. Hynes attempts to redress the balance in Bennett’s favour; Daugherty replies to his argument by uncovering a defensive stance against Bennett’s patriarchal view of literature in Woolf's strident essays.

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

Bennett, Mr Galsworthy [...] have disappointed us.”? In place of this form of materialism, Woolf asserted the relevance of a writing whose form and style would draw upon an altogether more modern type of

materialism:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms;

and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if

a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work

upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.*

The formulation borrows heavily from Impressionist theory in painting, with its concentration on confronting the evanescent, shifting patterns of atoms out of which life is composed and its call for art to exploit a natural, luminous light instead of the artificial light of the studio. Particularly relevant figures in this respect are M. E. Chevreul and Jules Laforgue.* Woolf replaces a conventional social 2

>

Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), II, 104.

Tbid., 106.

4M. E. Chevreul (1786-1889) published De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs (translated as The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of

Colours)

in Paris in 1839.

This book

became

an important

text for the

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

materialism with an attention to what Lawrence, through the Italian Futurists, would term a “physiology of matter” (II, 182). Switching the emphasis to the fundamentally impersonal, physiological determinants of life liberated the young artists and freed them from their enslavement to art’s conventions and its ethical dimensions. This re-visioning of materialism was met by a dismissive slight of incomprehension from the older generation of writers. Arnold Bennett, singled out by Woolf as the worst materialist culprit, was fifty-two in 1919 and a successful and prolific writer whose books and reviews, popular and celebrated, dictated public taste and response.” It is hard to believe that he would have failed to register Woolf’s lead article in the Times Literary Supplement but his journals and letters reveal no evidence of his having read the piece. It took him four years to respond to Woolf’s charge and to refer to the younger generation of writers through a discussion of Jacob’s Room. His article in Cassell’s

Weekly,

28 March

1923, entitled “Is the Novel

Decaying?”, begrudgingly recognized the originality of much of the writing but attacked the novel for what Bennett saw as Woolf's weakness in creating characters. Bennett argued that credible fiction must include recognizable characters whom the reader can Impressionists. Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) stated the basis of Impressionist materialism in the 1883 essay “L’Impressionnisme”, published in Oeuvres Complétes de Jules Laforgue: Mélanges Posthumes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913), 133-45. Chevreul’s work provided a study of the effects which

could be achieved by the blending and contrasting of paints. Laforgue stated the origins of the Impressionist concern for light as a return to the material actions of the eye: “In essence, the eye can comprehend only luminous vibrations, just as the acoustic nerve knows only sound vibrations.” This forms part of an argument against the “optical training of the art schools” in favour of “seeing naturally and painting naively”. Note Laforgue’s invocation of luminosity and its echo in Woolf’s essay.

>

rich,

See Ezra Pound’s lampooning of Bennett as Mr Nixon, the powerful and but

chronically

Mauberley”.

unimaginative,

self-made

man

in

“Hugh

Selwyn

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

understand: “if the characters are real the novel will have a chance; if they are not, oblivion will be its portion.”° It is an opinion which places great stress on a novel’s marketing potential, and it makes grand claims for a conventional style which will monopolize the real. Bennett had clearly hit upon a point of contention in his concentration on characterization and a convention of the real. Woolf’s diary entry for 19 June shows her considering the truth behind his remarks: People,

like Arnold

Bennett,

say I can’t create, or didn’t in

Jacob’s Room, characters that survive. My answer is — but I leave that to the Nation: it’s only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now; the old postDostoevsky argument. I dare say it’s true, however, that I haven’t that “reality” gift. I insubstantize, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality — its cheapness.’ Woolf’s reply to Bennett’s essay is not long in coming, and again her engagement with the idea of innovation as a movement away from popular Edwardian fiction involves her in the writing and reworking of her defensive manifesto piece. The essay that we now know as “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” first appeared as a short first draft in Nation and Athenaeum for 1 December 1923, was reworked for delivery before the Cambridge Heretics at Girton College in May 1924, and published under the title “Character in Fiction” in the Criterion, July 1924. On 30 October 1924 it appeared in a separate Hogarth Press pamphlet entitled “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. In this essay, Woolf categorized

Bennett,

Wells

and

Galsworthy

as “Edwardian”,

and,

asserting that the human character changed “in or about December

7

Bennett quoted in Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, 69.

Woolf quoted in ibid., 55.

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

1910” (the year of the death of Edward VII, and of the first London Post-Impressionist Exhibition), she consigned these novelists to the literary history books. Bennett once more seemed to take the criticism with a good deal of equanimity, as well he might with reputation, success and consensus opinion on his side. He did not feel the need to reply for more than a year, in spite of an offer from T. S. Eliot for a response in the Criterion. The response finally came in the London Evening Standard as part of an address to young writers. In it he restated quite accurately the grounds of their debate, stating that each had accused the other of being unable to create characters. He claimed to have been unable to discern a direction or a moral content in Woolf's writings (and stated that he had read Jacob’s Room with difficulty and failed to finish Mrs Dalloway). Bennett went on to review three of Woolf's books between 1927 and 1930, preferring To the Lighthouse to her other works, and retained his own sense of the importance of creating believable characters in novels whose seriousness demanded a direction and moral basis. The sense of incomprehension on Bennett’s part is quite apparent in his inability to finish Woolf’s novel. Her new, Impressionist comprehension of atomic contingency placed her writing outside the criteria on which he based his reviews. Through her argument with Bennett’s materialism Woolf had arrived at a radically different kind of attention to matter: she had executed what Harold Bloom has termed a revisionary swerve in relation to Bennett’s work, seizing on the notion of matter but giving her treatment of it a quite different turn. She subverts Bennett’s closed, patriarchal, idealist category of the real by drawing attention to the elusive nature of matter and calling for a new kind of fiction whose form will be less external and more intrinsic to its modern subject matter.

Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, in 4 Woman’s Essays: Selected Essays, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), I, 70.

6

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

The insight bears a close resemblance to Lawrence’s concern for matter in the work of the Italian Futurists, and he similarly develops his movement away from a conventional fiction through an attention to the impersonality of matter via his readings of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy. The subversion of Bennett’s category of the real seems also to be the issue at stake in Lawrence’s famous letter concerning the form of The Rainbow: Tell Amold Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels. A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction, and what he calls faults, he being an old imitator, I call characteristics. (II, 479) Lawrence read key works by Bennett and Wells around the time of his break with what he took to be a confining, traditional realist aesthetic,

and these helped to give definition to an evolving vision of human fulfilment which lay outside their conventional fictional worlds, and which called for a new kind of novelistic form. Lawrence and Woolf may be classed as strong Bloomian readers as both take the materialism of the Edwardian trio and develop through their reading of it new forms of attention to matter which appear completely alien to the older writers’ works.”

° Interestingly, in her notes on reading Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers in April 1931, Woolf comments that the world of the novel is “in some ways fuller of life than one had thought real life could be, as if a painter had brought out the leaf or the tulip or the jar by pulling a green curtain behind it.” She considers Lawrence to have surpassed Bennett’s category of the real, and the analogy she uses to capture this insight is taken directly from the principles of contrast and harmony that were so influential for Impressionism. See Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), 79-82.

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Lawrence as reader The strength of Lawrence’s readings can be traced to his own sense of the limitations of art criticism. In a seminal essay entitled “Art and Morality”, Lawrence argued that “the business of art is to reveal the relation between

man

and

his circumambient

universe,

at the living

When

wrote about a text, he revealed the relation between

moment” (Hardy, 171): all the sincere critic can hope to do is reveal the relation between himself and the work of art at a point in time. Lawrence

himself and the text at the moment he read it. This formulation places considerable emphasis on the discovery of an attitude or outlook in a work of art. Once this outlook has been perceived in, or projected onto, the work in question, then the critic will have his subject and his

motivation to write. It is a belief which accounts for the vividness of

Lawrence’s critical engagements with writers and artists, and it is of particular importance for the student of modernism. His appropriations, erroneous extrapolations and wilful misreadings from the works of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries place him at the centre of the modernist enterprise of renewal: he is a creative reader, forever developing his informing metaphysics through his readings of other writers, finding confirmation or denial of his always-evolving vision in a various array of works. The channels of influence are dense and congested in Lawrence’s work: his reading provides a platform and structure for his developing thought, just as his discursive essays are subjected to critical exploration in his fiction. The reading gives content to his vision and helps to fashion it into discursive expression, and the fiction tests out this expression and dislodges the theory, moving the vision along. This is a dynamic process in Lawrence’s writing life which is particularly evident at the transitional phase of his career after the completion of Sons and Lovers.

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

Reading Lawrence reading Thomas Mann Between July and November 1912 Lawrence was writing the fourth and final version of his work-in-progress, turning “Paul Morel” into Sons and Lovers, which would be published by Duckworth in May 1913. Still involved in work on a novel which had been started in autumn 1910, Lawrence was aware that his preoccupations were changing quite rapidly and assuming a shape whose outline was still very uncertain. After the completion of Sons and Lovers came a period of restlessness. He began and then abandoned (during the course

of December

1912)

his novel

based

on

the

life of Robert

Burns, and wrote the twenty-page fragment “Elsa Culverwell” and two hundred pages of another long work (between December 1912 and March 1913), before putting that aside to start “a new, lighter novel” (I, 530), which would better please potential censors. This

latter novel, “The Sisters”, forerunner of The Rainbow and Women in

Love, would prove to be Lawrence’s major enterprise as a writer. The restlessness of this transitional phase of Lawrence’s career shows him experimenting with new ideas of form. The lightness of his new novel reflects a desire for experimentation and for release from the burdens of those conventional characteristics set out later by Woolf: plot, comedy, tragedy, love interest, and catastrophe, “all rules

of construction”.

In a letter dated 30 December

1913

and sent to Edward

Garnett,

the foreignness of the new project is stressed: “It is very different from Sons and Lovers: written in another language almost [....] I shan’t write in the same manner as Sons and Lovers again, | think: in that hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation” (II, 132). Just as Lawrence had previously moved on from the styles of The White Peacock (‘a florid prose poem”) and The Trespasser (“a decorated idyll running to seed in realism” [I, 184]), so he proceeds in a slightly later letter to Garnett, of 29 January 1914, to elaborate his complaint against the writing of Sons and Lovers:

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

I have no longer the joy in creating vivid scenes, that I had in Sons and Lovers. | don’t care much more about accumulating objects in the powerful light of emotion, and making a scene of them. I have to write differently. (II, 142) The lightness of a new approach is imagined to offset the convention-

bound emotion and power of the earlier work, whose central scenes still conform to an Edwardian scheme of construction, with the

deathbed episodes involving Paul and his mother providing the most obvious examples. These snippets of criticism will be vital indicators of Lawrence’s positioning as a reader of realist narrative. This chapter will mainly consider his reading of two texts as they enter into a critical dialogue with the formation of his developing rejection of Flaubertian realism: Armold Bennett’s Anna Of the Five Towns and H. G. Wells’ The New Machiavelli. His readings are shaped by his growing reaction against the conventional

realism of Sons and Lovers, but the reading itself

gives him a new sense of his divergence from that novel’s techniques and from a tradition of European writing. An example of a strong Lawrentian reading from this period will serve as a good test case before going on to consider his readings of Bennett and Wells. Lawrence read the Bennett and Wells texts in October 1912 and April 1913 respectively. In May 1913, during a stay in Germany, he read and reviewed Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig for publication in the third and final July 1913 number of The Blue Review,

edited by Katherine

Mansfield

and John Middleton

Murry,

under the title “German Books: Thomas Mann”. He read the novella in German: a fact which accounts for what we might term a wilful mistranslation that both informs and confirms his entire argument:

10

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

There are two major errors in the review of Mann’s novella: 1. Mann is described as being “over middle age”, and subsequently as “fifty-three”. In fact, in May 1913 he was only thirty-seven, just ten years older than Lawrence. 2. In the novella it is stated that Aschenbach fell ill in Vienna at the age of thirty-five. Lawrence mistranslates this as fifty-three when he quotes from the text. A comparison of the original with Lawrence’s translation reveals this error: “Als er um sein fiinfunddrei®igstes Jahr in Wien erkrankte” “I quote from Aschenbach, in Der Tod in Venedig. ‘When he fell, at the age of fifty-three’” Lawrence’s errors appear to equate Aschenbach’s age with that of Thomas Mann. This equation forms the central preoccupation of his essay. The review ends with the assertion that “Thomas Mann is old — and we are young.” Its rejection of Mann’s Flaubertian aesthetic is facilitated by the errors. 10

Furthermore, this essay gives content to Lawrence’s notion of the Flaubertian: delight in the hard physical labour of producing refined, shapely prose, together with a recoil from life’s potential shapelessness. Germany is now undergoing that craving for form in fiction, that passionate desire for the mastery of the medium of narrative, that will of the writer to be greater than and undisputed lord over the stuff he writes, which is figured to the world in Gustave Flaubert [....] Thomas Mann seems to me the last sick sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him 10 Andrew Harrison and Richard Hibbitt, “D. H. Lawrence Mann”, Notes and Queries, 241 (December 1996), 443.

11

and

Thomas

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

something finer than ever physical life revealed. Physical life is a disordered corruption, against which he can fight with only one weapon, his fine aesthetic sense, his feeling for

beauty, for perfection, for a certain fitness which soothes him,

and gives him an inner pleasure, however corrupt the stuff of life may be. There he is, after all these years, full of disgusts

and

loathing

of himself as Flaubert

was,

and

Germany

is

being voiced, or partly so, by him. And so, with real suicidal intention,

like

Flaubert’s,

he

sits,

a last too-sick

disciple,

reducing himself grain by grain to the statement of his own disgust, patiently, self-destructively, so that his statement at least may be perfect in a world of corruption. (P, 312) Once Mann has been identified as middle-aged his connection with nineteenth-century Symbolism and Decadence can be legitimized. Mann is made to look the puerile, sick villain. The perfection of his statement betokens an aesthetic retreat from life into self-denial and

the embracing of self-destruction.'' This criticism shows Lawrence

externalizing a major source of the fashionable pessimism which he had used as a crucial component in his earlier novels. '?

''

Lawrence’s

reading of Mann,

and the relationship between

the two

'2

A Decadent mentality may be said to shape the action of both The White

writers’ works, is explored in Michael Bell, “D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann: Unbewusste Briiderschaft”, Etudes Lawrenciennes, 10 (1994), 187-97. Peacock (1911) and

The Trespasser (1912), though this mentality is “used”

by the younger Lawrence in a wholly self-conscious manner. In The White Peacock, for instance, the characters are fascinated by Aubrey Beardsley’s tail-piece illustration to Wilde’s Salomé, which seems to focus many of the energies of potential self-destruction in the novel (it holds a particular fascination for the tragically self-destructive George Saxton). The technique of placing works of art in relation to characters, and using them to illuminate certain of their impulses or motivations, is common practice in the Lawrence of the war years. Conversely, in his essay, Lawrence suggests that Mann,

12

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

The error of translation which informs Lawrence’s argument confirms a sense of Lawrence’s reaction against an encasement of life in a set notion of fictional form as developing through a wilful subversion of his weighty contemporaries. This subversion involves, for Lawrence, a celebration of youthful energy in its embrace of life’s chaos, combined with the denigration of a pessimistic retreat from chaos,

with the more

transient notions

of artistic form

to which

gives rise. In this process the climate of pre-war Italy proved crucial.

it

“Bennett’s resignation”: reading Anna of the Five Towns Lawrence read Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns in one day in October 1912, during his first stay in Italy. He claimed that, excepting Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, it was the first English novel he had read in five months, having been busy revising “Paul Morel”. Being a novel whose story draws exclusively on an industrial Midlands he had just left behind, Lawrence’s response carries the full force of his growing sense of antagonism towards Midlands life. He perceives in Bennett’s story a fatalistic pessimism that the predominant atmosphere of Italy, which in this pre-war period was undergoing rapid industrialization, threw into sharp relief. Italy appeared to be energetically embracing the machine as a symbol of youthful rebellion against the old, the rationalistic and the nostalgic: a tendency which Lawrence would soon perceive in the works of the Italian Futurists. The change of culture relativizes the familiarity of Bennett’s fictional world, allowing Lawrence the mental and geographical distance to reflect on the tone of the tale. In a letter of 4 October 1912, he writes:

I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate Bennett’s resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery. But Anna of the Five Towns seems like an acceptance — so whilst being a highly self-conscious artist, voices a Decadent position which seamlessly reflects an attitude to life.

13

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism does all the modern

wash

again

quick,

stuff since Flaubert. I hate it. I want to

wash

off

grubbiness and despair. (I, 459)

England,

the

oldness

and

Lawrence’s response reads as if Bennett’s text was a latest statement of England’s industrial problem, published at a moment as close to Lawrence’s reading as Der Tod in Venedig. In fact, it had been published in 1902, ten years prior to Lawrence’s reading, and its plot structurally resembles that of Dickens’ Hard Times, published half a century earlier (it also draws heavily on Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet). Anna of the Five Towns, ten years after its publication, is made to stand for England at the moment Lawrence read the novel. What this response affords us, besides a glimpse of Lawrence’s habitual tendency to equate tone and outlook with author, is evidence of the remarkable consistency of Lawrence’s responses to fiction at this transitional time in his writing life. He is beginning to articulate a critique of the Flaubertian aesthetic and its associated pessimism, steadily giving this hostile term a definite content, leaving the road clear for his denunciation of Thomas Mann seven months later. There is also abundant evidence to suggest that the hopelessness and resignation witnessed in Bennett’s novel may have pointed Lawrence towards particular aspects of his own writing he was finding least satisfying and most confining. In locating Bennett’s evasions we may uncover the source of a subversion of his narrative form in Lawrence’s

later work,

and to do this we

should return to

Virginia Woolf’s commentaries on Bennett. In her attack on Bennett’s materialism, Woolf selectively quotes from Hilda Lessways (1911): an attack which could easily, and more successfully, have been illustrated through quotation of a central scene

from Anna

of the Five

Towns,

in which

the heroine,

Anna

Tellwright, is escorted home by her admirer and husband-to-be, Henry Mynors, under the unspoken constraints of good form and social manners. Notice the startling way the narrative disperses the power of the emotional moment by switching attention to a wealth of everyday 14

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

domestic objects, avoiding the near indecency of the climactic moment by affirming the omnipresence of Anna’s social world: When,

in a moment

far too short, they reached Tellwright’s

house, Mynors, obeying a mutual wish to which neither had given expression, followed Anna up the side entry, and so into the yard, where they lingered for a few seconds. Old Tellwright could be seen at the extremity of the long narrow garden — a garden which consisted chiefly of a grass-plot sown with clothes-props and a narrow bordering of flower beds without flowers. Agnes was invisible. The kitchen-door stood ajar, and as this was the sole means of ingress from the yard Anna, humming an air, pushed it open and entered, Mynors in her wake. They stood on the threshold, happy, hesitating,

confused,

and

looked

at

the

kitchen

as

at

something which they had not seen before. Anna’s kitchen was the only satisfactory apartment in the house. Its furniture included a dresser of the simple and dignified kind which is now assiduously collected by amateurs of old oak. It had four long narrow shelves holding plates and saucers; the cups were hung in a row on small brass hooks screwed into the fronts of

the shelves. Below the shelves were three drawers in a line,

with brass handles, and below the drawers was a large recess which held stone jars, a copper preserving-saucepan, and other receptacles. Seventy years of continuous polishing by a dynasty of priestesses of cleanliness had given to this dresser a rich ripe tone which the cleverest trade-trickster could not have imitated. In it was reflected the conscientious labour of generations. It had a soft and assuaged appearance, as though it had never been new and could never have been new. All its corners and edges had long lost the asperities of manufacture, and its smooth surfaces were marked by slight hollows similar

15

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

in spirit to those worn by the naked feet of pilgrims into the marble steps of a shrine." The material description goes on, but we already sense the tenor of the narrative evasion, and in doing so we recognize a facet of Bennett’s materialism which encases his characters in a narrow, socially-defined realm of selfhood. We experience Anna’s internal conflicts through a recognition of her split loyalties, but Anna herself seems almost transparent, barely possessing any agency at all. In this excerpt her miserly father hangs menacingly in the background; the narrowness of Anna’s domestic environment is everywhere stressed; her Christian duties assert themselves through the very cleanliness and orderliness of the kitchen furniture. The novel does not explore anything outside these incredible boundaries of selfhood. The only covert facet of Mynors’ relation to Anna revealed in the passage is one whose basis is purely social and economic: here, the material description is evidence of considerable domestic economy and the furniture pays testimony to the financial status of father and daughter. Two chapters on, another character, Mrs Sutton, visiting Anna’s house and parleying in the kitchen, comments, “I see you’ve got your kitchen like a new pin, Anna, if you’ll excuse me saying so. Henry was very enthusiastic about this kitchen the other night, at our

house.”'* The swathes of description have cast a very vivid light on

the conflicts imposed on Anna’s inner life from without. They have also revealed the sham basis of her relation to Henry Mynors: the almost-too-perfect suitor is revealed to be callous and mercenary. They have not, however, given us any sense of Anna’s inner life that might have formed a critique of the restrictive social world in which she is encased.

3

Arnold

Bennett,

1936), 105-106.

Anna

of the

Five

"4 Tbid., 132.

16

Towns

(Harmondsworth:

Penguin,

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

Anna’s almost complete lack of autonomy is exemplified in a startling sentence describing her inheritance of a sum of money from her father: “Practically, Anna could not believe that she was rich; and in fact she was not rich — she was merely a fixed point through which moneys that she was unable to arrest passed with the rapidity of trains.”'* Bennett’s narrator recognizes the lack of agency, but there is no ironic distancing from the values of the society which removes Anna’s autonomy, and certainly no self-conscious awareness of the sexual politics of this passage, with its central image of rape (Anna is

a fixed point through which male money passes). '°

The scene of Anna and Mynors arriving at the Tellwright house constitutes a memorable moment in the story, memorably treated by

the narrative,

and

furthermore

a moment

whose

intense,

excluded

undercurrents Lawrence could hardly have failed to register. Two lovers on a threshold, held back by the constraints of the social world: the content Lawrence would extract from all of Hardy’s major novels, in the “Study of Thomas Hardy”, begun in September 1914. In this work, “about Thomas Hardy, but which seems to be about anything else in the world but that” (II, 220), Lawrence read against the grain of Hardy’s pessimistic metaphysics, uncovering the impersonal energy of the asocial selves kicking against the misery of social restraint and censorship. It is the discursive statement of a cumulative dissatisfaction with the fiction that had shaped his vision of his new project, “The Sisters”. The “oldness and grubbiness and despair” of Anna Tellwright’s submission before an overbearing social world; Thomas Mann’s shrinking from the chaotic impersonal forces of life; Thomas Hardy’s inability to follow through the radical unpredictability of his characters’ desires, and his failure to envision a space for them beyond the repressive social world. All three authors

'S [bid., 110. ‘©

The rape imagery in this passage is commented upon by G. M. Hyde in D.

H. Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1990), 80.

17

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

contribute in a complex and tantalizing way to the development of a metaphysical vision and its accompanying fictional technique. “Awfully interesting”: reading The New Machiavelli Lawrence’s engagement with H. G. Wells is a fascinating one: in many ways more telling than his engagement with either Bennett or Galsworthy.'’ It began in earnest with his reading of Tono-Bungay in its serialization in Ford Madox Hueffer’s English Review, 1908-1909. It was a novel he admired enormously, possessing the kind of acerbic social satire whose absence he lamented in Galsworthy’s fiction. In November 1909 Lawrence was taken by Hueffer to visit Wells at his house in Hampstead. The description of him is revealing: “‘a funny little chap: his conversation is a continual squirting of thin little jets of weak acid: amusing, but not expansive. There is no glow about him” (I, 144). At this time he would have been the talk of London, having published the controversial Ann Veronica one month before: a novel Lawrence read in January 1910 and thought “not very good” (I, 154). The description seems a curious distillation of contemporary views of Wells the novelist. Debate questioned Wells’ right to the title of novelist: his non-science fiction works seemed strangely piecemeal, full of biographical detail of the most blatant kind, interspersed with loose first-person interjections, possessed of a curious spasmodic energy which did not always hit its mark. Furthermore, Wells considered this looseness of composition a virtue in the novel, arguing for a discursive fiction which would present and discuss human conduct, whilst criticizing social dogmas and ideas: formative influences on his writing were Dickens, Sterne, Swift and Balzac. One

of the great debates of twentieth-century letters took place between

Wells

and

Henry

James,

and,

as with

Bennett

in the quarrel

with

'7 & broader account of the relation between Lawrence and Wells can be found in L. R. Leavis, “Wells, Lawrence, and Literary Influence”, English

Studies, LXX1IX/3 (May 1998), 224-39.

18

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

Virginia Woolf, Wells’ reputation has suffered as a result.'* In the course of a long correspondence dating from 1898 the views of the two men became steadily polarized: Wells was accused of telling instead of showing in his fiction, and James’ exacting attention to composition and form aroused Wells’ hostility. This quarrel came to a head in James’ reading of a novel whose importance for Lawrence’s pre-war development few commentators have closely considered. This novel is Wells’

The New Machiavelli, which Lawrence read

in April 1913, six months after he read Anna of the Five Towns and a

month before the reading of Der Tod in Venedig. As J. R. Hammond,

considering the Wells/James debate, writes in H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel, “with the publication of The New Machiavelli in January 1911 a new note becomes evident in their correspondence. For the first time James abandons his previously adopted tone of judicious appraisal and launches into a candid critique of Wells’ methods.” Lawrence asked his friend Arthur McLeod to forward a few books in early March 1913: The New Machiavelli was among the suggestions. It is very likely that Lawrence knew about this book’s problematic publication history. Serialized in the English Review between May and November 1910 (under the auspices of its new editor, Austin

Harrison), the manuscript was refused by Macmillan

and subsequently rejected by both Heinemann and Chapman and Hall, ostensibly on grounds of its libellous political content, but also, one imagines, due to its frank treatment of sexual desire. It was finally published in a single volume by John Lane in January 1911. Its serialization was complete the month after the publication by Edward '8 For a full account of this debate see Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel, eds Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (London: Rupert Hart-Davis,

1958).

'9

J. R. Hammond, H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel (London: Macmillan,

1988), 27.

19

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism Arnold of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, with which Wells’ novel has much in common.”°

20 Forster’s Howards End appeared in October 1910; Beatrice Webb’s diary, excerpted in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patrick Parrinder

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 181-82, reports that serialization

of The New Machiavelli was complete in the English Review by 5 November 1910. The two novels were commercial

successes. Ten thousand copies of

Howards End had been printed between its publication in October and the end of the year; seventeen thousand copies of The New Machiavelli had been

sold between its publication as a single volume in January 1911 and the end of April. The two novels both consider the Condition-of-England question from similar angles,

and they have

shared

frames

of reference, though, of course, their

forms are considerably different. In particular, three similarities of outlook seem worthy of comment: (a) The two novels place great emphasis on the value of seeing life steadily

and seeing it whole. Forster’s novel sees this objective as being prevented by

the hypocrisies of business and cultural partiality, whilst Wells’ novel locates the difficulty in the repression of sexual drives in public life.

(b) The novels seek to address a particularly English “muddle” (a word of particular resonance in both novels, and one taken from perhaps the most influential Condition-of-England novel, Dickens’ Hard Times). They both portray England as standing at an impasse, though both place great stress on possibilities for the future. (c) In seeking an answer to the impasse the two novels revert to the importance of children and parenting. They distrust urban England (note their separate depictions of London and Bromstead) and equate the city with a transience of vision. In Howards End it is Ruth Wilcox, the vision of female rootedness and continuity, who considers mothers to be the best legislators; in

The New Machiavelli, Richard Remington changes political parties in developing his policy of the “Endowment of Motherhood”: “the Family exists for the good of the children.” Both novels conclude with their chief protagonists facing the future with children in protected, remote rural enclaves. Note the significance here of C. F. G. Masterman’s important work The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), with its speculation that

20

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

Lawrence received McLeod’s books in San Gaudenzio in April 1913 and carried them with him to Germany. There he read Wells’ novel, much more slowly than he had done Anna of the Five Towns. His response is consistent with the earlier reading, though. On 23 April 1913 he writes: I am wading through New Machiavelli. It depresses me. | sometimes find it too long. But it is awfully interesting. I like

Wells, he is so warm, such a passionate declaimer or reasoner

or whatever you to be looking at street stares at a and esteem him, (I, 543)

like. But ugh — he hurts me. He always seems life as a cold and hungry little boy in the shop where there is hot pork. I do like him and wish I knew half as much about things.

He goes on to say how hard he found it to leave Italy behind, how his new project (“The Sisters”) seemed to be developing beyond his control and understanding, and how he thought the message of Sons and Lovers should now be taken seriously by his readership: People should begin to take me seriously now. And I do so break my heart over England, when I read the New Machiavelli. And I am so sure that only through a readjustment between men and women, and a making free and healthy of the sex, will she get out of her present atrophy. Oh Lord, and if I don’t “subdue my art to a metaphysic”, as somebody very beautifully said of Hardy, I do write because I want folk — English folk — to alter, and have more sense. (I, 544)

“the unquestioning love of the Earth and the children of it is perhaps the most hopeful element for future progress” (256).

21

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

The startling image of Wells as the hungry little boy at the shop front recalls one that Lawrence had taken from George Gissing and used in an earlier letter to Louie Burrows of 15 December 1910: “I remind myself of Gissing staring with fierce eyeballs in a pie-shop — and going away more famished” (I, 203). Here, the allusion is to Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.’' Yet, when applied to Wells, Lawrence’s image takes on broader resonances. The connection it makes between Wells and the mercantile world calls to mind Woolf's description of Wells in a diary entry (“had one seen him behind a

counter he would have seemed the very type of busy little grocer”””)

and her sketch of Amold Bennett in an entry for January 1931, the month of his death (“much at the mercy of life for all his competence; a shopkeeper’s view of literature””). It also evokes Yeats’ later description of Keats in “Ego Dominus Tuus”: “His art is happy, but who knows his mind? / I see a schoolboy when I think of him, / With

face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.” These resemblances are significant. Yeats saw Keats’ concern for beauty as a compensation for the circumstances of his birth, just as Wells’ satirical “jets of weak acid” may be attributed to an outsider’s sensibility, nurtured in the London suburbs. Also, Wells had stagemanaged his career to achieve fame and riches, and could turn out books at a prodigious rate. His works often portray minds under pressure from a frenetic urge to recount a million impressions in the instant, straining at the leash, like a hungry child before the window of a food shop.” Yet, Lawrence’s letter, with the connection it makes

*! See George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Sussex: Harvester, 1982), 28. 22 4 Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne

Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), 405.

33

Woolf quoted in Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, 61.

5

Lawrence employs a strikingly similar image in relation to Wells in a later

4 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1991), 161.

letter of 15 September 1913, and here, too, he characterizes Wells’ vision as

dominated by longing, but this longing he explicitly connects to melancholy

22

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

between the content of The New Machiavelli, the need of the English people to receive the message of Sons and Lovers, and Hardy’s intrusive metaphysics, surely portends some deeper meaning, and this we may find in the text of Wells’ story. The New Machiavelli purports to be written by a forty-two yearold former English politician who has eloped to Italy with his lover (by whom he has a child), leaving behind his wife and a glittering political career. The story recounts each stage of Richard Remington’s life, with its author struggling to make sense of developments in his thinking and his inner life — the “hinterland” — which led to his present ruination. We learn about his childhood obsession with building, his constructive vision of a newly-efficient

civilization, and his meeting with Margaret, an intellectual soul-mate whom he marries and with whom he plans a partnership to rival that of the Fabian Webbs (thinly disguised in the novel as the Baileys). Yet, alongside these developments we glimpse the sporadic emergence of repressed sexual desires, causing the teenage Remington to prowl the streets at night, smoking American cigarettes, to engage in a romantic tryst with a married woman during a walking trip of Europe, and to cavort with a series of prostitutes. This is what

the narrator terms the “sex motif?”° in his life, and it is shown to be in conflict with “the nets of civilization”,”” and with a form of life

premised upon self-preservation. Its emergence is connected in Remington’s life with an event which shocked him by illustrating the potential violence which underlies social relations: the young Remington has his pocket-knife stolen by “a little gang of four or five

(interesting in thinking of the connection with Bennett): “The feeling in the book [unidentified] wanders loose — like a sauce poured over it — Sehnsucht and Wehmut. The people are smothered in this sauce like shrimps in a mayonnaise — they arent [sic] much. But still I like the sensation — warm,

small, human longing for something, an infant crying in the night, which one

gets from Wells” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 74). % HG. Wells, The New Machiavelli (London: John Lane, 1911), 66.

27 Tbid., 68.

23

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching carriage”.”* The two insights — into the power of sexual desire and the existence of violence — open up areas of experience which Bennett’s text evaded, and Remington realizes their importance to his life: They had this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly taking for granted and let me see through it into realities — realities I had indeed known about before but never realized.” Confronting them with honesty and courage will leave Remington an exile from his old life in his elopement with Isabel Rivers. Here we can begin to uncover the significance of Lawrence’s image of Wells as a boy before the shop front. During his Cambridge days, the young Remington espies a picture of a girl in a shop window. The picture recalls a girl he had met during one of his night prowls. I saw in a print-shop window near the Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-shouldered, barebreasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling faintly. I looked

at it, went my way, then turned back and bought it.°”

Having purchased the picture he secretes it in his desk drawer: one of the most striking symbols of repression in a novel dedicated to addressing the prevalence of sexual hypocrisy. Wells’

narrator, unlike Bennett’s,

is quite conscious

of a sexual

self at odds with social convention, and he is quite willing to critique the textures of that accepted life, but this critique takes place within

8 Ibid., 63. 29 Tbid., 62. 30 Tbid., 69. 24

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

the old forms of social fiction, and its final vision is of Remington as a

sacrifice

to

his

desires.

Nonetheless,

Lawrence’s

interest

was

aroused by a work which suggests the power of asocial motivational forces, and quite beside the obvious and striking circumstantial similarities between Remington’s escape to Italy and Lawrence’s situation with Frieda in the same country, which would doubtless have accounted for a portion of Lawrence’s interest in the novel, its theme would have convincingly connected with Lawrence’s developing thought at this time.*’ The politic man of letters (an Oscar Bailey, with his punishing routine of work and leisure) versus the brigand at odds with the hypocrisies of social climbing (a chaotic antiFlaubertian like Remington): there is a clear relation here to Lawrence’s own completed novel of frustrated love and his new project, whose developments seemed elusive, uncertain and, above all, foreign to him. Reading this work so close to his reading of Mann’s novella would have clearly emphasized the classical control of the latter’s style, and may have foregrounded a sense of this style

as a national trait.

Finally, Wells’ novel clearly set him thinking about his metaphysics in relation to those of Hardy, whose works will help to articulate all of these gathering concerns and solidify his vision crucial pause in the writing of his enigmatic new work. The

own him at a New

Machiavelli seemed to confirm Lawrence’s sense that the need of England was making free demonstrated concentration

for ‘“‘a re-adjustment between men and healthy of the sex”, but at to him the potential dangers to on this message. Searching for a

form after Sons and Lovers, Lawrence 31

and women, and a the same time it art of too close a new conception of

did not want to fall into the

The similarities are evident in spite of the fact that, as John Worthen has

shown

in D.

Cambridge

H.

Lawrence:

University Press,

made in May elopement”.

1912

The

Early

Years

1885-1912

1991), 393, the journey Lawrence

from Dover to Ostend “was

25

(Cambridge:

and Frieda

very far from being an

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

trap of telling at the expense of showing. In Wells’ novel he saw a work whose formlessness resulted from the overwhelming amount of material its author brought to it; in Hardy he saw a novelist who insisted upon punctuating his novels with a fatalistic outlook that was too narrowly prescriptive. The new notion of form is worked out as a

kind of solution to these difficulties.

“Dear old out-of-date Galsworthy” John Galsworthy, the last of Woolf’s Edwardian trio, is superficially the least influential, though his hostile readings of Lawrence’s works are important by default: Lawrence clearly saw him as representative of a wider, entrenched, conservative reading public. All we have to go on in tracing their relations are their separate disparaging comments on a social meeting in mid-November 1917, various largely critical comments by Galsworthy on Lawrence’s writings, and an essay which Lawrence wrote on Galsworthy in 1927. In Galsworthy’s comments to Edward Garnett on Sons and Lovers we can see the truth behind Lawrence’s growing sense in 1913 that his fiction was taking a turn that the popular reading public would fail to understand, or at worst detest. Galsworthy praised the early parts

concerning the father, mother and sons, thought the mother’s death

magnificent, but complained that:

Neither of the women, Miriam nor Clara, convinced me a bit;

they are only material out of which to run wild on the thesis that this kind of man does not want the woman, only a woman. And that kind of revelling in the shades of sex emotions seems to me anaemic [...] it revels in the unessentials [....] The body’s never worth while, and the sooner Lawrence recognizes that, the better - the men we swear by — Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchekov, Maupassant,

26

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

Flaubert, France — knew that great truth, they only use the body, and that sparingly, to reveal the soul.” There is much to comment on in this excerpt. The stricture that Lawrence should soon learn that the body is never worthwhile strikes

a comic note, with its parental overtones, whilst the central announcement of the realist tradition, with its mention of Flaubert,

reminds us of Lawrence’s alignment of the Edwardian Novelists with a realist tradition whose residual traces he had grown weary of in his fiction to date. The parts of the novel which Galsworthy admired, and particularly the mother’s death, are those with whose methods Lawrence had grown tired: scenes where things were gathered together “in the powerful light of emotion”. This sense of noncorrespondence in outlooks on fit subjects for literature characterizes the relations between the two writers from this point on. In the autumn of 1915 Galsworthy wrote to J. B. Pinker that he found The Rainbow “aesthetically detestable”: he complained of “countless bodies made with tremendous gusto, and not an ounce of soul within them, in spite of incredible assertions and pretence of

sounding life to its core.”* A letter of 18 November 1917 shows that

a scheme was in hand to publish Women in Love by subscription under the auspices of Bennett and Galsworthy, though Lawrence was afraid that their fundamental criticisms of the novel might weaken their resolve. In later letters around this time he asked Pinker to “let me know what dear old out-of-date Galsworthy says [about the new novel]”; “revising the novel, I think of poor John Galsworthy’s sufferings as he reads it. He will never risk his name to it, poor darling” (III, 185). On 30 November 1917 Lawrence wrote to Pinker of Women in Love, “I know John Galsworthy must have loathed it. Do 2

Letters from John Galsworthy 1900-1932, ed. Edward Garnett (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1934), 218.

33D.

H.

Lawrence:

The

Critical Heritage,

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 108.

27

ed.

R.

P. Draper

(London:

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

tell me what he discreetly said” (III, 187). The opposition to Galsworthy is still there, as is the recognition of his significance as a representative reader. Lawrence’s hostility to Galsworthy-as-reader is interesting since it reflects his new ruminations on character and the need to courageously overcome the restraints of social convention, as articulated in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” and elsewhere. In a late essay on Galsworthy, started in February 1927 and finally published in Scrutinies

by

Various

Writers

in

1928,

Lawrence

tested

out

the

which

he

distinction between “social beings” and “human beings” that began to concern him as he worked on “The Sisters” over a decade earlier. Galsworthy’s characters are found to lack the essential “innocence or naiveté” (Hardy, 210) of the human being: they are all social beings, overcome by the need to insure their conscious lives with money and possessions. The most Galsworthy is able to show, according to Lawrence’s account, is those characters who consciously seek to rebel against property, and these (the “anti”s) simply affirm the system they struggle within. Lawrence praised Galsworthy’s early novels, The Island Pharisees, The Man of Property and Fraternity because of the potential they showed in the use of satire against materialism, but he considers

this

potential

unrealized

in

the

later

work,

dismisses as sentimental, “purely commercial” (Hardy, 219). The disappointment that Lawrence expressed at the limitations of the characters in Galsworthy’s fiction once more echoes his criticisms of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach and Hardy’s characters. In the case of Hardy, however, Lawrence sensed an underlying appreciation of the self as something which may act asocially and so provoke the repressive backlash of the social majority. In Mann he sensed the conscious adherence to a Flaubertian aesthetic as fear of selfrealization in the morass of the unconscious. Galsworthy’s realism, divested of the satire which may have given an ironic edge to the depictions of his society characters, reveals to Lawrence a more disturbing outlook: not an inability to allow the chaos of the self, or to follow through this insight, but a fundamental inability even to 28

Lawrence and the “Edwardian Novelists”

recognize that the self has any place outside of a social context. The final conflation in the essay of characters and author, dismissing both as hopelessly limited and commercially-oriented, leads us back to the Lawrence

of

October

1912,

reading

Bennett

and

feeling

that

acceptance of the selfs sacrifice to cumbrous social forms could be washed off: that the self could be realized in an asocial context which would call for a new type of fiction and a new idea of the Bildungsroman. The Edwardian novelists, in very different ways, helped him to a realization of this vision, but it was the work of the Italian Futurists which provided the vocabulary to undertake his new type of novel. “A bit futuristic”: discovering Marinetti

In a now famous letter of 5 June 1914 to Edward Garnett, Lawrence’s

literary adviser, the author articulates his interest in impersonality as a central concern for his treatment of character and as a principle for form in his writing. Here, through a discussion of the Futurist Marinetti, Lawrence arrives at an understanding of his new project: I think the book [at this stage entitled “The Wedding Ring”] is a bit futuristic — quite unconsciously so. But when I read Marinetti — “the profound intuitions of life added one to the

other, word by word, according to their illogical conception,

will give us the general lines of an intuitive physiology of matter” — I see something of what I am after [....] somehow — that which is physic — non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element — which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent [....] [Marinetti] is stupid, as an artist, for contrasting the heat of the iron and the laugh of the woman. Because what is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the molecules of steel or their action in heat: it is the inhuman will. (II, 182-83)

29

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

In moving away from the style of writing he had associated with Sons

and

Lovers,

Lawrence

realizes

his

own

subversion

of

Amold

Bennett’s category of the real, and the formulation, embracing modernity through its attention to a “physiology of matter”, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s atomic vision of life.** Lawrence goes on to provide a simile for the impersonal notion of form to which his vision leads: Again I say, don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into

the form of some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a

fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown. (II, 184)

This is a strongly Nietzschean argument, which overrides moral categories to assert the primarily aesthetic nature of life. The vision approximates to that of Woolf: “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there.” In reaction against Arnold Bennett and the Edwardian trio, the two writers arrive at this

articulation of their concern for matter. In so doing, they subvert the codes of their predecessors and forge a creative space for themselves in the face of a potentially stifling tradition.

4 For a textual exploration of the similarities between Mrs Dalloway and The Rainbow on the topics of impersonality and epiphany, see Earl G. Ingersoll, “Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence: Exploring the Dark”, English Studies, 71 (1990), 125-32.

30

Chapter Two “Something Of What I Am After”: Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

Marinetti’s four lecturing visits to England prior to the First World War caused a great stir in the English press, crystallized the Vorticist avant-garde in reaction against the Italian Futurist aesthetic, and confirmed Marinetti’s reputation as the “Caffeine of Europe”.' Yet, the virtual absence of English translations of the Futurists before the war contributed to the widespread tendency to dismiss Marinetti as an empty orator whose Latin temperament and hot-blooded outbursts could command little beside a native audience’s raw curiosity. Marinetti

wrote

in Italian and

French,

and

lectured to his London

audiences in French, since he did not speak English.” The language barrier was a cause of the general ignorance concerning Futurism’s specific project for the arts. There was only one acknowledged ' Marinetti visited England to give lectures in April 1910, March 1912, November 1913, and during spring 1914 (the last occasion providing the London Group with the chance to show public distaste for Futurism, leading to the founding of Vorticism). There were three pre-war Futurist exhibitions

in England: in March 1912, April 1913, and May-June 1914. The main Futurist influence on English art and letters occurred in this pre-war period,

and I will focus on this influence. The increasingly political project of the

Futurists

during

and

after the

war

has

received

considerable

academic

coverage in recent years, but Lawrence’s interest was always in their art and

he did not believe in their early nationalism and its trappings. See The Letters

of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 180.

2

See Lawrence Rainey, “The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F. T. Marinetti

and Ezra Pound”, Modernism/Modernity, 1/3 (1994), 203: “As Marinetti did not speak English, he delivered all his lectures in French while in England.”

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism English Futurist: C. R. W. Nevinson,

who

co-signed with Marinetti

the Futurist Manifesto entitled “Vital English Art” in The Observer for 7 June 19142 The general tendency among Marinetti’s more sympathetic English commentators was to assimilate his popularized anti-tradition declarations for their own purposes. Walter Sickert, then,

considering

the

1912

Futurist

exhibition

Galleries for the English Review, wrote that:

at

the

Sackville

The movement is one from which we in England have a good deal to learn. This is not to say that we are to accept the manifestoes in their literal entirety. We must remember that language in Italy is a far more florid and coloured thing than with us.* In a similar vein, Harold Monro could write in September 1913 of his twofold rationale for devoting the principal space of a whole number of his journal Poetry and Drama to the Futurists: Firstly, a movement which has obtained such wide notoriety legitimately demands study and consideration. Secondly, we

claim ourselves, also, to be Futurists. It concerns us not that

within the fortifications of Chelsea the word Futurism be gasped or growled to denote the art of the excitable young

men

who

exhibited

their

daubs

in

Sackville

Street,

were

laughed at for three months, and pocketed a little fortune at the expense of an unsympathetic yet gaping public [....] Futurism, indeed, is at war with tradition; but its activities, in

our conception, are confined neither to Italy nor to Sackville Street; it is represented neither by rebel thought nor ragged verse: it is an attitude of mind, a condition of soul — it exists 3

The “Vital English Art” manifesto is reproduced in Quaderno, 9 (1979),

164-67. The London Group artists responded angrily to its publication. 4 Walter Sickert, “The Futurist ‘Devil-among-the-Tailors’”, English

Review, 11 (April 1912), 148.

32

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

ultimately in a world of thought, imagination, and hope. Long ago, before we had heard of the Italian Movement, conceived the desire to “serve, worship, and obey beautiful Future”.°

we the

The Italian Futurist movement, characterized by Sickert as “austere, bracing, patriotic, nationalist, positive, anti-archaistic, antisentimental, anti-feminist, what Prudhon calls anti-pornocratic”,° is

thus condensed by Monro’s own assimilation to two vital tendencies or attitudes of mind: the one irreligious and the other unsentimental, opposing nostalgia. In fact, following Marinetti’s November 1913 visit to speak at Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London, the editor’s enthusiasm for Italian Futurism cooled considerably, and he emphasized in the December 1913 number that “in its origin the Futurist movement was avowedly Italian and for the Italians, rather than cosmopolitan in its aim”. He concluded by saying: “We admire his [Marinetti’s] extraordinary inventiveness; we were enthralled by his declamation; but we do not believe that his present compositions achieve anything more than an advanced form of verbal

photography.””

D. H. Lawrence’s engagement with Italian Futurism must be considered in the context of these assimilations, which drew upon the Futurists in order to invoke a more workable and considered version of modern art, without the provocative excesses of the Italian movement. Reading the Futurists, Lawrence could state that his new project (then entitled “The Wedding Ring”) was “a bit futuristic — quite unconsciously so” (II, 182) because he, like Monro, considered himself to have arrived at a similar anti-traditional set of interests independently of Marinetti. Harold ® walter Poetry Monro and

55.

Monro, Poetry and Drama, 1/3 (September 1913), 262. Sickert, English Review, 11 (April 1912), 148. and Drama, 1/4 (December 1913), 389. See Joy Grant, Harold the Poetry Bookshop (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967),

33

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Breakthroughs came when English commentators discovered certain of their own preoccupations being stated so unashamedly and in so exaggerated a manner by the Futurists. Sympathetic figures like Sickert and Monro praised the Italian movement for its selflessness in paving the way for a new generation of writers and artists. Sickert stated: In order that a salutary truth may penetrate the shell of inertia and habit in which humanity will ever lap itself, the most monstrous exaggerations may do good service. Fulminations that are easy to ridicule and confute, may, by the spirit they arouse and the atmosphere they create, serve as effective engines of beneficent force.* As Janko Lavrin wrote in 1935, Futurism “proved a useful and even a necessary ferment which exercised a definite influence upon the recent development of art and literature”.? More workable and considered approaches to modernity in the arts emerged through the exaggerations of the Futurists.'° I will be arguing here for a particular mechanism by which Lawrence arrived at a workable approach to modernity in his writing, through his reading of the Futurists. Having so far discovered Lawrence’s turn to impersonality to be a subversion of an English Edwardian

realism via Italian Futurism,

I now

want to consider the

Walter Sickert, English Review, 11 (April 1912), 148.

Janko Lavrin, Aspects of Modernism: From Wilde to Pirandello (London:

Stanley Nott, 1935), 183.

'° The main Futurist exaggeration to strike Lawrence came in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, where Marinetti writes: “Futurist poets! I have taught you to hate libraries and museums, to prepare you to hate the intelligence, reawakening in you divine intuition, the characteristic gift of the Latin races” (F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 89). Lawrence responded to this with his observation that “they want to deny every scrap of tradition and experience, which is silly” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 180).

34

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

nature of this impersonality. It achieved expression in relation to Marinetti’s concern for the energies of matter, but was explored fictionally through generational conflict and the effects of changing environment. I will argue that Lawrence engaged with the Futurist vocabulary of matter in The Rainbow, but in Women in Love he drew upon the work of individual writers that Marinetti had cited in the formation of his Futurist aesthetic. In particular, I aim to show that Lawrence’s vision of impersonality brings his later war writings into relation to Naturalist writings, as they were mediated through Futurism. Although Futurism and Naturalism are movements very different in spirit and intellectual content, their visions of humans as governed by mechanistic forces brought them into close relationship in Lawrence’s thought. We will look in some detail, during this chapter, at the deterministic writings of the founder of Naturalism, Emile Zola

(1840-1902). Zola’s Naturalism was a movement whose assumptions about Man’s non-human motivations find a remarkably close expression in the analogy of Man and matter in the Futurist outlook, and therefore connect to the Futurist position as Lawrence encountered it: the two movements shared a desire to apply the laws of science, in one case biology and in the other physics, to the understanding of human motivation. Marinetti named Zola among “the four or five great precursors of Futurism”.'' In Zola we can consider an embodiment of the impersonal and physiological formal concerns Lawrence perceived lay behind Marinetti’s manifestos.'?

'! FT. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 68. '2

Connections

between

Marinetti

and

Zola

have

not

been

documented,

perhaps because critics have shied away from tracing an appropriation on Marinetti’s part which appears to decontextualize Zola’s writings so

completely.

Likewise,

little

has

been

written

about

Lawrence

and

Zola.

Where articles have focused on the two writers it has been to draw comparisons between their separate depictions of working-class life. Such treatments have concerned themselves primarily with Sons and Lovers. One example of this approach may be discovered in Michael Cardy, “Beyond

35

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Discussion of Zola’s experimental method in the novel will reveal a vital precedent for an impersonal character treatment based on the application of a scientific model. Futurism and Naturalism concern themselves with a similar impersonality, but, as I have indicated, they differ widely in spirit, and this accounts for the difference in the way Lawrence relates to them. Futurism retains a naivety and optimism concerning the possibilities for Man in a modern climate where the new conditions of life call for the extension of language in order to express new psychological states, whereas Naturalism disregards such optimism in favour of reductive human analysis. Lawrence engages with both kinds of writing during the war years because they encapsulate the two extremes of optimism and pessimism that he felt as the war progressed, enabling him to trace these twin processes of war at work in his characters. Lawrence was well read in continental Naturalist

authors before the war. He

had read Zola,’?

Ibsen,

Strindberg,

Maupassant, Hauptmann and Chekhov with interest, but expressed reservations concerning the materialistic psychology to be found in their works. He wrote in early 1913 that he would not want to write like Ibsen or Strindberg, even if he could (I, 509). Yet, the Futurist Documentation:

Emile

Zola

and

D.

H.

Lawrence”,

Neohelicon,

XIV/2

(1987), 225-31. Lawrence anticipates these studies via his single reference to Zola in The Rainbow, where Winifred Inger proves “superior to the Zolaesque tragedy” of the Wiggiston miners’ lives (D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 322).

'3 The evidence for Lawrence’s reading of Zola is a little confused. In a letter of 11 November 1908, during the composition of The White Peacock,

he writes in praise of Eugénie Grandet by Balzac (1799-1850), comparing that author favourably to De Maupassant and Zola, who “inevitably light on a

wound” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1, 92). The comment appears to have called for some knowledge of Zola’s work. In a letter of 10 April 1911 Lawrence says that he has Débdcle and L’Assommoir to give away (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence,

1916 to Catherine Carswell,

I, 258). Yet, in another letter of 23 November

Lawrence

asks for a copy of L’Assommoir,

claiming only to have read Germinal (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Ill, 38).

36

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

reading and the war proved crucial in shaping Lawrence’s argumentative metaphysics, and his increasing pessimism concerning the continuation of the war led him, in Women

in Love, to adopt the

kind of materialistic psychology for the depiction of Gerald Crich that he had previously reacted against. In Chapter Four I show how Lawrence used his viewing of Ghosts (Ibsen’s 1881 play) in Italy before the war to conceptualize this psychology in Gerald. Through a conscious deployment of Naturalist determinism, Lawrence internalized the mass psychology of the war in his tragic character. In the depiction of Gerald’s strictly-determined, tragically-fated life we can detect not simply a critique of industrialism, then, but an overriding critique of the mindlessness of mechanized warfare. It is hoped that a study of the Zola who excited the young Marinetti will shed light on the nature of Lawrence’s impersonal preoccupations, and help to contextualize a movement in Lawrence’s thought which places him in relation to vital aspects of the international avant-garde in the period prior to the First World War. One of the central arguments in my thesis will be that, through his reading of the Italian Futurists, Lawrence released the energies of both Italian Futurism and continental Naturalism. Reading beyond the “sickly cant”

In the summer of 1914, when Lawrence read Marinetti, Buzzi and Soffici (and possibly Boccioni), only a few English translations of the

Futurists were available, all in the quarterly journal Poetry and Drama for September 1913, edited by Monro (see figure 2). Three of the five Futurist poems freely rendered into English by Monro here’ are printed in the original in the book of Futurist poetry to which Lawrence’s referred, J Poeti Futuristi: these are Paolo Buzzi’s “Hymn 4

See “Poems by the Italian Futurists”, Poetry and Drama, 1/3 (September

1913), 291-305. The poems translated here are Paolo Buzzi’s “Hymn to the

Spirit of the New Poetry”, Marinetti’s “Against the Earth”, Aldo Palazzeschi’s “The Clock”, Buzzi’s “Song of the Imprisoned” and Marinetti’s “Against Syllogisms”.

37

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

to the Spirit of the New Poetry” (“Inno alla Poesia nuova”) and “Song

of the Imprisoned” (“Il Canto Dei Reclusi”), and one of Marinetti’s

French poems, “Against Syllogisms” (“Contre les Syllogismes”).'* Monro’s journal also contains an editorial consideration of Italian Futurism,

and

a

translation

of

Marinetti’s

“Distruzione della sintassi — Immaginazione

May

1913

manifesto

senza fili — Parole in

liberta” as “Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty”.’° Lawrence

may have read these translations (Mark Kinkead-Weekes has assumed

that he did'’), and he certainly knew that an edition of Poetry and Drama was being given over to the Futurists,'® but his major Futurist reading was in the original Italian and French. This reading in the Futurists would have allowed him access to Marinetti’s “Technical

Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, to discussions of Futurism’s relation

to Cubism,

and

to reproductions

of Futurist

works

of art.’

It is

'S These poems are to be found in / Poeti Futuristi, 291-92, 116-19 and 295-

96 respectively. '6 “Wireless Imagination

and

Words

at

Liberty:

The

New

Futurist

Manifesto”, trans. Arundel Del Re, Poetry and Drama, \/3 (September 1913),

319-26.

" See Mark Kinkead-Weekes, 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge

D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912University Press, 1996), 121, where he

assumes that Lawrence had “come across them [the Futurists] in translation”

in the Monro volume. The only real documentary evidence we have for this is

circumstantial: in a letter of 4 September 1913 to Emest Collings, Lawrence wrote that “I must ask somebody to send me a copy of the Poetry and

Drama, that has you in” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 68). This was the

same issue that contained the Futurist poems. For textual evidence that Lawrence read the Monro volume, see Chapter Five. '8 On 1 August 1913, Lawrence had written to Monro informing him that he had submitted a couple of poems which he hoped Monro “might find futuristic” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 53). Monro rejected these, so we do not know to which poems this comment refers. '? Lawrence is known to have referred to / Poeti Futuristi and Ardengo Soffici’s booklet Cubismo e Futurismo. I Poeti Futuristi contains the proclama (“Giovani Italiani”), “Manifesto Tecnico della Letteratura Futurista”,

“Riposta

alle

obiezioni”,

38

“Battaglia

Peso

+

Odore”,

“Il

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

unlikely that he would have been aware of the debt that Marinetti acknowledged to Zola, or of his enthusiastic publication (in his magazine, Poesia, begun in February 1905) of poetry from the French Symbolist tradition of Verlaine and Mallarmé. That he understood the

continuities involved in the expressions of Futurism that he read is,

however, abundantly evident in the way he would contextualize Futurism in relation to Maeterlinck (II, 181). Lawrence’s ability to understand the Futurist declarations is striking: he is able to empathize with their desire to seek inspiration in contemporary life, with their yearning for emancipation from the stifling weight of tradition, and with their embracing of youth and the future (all established in the founding manifesto of Futurism, published in Le Figaro for 20 February 1909). His own subversion of the Edwardian novelists demonstrates that he would have been able to sympathize with the Futurists’ project to deconstruct old forms of art and life, bringing these terms together again as an answer to artistic decadence. Even their celebration of war as a destructive strike against the old forms of life and against an anachronistic humanism would come to seem understandable and necessary to him during the first year of the war. The crucial component in Lawrence’s ability to understand Futurism appears to be located in his broad appreciation of the intellectual background to the movement, through Nietzsche but also through other writers whom Marinetti promoted and assimilated. Movimento Futurista” (broken down into two parts, “L’atmosfera futurista

creata da noi” and “Le Vittorie della pittura futurista”), and Buzzi’s “Il Verso

Libero”, together with a large selection of poetry from thirteen of the futurist

poets.

Cubismo

e Futurismo

contains

essays

entitled

“I]

Cubismo”

and

“Cubismo e Oltre”, a major section entitled “Futurismo” (consisting of four essays), and thirty-two black and white photographic reproductions of mostly futurist art. Emile Delavenay suggests that Lawrence may also have consulted

a

volume

entitled

Pittura,

Scultura

Futuriste

(Dinamismo

Plastico). This contains a long essay, “Pittura e Scultura Futuriste” (consisting of seventeen sections), ten manifestos/exhibition catalogue prefaces, and reproductions of art works by Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Balla, Severini and Soffici, with sculptures by Boccioni.

39

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Before going on to consider how Lawrence’s reading of Futurism released the physiological impersonality of Zola’s Naturalism, I wish to look at Lawrence’s first published review and the evidence it already provides for his enthusiastic reception of mainland European writings which liberated their readers from a confining moral scheme, from an overwhelming decadence, and from social pessimism. Lawrence’s first published review was of Contemporary German Poetry, translated by Jethro Bithell.”° It appeared anonymously in the English Review for November 1911. Carl E. Baron published this review as a hitherto unknown piece by D. H. Lawrence in 1969.”! It is a revealing document in thinking of the intellectual context to Lawrence’s engagement with Futurism. In celebrating the passion, the violence, and the psychological depths of the German poems, Lawrence compares their authors to the Belgian poets he had come across in Bithell’s other translation, Contemporary Belgian Poetry,” which he mentions in the first line of the review: “This Contemporary German Poetry is very much like the recent Contemporary Belgian Poetry. The bulk of the verse is of the passionate or violent kind.”” This book of Belgian poetry is dedicated by Jethro Bithell to the Symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), whose thirty poems have pride of place in the volume. In his Introduction, Bithell calls Verhaeren “the greatest of all French poets, past and present”. Lawrence, who refers to this Belgian anthology in a letter to Louie Burrows of 10 November 1911, seems to have taken up the idea of

20

Contemporary German Poetry, ed. and trans. Jethro Bithell (London and

Felling-On-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911).

"Carl E. Baron, “Two Hitherto Unknown Encounter, XXXIII/2 (August 1969), 3-6.

Pieces

by

D.

H.

Lawrence”,

2 Contemporary Belgian Poetry, ed. and trans. Jethro Bithell (London and Felling-On-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911).

3° Carl E. Baron, Encounter, XXXIII/2 (August 1969), 3.

4

Contemporary Belgian Poetry, xix.

40

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

Verhaeren’s representativeness, because he makes reference to him throughout the review of the German poems.”° This privileged glimpse of Lawrence’s readings in winter 1911 becomes fascinating when we consider that Verhaeren was among the artists (including Zola) whom Marinetti acknowledged as precursors to Futurism.”° This review provides evidence for Lawrence’s familiarity with the particular literary background from which Futurism took its inspiration. Marinetti praised “Verhaeren, glorifier of machines and tentacular cities”,’’ alluding to his collection of poems entitled Les Villes tentaculaires (1895), which contains such retrospectively Futurist poems as “Vers Le Futur”. Bithell terms this collection “a cinematograph of the town”.”® This is one of three volumes of poetry — the others being Les Campagnes hallucinées (1893) and Les Villages illusoires (1895) — in which Verhaeren’s early descriptive Parnassian poetry gave way to an idiosyncratic mystic Symbolism. Michael T. H. Sadler, in an appreciation of Verhaeren published in Poetry and Drama for June 1913, makes a distinction between his poetry and that of “Verlaine, Merrill, Moréas”: these Symbolists, he says, “will sing of the plaintive beauty of decay rejoicing in the quiet music of the dying year, taking an isolated sensuous delight in nature’s melancholy, but giving no thought to the place of autumn in the endless cycle of seasons, feeling no sorrow that another summer

has faded into mist”, whereas with Verhaeren,

“the

25 In the letter to Louie Burrows Lawrence makes clear the “scandalous” nature of the Belgian poems. He is undecided whether it would be a good

idea to send them into the Burrows’ household, since they would be likely to

cause outrage among members of his girlfriend’s family: “I really hesitate to send the Belgian Poetry into Coteshael [the name of the Burrows’ house] — although

none

of your family

Lawrence, I, 325).

6

Marinetti’s

relation

to

are great poetasters”

Verhaeren

is explored

“Verhaeren and Marinetti”, Forum for Modern

(1996), 107-18. 7 8

FT, Marinetti, Selected Writings, 68. Contemporary Belgian Poetry, xxii.

41

(The Letters

in

David

of D.

H.

Gullentops,

Language Studies, XXXII/3

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

idea of continuity, of a future pregnant with possibility, never leaves

him”.”

It was clearly Verhaeren’s optimistic celebration of human technologies that Marinetti found most praiseworthy. He may also have been aware of Verhaeren’s early and unenthusiastic training in law, which reflects his own academic background.”

In fact, as Bithell

recounts Verhaeren’s life in his Introduction to the Belgian volume, a pattern emerges in his career wherein a period of pessimism and despair in the late 1880s is overcome and forms the prelude to a time when he can teach his readership “that new conditions of existence,

the din and dust of great cities, the never-resting activity of modern

brains, will create a new man whose nervous system will be able to

bear the strain imposed upon it”.*' It is a development which one can imagine Marinetti to have admired. Lawrence celebrated Verhaeren as one of the scandalous elders who lay behind the German poets. With a vigour that foretells the period of restless innovation which followed the final drafts of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence excitedly declared that “with Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Verhaeren, poetry seems to have broken out afresh, like a new crater”:*” Baudelaire, a while back, sent round with a rather red lantern,

showing it into dark corners, and saying “Look here!”; considerably startling most folk. Verhaeren comes after with a bull’s-eye lantern of whiter, wider ray than Baudelaire’s artistic beam, and flashes this into such obscure places — by no means corners — so that they stand out stark and real. He also, in the daylight, makes a hollow of his hand, and shades his eyes, and sees, deep in the light, the fabric of shadow. These 29 Michael T. H. Sadler, “Emile Verhaeren: Drama, 1/2 (June 1913), 175.

An Appreciation”, Poetry and

%©

This is mentioned in Contemporary Belgian Poetry, xx.

»

Carl E. Baron, Encounter, XXXIII/2 (August 1969), 4.

*! Tbid., xxi.

42

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

Germans follow like tourists after a guide. They stop at the places Verhaeren stopped at; they excitedly hold out their candle lanterns; they peer under hollowed hands to find the shadow set deep in the light.” The dense imagery betrays a mind fascinated by the new emphasis placed on the obscure places in life. Baudelaire’s brothel-like red lantern is a clever image, as is Verhaeren’s white lamp casting before a startled audience the hitherto hidden places of life.** According to Lawrence “Love passion pitching along with its beauty and strange hate and suffering, remains the one living volcano of our souls”, and these poets comprehend a volcanic energy which “comes from the central fire, which feeds all of us with life, although

it is gloved, clotted over and hidden by earth and greenery and civilization”. This led him to assert that Verhaeren’s vision is close to that of the Greek dramatists, and to compare Verhaeren’s honesty favourably to the excitable tourism of the German poets: Verhaeren, at his best, is religious in his attitude, honest and

religious, when dealing with the “scandalous” subject. Many of the Germans are not; they are sentimental, dishonest. much the worse for them, not for us.*°

So

°° Ibid., 3-4.

4 In D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, 62, John Worthen writes that Lawrence “made a special point, up to 1912, of using the French he had

learned at High Eastwood boys”. “witty cultivation French language

school, and which had distinguished him from the other Lawrence associated France and the French language with and an amoral pose”, but, more significantly, his use of the “was a reminder of how far he aimed to travel from the

limitations (and language) Eastwood sense) he was”.

>

of Eastwood,

and of how

cultivated

Carl E. Baron, Encounter, XXXIII/2 (August 1969), 4.

43

(in a non-

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

This criticism of the Germans calls to mind Lawrence’s later attack on contemporary German prose in the Thomas Mann essay, since both reviews attribute to the German mentality an overbalance of logic in fixing the direction that their work is to take. Criticizing the German writers for their craving of form in fiction in “German Books: Thomas Mann”, Lawrence wrote:

[I]t seems to me, this craving for form is the outcome, not of artistic conscience, but of a certain attitude to life. Form is not a personal thing like style. It is impersonal like logic. And just as the school of Alexander Pope was logical in its expressions, so it seems the school of Flaubert is, as it were,

logical in its aesthetic form. “Nothing outside the definite line

of the

book”,

is a maxim.

But

can

the

human

mind

fix

absolutely the definite line of a book, any more than it can fix absolutely any definite line of action for a living being? (P,

308)

It is the deliberateness of the German poets and prose writers that Lawrence distrusts, since this implies a contemplative distance between the artists and the life that they depict. This distance provides grounds

for dishonesty,

irreverence or aesthetic retreat, all of which

Lawrence contrasts to Verhaeren’s religious attitude to his scandalous subjects. Verhaeren’s healthy amorality offsets the conscious approach of the German poets and the ascetic recoil of Thomas Mann before the life he depicts. The review’s insistence upon a still, impersonal source of human life, its exploration through the Greeks, and the volcano image of channelled

energies,

will all find echoes

in Lawrence’s

innovations

after Sons and Lovers,*® and it is interesting to see him beginning to 36

See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 137-38, where Lawrence connects

his interest in still human impersonality to Greek sculpture: “There is something in the Greek sculpture that my soul is hungry for — something of the eternal stillness that lies under all movement, under all life, like a source,

44

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

articulate them at this early stage in relation to one of the founding influences on Marinetti. In the next section of this chapter, we will see how Marinetti’s interest in Zola may be said to have much in common with his celebration of Verhaeren’s industrial, urban poetry. In so doing, we will be able to consider how Zola’s novels reflect the kind of modern impersonality that Lawrence had perceived to be the source for Verhaeren’s poetry. Emile Zola’s experimental novels and Futurist impersonality The work of Emile Zola, with its experimental objectivity, its avoidance of romantic bourgeois sentimentalism, and its use of modern settings (railways, mines, factories) laid an important bridge between nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in mainland Europe. In Italy, Zola’s Naturalism lay behind the Verismo movement, whose key exponents were Luigi Capuana (1839-1915) and Capuana’s close friend, Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), whom Lawrence would go on to translate.’ Zola’s work was also eagerly read by Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, who was allegedly expelled from his French Jesuit School in Egypt for introducing Zola’s controversial novels to his classmates.** Zola’s origins, like those of Marinetti, are French and Italian. He was born in Paris of a French mother and Italian father, and attended the same school as Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence, while Marinetti,

incorruptible and inexhaustible.” John Worthen,

in D. H. Lawrence and the

Idea of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1979), 54-55, traces Lawrence’s language in this letter back to his reading of Walter Pater’s essay on Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1873).

37 By the time of this translation, in 1927, Lawrence wanted to rescue Verga from the comparison with Zola, largely due to widespread criticism of the latter’s often perfunctory application of the materialistic psychology to his characters. 38 Dictionary of Italian Literature, eds P. Bondanella Bondanella (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979), 315.

45

and

J. Conaway

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

born in Egypt of Italian parents, studied in Paris and wrote most of his early free-verse poetry in French, moving to Northern Italy in the mid1890s. Their Parisian connections meant that, in spite of the generation gap, they shared some common journalistic ground. For example, the conservative Parisian daily Le Figaro, which carried Marinetti’s founding manifesto of Futurism on 20 February 1909, had appointed Zola as its literary chronicler and critic in the mid-1860s, and later, during the composition of the twenty novels which formed the Rougon-Macquart series and made Zola’s name (written between 1871 and 1893), it commissioned him to write on any subject he chose. As was the case with Verhaeren’s education, then, Zola’s work

emerges from a background that would have been likely to pique Marinetti’s presiding egoism. The importance of Zola as a figure whose work challenges passéiste sentimentalism and a strictly moral basis for character presentation is established in this Rougon-Macquart series of novels, but it is already implicit in the first novel, Thérése Raquin, published in December 1867. Here, Zola announced his concern for an objective, scientific approach to his characters in his use of a famous quotation from Taine as epigraph to the second edition: “Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” In a Preface added to the text in this second edition, seeking to answer the charges of immorality, he writes: “I chose to portray individuals existing under the sovereign dominion of their nerves and their blood, devoid of free will and drawn into every act of their lives by the inescapable promptings of their flesh.”*? Taine himself praised the novel, but suggested that future works should be set in a broader social context, and it is this prompting that gave rise to the Rougon-Macquart series, and to Zola’s manifesto piece for it and the new Naturalism, “The

%° Emile Zola, Thérése Raquin, University Press, 1992), 1.

trans. Andrew

46

Rothwell

(Oxford:

Oxford

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

Experimental Novel”, written in 1880 and published in Russia in the following year.”° “The Experimental Novel” applied the principles of experimental medicine pioneered by the French physiologist Claude Bernard (18131878) to the novelist’s treatment of character and its formation through heredity and environment. In the Preface to Thérése Raquin Zola claimed that he had already in fictional terms “carried out on two living bodies the same analytical examination that surgeons perform on corpses”."’ Now, developing the analogy through his application of Bernard’s 1865 essay “Introduction a l’Etude de la Médecine Expérimentale”, Zola brings his scientific vision to bear on the sentimentalism of fiction: “We are actually rotten with lyricism; we are very much mistaken when we think that the characteristic of a good style is a sublime confusion with just a dash of madness added; in reality, the excellence of a style depends upon its logic and clearness.””” Through observation and experimentation (the placing of characters in situations or environments where inherited traits are activated) the actions of a novel may emerge not as the necessary accompaniments to sentiment, but as the products of a reaction whose conditions will already have been studied. In Zola’s fiction “living beings [...] are in their turn brought under and reduced to the general mechanism of matter”: “A like determinism will govern the stones of the roadway and the brain of man.” In this seminal essay of intention, Zola pre-empted the Futurist concern for a physiology of matter which proved so important and liberational for Lawrence in summer 1914. The physiological focus upon the “non-human, in humanity” (II, 182), which Lawrence © “The Experimental Novel” was first published in the St Petersburg review Le Messager de l'Europe. 4.

“”

Emile Zola, Thérése Raquin, 2.

Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, trans. Belle M.

Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964), 48.

® Tbid., 16. “ [bid., 17.

47

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

recuperated from Marinetti, is explicitly there in Zola’s essay, and the questions which it raises fascinated Lawrence at this time.“ In The

Rainbow, for instance, the author shows Ursula Brangwen considering

the opinions of a female Physics teacher (the significantly named Dr Frankstone) concerning the reduction of living things to the general

mechanism of matter:

“No really,” Dr Frankstone had said, “I don’t see why we should attribute some special mystery to life - do you? We don’t understand it as we understand electricity, even, but that doesn’t warrant our saying it is something special, something different in kind and distinct from everything else in the universe — do you think it does? May it not be that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the same order as the activities we already know in science? | don’t see, really, why we should imagine there is a special order for life, and life alone -———”

(R, 408)

The note of uncertainty in Dr Frankstone, in Ursula, and in Lawrence

is wholly evident. Looking at living cells under a microscope, Ursula

asks herself if she is “an impersonal force, or conjunction of forces, like one of these”, and, if so, how the forces become unified and for

what ‘“S

purpose

(R,

408).

Zola

had

similarly

reflected

on

Claude

Lawrence was fascinated from a young age by biology and the scientific

study of living organisms. He was an enthusiastic student of botany during

his time at Nottingham University College. This fact is reflected in his fiction. It has been noted, for instance, how often the young Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers appears to conceive ideas in sympathy with those expressed in Herbert

Spencer’s Principles of Biology.

Ursula’s passion for botany in

The Rainbow reflects a growing interest in the non-human world and catalyses her break with Anton Skrebensky (see the chapter entitled “The

Bitterness of Ecstasy”). Indeed, Ursula is teaching a lesson on elementary botany in Women in Love when Rupert Birkin enters and gives an impromptu lecture on catkins. For details of Lawrence’s interest in biology, see John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, 179-84.

48

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

Bernard’s belief that “we shall always be ignorant of the ‘why’ of things; we can only know the ‘how’”. Bernard is quoted as saying that: Science has precisely the privilege of teaching us what we are ignorant of, through its substitution of reason and experiment for sentiment, and by showing us clearly the limit of our actual knowledge. But, by a marvellous compensation, in proportion as science humbles our pride, it strengthens our

power.”

The biologistic model of the non-human potentially retains the sense of wonder at life (though Zola chooses to put aside the wonder in order to document its actual manifestations); the physical model is interested intellectually in life as a complex chemical or mechanical process. As we will see, in the final chapters of The Rainbow Lawrence uses the Futurists’ physical, analogical language of matter to describe the gleaming life that becomes evident to Ursula beneath her microscope; in so doing, he explores the “how” of things in order to stress the overriding biologistic mystery of the “why”. The unknowable physical energies of matter emerge in a primarily destructive capacity in Zola (in The Rainbow, their destructiveness paves the way for a reconstruction of the self). This is one of the reasons why “The Experimental Novel” has been widely criticized as a manifesto piece for the novels: the objective scientific claims which it makes for the novels are considered to be bogus since Zola rigs his experiments, choosing gullible and weak-willed characters to experiment upon because they produce the most interesting and

cataclysmic results.*” Lawrence was fully aware of this habit in Zola

4

Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, 22.

‘7 One of the most vehement and comprehensive early Max Nordau. In Degeneration he states that Zola “does nature of scientific experiment”, and he goes on to chosen for the subject of his magnum opus the most

49

criticisms came from not even suspect the write that Zola “has exceptional case he

; J

1

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

to “inevitably light on a wound” (I, 92) because the method called for the exploitation of a flaw in each character. In 1908 this tendency in Zola caused Lawrence to distinguish his work from that of Balzac (1799-1850), which he considered “magnificent and supreme” (I, 92) in its avoidance of sentimentality, melodrama and flippancy.** What seems

clear,

however,

is

that

the

energies

of

Zola’s

wounded

characters may have appeared more relevant to the Lawrence of the war years than to the writer of The White Peacock (1911). The subjection of Zola’s wounded central characters to an inevitable forward movement towards destruction appealed to Marinetti, who greatly admired, for instance, the novel of railway life, number seventeen in the series of twenty Rougon-Macquart novels, La Béte Humaine (1890). In this novel, among Zola’s most violent, the action takes place against the background of the movement of trains to a timetable. Action is intersected by the dirt, noise and vibration of the trains, whose movements provide suggestive analogies to the fates of the characters, who are maimed and killed by their hereditary taints and physiological desires. The novel is based both formally and thematically around a series of disruptions: on the formal level, action alternates

with

description,

whilst

thematically

characters

are

motivated by a basic impulse which produces oppositional actions (the need to possess someone sexually giving way to a desire for utter possession through murder, or being translated into a basic acquisitive instinct). The disruptions are founded on a simple structural logic, could possibly have

found — a group

of degenerates,

lunatics, criminals,

prostitutes, and ‘mattoids’, whose morbid nature places them apart from the

species; who do not belong to a regular society, but are expelled from it, and

at strife with it; who conduct themselves as complete strangers to their epoch and country, and are, by their manner of existence, not members of any

modern civilized people whatever, but belong to a horde of primitive wild men of bygone ages”. See Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann,

1913), 489 and 495-96 respectively.

48 These comments refer to Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833-1834, volume 1839). See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1, 91-92.

50

single

Lawrence,

Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

which is that of Lawrence’s “inhuman will”: the movements of the

trains, and their breakdowns and derailments, work on an identical principle to the actions of the characters, whose own breakdowns,

violent episodes and deaths contain the same inevitability. In La Béte Humaine,

humans

are mechanized

and machines

are

humanized: the burnt-out ruins of a derailed train are given the same

treatment as the remains of the human

victims within, and the novel

repeatedly describes in minute detail the merging of subjects with their environments in grotesque moments of pain or annihilation, suggesting the Futurist preoccupation with the violation of the subject by the geometric planes of the city. Take, for instance, the description of the scene during Séverine’s violent argument with Roubaud in the opening chapter: He seized her head She fought, and he knocking chairs out he felled her to the through

and banged it against a leg of the table. dragged her across the floor by the hair, of the way. Each time she tried to get up floor with his fist. And he was gasping

clenched teeth, in savage,

mindless

fury. The

table

was pushed away and almost knocked the stove over. There was blood and hair sticking on one corner of the sideboard.””

The violent reactions of the two characters have action of the table on the stove. The excerpt grotesque merging of human matter with the recall a similar scene from Sons and Lovers in throws a drawer at his wife which catches her on blood to fall onto the shawl of the baby Paul:

*° See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 183.

their analogue in the concludes with the furniture. We might which Walter Morel the brow and causes

°° Emile Zola, La Béte Humaine, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 36.

51

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

He jerked at the drawer in his excitement. It fell, cut sharply on his shin, and on the reflex, he flung it at her.

One of the corners caught her brow as the shallow drawer crashed into the fireplace. She swayed, almost fell stunned from her chair. To her very soul she was sick; she clasped the child tightly to her bosom. (SL, 53) In this case, however, the violence is integrated more explicitly, and less analogically, into the psychological battles within the Morel family: it is an instance of what Lawrence would, with some dissatisfaction,

term

“that

hard,

violent

style

full of sensation

and

presentation” (II, 132). Zola’s novel uses violence in a manner which liberates it from subservience to a moral context which dictates that it should reflect upon characters in a certain way. Such fiction presents

the violence; Zola shows it. Violence of the kind seen in Zola’s novel

works to sustain the extended analogy between people and objects. In one

of the central

episodes,

at the scene

of a train

crash,

human

remains form part of the overall debris: “Some of the injured were sticking out from the heap, buried there chest-deep, crushed as in a vice and screaming.”*' The material anonymity of these bodies, maimed by a logic of destruction which pertains both externally and internally, moves the action along to a point where the novel ends simply because all of the main characters are either dead or in the torpid state brought on by the indulgence of their desires. Peter Brooks has conflated Zola’s detailed description of engines with the inexorable forward momentum of his plots: With Zola, nearly every novel centres on an engine itself or else a social institution that functions as an engine [....] Not only do these in each case provide the thematic core of the novels in which they figure, they also represent the dynamics of the narrative, furnish the motor power by which the plot moves forward. In this sense, Zola’s engines — like Balzac’s

*! Ibid., 296. 52

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

“devouring presses” — are a mise-en-abyme of the novel’s narrative motor, an explicit statement of the inclusion within the novel of the principle of its movement.” La Béte Humaine is a particularly interesting novel in this respect, since it concludes with pure and simple movement, having reduced itself to the statement of its own principle of propulsion. This formulation recalls the simple motion that Lawrence detected in the Futurists.° It also significantly echoes the process of chemical reduction that Lawrence would attribute to Edgar Allan Poe’s writings, with their concentration on material, psychological reactions, and their ultimately anatomical, metonymic focus (on Ligeia’s eyes, for instance,

or on Berenicé’s

teeth).™ In the process

of reduction,

everything is reduced to matter, and to the motion involved in its

slidings and collidings.*

In the ending to La Béte Humaine, all that is left is a symbol of the destructive energies animating the world of the novel. In these final

pages, Jacques

Lantier, one of the central characters, a train driver

tainted by the hereditary desire to kill women, is left with his fireman, Pecqueux, on a train filled with soldiers. The final scene favourite of Marinetti’s, who remembered it in his memoirs:

was

a

An hour later in our small pension I was reading aloud with a certain vehemence the epic Futurist finale of La Béte Humaine when a maritally betrayed machinist and an adulterous fireman came to blows with the engine going at full speed and fall off so that the locomotive realizing it was fully free of all control raced madly ahead hauling carloads of > Peter Brooks, Reading For the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1985), 45.

3°

See D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, 75-76.

°°

Lawrence

54

See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 75 and 81.

uses these terms

in his essay on Melville’s Moby-Dick,

Studies in Classic American Literature, 154.

53

in

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

soldiers through the terrorized stations like a cyclone thus becoming the lugubrious symbol of France of 1870. The

mutilated

driver

and

his

fireman,

crushing each other to death”,®’

“two

bloody

trunks

together with the carriages

still

of

drunken, singing soldiers (“cannon fodder”), “bound for the future, heedless of spilt blood”,** embody the vision of Man merged with machine that would animate all of Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos. Peter Brooks makes special mention of this ending, stating that “the erotic and aggressive desires of the human characters ultimately become invested in the industrial engine that subsumes and represents them all, laying bare the dynamic of the narrative text as pure motor

force”.” It is in the forward drive of the text and the engine that we

can locate the inhuman will that Lawrence sought to rescue from beneath Marinetti’s reactionary bombast. Marinetti’s celebration of the final scene in Zola’s novel as a symbol of war-time France suggests an acute awareness of the manner in which the author represented the energies of war through violent dramas in the text. The destructive energies of war give prominence to the violence in Zola, and Lawrence’s vision coincides with the vision

of Zola in his attribution of war to mass impersonal compulsions. The scene that forms the conclusion to La Béte Humaine finds startling echoes in Lawrence’s later war-time writings; particularly in Women

in Love,

where

the author tells his readers

there

could

be

found “the results in one’s soul of the war” (III, 143), and in the F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 318.

°7 Emile Zola, La Béte Humaine, 365. °8 Tbid., 366. 46. 6°

Peter Brooks, Reading For the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative , In Women

in Love note the scene in which the bodies of the drowned

Diana Crich and the young doctor are discovered, “her arms tight round the neck of the young

man,

choking him”

(D. H. Lawrence,

Women

in Love,

189). Indeed, a strong suggestion of tragic determinism hangs over the entire

54

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

short story “Tickets Please”, completed in December 1918, shortly after the end of the war.°' This seems to be the case because in the early stages of the war a short period of “hygienic” conflict seemed likely, making the Futurist position appear attractive to Lawrence, who incorporated the impersonal Futurist vocabulary into his novel in the last draft; by the time Women in Love was being written, however, Lawrence’s thought came closer to the deeper pessimism of Zola, and Zola’s method of embodying purely destructive war energies in individual characters becomes evident in his work. Lawrence uses an analytical Naturalist character portrayal in order to reveal processes of reductive sensationalism in Gerald Crich, internalizing through Gerald his deep sense of pessimism about the course the war was taking at the level of the individual psyche. This distinction will be worked out through my subsequent close readings of The Rainbow and Women in Love, but for now I will consider “Tickets Please” as a story which echoes La Béte Humaine both externally, in plot, and thematically, in terms of its embodiment of war energies. “Tickets Please” sets up an extended analogy between the selfabandonment and destructiveness of war and the thrills and dangers of the tram service in war-time England. The story has as its setting a Midlands tramline run by girl conductors and young male inspectors and drivers whose energies, allowed no outlet on the battlefield, find

expression through their work and in their sexual philanderings:

Crich family, as the inset narrative describing Gerald’s accidental childhood killing

of his

brother,

together

with

Gerald’s

indicate. *! This story’s original title, “John Thomas”, magazine

publications

to

“Tickets,

own

admission

was changed

Please!”

and

to

Birkin,

in successive

“The

Eleventh

Commandment”, probably to protect against charges of indecency. Lawrence subsequently adopted “Tickets Please”. The story was the only piece of fiction that Lawrence got into print in 1919. ° In the founding manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti declared that the Futurists would “glorify war — the world’s only hygiene” (F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 42).

55

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Since we are in war-time, the drivers are men unfit for active service: cripples and hunchbacks. So they have the spirit of the devil in them. The ride becomes a steeplechase. Hurray! — we have leapt in a clean jump over the canal bridges — now for the four-lane corner. With a shriek and a trail of sparks we are clear again. To be sure, a tram often leaps the rails — but what matter! It sits in a ditch till other trams come to haul it out. (EmyE, 34)

This war-time recklessness, and the mingling of the sexes in the workplace, upsets the conventions of courtship and creates a volatile environment in which sexual conflict is never far from the surface. The girl conductors revel in the atmosphere of danger: With a tram packed with howling colliers, roaring hymns downstairs and a sort of antiphony of obscenities upstairs, the lasses are perfectly at their ease. They pounce on the youths who try to evade their ticket-machine. They push off the men at the end of their distance. They are not going to be done in the eye — not they. They fear nobody — and everybody fears them. (EmyE, 35) In fact, the women police not only the male colliers, but also the male tram workers. They plan to confront a womanizing inspector aptly named John Thomas Raynor, but, in the event, the confrontation turns

into a savage, almost Bacchanalian attack:

He struggled in a frenzy of fury and terror, almost mad terror. His tunic was simply torn off his back, his shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked. The girls rushed at him, clenched their hands on him and pulled at him: or they rushed at him and pushed him, butted him with all their might: or they struck him wild blows. He ducked and cringed and struck sideways. (EmyE, 43) 56

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

It is an attack in whose aftermath the women are left mute and stupefied. The trams in “Tickets Please” embody an energy of disruption and destruction that propels the story forward and foretells the violent outburst of the women. They also capture the glamour of violence and destruction: a glamour that people in war-time are, according to Lawrence’s prognosis, drawn towards.” Zola’s method of embodying war energies by showing characters who are caught up in the destructive rhythms of the machines they tend is echoed by Lawrence here. I will go on, in Chapter Four, to show that Gerald Crich’s life is also caught up in a destructive, mechanistic, and regressive determinism, whose affinity is likewise to a pessimistic Naturalist impersonality. Zola’s Naturalism in England The convergence of Lawrence’s violent war-time character analysis in “Tickets Please” with that of Zola’s novel of France during the Franco-Prussian War is fascinating because of the distinct lack of a vital Zolaesque fiction in England before this time. In spite of the rapid appearance of translations of the French realist writers in England during the 1880s and 1890s, there was a widespread reaction against what was considered to be their Gallic excesses, their vulgarity, and their pernicious influence on public morals. England was at this time still in the grip of the circulating libraries, who dictated English taste by disseminating works whose subjects appeared sufficiently innocuous not to raise too much controversy with the press. This, of course, sometimes led to cases where the criteria for certain rejections were questioned, as was most ®

See,

in particular,

Lawrence’s

description

of the

wounded

soldier

at

Bognor in “The Crown”, and the fascination he holds for the women who view him (D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 291-92). I discuss this section of “The Crown” in Chapter Four.

57

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

notably the case with George Moore’s argument against the rejection of A Mummer’s Wife in 1885.™ It also led to the writing of articles like Thomas Hardy’s “Candour in English Fiction”, published in 1890, which reflected pessimistically on the possibilities for fiction in this

climate of censorship.” However, responsibility for the emergence of

a new fiction which could challenge the narrow censorship of these libraries and admit new emphases into the English novel rested upon publishers with the courage to publish controversial works cheaply for sale to a wide public, and these put themselves at the mercy of the authorities. Hardy is a fine example of a writer whose fiction activated a backlash from a public accustomed to library fiction. Certain reviewers of Hardy’s later novels accused the author of imitating Zola’s excesses, using this as a pretext for attacking both authors for being “disgusting” or “impious”. Hardy sought to reject the suggestion that Zola exerted any direct influence on his work, declaring that Zola’s fiction was too materialistic and claiming in 1895 to have read very little of Zola’s work. However, the very significant parallels in terms of character treatment and the use of physiology, particularly in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, have long been noted, and are given centre-stage by Lawrence in his famous assertion from the “Study of Thomas Hardy” that Egdon Heath is the source of great tragic power in The Return of

** Moore published a scathing attack on Mudie’s Circulating Library for their refusal of A Mummer’s Wife (1885) and A Modern Lover (1883). The piece was entitled “Literature At Nurse, or Circulating Morals: A Polemic on Victorian Censorship”. It is reproduced in a book bearing the same title

(Sussex: Harvester, 1976). 6 Fora reproduction of this article, see Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 125-33.

6° These adjectives are taken from Mrs Oliphant’s review of Jude the Obscure, which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. See Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. G. Cox (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 257.

58

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

the Native."’ The annexing of human energies to the energies of the earth and the animal kingdom led to a kind of fiction that publishing houses were reluctant to handle. Lawrence’s first three novels were all subject to the pressure for censorship exerted by the circulating libraries and felt in striking fashion by Hardy: a fact which is reflected in his change of publishers from Heinemann (who published The White Peacock, having forced a reluctant Lawrence to censor himself) to Duckworth, who published both The Trespasser and Sons and Lovers. In particular, Heinemann’s response to the manuscript of “Paul Morel” (an earlier version of Sons and Lovers), which so outraged Lawrence, reveals the pressure for fiction to conform both aesthetically and morally to the demands of the libraries: the novel is said to lack unity and character development as well as the required levels of reticence.“ Duckworth also published The Prussian Officer and Other Stories in November 1914. As we will see in the next chapter, it was this collection that contained a first fully-developed expression of Lawrence’s impersonal preoccupations and_ his connecting of human energies to the energies of matter. Reactions to the collection ominously dwelt upon its morbidity. One of Lawrence’s reviewers in The Standard explicitly invoked the spectre of Zola, writing: “We notice here an inclination towards a rather hideous form of naturalism.” Lawrence heard rumours through E. M. Forster that the authorities meant to withdraw

the book

from circulation, and it

was believed that Sir Jesse Boot was refusing to supply the book to subscribers of his circulating library because he considered it “disgusting”.”” Lawrence was understandably sensitive to reviews which linked his own fiction with that of Zola. In a 1925 interview §7 See D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, 25. For a discussion of the connections between Zola and Hardy, see William Newton,

“Hardy and the Naturalists: Their Use of Physiology”, Modern Philology, 49

(August 1952), 28-41. 8 See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 455. ® Quoted in John Worthen’s Introduction to The Lost Girl, xxxiii-xxxiv. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 257, footnote 3.

59

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism with Kyle Crichton, an American

author and journalist, Lawrence

is

said to have observed that his early novels were considered Zolaesque. Lawrence revealingly added to this observation a further comment on his connection with Zola: “They thought it [the comparison] would put me down [...] but I took it as a compliment. I thought highly of

Zola then, and I still do.””!

The most famous publisher of controversial fiction in London in the late nineteenth-century was Henry Vizetelly (1820-1894), who published translations of Zola’s works in England, and who was also responsible for publishing English novels which other publishers would have avoided, such as A Mummer’s Wife. Vizetelly was central to the appearance in English of the French realists, publishing works by Zola, Flaubert, Bourget and Maupassant. The emergence of these controversial new works was halted by the August 1888 trial of Vizetelly on the charge of publishing obscene books, which resulted in a fine and his release, conditional upon good behaviour in the following twelve months

(a condition which forbade him to publish

works considered obscene during that period). As a consequence, Vizetelly subsequently published modified and censored translations

of Zola.

Even

these

altered

versions,

however,

brought

him

more

trouble and another trial in May 1889. This time, Vizetelly was sent to prison for three months: a sentence which outraged a large group of English writers and men of letters (including Thomas Hardy) who petitioned the Home Secretary for Vizetelly’s release. Thus, the controversies concerning Zola’s works in England in the 1880s and early 1890s secured public interest but prevented a considered engagement with the style or objectives of Naturalism at

this time. In the mid-1890s, when the controversy had died down, an

English fiction sharing some of the social concerns of French realism emerged, but its energies and its vision, lost in the controversies of previous

"

D.

H.

years,

were

Lawrence:

largely

absent,

subsumed

in the

Interviews

and

Recollections,

ed.

(London: Macmillan, 1981), II, 215.

60

clamour

Norman

for

Page

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

novels depicting naturalistic subject matters, such incompatibility. William C. Frierson has written that:

as

marital

The realistic controversy died down, as we see, after a partial victory had been won for the principle of realism. But the victory secured for English realists no new license of expression in the matter of sex treatment. One result of the Vizetelly trial, as W. L. George tells us, was to make English publishers very timorous in accepting work which dealt too intimately with carnal relationships. When unconventional situations were treated “a thick veil of ellipse and metaphor” was therefore necessary.” The entrance of Zola’s naturalistic fiction into England was therefore crucially truncated and deprived of the serious consideration it deserved. It was D. H. Lawrence, through his subversion of the sanitized English realists, who resurrected the energies of Zola’s Naturalism, and it was he who suffered the consequences of the Vizetelly trial in his locating of these energies in the treatment of sexual relations. The extent of the differences between the vision of continental Naturalism and that of the English realists is starkly illustrated by George

Moore’s

letter to Lawrence

in January

1918.

In a separate

letter of 18 December 1917, Lawrence had informed his literary agent that he had indirectly heard of George Moore’s praise for Women in Love.” In January 1918, Lawrence wrote to Moore asking if he would

like to read some manuscripts that were available.” In response, he received a letter from Moore in which the tenor of Moore’s social vision is made quite explicit. Praising Sons and Lovers, Moore

2

William C. Frierson, “English Controversy Over Realism in Fiction 1885-

®

See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Ill, 191.

95”, Publications (1928), 550.

of the Modern

Language

4 See ibid., 196.

61

Association

of America,

43

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

reproduces Galsworthy’s criticism of the “vague animal abstractions” in the war-time novels, expressing a preference for novels of description over novels of ideas. He goes on: If I may venture to criticize your writings in detail, I would say, for I believe the criticism may be of use to you, that I should like you to keep the classes separate. It is possible that miners’ sons may retire into corners, while their mother is laying the kitchen table for supper, to discuss Shelley’s poetry and Sarah Bernhardt. But it does not seem to me wise to introduce these incongruities into prose narrative. I doubt very much if Shelley’s poetry and Sarah Bernhardt’s French accent should ever find their way into English prose narrative, and if I feel certain about anything in this world, it is that reapers from the corn fields should not indulge in aesthetics. (III, 196) Moore, whose work was considered controversial in England and who attacked the circulating libraries’ stranglehold on the appearance of new fiction, wants to stress in these lines the difference between the English and French sensibilities, and he locates this difference in the class structure.’”” He reacts against Lawrence’s francophile allusions, and his un-English mixing of the classes, casting a critical eye on the presence of French expressions and Lettie’s rambling French outbursts (together with her discussion of aesthetics with the farm labourer George

Saxton)

in

The

White

Peacock,

and

on

the

presence

of

Baudelaire’s poetry in Sons and Lovers. Moore’s recommendations to Lawrence polemicize the kind of pessimistic social outlook that Lawrence had detected in Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns. The French accent which Lawrence introduced into the English novel, in reaction against these English realists, went beyond the subversion of George Moore was himself an aristocratic Irish landowner with vast lands in County Mayo. He spent his formative years in Paris, turning to literature after failing in his attempts to become a painter. See Tony Gray, A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996).

62

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism a restricted social vision: it included his use of a continental Naturalist

approach to character and to the embodying of war energies in both “Tickets Please” and Women in Love.

Lawrence: between Futurism and Naturalism In articulating a way beyond Armold Bennett’s social fiction, Lawrence expressed his interest in the kind of impersonal energies

which Marinetti had celebrated in La Béte Humaine. This, as we have

noted, places

him at the interface of two movements

visions of human

energies, but quite different

with similar

intellectual

outlooks.

Zola operates within a deterministic frame of reference informed by

Darwin, Comte and Taine, and is fascinated by the idea of accounting

for human ideas and behaviour in medical terms: the tone of his engagement with this intellectual background is essentially tragic, and he is drawn to a regressive view of human life in the impersonal climate of the cities. Marinetti, in contrast, takes his chief influences

for the development

of Futurism

from

the intellectual

climate

of

Nietzsche and Georges Sorel, and from the arts (Zola, Whitman, Paul

Adam, Gustave Kahn, Verhaeren and Alfred Jarry are particularly relevant here), distils from their works a view of the energy of the

cities, and, in an Italian climate of rapid industrialization, fashions a

movement which celebrates the march of machinery and its opening up of possibilities for the domination of nature. Futurism’s idealistic optimism draws on physics and progress, where Zola’s Naturalism rests on biology and regression. It took time for Lawrence to understand, through his own writings, the dual nature of the impersonality that interested him when he read Marinetti. Lawrence’s summer 1914 announcement of his impersonal concerns reveals the confusion occasioned in his mind by Marinetti’s decontextualization of the mechanistic energies in La Béte Humaine. His first extended reference to Futurism in a letter of 2 June 1914

reveals his awareness of the Futurist desire to subject both life and art

to the laws of physics, and it also indicates a recognition of Futurist optimism. I will quote the lengthy discussion in full, for future reference: 63

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

I have been interested in the futurists. I got a book of their poetry — a very fat book too — and a book of pictures — and I read Marinetti’s and Paolo Buzzi’s manifestations [sic] and essays — and Soffici’s essays on cubism and futurism. It interests me very much. I like it because it is the applying to emotions of the purging of the old forms and sentimentalities. I like it for its saying — enough of this sickly cant, let us be honest and stick by what is in us [....] They want to deny every scrap of tradition and experience, which is silly. They are very young, infantile, college-student and medical-student at his most blatant. But I like them. Only I don’t believe in them. I agree with them about the weary sickness of pedantry and tradition and inertness, but I don’t agree with them as to

the cure and the escape. They will progress down the purely male or intellectual or scientific line. They will even use their intuition for intellectual and scientific purpose. The only thing about their art is that it isn’t art, but ultra-ultra intellectual,

going beyond Maeterlinck and the Symbolistes, who are intellectual. There isn’t one trace of naiveté in the works — though there’s plenty of naiveté in the authors. It’s the most self-conscious, intentional, pseudo scientific stuff on the face

of the earth. Marinetti begins “Italy is like a great Dreadnought surrounded by her torpedo boats”. That is it exactly — a great mechanism. Italy has got to go through the most mechanical and dead stage of all — everything is appraised according to its mechanic value — everything is subject to the laws of physics. (II, 180-81) Here, Lawrence states the Futurist preoccupation with physics and demonstrates this with reference to a characteristic excerpt from Marinetti, celebrating war machinery. Finding himself in agreement with their desire to abolish old forms and sentiments, he intuitively distances himself from their reactionary self-consciousness. He likens

64

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

the young artists to medical students:”° a significant metaphor, which shows Lawrence already reviving the Zolaesque physiological slant of this Futurist outlook from its encasement in Marinetti’s rhetoric of physics. Futurist naiveté is being located in the referral of life and art to mechanical energies whose progressive tendencies Marinetti can uphold only by his desire to eliminate all psychology from literature. This quixotic desire is expressed in the May 1912 “Technical Manifesto

of Futurist

Literature”,

to which

Lawrence

refers in the

famous letter to Garnett. Once again, I quote at length for the purposes of later discussion:

But when I read Marinetti — “the profound intuitions of life added one to the other, word by word, according to their illogical conception, will give us the general lines of an intuitive physiology of matter” — I see something of what I am after. I translate him clumsily, and his Italian is obfuscated — and I don’t care about physiology of matter — but somehow — that which is physic — non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old fashioned human element — which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I object to. In Turguenev, and in Tolstoi, and in Dostoievski, the moral scheme into which all the characters fit — and it is nearly the same scheme — is, whatever the extraordinariness of the characters themselves, dull, old, dead.

When

Marinetti writes: “It is the solidity of a blade of steel

that it interesting by itself, that is, the incomprehending and inhuman alliance of its molecules in resistance to, let us say, a

bullet. The heat of a piece of wood or iron is in fact more

7° Lawrence’s immediate stimulus may have been Marinetti’s curtailed — and rather discordant — reference to “microbes” in the final paragraph of the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”: “Microbes — don’t forget — are

essential to the health Selected Writings, 89).

of the

intestines

65

and

stomach”

(F.

T.

Marinetti,

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

passionate, for us, than the laughter or tears of a woman” — then

I know

what he means.

He

is stupid, as an artist, for

contrasting the heat of the iron and the laugh of the woman. Because what is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the molecules of steel or their action in heat: it is the inhuman will, call it physiology, or like Marinetti — physiology of matter, that fascinates me. I don’t care so much about what the woman feels — in the ordinary usage of the word. that presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the woman is — what she is — inhumanly, physiologically, materially — according to the use of the word: but for me, what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception. That is where the futurists are stupid. Instead of looking for the new human phenomenon, they will only look for the phenomena of the science of physics to be found in human being [sic]. They are crassly stupid. But if anyone would give them eyes, they would pull the right apples off the tree, for their stomachs are

true in appetite. (II, 182-83)

Marinetti, celebrating the energies he found in Zola by blinding himself to the pessimistic biological determinism which lay behind Naturalism, has to create an obfuscated new vocabulary to account for the mechanistic energies found in a Man devoid of psychology. Marinetti’s original phrase, “fisicologia intuitiva della materia”,”’ translated by Lawrence as “intuitive physiology of matter”, and replaced by “psicologia intuitiva della materia” (intuitive psychology of matter) in Italian reprints, shows him using one of his characteristic compound words (much in the same way as he uses “body-madness” [fisicofollia] to describe the dominance of instinct and intuition over psychology in the manifesto entitled “The Variety Theatre””’). In fact, ” 8

1 Poeti Futuristi, 20. See F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 120.

66

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

“physicology” meaning, as functionings

might Emile

of the

be a closer approximation to Marinetti’s Delavenay has suggested:” the physical

mechanical

energies

in all matter,

animate

or

inanimate. Lawrence, dismissing the blind idealism of the Futurist rejection of psychology as “crassly stupid”, construes Marinetti to mean physiology, states his special interest in showing how impersonal energies operate on human subjects, and so frees the hidden framework of Zola’s Naturalism from Marinetti’s suppression

of it.”

Lawrence’s freeing of this physiological slant from the rhetoric of physics would help to account for the images which he uses to outline his new conception of character and fictional form in the letter to Garnett. The first image, concerning character, refers us to chemistry (a field which T. S. Eliot also used to announce his quite different

aesthetics of impersonality*’):

There is another ego, according to whose action the individual

is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radicallyunchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond — but I say “diamond, what!

7

See

Emile

Phenomenon,

Delavenay

145.

in

The

Modernists:

Studies

in

a

This

Literary

8° In his Introduction to Marinetti’s Selected Writings, 20, R. W. Flint,

quoting this letter, states: “One might conclude from this that Lawrence had merely rediscovered nineteenth-century Continental Naturalism in a new form, the social Darwinism of Blind Forces in Zola and the Goncourts.”

5! In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot would use a

chemical analogy to elaborate on the separation of the man who suffers from the mind which creates. In this analogy, the poet’s mind is a catalyst, transmuting emotions and feelings into the stuff of art whilst remaining unchanged by the process. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 17-18.

67

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

is carbon”. And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my

theme is carbon). (II, 183)

Prompted by his Futurist readings to realize his vision through this simile of chemical allotropy (one of the poems appearing in J Poeti Futuristi is Luciano Folgore’s “Al Carbone” [“‘To Coal’)), the passage nonetheless echoes the special pleadings of Zola, asking that his readership be aware of his intention to show characters existing under the inexorable laws of their physical nature. Carbon, we should recall, is the base element of all biological life. The second image (that of the Chladni plate) describes the new form of Lawrence’s fiction in terms of a physical experiment in which a visible acoustic is produced in sand. The experiment, however, uncovers an harmonic structure in the music produced by the fiddlebow: the patterns produced are not fixed, but their contingency contains a highly-ordered provisional shape which invokes the continual movement of atoms. One critic has written that these patterns are “all intricate, balanced, beautiful, and strongly resembling the structure of living organisms”.*’ Lawrence’s use of this simile is consistent,

then,

with

a concern

for

biological

determinism.

The

Futurists preferred noise to music, not wanting to submit Dionysian energies to Apollonian structure since structured music appealed to the emotions, all forms of which the Futurists rejected as passéiste. Lawrence’s announcements of his innovations place him between the Futurist concentration on matter and the physiological realm of Zola’s Naturalism: he desires to structure his work along the lines of a scientific logic which preserves a conception of psychology that only approximates to physical processes in matter. His images demonstrate how his vision attempts to reconcile Marinetti’s impulse to reject

moralism

and

sentiment,

and

to

celebrate

modern

energies,

with

® Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 70.

Lawrence:

An Illustrated Biography

Zola’s treatment of how such energies, in action through humans, might not only be violent but regressive and savage. As we will see,

68

Lawrence, Marinetti and Zola’s Naturalism

the two positions are not finally reconciled in Lawrence’s major wartime novels; rather, they are polarized as the Futurist extension of language and search for new forms of expression, and the Naturalist analysis of humans as reduced to simple regressive matter and energy. The polarization I am going to be arguing for in Lawrence’s major war-time novels gives a particular emphasis to Marinetti’s assimilation of Zola. In Marinetti’s idealistic take on Zola’s determinism we may perhaps find evidence of a popular misconception of Darwin. Anne Fernihough has written that “Darwin proved unable to prevent teleology from infiltrating popular conceptions of his theories, perhaps because the nineteenth century was witnessing such a proliferation of examples of technological ‘progress’”.*’ She also states that “much nineteenth-century writing had used the railway as an emblem of progress;

Lawrence

uses

it to

deconstruct

the

whole

concept

of

it places

on

progress, transforming the image of teleology into that of a blind, relentlessly self-perpetuating instrumentality which takes no account of the havoc it wreaks on its way”.** Marinetti clearly engaged with Zola’s railroad symbolism as a harbinger of progress. Zola’s vision throughout

the

novel,

however,

with

regression and wasteful destruction, attributes to the Lawrence of Women “conscious of the blind forces of life which consists of struggle and death”.®° In the next two chapters my purpose between the Futurist struggle for new

the

emphasis

is that which Fernihough in Love: Zola’s characters are weighing down on them, life is to show how the dichotomy forms of expression, and the

Naturalist analysis of humans as reduced to will, matter and energy, is

revealed in the two major novels of the war years: The Rainbow and Women in Love. The former novel will be seen to have contained a celebration of the Futurist desire for new expression, whilst the later

83 Anne Fernihough, D. H. Clarendon Press, 1993), 174.

4 8

Lawrence:

Ibid., 173. Emile Zola, La Béte Humaine, 243. 69

Aesthetics

and

Ideology

(Oxford:

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

work reveals a self-conscious tension between pessimistic sense of Naturalist regression.

this desire

and

a

Initially, however, in the first parts of Chapter Three, I will turn to

the writings which immediately followed the final drafts of Sons and Lovers in order to trace the course of Lawrence’s work out of the realism of his earlier fiction and towards the new conception of character, style and form that emerged from his various readings.

70

we

£20 Medio sai Verse lidere # PAOLO

8UZZI

| M BISMO ‘

FUTURISM 1

ENZO ‘Dt

PUT URISTE SCESIA.

so | Cow there ot

'

1 LLUSTAALIOM OF TALS, 3OCC:OM, 2349UE,

2) US TSS I TU

Enrice Cavacchioll

Se NSS

Batuds

oe SZANNE, PICASSO, WSSGLO, SEVERIN, LOFFICE »

cormtgne

I

[ TUREUEATO OALLs Giementa oetin yoo « cmanse. von

oseetet

sae Libero Altomare - Marie

Pasle Burzi - Ennice Caraile - Giuseppe Carneri

+

| POET! FUTURIST!

SOFFICI

Figure 1 The two Futurist volumes Lawrence definitely consulted in summer

1914: J Poeti Futuristi (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1912) and Ardengo Soffici, Cubismo e Futurismo (Florence: Libreria Della Voce, 1914).

No. 3

POETRY

AND

DRAMA

Serr. 1913

CONTENTS VARIA:

cy

Feveriss—Mirioct—Furariet Pectry—Brandsides cod Chse-besio—Poerry tad Sermoc—Medal Advertinamant—-The Pecey Secery—Lqarante’s Bapr—Peewy «0 The Lagi Revine—Neres 10d Annoustunese.

POETRY:

Anrep. . : : : : : Paolo Buzzi \ F. T. Marioera +} Trasslated by Harold Moaro Aldo Palarzeschi F. S. Fline E-mnest Collings

: .

:

+

27

:

-

298 306 i)

STUDIES AND A?PRECIATIONS: Robere Bridges . . : « Lareclles dbererembie The New Fumrise Micifesto : : F. 7. Marinas’ Poecry Alive. : B. Caldeell Cost Gordoa Craig aad the Theitre of the Furuse John Carnes Suggested Use of 2 Vowel-Mark ia Ragluh. Sir Ronald Rots . . Willer Plarr A Savage Poer . CHRONICLES :

Carreat English Poecryp

French Chronicie

—.

:

:

:

«

:

:

:

Ernest Rhye

F.S. Flint

REVIEWS :

315 319 327 334 540 344 348

357

38

Poems : Jona Geaid Fletcher—?eems: fons Alferd—Seem to Pirses: sad etner Puredion 10d Divertiom; The Three Hill 10d ether Poems: J. < Sqerre——Coltecled Pocms: Aasda Detvwa—Eve rad ocher Peams : Ralph Hedgree—The Fluce of Sardearr: Edmund Jone—Simes Deas : Sand: Wiseo—la Lavender Cover : Dormer

Freper—Pdgrassge of Gree: Aber Shirley Cappe—Vildiosr, A

Pease Drums : Rewild Campbell Mactre—-The Quiet Spine : j. S$.

Muirhed—Seap trom Lemar: WM Lore

A

LIST

OF

RECENT

BOOKS

[(Axwotatzo]

2.)

.

577

Figure 2 The contents page of the “Futurist” number of Harold Monro’s journal Poetry and Drama for September 1913.

Figure 3 Umberto Boccioni “Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio (Natura morta)”. 1912. Source: Soffici.

Figure 4 Carlo Carra “Donna + bottiglia + casa (Espansione plastico nello spazio)”. 1913. Source: Soffici.

Figure 5 Gino Severini “Treno in un paesaggio”. Source: Soffici.

Figure 6

Carlo Carra “Forze centrifughe”. 1913. Source: Soffici.

WIRELESS IMAGINATIQN WORDS AT LIBERTY THE

NEW

FUTURIST

AND

MANIFESTO

(Taassuateo ay Agoyoet oer Rr)

The

Fucurist Consciousness HE “ Techaical Maatiesto of Fucurist Liceracuce,” ia whied [ origi-

aaced erential und rynthetic lyricirm, wirclest imagination and free

werd, is coacerned solely wich goetic inspiratioa.

Phidosopay, politics, jouraalinm, teaching, busines, che eract sciences, while aacurally seeking more o¢ less synthetic forms of expression, will,

however, for 1 loag period, scill have to use syarax, rdjectiver, 20d suacdua-

tioa.

U myrtelf 1c obliged, 1s you tec, to use all these in order co etpound

my coacencioa Co you.

Fucusism is dased oa chac complete renewal of humaa teasibilicy which

has eaten place siace the geese scientific discoveria. Those who use Celegraphs,

eraasadances,

teleghones, zramophoncs, cycles,

dirigibles,

sccoolanes,

mocor-cycles,

kinemacograohs,

big

to-day

aotor-cacs,

daily

capers

(syachesis of che world’s day) do aoc cealise thae chese diferent mezas of communicacion, of transit, 10d of information exercise 1 very decisive intnence aa their arycar. . The orcsnary aia say, wich a day's craia jouraey, go from 1 small city

wich emocy squares, -whecs che sua, the dust, sad the wind

olay ia sileace,

co a great capital, deisdiag with ligha, movement, rad cries. The iahadiczac

of s mountain village c2a, every day, ia a aewspaper, follow with ruspense

che movemcant of the Chinese rebels, the English tad the Americza sudragetzes, Dr Carrel sad the heroic sledges of the Arctic explocers. The pusillaaimous and sedentary citizen of any proviacial cowa cia adored x19

Figure7 The first page of Arundel Del Re’s translation of a Marinetti manifesto in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama for September 1913.

Chapter Three The Emergence of a New Vision: From the “Burns Novel” Fragments to The Rainbow

The writings which immediately followed completion of the final draft of Sons and Lovers in November 1912 are valuable documents in tracing the innovation of Lawrence’s style in the movement out of his youthful period. They emerge from a phase in which he was fighting to externalize the forms of English Edwardian fiction (the “old forms and sentimentalities” [II, 180]) and to envision a kind of writing which, through a radical subversion of these forms, would allow him

to explore the theme of non-social human development that they had masked or frustrated. Lawrence’s immediate predicament in the writings which followed Sons and Lovers involved the move away from the material of a novel which had yielded him his metaphysic and, in the long period of its composition, come to seem too conventional in its presentation to contain the impersonal vision it strains towards. The “hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation” (II, 132), “accumulating objects in the powerful light of emotion, and making a scene of them”

(II, 142), was considered to be inadequate to the capturing of this vision. Yet, the emotion and the sensation emerged in large part from the painfully personal nature of the material he brought to the writing of the novel. The brash impersonality of the Futurist manifestos would crystallize the subversion of Edwardian fiction and enable Lawrence to articulate a new idea of form for his novels in the summer of 1914,

but the movement away from a personal fiction would preoccupy from November 1912 onwards. The writings of this post-Sons Lovers period show Lawrence struggling to move beyond transformed autobiographical content of that novel and to explore

him and the his

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism new-found metaphysic, which would find its first articulation in the “Foreword to Sons and Lovers”, completed by 20 January 1913. The “Burns Novel” and “Elsa Culverwell” fragments At the end of October 1912 Lawrence first suggested to Edward Garnett that the work he would move on to would be entitled “Scargill Street”: a novel of working-class life.’ By 19 November 1912 he is defending Sons and Lovers in his letter to Garnett, answering the kind of sweeping criticisms about form and character development that had been voiced in Heinemann’s rejection of its earlier form (“Paul Morel”) in early July 1912. “I tell you it has got form — form” (I, 476), he declares: It’s a great tragedy, and I tell you I’ve written a great book. It’s the tragedy of thousands of young men in England [....] Now tell me if I haven’t worked out my theme, like life, but always my theme. Read my novel — it’s a great novel. If you can’t see the development — which is slow like growth — I can.

(I, 477)

This appraisal of his own work betrays a desire to push the new novel away

from

him

(“like the true maternal

instinct, that kicks

off an

offspring as soon as it can go on its own legs” [I, 491]): he wishes to universalize the painfully autobiographical (though consciously transformed) content of Sons and Lovers and mounts a defence of it along objective aesthetic and thematic lines. The Foreword constitutes another move in this direction, casting the novel’s development, or the tragic momentum of the plot, in biblical terms. Here, Lawrence asserts that “in the flesh of the woman does God enact Himself’, and he states the importance to her of

finding a man with the strength to fulfil this enactment (SL, 472). If

the man denies her, or is too weak, then she turns to her son as a go-

between, realizing herself through her offspring: '

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 466.

72

The Emergence of a New Vision

And if that Woman be his mother, then is he her lover in part

only: he carries for her, but is never received unto her for his confirmation and renewal, and so wastes himself away in the

flesh. The old son-lover was (Edipus. The name of the new one is legion. And if a son-lover take a wife, then is she not his wife, she is only his bed. And his life will be torn in twain, and his wife in her despair shall hope for sons, that she may have her lover in her hour. (SL, 473) This articulation of the tragic momentum of Sons and Lovers announces the emergence of a metaphysic which will finally be voiced through the project he entitled “The Sisters” (forerunner of The Rainbow and Women in Love): it is the positive flip-side of the tragic mother-son Oedipal scenario (“woman becoming individual, selfresponsible, taking her own initiative” [H, 165]). Between the process of working towards the announcement of the new metaphysic of Sons and Lovers and its exploration in the major fiction, however, came the struggle to put some distance between the tragic, transformed autobiographical content of Sons and Lovers and a new project which could develop the insights it provided and seek an alternative to the earlier novel’s narrative of frustrated love. The subversion of that novel’s tragic vision required an upheaval in narrative form that the reading of Marinetti and the Futurists would finally facilitate. Their concentration on the impersonal energies of matter would ultimately provide a new language for The Rainbow, and a new way of casting relationships in a non-sentimental, less sensational light. As a prelude to my reading of The Rainbow I want to trace the kind of fiction that Lawrence wrote immediately after Sons and Lovers in his attempt to avoid the presentation, the hard, violent

style, and the visualized prose that he considered to embody the pessimism of the old type of writing. By 17 December 1912, the “Scargill Street” novel has been dropped, and the tale of the common people has become another kind

73

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

of Kiinstlerroman (like Sons and Lovers). Lawrence writes to Arthur McLeod: I am thinking so hard of my new novel, and since I am feeling hard pushed again, am in the right tune for it. It is to be a life

of Robert Burns — but I shall make him live near home, as a

Derbyshire man — and shall fictionize the circumstances. But I have always loved him, in a way. He seems a good deal like myself — nicer in most ways. I think I can do him almost like an autobiography. Tell Miss Mason the Life came all right, and give her my thanks. I am waiting for her letter before I write. If it would amuse you, just peep round and see if you can spot anything interesting about Burns, in the library, during the holiday. I’ve only got Lockhart’s Life. I should like to know more about the Highland Mary episode. Do you think it’s interesting?

(I, 487)

The letter reveals Lawrence’s predicament. This novel will be set in the industrial Midlands of Sons and Lovers and concern the life of a writer who is a good deal like the author (as Paul Morel, the aspiring painter, had been). The resulting work will be “almost like an autobiography” (another version of his earlier novel). Since Lawrence realizes the dangers to his own progress of retreading the same ground in the new work, he wants to locate Burns’ life over the border from

Nottinghamshire in Derbyshire, and he seeks to read as much about Burns’ life as possible in order to direct the project away from its purely autobiographical course.” ? Lawrence referred to J. G. Lockhart’s Life of Robert Burns (1828) and Andrew Lang’s 274-page volume of Selected Poems (1905). It is likely that McLeod forwarded notes to him from W. E. Henley’s biographical essay in Poetry of Robert Burns (1896), which Henley also edited. See a later letter to McLeod for the details of his readings (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 504-505).

biography

Lawrence’s

of Burns,

friend,

and

in

Catherine

1927

Carswell,

Lawrence

74

later

wrote

to

came

her

to write

denouncing

a

The Emergence of a New Vision A letter to Edward Garnett, also of 17 December enlists outside advice about the project:

1912, similarly

I’ve thought of a new novel I’m keen on. It’s a sort of life of Robert Burns. But I’m not Scotch. So I shall just transplant him to home - or on the hills of Derbyshire — and do as I like

with him as far as circumstances

man. (I, 489) The

potential

Lawrence

risk

considers

becomes Burns

still

more

go, but I shall stick to the

evident

so like himself,

there

here:

given

that

is a risk that the

transplanting of him to the Midlands will entail a kind of projection on the author’s part, and that the presentation and personal emotion that he had criticized in Sons and Lovers will return in the new work. In fact, the “Burns Novel” fragments counter the dangers of repeating the limitations he perceived in the earlier work through a concentration on thematizing characters being driven by forces and desires that they do not understand. The action takes place at dusk on a November day. A youth of twenty, Jack Haseldine, calls through the dimness to his donkey. A girl of about eighteen (Mary Renshaw: possibly the model for Highland Mary) hears the cries and calls back to direct him to the animal. They exchange pleasantries, and Jack returns home with the firewood he has gathered. Later, going out to check the snares he has set, he walks on (not knowing his own mind) to Mary’s house. The two meet, and Jack mimics her call to him from the field: ““He’s here!’”, he suddenly said, curiously and lovingly

imitating the voice in which she had called to him on the common. ““‘He’s here’! — I thought it was a witch o’ the 29

woods callin’.

Lockhart’s

biography

for its middle-class

presumption

and

understand Burns (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, V1, 231-32).

75

its failure to

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

He had got her tightly clasped to his bosom,

trembling.

and was

“What made thee ca’ to me?” he asked. “T niver thought,” she replied. (LAH, 208)

The thematic

concentration here is upon

large, blind forces which

move the characters to act, but remain unknowable. These forces are

suggested by setting (the darkness through which the characters call to each other), but also by the annexing of individual energies to the larger energies of the natural world (Mary’s hair is “red as a squirrel”; Jack’s irritable pride in the family setting connects him firmly to the donkey). Lawrence has Jack come across a rabbit in a snare (recalling a scene between Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, whose reflections upon the cruelty of marital entrapment had previously led to numerous echoes in The White Peacock’): “He had snared and killed hundreds, but this one frightened him. It was a living little rabbit-person with dark eyes, and it was afraid of him” (LAH, 206-207). As Michael Black has shown, this rabbit becomes “in some

way associated with [Mary]”, although the symbolic weight we can attach to this association remains uncertain.’ Lawrence’s use of the 3 The episode occurs in Part Four, Chapter Two of Jude the Obscure (London: Penguin, 1983), 274-77. Jude and Sue, separated by unhappy marriages, sleep in houses on opposite sides of a green. In the night, both hear the crying of a rabbit caught in a gin, and, unable to sleep, go out to set it free. They meet, but the rabbit is beyond help and is humanely dispatched by Jude. The clever use of this symbol to reflect upon the cruelty of nature and society is taken up directly in The White Peacock, where scenes of destruction in nature are used to comment upon the destructiveness of human relations. In Part One, Chapter Nine (“Lettie Comes of Age”) Hardy is drawn upon by Marie, the maid, as evidence that life is terrible. See also Lawrence’s

poem, ‘Rabbit Snared in the Night’ (D. H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, 24042) “ Michael Black, “‘Theorizing Myself Out’: Lawrence after Sons and Lovers: ‘The Burns Novel’ and ‘Elsa Culverwell’”, The Cambridge Quarterly, XXVI1/3 (1997), 250.

76

The Emergence of a New Vision episode with Bismarck (Winifred Crich’s rabbit) in Women in Love would exhibit a tighter and more subtle command of the particular resonances generated by natural forces, but this incident signals a step towards this mature style. The problem is that the impersonal forces are being kept too close to the thematic surface of the text, and need to be insisted upon at this level because the form of the work is still quite conventional and linear. Perhaps it was this flaw that led Lawrence to abandon the project by 29 December 1912 after confiding to Ernest Collings that it was “more clever than good” (I, 491). On 23 December, Lawrence had written to Sallie Hopkin: “I shall do my work for women, better than the suffrage” (I, 490). The comment foretells a further shift in his subject matter and its narrative form that would lead directly into the major fiction of the war years. Twenty manuscript pages of a first-person narrative entitled “Elsa Culverwell” would follow the “Burns Novel” project. Lawrence writes: I’ve stewed my next novel inside me for a week or so, and have begun dishing it up. It’s going to have a bit of a plot, and I don’t think it’Il be unwieldy, because it’ll be further off from me and won’t come down on my head so often. (A bit mixed in the metaphor). (I, 496-97)

Again, the emphasis is upon distancing the work from the transformed

autobiography of its predecessors. In this case, the objective will be achieved by having a female narrator, though once more the concentration will be on plot, keeping things closer to the surface in order to avoid violence and sentiment, as had been the implication of Lawrence’s chasing up of Burns’ external biographical details. Yet, the Culverwell family (like the Houghton family of The Lost Girl) is closely based upon the Staynes family, of whom Miriam is the daughter in the first extant draft of Sons and Lovers.’ This new work is still drawing on the material of the earlier novel. 5

See D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, xx-xxi.

77

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Before

considering the “Elsa Culverwell”

piece it is crucial to

rehearse its complex evolution into the later works, in order to realize

just how catalytic it proved to be. In early 1913, “Elsa Culverwell” was itself to be abandoned in favour of a development of its material into “The Insurrection of Miss Houghton”. Two hundred pages of this novel were completed between January and March before its content seemed too improper for publication. The manuscript was lost, so that we can only guess at its content, which was very likely quite satirical: Lawrence, whilst enjoying writing it, was concerned that it “will give most folk extreme annoyance to read; if it doesn’t bore them” (I, 505).

He nevertheless liked the novel immensely, declaring “it is quite different in manner from my other stuff — far less visualized” (I, 511). In the absence of the manuscript we can only speculate as to the meaning of “less visualized”: it may imply that the writing was more plot-driven than his earlier work had been, and less reliant upon descriptive poetry (he would go on to call its style “all analytical” [I, 526]). One of the few things that we do know for sure about the lost manuscript is that Elsa becomes Anna Houghton (who will go on to become Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl).© The name invokes Anna Tellwright in Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns, which Lawrence had

read in October 1912 (“The Insurrection of Miss Houghton” may therefore have been developed as a first explicit rewriting of Bennett’s pessimism). “The Insurrection of Miss Houghton” was put to one side whilst Lawrence began “The Sisters”, and during the war it was left in

Germany. “The Sisters” invites comparison to “Elsa Culverwell” in its use of a first-person narrator and its focus on a heroine.’ Lawrence tried to retrieve “The Insurrection of Miss Houghton” after completion of The Rainbow but was unable to do so, and so returned to the earlier drafts of The Rainbow in order to develop Women in Love out of this earlier work. “The Insurrection of Miss Houghton” was rewritten as The Lost Girl after the war.

°

Ibid., xxii.

For evidence

that “The

Sisters”

had

a first-person

narrator,

see

The

Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1, 550, and The Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, Il, 20.

78

The Emergence of a New Vision “Elsa Culverwell” may be seen in many senses as a breakthrough piece in Lawrence’s transition phase. It avoids the descriptive excesses of the “Burns Novel” fragments, it heralds the emergence of a heroine at the centre of the action, and its first-person form looks

forward to “The Sisters”. The main problem with “Elsa Culverwell” is to be located in Lawrence’s handling of the first person. His first novel, The White Peacock, exhibits the same weakness: the narrator,

in providing a vivid window onto the action, becomes almost too transparent and ineffectual. This presents a severe problem for Lawrence in “Elsa Culverwell”, since the narrator’s apparent strength of character is diffused through her role as narrative eyepiece. Elsa is literally pushed to the side of her own narrative. The fragment of story is set in Nottingham and concerns the

marriage

of Elsa’s

mother

to Frederick

Culverwell,

a man

eleven

years her junior. It charts Frederick’s failures in the clothes trade, and the collapse of his further financial speculations, and places these in the context of his unsuccessful marriage. Elsa’s strength in comparison to her mother is asserted in the opening line: “My mother made a failure of her life. 1 am making a success of mine” (LG, 343). Yet, increasingly, the hero seems to be Miss Niell, Elsa’s independent

and spirited governess, who takes over the running of domestic affairs in the household when Mrs Culverwell is struck down with heart disease. Elsa compares herself to Miss Niell, who emerges as her idol: I was very to wander why I had front of my

ordinary, very quiet, rather shy. I remember I used about the dark, lofty rooms, vaguely wondering been born. And I have often stood on a chair in mothers [sic] great oval mirror, to look at myself.

I was rather pale, and rather weedy, with dun-coloured hair. But I had an aristocratic, hard cut of face, with real blue eyes,

that stared at myself in a sort of defiance. I was pale and

weedy, and I saw it. But I refused to care. (LG, 350)

It is difficult to care much about Elsa, in spite of the insistence upon

her defiant spirit. Even a brief mention of the husband she is to take 79

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism fails to convince.* When the young Elsa intrudes into her narrative in

an active way she betrays a curious social snobbery, and she combines crass assertiveness with shrinking sensitivity in a cumbersome manner. On one occasion, a young singer visits the Culverwell house to practice to the accompaniment of Miss Niell’s piano playing:

“Is Miss Niell ready for me?” he asked, in a metallic tenor voice. “T beg your pardon?” I said to him. “Is Miss Niell ready for me?” he repeated. I asked him into the hall. He took off his hat. He was something of a buck. His auburn hair was very glossy, very wavy, very carefully parted. He had high, hard-cheek bones, rather ruddy, and hard blue eyes. Of course I did not like him. Something in his body, something taut and hard of masculine force,

made

me

draw

away

from

him

with

suppose, was inverted fascination. (LG, 353)

a hate

that,

I

The jealousy of young Elsa is entirely consistent, but the insistence of the final line is unconvincing because it indicates a complexity in her character that the narrative has so far failed to suggest. The same incongruity surrounds Elsa’s fascination with Jack Holderness in the final pages of the manuscript. Elsa attains transparency in the Holderness home.

Miss Niell engrosses our interest, because she is idolized by Elsa.

From the outset, she is described in terms which throw into sharp relief the other characters in the piece:

We loved Miss Niell from the first. She was a real woman. I love her still, and am not ashamed that I loved her better than

my own mother, because she was bigger. She was quiet and erect, with grey eyes that watched one like strength. She was

only thirty, but she was quite grey. Her mother and her father 8

See D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, 348.

80

The Emergence of a New Vision were both dead, her father only a little while when she came to us, and she had no money. But she was independent as if she had been rich. (LG, 347) She has all of the qualities which an independent heroine might possess, and so we feel that Elsa is displaced from her own narrative. Even Miss Niell’s personal life is recounted in a manner that encapsulates any movement toward self-responsibility that the young heroine might undergo: She had had a great love for some man, and he had been unworthy, had taken, perhaps in self-defence, a woman much inferior to her. So, she ceased to love him, but she did not

cease to believe in love. She was very strong. I loved her. (LG, 348)

This reads like the summary of a novel: a novel that might have contained the story of Elsa’s development. The first chapter of The Lost Girl recasts in the third person the material of “Elsa Culverwell” and relegates the governess (now Miss Frost) to a more subsidiary role. In addition to these significant changes, the opening to the second chapter makes special mention of the protagonist’s initial marginalization (Elsa Culverwell has now become Alvina Houghton): The heroine of this story is Alvina Houghton. If we leave her out of the first chapter of her own story it is because, during the first twenty five years of her life, she really was left out of count, or so overshadowed as to be negligible. She and her mother were the phantom passengers in the ship of James Houghton’s fortunes. (LG, 20) The finished work displays Lawrence’s understanding of the drawbacks of the earlier piece, and his alterations redress the story’s balance in favour of the protagonist, incorporating her relative 81

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

transparency in the opening chapter into the larger issue of her early growth. Before moving on to consider the development of the project entitled “The Sisters”, it is important to mention Lawrence’s short story “The Overtone”, which Mark Kinkead-Weekes has dated to the first months of 1913.” This story draws upon the biblical language of the “Foreword to Sons and Lovers” in depicting the coming to consciousness of another Elsa-figure: Elsa Laskell. Elsa is a “tall, rather aloof” (SM, 5) girl, who starts the story in a rather ineffectual bit-role, but ends it as the main protagonist. She sits listening to Edith Renshaw, the hostess of a summer evening gathering, talking to Mrs Hankin,

a quiet lady, “about the suffrage”

(SM,

5). Will Renshaw,

Edith’s middle-aged husband, pretends to read in the background. Yet

Elsa, who senses a discord in the atmosphere of the room, is attuned

not to the conversation but to its subtext: its overtone. We are told that “she sat in a sort of dreamy state, and the feelings of her hostess, and the feeling of her host, drifted like iridescence upon the quick of her soul” (SM, 6). Will Renshaw is similarly transported by the languorous summer evening atmosphere to an evening six months after his marriage to Edith. That evening had proved to be the crisis of their marriage. During it, Will had led Edith to the top of a red hill outside their home, where he had asked and pleaded with her to strip naked

and make love to him; Edith, however, had refused, making obvious her hidden hatred of his body. Will had, soon after, abandoned coming

to her in the night. As the narrative returns us to the present, Edith is still talking about “the State-endowment of mothers” (SM, 10), whilst Will, upset by his reminiscences, goes outside. Elsa toys with a bowl containing pink and crimson rose petals, and these petals come to embody the bitterness and lack of fulfilment that Elsa senses exists between her host and hostess:

9 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “Re-Dating Lawrence Review, 25 (1994), 75-80.

82

‘The

Overtone’”’,

The

D.

H.

The Emergence of a New Vision And she felt the nights behind like a purple bowl into which

the woman’s heart-beats were shed, like rose leaves fallen and

left to wither and go brown. For Mrs Renshaw had waited for him. During happy days of stillness and blueness she had moved, while the sunshine glancing through her blood made flowers in her heart, like blossoms underground thrilling with expectancy, lovely fragrant things that would have delight to appear [....] But he had come like a bitter morning. He had never bared the sun of himself to her — a sullen day he had been on her heart, covered with cloud impenetrable. She had

waited so heavy anxious, with such a wealth of possibility. And he in his blindness had never known. (SM, 10-11) The lack of fulfilment of the woman is here articulated in terms which

recall the “Foreword to Sons and Lovers’, but Edith Renshaw does not

have a son, so the tragic momentum

of that novel is not repeated.

Instead, Elsa Laskell is moved to tears by the overtone she hears of their lack of fulfilment, and Edith, in the voices Elsa hears, becomes

firmly associated with the bowl of petals. Edith’s voice asks: “What

am I now but a bowl of withered leaves, but a kaleidoscope of broken

beauties, but an empty bee-hive, yea, a rich garment rusted that no-one has worn, a dumb singer, with the voice of a nightingale yet making discord” (SM, 12). Finally, talking openly with her host and hostess, Elsa takes both of them to task for their dividedness, and it is she who

argues for a balancing of the male Pan with the female Christ, in place of their mutual fear, and the killing of the former by the latter. She declares that she will “look in the eyes of [her] man for the faun”: “I won’t be cheated by my man. When between my still

hands I weave silk out of the air, like a cocoon, he shall not

take it to pelt me with. He shall draw it forth and weave it up. For I want to finger the sunshine I have drawn through my body, stroke it, and have joy of the fabric”. (SM, 15)

83

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

She ends with a lyrical flourish that announces a kind of individual being imagined to offset Edith Renshaw’s suffragism: “Tam myself, running through light and shadow for ever, a nymph and a christian, I, not two things, but an apple with a gold side and a red, a freckled deer, a stream that tinkles and a

pool where light is drowned; I, no fragment, no half-thing like the day, but a black bird with a white breast and underwings, a peewit, a wild thing, beyond understanding.” (SM, 17) As Mark Kinkead-Weekes writes, “The Overtone” is “perhaps overlyricized”,'° but it once again shows Lawrence working to uncover

kinds of motivation beneath the consciousness of his characters, and it

shows him connecting the resulting impersonality to a celebratory form of female emancipation that had been implicit in “Elsa Culverwell”. The important technique that this short story develops, along with the “Burns Novel” fragments, is that of realizing impersonal tensions through the use of objects (in this case, the bowl of rose petals). If these two pieces show Lawrence using objects in a rather derivative and insistent way, they nonetheless contain the early, tentative signs of a method that would become more powerfully evocative in the revisions to The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. “The Sisters” and the new vision of the Prussian Officer stories We

know

that

Lawrence

stuck

with

a

female

protagonist,

and

attempted to contain her development in the first-person form of “Elsa

Culverwell” in “The Sisters”.'' This in turn would present a similar set

of problems to Sons and Lovers concerning the transformation of autobiography into art, since the female character (first called Ella,

'0 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922,

66. '' Mark Kinkead-Weekes suggests that the first-person narrator of “The Sisters” may have been male (ibid., 73).

84

The Emergence of a New Vision later Ursula Brangwen) increasingly became associated with Frieda.” “The Sisters” developed rather rapidly beyond its starting-point as a “pot-boiler” to offset the unpublishable “Insurrection of Miss Houghton”: on 5 April 1913 Lawrence wrote, “The pot-boiler is at page 110, and has developed into an earnest and painful work — God help it and me” (I, 536). The first person was becoming too personal once more, but this time the theme of woman becoming individual and self-responsible had found a suitably broad canvas for exploration, and the material was strong enough to support a rewriting at this stage. Moving on from the first draft, Lawrence wrote: [I]t did me good to theorize myself out, and to depict Frieda’s God Almightiness in all its glory. That was the first crude fermenting of the book. I’ll make it into art now. (I, 550)

On 22 April 1914, as the third draft was nearing completion, he would be able to state quite freely his quarrel with the first version: “the first Sisters was flippant and often vulgar and jeering. I had to get out of that attitude, and make my subject really worthy” (II, 165). Lawrence

rewrote

“The

Sisters”

in

three

versions,

named

by

Lawrence scholars “The Sisters II’, “The Wedding Ring”, and The Rainbow. The first version also contained the seeds of Women in Love, which Lawrence began writing in late April 1916. “The Sisters”, this first draft, was begun in March 1913 and completed in June (one month after the writing of his essay on Thomas Mann);’? successive

drafts were completed by January and May 1914 respectively, and the final version of The Rainbow was finished (after the Futurist readings

and the writing of the “Study of Thomas Hardy”) by 2 March 1915."

2 See ibid., 72.

"3 It is significant that in the essay on Thomas Mann, Lawrence had criticized the strict determining of the lines of Mann’s work by a certain attitude to life (D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix, 308). 4 For a full discussion of the process of composition see Mark KinkeadWeekes’ Introduction to the Cambridge edition of The Rainbow.

85

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Throughout the extensive rewritings that produced The Rainbow, Lawrence worked to make the novel less polemical and more dialectical; the relationships more dynamic and less determined by an intrusive authorial voice. The final draft introduces a modern scientific vocabulary, and a mature style of writing, that harnesses the impersonality his writing had been straining towards since he first expressed dissatisfaction with Sons and Lovers. The real advances in theme and technique occurred during the composition of The Rainbow, and these are traceable in the writing and revising of the stories

collected

in (or associated

with)

The

Prussian

Officer and

Other Stories. Before progressing to a consideration of two of the stories from the Prussian Officer collection I want to consider the case of a short story entitled “New Eve and Old Adam”. “New Eve and Old Adam” was written, together with the first versions of the stories that would become “The Prussian Officer” and “The Thorn in the Flesh”, between May and June 1913 (after “The

Sisters”). Lawrence, at one time, had intended to include it in the Prussian Officer collection (II, 190). It is a fascinating story because,

whilst it draws upon the theme of marital estrangement explored in

“The Overtone”, it also (as John Worthen has pointed out'*) begins to

develop a decidedly new language in which to explore the impersonal conflict of relationships. The story concerns a couple (Peter and Paula Moest) whose one-year-old marriage has disintegrated into an estrangement whose origins are essentially inarticulable. Paula struggles to voice her complaint against her husband, “trying to get her feeling into words”, but, as her husband says, these struggles bring the couple “to the incomprehensible” (LAH, 167). As in “The Overtone”, the estrangement finds its ultimate expression in the liberated woman’s rejection of her husband’s sexual advances, but where the earlier story falls back on the musical overtone of the couple’s mute interactions to give a sense of their inexplicable 'S

See

John

Worthen,

“Short

Detachment in D. H. Lawrence’s Studies, 29 (1985), 13.

Story

and

Autobiography:

Kinds

of

Early Fiction”, Renaissance and Modern

86

The Emergence of a New Vision conflict, “New Eve and Old Adam” uses the fictional device of an incorrectly-delivered telegram. In the story, a telegram arrives at the Moests’ flat. This telegram contains the hurried note: “Meet me Marble Arch 7.30 — theatre — Richard” (LAH,

164). The note had been

intended for a young German of the same name who is visiting a friend in the building, but Peter Moest assumes that the mysterious Richard is his wife’s secret lover. As a plot device the misdirected telegram is somewhat clichéd, but telegraphy has much broader implications in the story. Early on in “New Eve and Old Adam”, Paula looks out of the window at a confusion of telegraph wires and sees a man who “belted himself amid the netted sky, and began to work, absorbedly”. On gaining eye contact with him, she involuntarily whispers “I like you”. The incident passes with only a passive, and unanswered, enquiry from her husband concerning the recipient of the remark, but the entire episode is particularly resonant in terms of the story’s treatment of its impersonal theme. We are told that Peter and Paula are “both rendered elemental, like impersonal forces, by the battle and the suffering” (LAH, 162): the “connection” (LAH, 181)

between them is itself telegraphic. They are subject to vibrations of sympathy and revulsion, and (like the telegram) they produce words that,

far

from

healing

a

rift,

lead

to

greater

confusion

and

estrangement. This scientific analogy (particularly striking since Lawrence would associate wireless telegraphy with Futurism in his essay on Moby-Dick in Studies in Classic American Literature'®) accompanies a striking new attention to matter in the language of the story, as it attempts to explore the couple’s estrangement without recourse to the standard lyrical and sentimental associations still present in “The Overtone”. We are told that Paula sometimes thought of her husband as “a big fountain pen which was always sucking at her blood for ink” (LAH,

170); Peter, apart from Paula and unable to

sleep in his hotel room, “felt like a thing whose roots are all straining

on their hold, and whose elemental life, that blind source, surges backwards and forwards darkly in a chaos, like something which is '©

See Chapter Five.

87

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism threatened with spilling out of its own

vessel” (LAH,

172-73);

and,

when Peter holds Paula during their brief reconciliation, “the intensity of his feeling was so fierce, he felt himself going dim, fusing into something soft and plastic between her hands” (LAH, 181). The use of objects foretells that achieved in the Prussian Officer stories, whilst the latter description of Peter’s experience in his embrace with the “New Eve” anticipates the strikingly similar experiences of Anton Skrebensky with Ursula Brangwen in the final version of The Rainbow. We now arrive at the Prussian Officer stories. These stories were revised around the time of Lawrence’s reading of Marinetti, Buzzi and Soffici, and they raise crucial issues concerning the nature of his interaction with Futurism. A number of the specific studies which have focused upon Lawrence and Futurism have been flawed because,

ignoring the very considerable extent of Lawrence’s engagement with the European artistic climate out of which Futurism grew, they have tended to apply strict chronological criteria in their mapping of the author’s indebtedness to the manifestos.'’ This approach posits a naive model of Lawrence’s development. It fails to comprehend the possibility that the impersonal concerns Lawrence perceived in the manifestos, and the artistic techniques to which these gave rise, had already been preoccupying Lawrence’s art and thought since late 1912. It also fails to adequately account for the complexity of Lawrence’s dialogue with the Futurist aesthetic and with its various '7

T refer,

in particular,

to

Giovanni

Cianci’s

“D.

H.

Lawrence

and

Futurism/Vorticism”, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik VIII/1 (1983), 41-53, and Emile Delavenay’s article, “Lawrence and the Futurists”,

in The Modernists: Lawrence’s

interest

Studies in

the

in a Literary Phenomenon. Futurists

(and

his

Cianci

fascination

collapses

with

their

impersonality) into their shared “revolt against the status quo” (44). He does not point up Lawrence’s exploration of impersonality in the works that preceded his reading of the Futurists. Delavenay’s comparative approach attempts “to show that Lawrence’s writings offer evidence of interest [in the Futurists] from the autumn of 1913 to at least 1917” (140).

88

The Emergence of a New Vision techniques; a dialogue which we can profitably trace back to a time well before his letter to Garnett of June 1914. In my readings of two stories from the Prussian Officer collection I want, then, to suggest the presence of an avant-garde outlook which places Lawrence in relation not only to Futurism but to the allied

English movements, Imagism and Vorticism.'® Although Lawrence

resisted assimilation into specific literary movements, his own literary themes and their accompanying techniques brought his writings into close relation to those produced by certain of these movements. For instance, some of Lawrence’s poetry was included in Imagist poetry anthologies

of 1915,

1916,

and

1917,

and

Imagism’s

concern

for

redefining the relation of subject and object in the movement away from late-Victorian verse is clearly one that Lawrence shared, though his own innovations are less systematic and come from various, often

'8

Vorticism was a movement

in the visual arts which Pound founded as a

corrective to what he considered to be the dilution of the Imagist aesthetic in the anthologies. Natan Zach’s essay on “Imagism and Vorticism”, in

Modernism, eds M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 228-42, charts the emergence and development of both movements.

Vorticism also arose in reaction against Futurism. Two useful articles which

discuss this interaction are William C. Wees, “England’s Avant-Garde: The Futurist-Vorticist Phase”, Western Humanities Review, 21 (Spring 1967), 117-28, and Charles Ferrall, ““‘“Melodramas of Modernity’: The Interaction of

Vorticism and Futurism before the Great War”, University of Toronto Quarterly, LXIII/2 (1993/4), 347-68. The chief proponents of the Vorticist

movement

in

England

in

1914-1915

(T.

E.

Hulme,

Ezra

Pound

and

Wyndham Lewis) criticized the Futurist aesthetic along similar lines to those in Lawrence’s writing on Boccioni. Hulme damned Futurism as “the

deification of the flux, the last efflorescence of impressionism” (T. E. Hulme,

Speculations [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987], 94). Pound reacted against its “accelerated impressionism [...] a spreading or surface art” (cited in Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988], 21). Lewis viewed the movement as fanciful and romantic, “largely impressionism up-to-date [....] Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt” (Blast, 12, ed. Wyndham Lewis [New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1967], 143).

89

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism idiosyncratic sources.'” It is vital, therefore, to trace the similarities

between a Futurist artistic impersonality and Lawrence’s emerging impersonality with caution: we must acknowledge that a fine line exists between the Lawrence whose impersonality echoes that of the Futurists

and

the

Lawrence

who

consciously

employs

a Futurist

language of impersonality. I have chosen to discuss the two stories “The Prussian Officer” and “Second-Best”. In Keith Cushman’s full-scale study of the stories in

this collection, these two are marginalized.*° Cushman is keen to show

how the summer 1914 revisions chart a specific change in the author’s vision (a change which occurs in the light of the Futurist readings, although he avoids a consideration of Marinetti*'). In the case of “The Prussian Officer” Cushman’s chief analysis occurs in an appendix, primarily because “it required no fundamental reseeing, no systematic revision” from its first version (“Honour and Arms”) of early summer

1913.” “Second-Best” is considered among the “more negligible stories” in the volume, and omitted on these grounds (this early story dates in its first version from August 1911). Remove Cushman’s chronological framework and these texts reveal techniques and preoccupations which open out onto the concerns of the native and continental avant-gardes. “The Prussian Officer” is a story which traces the evolution of the destructive energies

which connect an orderly to his captain. These

energies structure the progress of the plot and find expression through 'S

For a full account of Lawrence’s dealings with Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell,

and the Imagists, see Kim Herzinger, D. H. Lawrence in His Time: 19081915, 140-57.

0

See Keith Cushman, D. H. Lawrence at Work:

The Emergence of the

Prussian Officer Stories (Sussex: Harvester, 1978). 21 For instance, when he quotes the Garnett letter he cuts the references to

Marinetti. This move, alienating the reader from the passage’s immediate context, obliges Cushman to state that “the oddly scientific language is somewhat opaque” (Keith Cushman, D. H. Lawrence at Work, 36-37).

2 Ibid., 173. °° Ibid., 7.

90

The Emergence of a New Vision the characters’ relations to objects. In the early paragraphs, the individuals are set against an oppressive landscape which is characterized by the energies it omits: On either hand, the valley, wide and shallow, glistered with

heat; dark green patches of rye, pale young corn, fallow and meadow and black pine-woods spread in a dull, hot diagram under a glistening sky. But right in front the mountains ranged across, pale blue and very still, the snow gleaming gently out of the deep atmosphere. (PO, 1)

Already, the story’s method of juxtaposition is in evidence, placing the pale young corn and the pale blue snowy mountains against the dark rye, the black pine woods and the dull, hot valley. It is a setting which contextualizes the young orderly in relation to the “pale blue uniform” and “dark streaks of sweat” of the older captain (PO, 1-2). The development of the antagonism between the two men is focused through objects which concentrate the release of energies. One of the most striking examples of this technique provides a turning-point in their relations: Once,

when

a bottle

of wine

had

gone

over,

and

the red

gushed out onto the table-cloth, the officer had started up with

an oath, and his eyes, bluey like fire, had held those of the

confused youth for a moment. It was a shock for the young soldier. He felt something sink deeper, deeper into his soul, where nothing had ever gone before. It left him rather blank and wondering. Some of his natural completeness in himself was gone, a little uneasiness took its place. And from that time an undiscovered feeling had held between the two men.

(PO, 3)

The description of the spilling of the wine enacts the release of energies, with the suggestion of spilt blood or of sexual release. These energies are always present in the story’s sporadic bursts of dialogue 91

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

(the orderly’s contributions are purely defensive, and offered within

the context of his rank and position). The bottle here acts as the

agent for the energies, as in the Boccioni sculpture “Development of a Bottle in Space” (‘‘Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio”), which Lawrence discusses in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” (see figure 3).”° Irritations arise in the story in relation to physical objects, like the scar on the orderly’s left thumb (“He wanted to get hold of it and —. A hot flame ran in his blood” [PO, 4]) or the pencil in the orderly’s ear: “And why have you a piece of pencil in your ear?”

The orderly hesitated, then continued on his way without

answering. He set the plates in a pile outside the door, took the stump of pencil from his ear, and put it in his pocket. He had been copying a verse for his sweetheart’s birthday-card.

(PO, 7)

24 The exchanges are based upon the question-and-answer ritual of military drills. The Captain’s questions receive answers from the orderly (he

questions him about his haste, the scar on his thumb, and the pencil in his

ear).

Lawrence

initially

considered

calling

his collection

of stories

The

Fighting Line (see The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 221). The collection was published in November 1914, several months after the start of the First

World War. 5 See D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, 75-76. Here, Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture of the bottle is seen to be the site of struggles between male and female impulses in Italian art. Lawrence argues that “the Italian is rather more female than male now [.... Italians are] too much aware of [the] utter lockedness male with female, and too hopeless, as males, to act, to be passionate”. In Lawrence’s mind, the sculpture expresses

an assertion of the male impulse for “motion, simple motion”, and as such contains a fascinating pathos. Lawrence may have had access to the Boccioni sculpture through Ardengo Soffici’s Cubismo e Futurismo, or Boccioni’s Pittura,

Scultura

Futuriste

(Dinamismo

Plastico).

contain a good quality photographic print of it.

92

These

volumes

both

The Emergence of a New Vision A sentimental gesture is incorporated into the larger energies of conflict through this small material detail. The captain responds to the orderly with confused sadism, his anger claustrophobically associated with an unspoken and largely unrealized sexual subtext. The continual process of connecting characters’ energies to the energies of objects recalls the Futurist use of analogy in literature, and the interpenetration of subject and object in Futurist sculpture, and in paintings like Carlo Carra’s “Donna + bottiglia + casa” (“Woman + Bottle + House”), reproduced in Cubismo e Futurismo (see figure 4). In the May 1912 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (which we know Lawrence read) Marinetti called for an intensive use of analogy in Futurist writings: Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things. An orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, can embrace the life of matter only by means of the most extensive analogies.”° This implies that analogy can contain or concentrate the energies of matter. Marinetti goes on to illustrate the employment of analogies in “a strict net of images””’ using an excerpt from his own Battle of Tripoli: It is the sunset-conductor whose wide sweep gathers the scattered flutes of tree-bound birds, the grieving harps of

insects, the creak of branches, and the crunch of stones. It is

he who suddenly stops the mess-tin kettledrums and the rifles’ clash, to let the muted instruments sing out above the orchestra, all the golden stars, upright, open-armed, across the footlights of the sky. And here is the grande dame of the play [....] Prodigiously bare, it is indeed the desert who displays

26 FT. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 85. 27 [bid., 86. 93

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

her immense

bosom

in its liquefied curves, all glowing

rosy lacquer beneath the mighty night’s cascading jewels.”

in

The scene, with its potentially sentimental connotations (sunset, the song of birds and insects, the wind through the trees, the stars, the

desert setting), is transformed through the association with an orchestra whose lack of organization suggests the Futurist art of noise of Luigi Russolo: the instruments are “scattered” and “grieving”,

while the music creaks, crunches and clashes, calling forth the analogy

to the noises of war.”” Lawrence’s story may be seen to be avoiding nostalgia and sentiment, and approaching a war-time psychology marked by conflict and disruption, through a different use of analogy, but one which similarly harnesses the ungraspable energies of matter, revealing an

8 Ibid., 87.

2° For a discussion of the Futurist Art of Noise, see Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1971), 33-40. Russolo,

primarily a painter, claims to have articulated the fundaments of the Art of Noise after listening to a performance given by the Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880-1955). They appear in an open letter to Pratella of March

11, 1913. Here, Russolo asserts that the noise of machines

in the modern city has accustomed the public to dissonant sounds and educated their sensibilities to an appreciation of them. In a typical Futurist ploy, Russolo uses a bold and capitalized typography to declare the arrival of a new orchestral music: “WE TAKE GREATER PLEASURE IN IDEALLY COMBINING THE NOISES OF TRAMS, EXPLOSIONS OF MOTORS, TRAINS, AND SHOUTING CROWDS THAN IN LISTENING AGAIN, FOR EXAMPLE, TO THE “EROICA’ OR THE ‘PASTORALE”” (Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance, 168). The Futurist orchestra required new (mechanical) instruments to produce the necessary range of noises, and these instruments were called intonarumori (noise-intoners or tone-generators). In announcing the Futurist fascination with

noise,

Russolo

refers

to

the

ambitions

of

Futurist

literature,

and

particularly the “words-in-freedom” dictum which Marinetti used to describe techniques for the translation of noise (and other sense impressions) into literature through the use of onomatopoeia, neologisms and the rejection of grammar.

94

The Emergence of a New Vision inevitable development in the characters. The scene with the spilt wine echoes throughout “The Prussian Officer”, for instance. Questioning the orderly about his pencil, the captain “poured himself a glass of wine, part of which he spilled on the floor” (PO, 7). This spilling of wine provides an analogy to the spilling of blood, but always with a sharp focus given to the energies which generated the events.

So, having

struck the orderly

in the face with his belt, the

energies of both men are concentrated in the aftermath: “When he saw the youth start back, the pain-tears in his eyes and the blood on his mouth, he had felt at once a thrill of deep pleasure, and of shame”

(PO, 6). This technique of association finds its ultimate expression in

the scene where the orderly, having murdered the captain in a final release of repressed energy, is startled by the inert body of his victim, whose energies are now spent: How

curiously the mouth was pushed out, exaggerating the

full lips, and the moustache

bristling up

from

them.

Then,

with a start, he noticed the nostrils gradually filled with blood.

The red brimmed, hesitated, ran over, and trickle down the face to the eyes. (PO, 15)

went

in a thin

The body of the captain (the former site of energies which provided the context for the orderly’s daily routines) now fails to connect with the orderly, and the latter’s alienation from the military life is suggested in his relation to detached things, whose energies he can neither understand nor interact with. Most notably, the orderly is fascinated by the detached energies of a squirrel in a section of the story which, like the flashback concerning the spilling of the wine, was cut by the English Review on its first publication in August 1914.°° The young soldier’s condition is suggested by his relation to the squirrels: 3° It first appeared as “Honour and Arms” in the English Review, 69 (August 1914), 24-43. Note how this publication date significantly coincided with the start of the war.

Keith

Cushman,

in D.

95

H.

Lawrence

at

Work,

213,

has

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

The squirrels burst away — they flew up the trees. And then he saw the one peeping round at him, half way up a tree-trunk. A

start of fear went through him, though, in so far as he was conscious, he was amused. It still stayed, its little keen face

staring at him half way up the tree-trunk, its little-ears pricked up, its clawey little hands clinging to the bark, its white breast

reared. He started from it in panic. (PO, 18)

The style of the passage, with its heavy use of punctuation, its alternating short and long sentences, and its use of repetition, reflects the threatening furtive movements of the squirrel. The stylistic channelling of physical and emotional energies through symbols, which distinguishes the technique of this story, achieves an effect which Lawrence also exploited in his poetry. It is this technique which led to the appearance of his poems in the Imagist anthologies. His exploratory style brought his writings into relation with

a movement

whose

theories,

articulated

by

Pound,

he

never

explicitly endorsed.*' We can profitably consider his handling of energies in “The Prussian Officer’ in the light of these Imagist theories, though. Pound’s Imagist movement, drawing upon the ethos of T. E. Hulme’s 1909 group, called for a poetry which would avoid superfluous words, fear abstractions, and give direct treatment to revealed that it was Norman Douglas who cut the scenes from the story for publication in the journal. The censorship implicit in Douglas’ cutting of these scenes shows a lack of understanding of the story’s development in terms of repressed and released energies, and it provides an important early example of the pressures and incomprehension Lawrence had to endure in developing this avant-garde style in reaction against a sentimental scheme of construction. 3! Significantly, Pound did not invite Lawrence to contribute to the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes, published in 1914; only once Pound had left the movement and Amy Lowell joined it did his poems appear in Imagist volumes.

96

The Emergence of a New Vision things (“whether subjective or objective”™’). For Pound, Imagism is a “sort of poetry where painting or sculpture seems as if it were ‘just coming over in to speech’”’? and Pound defines the Image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of

time”.** The desire to avoid sentimentalism and contain abstractions by connecting emotions to objects is as explicit in the style of “The

Prussian Officer” as it is in Imagist poems, like Lawrence’s “Green”,

published in the 1915 edition of Some Imagist Poets:

The sky was apple-green, The sky was green wine held up in the sun, The moon was a golden petal between. She opened her eyes, and green

They shone, clear like flowers undone, For the first time, now for the first time seen.

(Poems, 216)

The eyes of the lover, deprived of the sentimental associations and traditional significances of Romantic verse, are annexed to apples, to

wine, and to “flowers undone” (the conventional symbolic value of the flowers is carefully subverted). The overall effect of the merging of the lover with the opening flowers and the dawn is reinforced by the repetitions, stressing the material actions which govern the human body-clock and the cycles of day and year. The subject’s strangeness is thus assured for the speaker, with the suggestion of newness applying equally to the day, to the season and to the woman (the sky/moon, the opening flowers, and the green eyes). It is the strangeness of the energy which supplies all three that finally emerges from the poem. Hugh Kenner has written of Pound’s “steady 32

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber,

1960), 3.

33 Pound quoted in Modernism, 234. #4

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 4.

97

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

preoccupation with persistently patterned energies”®* in his Imagist/ Vorticist phases, and the same concern, given a different emphasis, is also at the heart of Lawrence’s innovations in the Prussian Officer stories. The technique of concentrating energies through objects in “The Prussian Officer” is also evident in “Second-Best”, which contains a central scene notable for the way it gathers together a host of unspoken tensions. Ostensibly the story of a girl who takes a secondbest lover in lieu of her first choice (a man who has secretly become engaged), the tale manages to suggest the violence of the frustration and ennui evident beneath the surface dialogue. In this excerpt, Frances, the betrayed girl, speaks to her younger sister, Anne, about Tom Smedley, the farm labourer whom Frances is already considering as her second-best option: “Eh, you [Anne], as she “T suppose “Well, he with my tame “That’s a ironic.

know Tom Smedley?” began the young girl pulled a tight kernel out of its shell. so,” replied Frances sarcastically. gave me a wild rabbit what he’d caught, to keep ones — and it’s living.” good thing,” said Frances, very detached and

“Well, it is! He reckoned he’d take me to Ollerton Feast, but he never did. Look here, he took a servant from the rectory, I saw him.” “So he ought,” said Frances.

“No he oughtn’t! And should tell you — an’ I have Click and snap went a out the kernel, and chewed

35

I told him so — and I told him I done.” nut between her teeth. She sorted complacently. (PO, 114)

Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 173.

98

The Emergence of a New Vision The situation is encapsulated in the dialogue, which seems trivial but actually contains Frances’ ruminations on Tom and his right to betray her young sister in escorting a servant to the Feast. Frances is clearly considering the loss of her faithless first choice lover and reassessing his actions. Anne’s adamant assertion of her rights presents to Frances an image of her own rejected self, and in sarcastic reaction against this image Frances arrives at an acceptance of Tom. The cracking of the shell and chewing of the nut provides an analogy to the processes of self-discovery occurring in the dialogue, and it also suggests something of the violence which can lie behind such apparent ennui.*° In many respects the passage is reminiscent of the churchyard discussion between Ursula and Gudrun in the opening chapter of Women

in Love, and most notably in the sense it creates of frustrated

energies needing an outlet.

In the central scene of “Second-Best”

the two girls find a mole,

which Anne picks up and considers killing. Whilst she is holding it up, the subject of Jimmy Barrass, the faithless lover, is raised, and Frances tells Anne that he is already engaged. Anne, who asserts Tom’s duty to be true to his word, is at this point bitten by the mole, which represents the struggle of blind and frantic energies to find release:

“Oh!” she cried. “He’s bit me.”

She dropped him to the floor. Dazed, the blind creature fumbled round. Frances felt like shrieking: she expected him to dart away in a flash, like a mouse, and there he remained groping; she wanted to cry to him to be gone. Anne, in a sudden decision of wrath, caught up her sister’s walking-cane. 36 The “click” and “snap” of Anne’s breaking of the nut during this exchange suggests the sound accompanying the pulling of a trigger. The fields in the story are described as being composed of “khaki patches of pasture, red strips of fallow”, suggesting the uniforms of soldiers and the bloodshed of the battlefields (D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, 114).

99

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism With one blow, the mole was dead. Frances was startled and shocked. One moment, the little wretch was fussing in the

heat, and the next it lay like a little bag, inert and black: not a struggle, scarce a quiver. (PO, 117) The killing, with its origins in the release of half-realized energies, foreshadows the orderly’s murdering of his captain in “The Prussian Officer”,

with

Frances’

startled reaction

to the loss of the mole’s

animation mirroring the orderly’s shock at observing the inert body of his victim. In this one event all of the pent-up energies find cathartic release. Anne reacts with instinctive aggression to the mole’s unexpected bite (like Tom’s betrayal), and Frances, coming to reevaluate the nature of betrayal, almost wants the mole to escape. The mole’s blind energies, and its apparent equanimity in the face of death, will soon be reflected in Tom Smedley’s attempts to mask his nervousness in a kind of self-sufficient heartiness.*” The use of this scene to bring together in a single focus the implicit energies of the two girls calls to mind Pound’s redefinition of the Image as a vortex:

The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX,

37

from which,

The mole is, of course, a kind of miner (miners wore moleskin trousers).

The mole in “Second-Best” concentrates the qualities that Lawrence would attribute to his father, his mining colleagues, and their pit, in “Nottinghamshire and the Mining Countryside” (written in 1929): curious dark intimacy; the continual presence of danger; instinctive and intuitional contact. Lawrence also describes the miners as having to blink and “change their flow” on coming back to the surface of the mines, recalling the dazed reactions of the mole (D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix, 135-36). These comparisons

help us to understand the symbolic significance of the mole and the manner in which the girls’ reactions to it reflect back on their own ruminations concerning men and the danger and difference that men present to them.

100

The Emergence of a New Vision and through moving.*® The movement

which,

and

into

which

ideas

are

constantly

of energies and ideas into this one object (the mole)

gives the emotions an immediate context and heightens the story’s capacity to “show” (removing the necessity to “tell” through the use

of abstract nouns and adjectives). As Kim Herzinger has suggested,”

Lawrence’s own use of the vortex is revealed in a letter of 19 January 1914 to Henry Savage, and (drawing upon Walter Pater’s essay on

Winckelmann in The Renaissance’) it is concerned with a stillness underlying movement:

The Laocoon writhing and shrieking have gone from my new work [“The Sisters IJ], and I think there is a bit of stillness, like the wide, still, unseeing eyes ofa Venus of Melos. I am still fascinated by the Greek — more, perhaps, by the Greek sculpture than the plays, even though I love the plays. There is something in the Greek sculpture that my soul is hungry for —

something of the eternal stillness that lies under all movement, under all life, like a source, incorruptible and inexhaustible. It

is deeper than change, and struggling. So long I have acknowledged only the struggle, the stream, the change. And now I begin to feel something of the source, the great impersonal which never changes and out of which all change comes. (II, 137-38) Pater, in the essay on Winckelmann, writes of Greek sculpture: In it, no member of the human form is more significant than

the rest; the eye is wide, and without pupil; the lips and brow

38 Pound quoted in Modernism, 237. 3° Kim Herzinger, D. H. Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915, 121-26. “John Worthen first drew attention to Lawrence’s use of Pater in D. H.

Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, 54.

101

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism are hardly less significant than hands, and breasts, and feet.

But the limitation of its resources is part of its pride: it has no backgrounds, no sky or atmosphere, to suggest and interpret a train of feeling; a little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming surfaces, with pure form — only these. And it gains more than it loses by this limitation to its own distinguishing motives; it unveils man in the repose of his unchanging characteristics.”" “The Prussian Officer” and “Second-Best” rely little on plot: they progress by setting their changeable characters unchanging backdrop of energies and by revealing their interactions with each other at this level. It is this focus

background against an characters’ that brings

these writings into close relation to the avant-garde, and, of course,

Lawrence would intuit the theoretical expression of the focus in the Futurist anthologies in summer 1914.

The “Study of Thomas Hardy” and the final draft of The Rainbow

After the revision of the Prussian Officer stories, and the outbreak of

war in August 1914, Lawrence wrote the “Study of Thomas Hardy” (between 5 September and late November 1914).” Arising out of an original commission to write an interpretive critical study for a series

entitled “Writers of the Day”,” it provided him with the distance he 4'

Walter

Pater,

The Renaissance:

Fontana, 1964), 204-205.

Studies

in Art and Poetry

(London:

“Interestingly, E. M. Forster (whom Lawrence would meet for the first time in January 1915) similarly turned to criticism at this time, as his biographer, P. N. Furbank, reveals: “‘At the beginning of the war, Forster had decided that creation — that is to say fiction — was for the moment impossible for him. As a substitute, he resolved, in the autumn of 1914, to write a critical

book on Samuel Butler” (P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978], II, 3). Lawrence and Forster made a positive impression on each other in the course of their first meeting. “During July 1914 Lawrence was approached by Bertram Christian, the editor of the “Writers of the Day” series. The study was originally intended to

102

The Emergence ofa New Vision needed to reflect on a series of developments: the swift evolution of the project he entitled “The Sisters”,“* Methuen’s returning in early August

of its third draft (“The

Wedding

Ring’”*), and the onset of

war, against which Lawrence (now married to Frieda) raged. Allowing him to articulate the vision of that impersonal character development evident in the stories, the “Study” also shows Lawrence explicitly connecting his understanding of impersonality to the energies of war. The project grew beyond its original scope, which precluded the possibility of publication. Lawrence’s statements in the “Study”, however, profoundly affected the final draft of The Rainbow, in which significant sections were added to the text, and in which a futuristic “metallic-corrosive’”’ vocabulary emerged in the depiction of the separation of Ursula and Anton Skrebensky. Lawrence’s reading of Hardy was heavily shaped by his reading of Lascelles Abercrombie’s book, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study, published in 1912. It had been Abercrombie’s comments on Hardy’s subduing of his art to a metaphysic that Lawrence summarized in his

April 1913 letter concerning crombie had written:

Wells’

The New

Machiavelli.

Aber-

No great poet can do without a metaphysic: but that does not mean

that

it must

always

be

explicit.

Creative

literature

divides itself into two main kinds; that in which a metaphysic

be 15,000 words long, and was to have been published by James Nisbet and Co.

“ The material was still rather unwieldy. It was not until January Lawrence decided the project needed to be split into two books.

1915 that

It is not known for certain what Methuen wrote to Lawrence about “The Wedding Ring”, but evidence suggests that Methuen — at the start of the war — may have decided to suspend all new projects for six months, plunging Lawrence

into

financial

difficulties

(see

Mark

Kinkead-Weekes,

D.

H.

Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922, 149). “© The phrase is used by Charles L. Ross in The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 34.

103

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism is fitted to experience, and that in which experience is fitted to

a metaphysic. The first kind is the work of a poet who judges instinctively; the second, of the poet who judges intellectually.’

Abercrombie, however, whilst locating Hardy in the intellectual camp, vindicates the resulting fiction as fully realized art: “There is no rational possibility of preference for the one or the other of these two kinds of literature. In them we must only see two methods of arriving at one end — formal mastery.”** It was precisely this mastery that Lawrence would take against in the essay on Thomas Mann of May

1913.

Lawrence’s “Study of Thomas Hardy” deconstructs, through the metaphysic, the closure which Hardy imposes on his fictional world. It does this by reading against the grain of the character portrayals in the novels, uncovering Hardy’s bourgeois morality, which must make villains of his exceptional, aristocratic characters. Lawrence describes Hardy’s fictional world as embodying the conflict between a staid, everyday immersion in the communal, and the exceptional movement towards a non-social form of self-realization. The two positions are labelled as separate principles: female Law (‘“being” and selfrealization through the “law of the body” [Hardy, 78]) and male Love (knowledge of a world outside the self, and the conscious principle of individuation). The impersonal self of Law stands in defiance of the world’s conventions and its narrow codes of conduct, risking that chastisement from the outside world which Lawrence saw as the pathetic moment in Hardy’s Wessex novels. The contemporary dominance of Love over Law, Male over Female, spirit over body, is

felt by Lawrence to be the animating crux compelling our interest in Hardy’s characters; his reading of the novels redresses an imbalance in Hardy’s metaphysic by restoring, against all odds, the vital positive “7

Lascelles Abercrombie,

Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study

Russell and Russell Reprint, 1964), 168.

“8 Ibid., 169.

104

(New

York:

The Emergence of a New Vision force at work in such figures as Alec D’Urberville and Arabella Donn. Lawrence states that Hardy’s actual artistic disposition is towards the aggrandizement of these characters, but that he is unable to realize the wholesome development of their individuality in other than villainous terms because of his adherence to a bourgeois morality. He writes of Hardy that: His private sympathy is always with the individual against the community: as is the case with the artist. Therefore he will create a more or less blameless individual and, making him seek

his

own

fulfilment,

his

highest

aim,

will

show

him

destroyed by the community, or by that in himself which represents the community, or by some close embodiment of the civic idea. Hence the pessimism. To do this, however, he must select his individual with a definite weakness, a certain coldness of temper, inelastic, a certain inevitable and

inconquerable adhesion to the community. (Hardy, 49)

The “weak life-flow” of the exceptional characters prevents the conventional morality of the community from being transcended, and it is this limitation in Hardy’s characters that sets his narratives aside from the great tragedies of Shakespeare and Sophocles: “There is a lack of sternness, there is a hesitating betwixt life and public opinion, which diminishes the Wessex novels from the rank of pure tragedy” (Hardy,

50).

The Love/Law distinction is also invoked by Lawrence to make sense of World War. The “Study” is permeated by a military vocabulary, just as the Prussian Officer stories had allegorized the energies of war. In particular, Lawrence starts the essay by invoking

the symbols of the cabbage and the poppy to illustrate the states of being respectively produced by the principles of self-preservation (Love) and individual self-realization (Law). Self-realization is symbolized through the blooming of the poppy:

105

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism [H]is fire breaks out of him, and he lifts his head, slowly, subtly, tense in an ecstasy of fear overwhelmed by joy,

submits to the issuing of his flame and his fire, and there it hangs at the brink of the void, scarlet and radiant for a little

while, immanent on the unknown, a signal, an outpost, an advance-guard, a forlorn, splendid flag quivering from the brink of the unfathomed void, into which it flutters silently,

satisfied, whilst a little ash, a little dusty seed remains behind

on the solid ledge of earth. (Hardy, 18)

The flag, an “advance-guard”, marks the edge of an army’s forward movement; the “unfathomed void” conjures a no-man’s land. Flowers, as

Lawrence

continually

reminds

us,

“shoot”.

In

fact,

Lawrence

accounts for the onset of war as a destructive reaction of Law against Love; as a statement of the need for self-realization in a society based

on self-preservation. writes:

War

is destructively

reactionary.

Lawrence

No wonder there is a war. No wonder there is a great waste and squandering of life. Anything, anything to prove that we are not altogether sealed in our own self-preservation as dying chrysalides. Better the light be blown out, wilfully, recklessly,

in the wildest wind, than remain secure under the bushel, saved from every draught. (Hardy, 15-16)

Conceived in this capacity, war has a crucial purpose to serve, enabling the realization of Man’s need for recklessness and adventure in the process of submission to Law. Lawrence’s initial optimism about the progress of the war, which he shared with a broad spectrum of commentators in England and throughout Europe,” rests on his * See John H. Maurer, The Outbreak of the First World War: Strategic Planning, Crisis Decision Making, and Deterrence Failure (London: Praeger Publishers, 1995), 3: “when war broke out in the late summer of 1914, Kaiser

Wilhelm told his soldiers heading for the front: ‘You will be home before the

106

The Emergence of a New Vision belief that war will result in the re-establishment of balance in the lives of Men, and that Men

will come through, rainbow-like, to new

forms of creativity in its wake: “That will free us, perhaps, from the bushel we cower under, from the paucity of our lives, from the

cowardice that will not let us be, which will only let us exist in security, unflowering, unreal, fat, under the cosy jam-pot of the State,

under the shelter of the social frame” (Hardy, 17). This heavily qualified enthusiasm concerning war, which informs the final draft of The Rainbow (whose biblical title echoes the concept of renewal after

destruction), takes on a darker hue of pessimism in “The Crown”, with

its focus upon the maimed and the wounded among the homecoming soldiers. The “Study” anticipates their impact on society, but the later essay sees the crippled as reminders of the continuation of the processes of destruction in the psyches of the people. In the “Study”, Lawrence writes that: We must also undertake the incubus of crippled souls that will come home, and of crippled souls that will be left behind: men in whom the violence of war shall have shaken the life-flow and broken or perverted the course; women who will cease to live henceforth, yet will remain existing in the land, fixed at some lower point of fear or brutality. (Hardy, 17)

He could not have realized at this stage that the war would be so protracted. His growing pessimism separates the “destructiveconsummating” vision of The Rainbow from the “purely destructive” vision of Women in Love (III, 143). Fittingly, the poppy is now used as a symbol through which to mourn the dead of the Great War. The progression of Lawrence’s project from its earlier forms before the war, through the changes wrought in the final draft of The Rainbow by the onset of the war and its treatment in the “Study of leaves have fallen from the trees.’ Most people throughout Europe agreed with this optimistic forecast, believing that the conflict would not last longer than a few months.”

107

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Thomas Hardy”, to the full-blown pessimism of “The Crown” and Women in Love, reveals a three-stage evolution. The detailed attention that I want to give to the additions of the final draft of The Rainbow will seek to show how the avant-garde techniques for harnessing impersonality through an attention to objects and matter (evident in

the immediate post-Sons and Lovers pieces, but more successfully

handled in the Prussian Officer stories) developed a stage further in this later work. The final draft of The Rainbow was written after the “Study”,”

between late November

1914 and 2 March 1915, and revised between

March and August 1915. In a letter to Waldo Frank, Lawrence was to write: “I don’t think the war altered [The Rainbow] from its pre-war statement. I only clarified a little, in revision” (III, 142). The highly significant nature of these revisions, whose importance Lawrence plays down, has been revealed by close textual work done on existing manuscripts by Mark Kinkead-Weekes (and, earlier, by Charles L.

Ross).°' The months of final revision were formative to the overall

shaping of The Rainbow and Women in Love. It was during this period, for instance, that Lawrence decided the project would need to

be split up into two novels.” He had been troubled by the evolution of 5° Lawrence gave his principal attention to The Rainbow in December 1914, but he did not entirely forget the “Study”: on 18 December he reported to Amy Lowell that he and Frieda were typing it out (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 243).

5' See Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence”, in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novelists in Honour of John Butt, eds lan Gregor and Maynard Mack (London:

Methuen,

1968), 371-418,

revised

in 1992

for D. H. Lawrence:

Critical Assessments, eds David Ellis and Ornella De Zordo (Sussex: Helm

Information,

1992), II, 179-213. See also his introduction to the Cambridge

edition of The Rainbow. Rainbow and

Women

Charles L. Ross wrote

in Love: A History, which

The Composition

is now known

of The

to contain

inaccuracies. °° Lawrence decided that his unwieldy material would need to be split into two books in January 1915.

108

The Emergence of a New Vision “The Sisters” from its earliest days. Lawrence himself employed a sculptural analogy to explain his struggles with the evolving work. He

stated of The Rainbow:

I know it is quite a lovely novel really — you know that the perfect statue is in the marble, the kernel of it. But the thing is the getting it out clean. I think I shall manage it pretty well.

IL, 146)

The struggle is to be located in that managing of the medium to which all art must aspire. This was Lawrence’s chief criticism of the Futurist Boccioni’s sculpture “Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio” in the “Study”: that the sculptor’s desire to express the tension between

inertia and motion in matter, combined with his conscious intention to

assert a masculine withdrawal and simple movement, brings confusion and removes the possibility of the successful use of the medium:*

Geometry, pure mathematics, is very near to art, and the vivid attempt to render the bottle as a pure geometric abstraction might give rise to a work of art, because of the resistance of

the medium,

the stone. But a representation

in stone of the

3 The confusion in the Latin nature of the Futurist sculptor seems initially to have been suggested to Lawrence through a conversation in April 1914 with Giuseppe Garuti, an illustrator and friend of Marinetti and Boccioni, from whom Lawrence may have received his few Futurist volumes. Garuti (nicknamed “Gamba”) spoke to Lawrence in mid-April 1914 (see The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 163). On this occasion Garuti argued that “the Latin

nature is fundamentally geometrical: its deepest aspiration is essentially geometry — Form”. He claimed that this was the true legacy of the Renaissance, and that the Italian mind was now rationalistic and materialistic.

Lawrence expressed interest and confusion at this, commenting that “if the nature

of

the

Italian

is

rationalistic

and

materialistic,

what

about

the

[religious] procession I tell you of now? — and yet it is rationalistic and

materialistic”. For a discussion of Garuti, see Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922, 117 and 785.

109

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism lines of force which create the state of rest called a bottle, that

is a model in mechanics. (Hardy, 76)

Lawrence’s own struggle to overcome his confusion over “The Sisters” and to find a language equal to the realization of material impersonality is the struggle to get the novel out, through successive reworkings. The strangeness of Italy and its language becomes an important metaphor in his letters, describing his first tentative attempts to give form to an increasingly vehement attack on sentiment and emotion. On 4 October 1912, he wrote: For five months I have scarcely seen a word of English print [....] Iam so used to the people going by outside, talking or singing some foreign language, always Italian now. (I, 459) On 23 April 1913, Lawrence work on “The Sisters”:

wrote to Arthur McLeod

of his early

I am doing a novel which I have never grasped. eyes, there I am at page 145, and I’ve no notion about. I hate it. F[rieda] says it is good. But it’s like a foreign language I don’t know very well — I can make out what it is about. (I, 544)

Damn its what it’s a novel in only just

His struggle to translate Marinetti is echoed in his struggle to come to terms with a new novel whose language he cannot quite

comprehend.

See The Letters ofD. H. Lawrence,

Il, 182: “I translate him [Marinetti]

clumsily, and his Italian is obfuscated.” Emile Delavenay, in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, emphasizes Lawrence’s incorrect

translation of Marinetti’s “fisicologia” in the Garnett letter (it is actually a

compound word, which Delavenay translates as “physicology”). Delavenay also points out a slight error in the translation of the title of Umberto

110

The Emergence of a New Vision In the final draft of The Rainbow, the impersonal development in Ursula Brangwen, and her movement away from Anton Skrebensky, is finally explored through the use of a futuristic style and language that firmly connects her reactions against him to the reaction of Law against Love in the soldiers on the battlefield. This would be stressed by the startling similarities between the images of flowering in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” and the dust-jacket notes to the first Methuen

edition

of The Rainbow

of September

1915,

which

were

probably composed by Lawrence. Here, we are told that the novel “ends with Ursula, the leading-shoot of the restless, fearless family, waiting at the advance-post of our time to blaze a path into the future”.°° The destructive-consummating energies of war work through Ursula in the additions to the final draft of the novel, and in attempting to contain these energies Lawrence naturally turned to a Futurist vocabulary, since it was in the separation of the male and female, and in the embrace of war as a means to clearing away the old and ushering in the new, that he had written of his fascination for the

Futurists and their works. Ursula’s struggle to become individual and free from domestic constraints takes place in a society where associated movements for freedom and release are in full swing. War, college education and the Women’s

Movement,

however,

are

dismissed

by

the

heroine

as

simply reinforcing human laws and demonstrating the inability of lifeless humans to find fulfilment on terms other than those of their society. As Emile Delavenay has noted, Lawrence’s criticism of the suffragettes and their push for the vote in the “Study” echoes Marinetti’s similar attack on suffragists and parliament in a short piece >

entitled “Contempt for Woman”,

66,

“which circulated in various forms

Boccioni’s sculpture in the “Study of Thomas Hardy”: “Development of a Bottle Through Space” should read “Development of a Bottle in Space”. > In The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, caption to figure 1, Keith Sagar suggests that Lawrence probably wrote these dust-jacket notes. °° See the illustration accompanying the above source.

111

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

and languages before 1914”.°’ Lawrence wants “a parliament of men and women for the careful and gradual unmaking of laws [....] [T]he women, however, want the vote in order to make more laws” (Hardy, 14-15). The criticisms of both Lawrence and Marinetti emphasize the inadequacies of the system of democracy and call for individual energies to be directed against actual institutions instead of their policies. The Futurist preoccupation with impersonality and its attack on parliamentary democracy, however, led to an admiration for

fascism

which

Lawrence

did

not

share,

despite

the

damaging

comments of Bertrand Russell in the second volume of his autobiography.** Lawrence did not want tyrants.°° Similarly, he views war not as an unequivocal source of hygiene but as the necessary result of the corruption of Man’s struggle into self-realization. The kinship between the Futurist project and The Rainbow is more fundamentally a confluence of outlook, uniting theme

and technical

realization. The final draft of The Rainbow discovers a lineage of courageous singleness and openness to impersonal experience in the Brangwen family, and in Ursula’s generation it opens up a new language and style emphasizing a vital relation to the modern world and a break with the complacency of institutions, both of which we may term futuristic in their effects and their vision. The emergence of this impersonal development provides the key to a consideration of the major Futurist influence at this late stage in the composition of The Rainbow. Closer attention to certain vital episodes °7 Emile Delavenay quoted in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, 143. The Marinetti piece is collected under the title “Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo”, in F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e Invenzione

Futurista, 250-54. It is reproduced in translation in F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, as “Against Amore and Parliamentarianism”, 72-75. The phrase

“scorn for women” appears in the first sentence of the Flint translation. 8 See Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), H, 20-24.

°° See the letter to Bertrand Russell of 26 July 1915, in The Letters of D. H.

Lawrence, II, 370.

112

The Emergence of a New Vision will show the extent of Lawrence’s attempts to integrate into the existing draft the mew preoccupation with their non-human metaphysic, and his introduction of a verbal equivalent of Futurist art techniques. Mark Kinkead-Weekes records a number of highly significant episodes appearing for the first time in the final draft and its revisions. The chapter entitled “The Cathedral” and possibly much of “The Child”, including Will’s flirtation with Jennie the warehouse girl, were added to the second generation, and “Shame” was added to the third generation,” along with the Ursula-Anton stackyard scene in “First Love” and the important beach scene between Ursula and Anton

in “The Bitterness of Ecstasy”.”"

“The Cathedral” is a chapter whose revision (following its addition in the final draft) was significant in Lawrence’s struggle to make the Will-Anna relationship more dialogical and to resist an argumentative insistence in the depiction of its cessation. It is one of the sections much lauded by Leavis for its dramatic presentation of an essential

psychological conflict,” though it stands out as a late insertion by its

introduction of information concerning Anton’s father and his remarriage to Millicent Maud Pearse, “a young English girl of good family” (R, 183). The novel gains from introducing two new characters whose different interactions with the Brangwen couple provide relief from an insularity exemplified by the honeymoon period at the opening of “Anna Victrix”. Anna recognizes the intellectual, male quality in Baron Skrebensky (he has not long published an antiquarian work on the parish of which he is vicar); she 6°

See

Kinkead-Weekes’

6!

See Kinkead-Weekes’ D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922,

Rainbow, xxvi-xxvii.

205: “All this is almost to extremes which had full implications of the revision of ‘The White

Introduction

to the Cambridge

edition

of The

certainly new, as it involves the pushing of opposites become the structure of The Rainbow, teasing out the wedding dance and its aftermath, itself new after the Stocking’ and the dialectic of ‘Hardy’.”

* F.R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Pelican, 1981), 148-51. 113

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

compares

his impersonality and separateness with Will’s failure to

enter the world beyond

separate

their marriage:

fire, fascinated by it. Would

“she watched his cool, hard,

she rather have

it than her

husband’s diffuse heat, than his blind, hot youth?” (R, 184). In turn,

the Baroness despises Will’s “uncritical, unironical nature”, though

we reflect that she is taken aback by his difference from her, since,

“she had no power over him”, “it angered her as if she were jealous”. In these extraordinary interactions no categorization of characters along moral lines is permissible. We are left with the generation of symbolic and imagistic patterns or suggestions to carry forward the action of the novel, as a prophetic note is struck with the appearance of young Anton, “a quick, slight child with fine perceptiveness, and a cool transitoriness in his interest” (R, 185). Anton demonstrates that self-possessed, aristocratic manner which will so fascinate Ursula in “First Love”. The Skrebensky visit sets up the tensions explored in Lincoln Cathedral, visited immediately afterwards. Anna, having glimpsed a “cool

outside”

(R,

186)

as

relief from

Will’s

“blind,

hot

youth”,

focuses on the stone faces in the grand tide of the cathedral in order to offset Will’s passionate attachment to the cathedral as an absolute. The malicious faces suggest “the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church”; an insight that forcibly quenches Will’s blind devotion, leaving his mouth “full of ash”. Unanchored by

either Anna or the church, he finally opens his senses to “life outside the church”, listening to thrushes in the garden, witnessing the yellowness of dandelions, and later caring for the church furnishings, “mending the organ and restoring a piece of broken carving”. In a novel full of broken arches, Will’s new-found extroversion is a sign of his own limited and belated movement towards individual being; though his life is now more “superficial”, inarticulate, “uncreated” (R, 189-91), he has undergone the first stage on the path to a greater form of self-realization. Anna’s life is similarly transformed by intense industry, as she takes refuge in her new baby, Ursula, and develops a “little matriarchy” (R, 193) of children. Though Will remains undeveloped, “unready for fulfilment” (R, 195), he is now prepared 114

The Emergence of a New Vision for his encounter with Jennie, the warehouse girl, and that entry into strange impersonality through sensual experience which gives rise to his purposive self and confirms the development of the marital relation beyond the stage of absolute dependency. This new chapter has laid the foundations for an impersonal development in the second generation, and its introduction of Anton looks forward to the stackyard scene of “First Love”: a reworking along impersonal lines of the corn harvest scene between Anna and Will in “Girlhood of Anna Brangwen”. As I have noted, Lawrence’s vision of the male-female, Love-Law

dialectic had been applied in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” to Boccioni’s sculpture “Development of a Bottle in Space”, and the Futurist insistence on the centrifugal force of male motion (its withdrawal from the female) found to be a source of confusion.” Lawrence wants “the collision of the originating forces” (Hardy, 76) in place of their separation, but it is here — in the depiction of the human struggle for separation — that he finds the violence of Futurist techniques essential, as we shall see. He expresses the necessity of a new relation between male and female drives using an architectural image: “the column must always stand for the male aspiration, the arch or ellipse for the female completeness containing this aspiration. And the whole picture is a geometric symbol of the consummation of life” (Hardy, 72). This symbol replaces another more stable and fixed symbol of male-female marriage in Lawrence’s novel: he changes the title from “The Wedding Ring” to The Rainbow in early December 1914, “in reference to the Flood” (III, 142), influenced by the war to

emphasize the importance of struggle and catastrophe in achieving new self-responsibility and a new relation between the sexes. A comparable symbol of fragile and transitory completeness is invoked in the corn harvest scene between Anna and Will, where Anna takes

control of their courting on a walk at nightfall through the farm buildings. By moonlight, they work at putting up the sheaves of corn in shocks, moving backwards and forwards in movements of ebb and §

See D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, 75-76.

115

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

flow beneath the moonlight, stressing the dominance of those impersonal forces of organization termed “Law” in the “Study of Thomas Hardy”: And always she was gone before he came. As he came, she drew away, as he drew away, she came. Were they never to meet? Gradually a low, deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord, tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together. (R, 114-15) In Will’s insistence we already witness the hopeless tension of the

relationship;

Anna,

dominant

in their outward

actions,

is perturbed

and bullied by Will’s dependency into letting her sheaves fall, once by mistake and once through Will’s insistence in his desire to embrace her. They have not achieved the consummation of column and arch; instead, their symbol is the shock, where sheaves of corn lean against each other in conflict and dependency, always threatened by the prospect of breaking apart. We sense the same drawing apart of male and female that Lawrence had discovered in the Boccioni

sculpture;

their struggles match the doomed labour of the artist to “re-state the real [geometric] abstraction”, “the conception of this same interlocked state of marriage between centripetal and centrifugal forces” (Hardy,

75).

This scene of rhythmic surrender to impersonal forces, upset by a lurking imbalance, is recreated in striking fashion in Ursula’s dance with Anton at her Uncle Fred’s wedding to Laura. Here, the terms of the “Study” connect the two generations, and Lawrence’s Futurist reading suggests a new language in which to explore Ursula’s more modern experiences in a widening circle of society where industrial centres replace the farm world of her predecessors and war in South Africa can be a pressing reality in individual relationships. Marinetti’s “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, which Lawrence read in the summer of 1914, lays down the tenets of a new intuitive language of analogy which will enable the Futurist writer to 116

The Emergence of a New Vision move beyond “dramas of humanized matter” to harness the molecular energies of a strip of steel, “the incomprehensible and nonhuman

alliance of its molecules or its electrons that oppose, for instance, the

penetration of a howitzer”. Inspired by the propeller of a plane as he flies over the industrial chimney-pots of Milan, Marinetti proposes a wholesale destruction of old sentence structures:

[O]ne must destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random [....] One must abolish the adjective, to allow the naked noun to preserve its essential colour [....] One must abolish the adverb [.... and] abolish even the punctuation. Lawrence has his heroine develop towards self-responsibility in the fashion laid down by Marinetti: she develops a hatred of “sentimentality” (R, 267), exhibits a refusal to bow down before the altar of Art (“Why should one remember the things one read?” [R, 310]), and experiences a tiredness with the formalities of language (“Once she knew how to read French and Latin, the syntax bored her” [R, 310]).

Furthermore,

Ursula’s modern

vision demands

a form of

expression which rests on the same essential principles of analogy as the vital literature celebrated in to his regiment, in “First Love”, part to articulate an impersonal moon, that powerful symbol of second and third generations. In

Marinetti’s work. On Anton’s return we witness an attempt on Ursula’s longing using an analogy with the Law and female ascendancy in the her diary she writes: “If I were the

moon, I know where I would fall down” (R, 308). Marinetti wanted to

replace syntax and punctuation with scattered nouns, doubled nouns (“woman-gulf, crowd-surf”, etc.), and mathematical symbols, in order

to invoke “an ever-vaster gradation of analogies, [...] ever-deeper and more

solid

short excerpt

affinities,

however

remote”.

Marinetti

quotes

a second

(this time from his Mafarka the Futurist) in order to

further illustrate a “strict net of images”, the chain of analogies which

reveals the Futurist method of interpenetration and simultaneity: 64

F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 87.

117

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

All the bitter sweetness of past youth mounted in his throat, as the cheerful cries of boys rose from the schoolyard toward their teachers leaning on the parapets of the terraces from

which ships could be seen taking flight.

The man, the boys, the schoolyard, the teachers, the parapets, and the ships: the movement is away from the “bitter sweetness” of the man’s response and towards an embodied series of analogical approximations to this condition in the “cheerful cries” of the boys, the adult detachment of the teachers leaning on the terraces, and the action of the ship as it retreats with a motion of flight that captures the man’s separateness from the scene, and the ambivalence of his feelings. Here

we witness the formation of what Lawrence,

in the “Study”, termed

“lines of force” (Hardy, 76): the interpenetration of “people, things, landscapes, and abstractions [...] in changing patterns of ‘related-

ness’”. Through the use of analogy Ursula found a sentence to include all of her wonder at the new and powerful impersonal world: “she put into it all the anguish of her youth and her passion and yearning” (R, 308-309). Lawrence, looking for a fit language in which to

narrate

Ursula’s

excursions

into

this

new

world,

found

in

Marinetti’s “obfuscated” (II, 182) Italian a way of recording that which is “most fugitive and ungraspable in matter”.”” In the sections of “First Love” which Lawrence extensively revised in the final draft, these “lines of force” access a plane of experience which throws into sharp relief Ursula’s domestic existence at the level of diamond, coal and soot. Her “daytime consciousness” is displaced by “overpowering desire”, “that other burning, corrosive self” (R, 299). No longer wishing to react upon herself in the “vision world” (R, 266) of Sundays, “she wanted to become hard, indifferent, brutally callous to everything but just the immediate need, the immediate

°° Ibid., 84-86. 6 67

GM. Hyde, D. H. Lawrence, 53. FT. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 86.

118

The Emergence of a New Vision satisfaction” (R, 267). She now wants to react upon somebody outside herself, and this need finds its satisfaction in the dancing and stackyard encounters with Anton: “he knew she wanted to react upon him and to destroy his being” (R, 302). The language of physical reaction provides Lawrence with a solid and unemotional analogue for impersonal forces, enabling him to absorb a landscape dominated by “two great, red, flameless fires [...] lights and lanterns” (R, 294) and “a great white moon” (R, 296) into lines of force generated by the physical attractions and repulsions of the lovers. During their four or five dances, Ursula and Anton are already reacting upon each other: Skrebensky, like a loadstone weighed on her, the weight of his

presence detained her. She felt the burden of him, the blind,

persistent, inert burden. He was inert, and he weighed upon her [....] She felt like bright metal weighted down by dark, impure magnetism [....] Her hands felt destructive, like metal blades of destruction [....] There was fierce, white, cold passion in her heart [....] She was cold and hard and compact

of brilliance

as

the

moon

itself [...] bright

moonlight, as bright as a steel blade. (R, 296-97)

as

a piece

of

Here we witness the interpenetration of fire and steel, magnet and moon, with the insistence on mixed and overlapping adjectives confirming the simultaneity of sensual responses: “blind, persistent, inert [....] inert [....] bright [...] dark, impure [....] fierce, white, cold [....] cold and hard and compact [....] bright [...] bright”. This “delicious

flux

and

contest

in

flux”

(R,

295),

like

the

ensuing

stackyard scene, is a reworking of that between Will and Anna in the

°* It must have been passages such as this that led John Galsworthy to lament Lawrence’s “perfervid futuristic style” in The Rainbow, in a letter to J. B. Pinker of autumn 1915. Galsworthy, in the same letter, comments that the book’s “reiterations bore me to death” (D. H. Lawrence: The Critical

Heritage, 108-109).

119

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

cor field, but its language marks it as a radical departure: a violently modern episode. In the stackyard, the looming stacks of corn retain the association with impersonal forces that had been symbolically established in “Girlhood of Anna Brangwen”, and around their symbolic presence now gather many of the images of hard indifference and brutality. The separate reactions of the two lovers are of great significance for their final encounter in “The Bitterness of Ecstasy”: They went towards the stackyard. There he saw, with something like terror, the great new stacks of corn glistening and gleaming transfigured, silvery and present under the night-blue

sky,

throwing

dark,

substantial

shadows,

but

themselves majestic and dimly present. She, like glimmering gossamer, seemed to burn among them, as they rose like cold fires to the silvery-bluish air. All was intangible, a burning of cold, glimmering, whitish-steely fires. He was afraid of the great moon-conflagration of the corn-stacks rising above him. His heart grew smaller, it began to fuse like a bead. He knew he would die. Ursula,

with

her

insistent and wilful

“brilliant, Anton

cold,

salt-burning

into “warm,

body”,

soft iron”;

she

melts

the

crystallizes

herself whilst corroding Anton until he is “dissolved with agony and annihilation” (R, 298-99). The corn acts as a focus for what Charles L.

Ross terms the

666

“‘metallic-corrosive’ vocabulary”,” and Ursula now

realizes the connection: “she saw the delicate glint of oats dangling from the side of the stack, in the moonlight, something proud and royal, and quite impersonal. She had been proud with them, where they were, she had been also” (R, 300). Ursula’s awareness of the analogy between her own experiences and the separateness of the moon and the oats brings her to verbal consciousness in the writing of °°

Charles L. Ross, The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A

History, 34.

120

The Emergence of a New Vision her moon analogy, and also empowers

her in the movement

away

from the constraints of a familiar, domestic world. Recognition of the

forces of matter at work in the individual is necessary for Ursula’s growth toward self-responsibility, and this begins with the crisis at Uncle Fred’s party. Marinetti demands a closer attention to sound,

weight and smell in literary works.” In the scene at the dance,

Lawrence gives us the “sound of laughter and voices, and a scent of coffee” (R, 294), while the lovers weigh upon each other in struggles analogous to those between metal and magnet. The importance of the moon as the controller of ebb and flow is now given an impersonal and scientific twist; this new language was developed rapidly around the time of Lawrence’s exposure to Marinetti, but it articulates forces which Lawrence had already intuited. These forces achieve their most vivid expression in the final scenes between Ursula and Anton, on the Lincolnshire coast, at the party of Anton’s great-aunt. These scenes help us to understand Anton’s feelings of annihilation when confronted by Ursula’s corrosive self. As Valentine de Saint-Point has written in the “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913), the forces of conquest and of lust have been closely connected in soldierly tradition. “When they have fought their

battles”, she writes, “soldiers seek sensual pleasures,

in which their

constantly battling energies can be unwound and renewed.”’' Anton seeks sexual conquests when he is not engaged in the conquests of colonialism and militarism. The first sexual encounter with Ursula in Lincolnshire reveals this need in him: He held her close against him, felt all her firm, unutterably desirable mould of body through the fine fire of the silk that fell about her limbs. The silk, slipping fierily on the hidden, yet revealed roundness and firmness of her body, her loins, seemed to run in him like fire, make his brain burn like

0 FLT. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 88; I Poeti Futuristi, 19. "| Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 71.

121

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism brimstone. She liked it, the electric fire of the silk under his hands upon her limbs, the fire flew over her, as he drew nearer

and nearer to discovery. She vibrated like a jet of electric, firm fluid in response. Yet she did not feel beautiful. All the time, she felt she was not beautiful to him, only exciting. She let him

take

her,

passion. (R, 442)

and

he

seemed

mad,

mad

with

excited

Ultimately, Ursula’s yearning for “something unknown” repels and undermines Anton’s desire to “[take] her for himself” (R, 443). In the final, destructive

scene

between

them,

Ursula’s

“burning,

corrosive

self’ emerges once more in a destructive capacity, and the language again transforms the actions into reactions and the characters into reagents. The lines of force convey the violence of the encounter and generate a “Dionysic” (III, 142) effect through their surfeit of simultaneous symbolic and imagistic elements: He felt as if the knife were being pushed into his already dead

body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for some minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in

the moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eyes, in which slowly the water gathered, shook with glittering moonlight, then, surcharged, brimmed over and ran trickling, a tear with its burden of moonlight, into the darkness, to fall in the sand. (R,

445)

In her destructive moving apart from Anton, Ursula turns away from the conventional colonial married life that had awaited her in India. In this excerpt, the woman’s tear is an expression of the inhuman will in her.’* Ursula’s rejection of the “hard, easy, shallow intimacy” (R, 441) of high society is achieved through the agency of an electricity celebrated in Futurist manifestos for its channelling of the impersonal energies of modernity. Her metallic countenance is a good conductor ”

See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 183.

122

The Emergence of a New Vision

of electric currents: she is surcharged, and this energy (the force animating her “inhuman will”) leaves her outside of Anton’s world, to whose shallow surfaces it represents a severe threat. She has developed into the kind of impersonality that Lawrence found of surpassing interest in the Futurists, captured in lines like these from Enrico Cavacchioli’s “Damned Be the Moon!” (‘Sia maledetta la luna!”), to be found in / Poeti Futuristi: Quando il tuo cuore sara come un rocchetto di Rumkorf e le tue mani tenaci avranno un furore metallico,

ed il tuo petto potra gonfiarsi come un mare, oh, grida allora la tua vittoria definitive!

When your heart has become like a small Rumkorf rocket and your tenacious hands possess a metallic fury, and your chest can swell like a sea, oh, cry then your definitive victory!” Ursula’s final encounter with Anton yields a victory of sorts, but in Lawrence’s novel it is far from definitive. It is the equivalent for Ursula of Will’s experience with the warehouse girl, confirming her essential alienation from the fixed and conscious environment of home. It brings the relationship to an end, and the novel to its dialectical apogee: Anton becomes afraid of the darkness, whose void

Ursula

has

always

sensed

beneath

his aristocratic

and

soldierly

manner, but Ursula herself is racked with self-doubt and denounces for the duration of a letter the corrosive, dominant self which,

throwing up the offer of marriage, “must have the moon” (R, 449). Anton marries his colonel’s daughter and goes off to settle in colonial India (retreating from a threatening impersonal darkness into the comforting, thoughtless darkness of colonialism) whilst Ursula suffers a miscarriage and the confirmation of her difference from Anton and ® 1 Poeti Futuristi, 210-11. translation of these lines.

Thanks

are due to Grazia

123

Piffanelli

for her

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

the world of domesticity he represents for her: “She fought and fought and fought all through her illness to be free of him and his world, to put it aside, to put it aside, into its place” (R, 456). So, in keeping with the author’s desire for a dialectical development in the novel, Anton Skrebensky’s apparent failure to attain Lawrentian self-responsibility is framed in dialogue and in the narrative’s polyphonic voices, explored within the fears and uncertainties of Ursula: “It

seems

to

me,”

she

answered,

“as

if you

weren’t

anybody — as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me.” (R, 289) She looked at him, she turned to him, but he was always so strange and null — so null. He was so collected. She thought it was that which made him null. Strangely nothing he was. (R,

307)

Anton remains for Ursula predominantly a soldier, “stiff and wooden” (R, 289), burnt and corroded by the fires at the edge of space which mark out her own movement into impersonality: “This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp [....] Yet all the time, within the darkness she had been aware of points of light, like the eyes of wild beasts, gleaming, penetrating, vanishing” (R, 405). These flashing lights — the “kindled bonfires on the edge of space” in the “Study”, the “two great, red, flameless fires” (R, 294) of “First Love” — generate potent lines of symbolic force in The Rainbow, so that the 74 David Lodge has suggested the presence of a Bakhtinian polyphony in the later stages of The Rainbow in his essay “Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin”, in After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), although he rightly affords Women in Love pride of place as a dialogic novel. His description of Lawrence’s steady movement to a dialogical fiction between Sons and Lovers and Women in Love is, | believe, an instructive one.

124

The Emergence of a New Vision scenes of struggle between Ursula and Anton become culminative and powerful whilst remaining enigmatic, suggestive and resistant to a monological reading. The Rainbow, with its language of “Dionysic or Aphrodysic ecstasy” (III, 142), is, as Lawrence indicated, “destructive-consummating”:

Ursula’s vision destroys Anton (“His will was broken” [R, 446]), but the destruction takes place within a polyphonic narrative where “the fight, the struggle for consummation” (R, 445) is paramount. The dynamism of the struggle, the language of battle, the simultaneity and interpenetration of impressions (all elements of the Futurist aesthetic) are deployed by Lawrence in his final draft to create a symbolic culmination whose sudden emergence has puzzled critics from Leavis

onwards.’> Marinetti’s futuristic writings suggested a language vital

for Lawrence’s process of writing himself out of the novel, but the method was so new and radical that its symbolic lines of force came to dominate in place of the authorial voice. It is for this reason that the latter stages of The Rainbow develop along lines suggested not by characters and action but by the force of symbols and images: a courageous and new, if arguably ill-integrated, development of the novel along impersonal lines.

3

See F.R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, 70.

125

Chapter Four Futurist Articulacy and the Narrative of Fate

in Women in Love

In his “Foreword to Women in Love”, Lawrence wrote that he wanted

the chronology of its action “to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (WL, 485).

This, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes has noted, marks

Women in Love off

from The Rainbow as a novel “which overtly renounces the sense of date and historical precision”.' However, if we extrapolate the intricate chronology of the earlier novel into the opening chapters of Women in Love we arrive at a provisional pre-war date for the momentous excursion of Ursula and Gudrun to the church at Willey Green: the year is 1909.” This proves to be the same year in which the founding manifesto of Futurism was launched in Le Figaro. The place of Futurism in Women in Love has been greatly underplayed or simplified by critics of the novel. The movement is now being engaged with by Lawrence at a thematic level, but it has generally been taken to possess a negative importance in this work. It has been said merely to channel Lawrence’s scorn at the London bohemians

represented

in the

novel,

and

at the

character

of the

' Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “The Sense of History in The Rainbow”, in D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World, eds Peter Hoare and Peter Preston (London: Macmillan, 1989), 136.

At the end of The Rainbow the year is 1905 and Ursula is twenty-two. When Women in Love opens, Ursula is twenty-six (D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, 8).

Women in Love

German sculptor Loerke, whose celebration of industry and whose French and Italian outbursts are held to broadly mimic Marinetti.* These readings place great emphasis upon the presence of Futurist works in Julius Halliday’s London flat, and treat Loerke as a representative Futurist artist. Even the most cursory reading of the text complicates and upsets this picture. Halliday may have “one or

two new pictures in the room, in the Futurist manner” (WL, 74), but it

is Gerald Crich who is most closely associated with these pictures (he goes out of his way to look at one in the chapter entitled “Créme de

Menthe” [WL, 75]). Loerke expounds upon the maddening beauty of machinery and labour, but “was not satisfied with the Futurists” (WL,

448). His aesthetic, based around the subservience of art to industry and the submitting of art to the demands of the workplace, draws most heavily upon the German Werkbund movement of the pre-war years.* 3 Scott Sanders, for instance, in D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels (London: Vision Press, 1973), 101, states, with some qualifications,

that “Loerke, with his love of machinery and his deification of industry, could be taken as a satirical portrait of the Futurist”. Jennifer Michaels-Tonks writes, in D. H. Lawrence: The Polarity of North and South — Germany and

Italy in His Prose

Works,

57, that “Loerke

represents the epitome of what

Lawrence dislikes in art and, significantly, Lawrence puts futuristic theories of art into his mouth”. Likewise, Emile Delavenay in “Lawrence and the Futurists”, from The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, 157, states that Loerke’s “sinister views are in effect a brilliant if caricatural synthesis of some of Lawrence’s impressions of the Futurists, gathered in the spring of 1914, and matured during the final period of gestation of Women in

Love”.

Giovanni

Cianci

in

“D.

H.

Lawrence

and

Futurism/Vorticism’,

Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, VIII/1 (1983), 49, writes: “In the negative depiction of Loerke we find a Futurism already directed towards a Vorticist position, as well as aspects of a sterile aestheticism that can be related to Lawrence’s frustrating experiences with Bloomsbury.” 4

The editors of the Cambridge edition of Women

in Love note that, in the

depiction of Loerke’s aesthetic position, Lawrence “refers to the movement in Germany during the decade before the First World War to link art and industry; cf. the history of the Deutscher Werkbund, and the work of men like

127

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

This movement had strong connections with Loerke’s preferred hometown of Dresden, and its major exhibition took place between May and October 1914 in Cologne, where Loerke is working on his granite frieze for a factory. In a letter of 5 December

1916, Lawrence

wrote to Mark Gertler claiming that, whilst Gertler’s “Merry-GoRound” was “part” of the Loerke frieze, the circumstantial inspiration for the character of Loerke was a German who did “big reliefs for

great, fine factories in Cologne” (III, 46).° This German would almost

certainly have been a member of the Werkbund circle. Loerke is a character whose aesthetic, with its genesis in a conversation Lawrence may have had with a Werkbund artist, brings together various industrial and mechanical tendencies in modern art. Approaches which try to pigeonhole Loerke as a Futurist artist are textually inaccurate. They limit the possible importance of Futurism in the novel to the surface level of character, and, by viewing the movement as a reminder of the negativity of the London bohemians and of Loerke, they reinforce a normative approach to character that Lawrence was attempting to move beyond in the fiction of the war

years.

Critics encounter difficulties when discussing the significance of Futurism in Women in Love if they attempt to directly relate Lawrence’s own ambivalent pronouncements on Futurism in his letters and in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” to this open-ended, Richard

Riemerschmid

(1868-1957)”

(578, footnote 424:6). The

Deutscher

Werkbund movement was founded in 1907 in Munich: it answered the appeal of twelve artists and twelve manufacturers to restore the links between art and industry. See The Werkbund: Studies in the History and Ideology of the

Deutscher Werkbund 1907-1933, Design Council, 1980).

ed.

Lucius

Burckhardt

(London:

The

° The full excerpt reads: “Sculpture, it seems to me, is truly a part of architecture. In my novel there is a man — not you, I reassure you — who does a great granite frieze for the top of a factory, and the frieze is a fair, of which your whirligig, for example, is part. — (We knew a man, a german [sic], who did these big reliefs for great, fine factories in Cologne).”

128

Women in Love

polyphonic novel.° To admit the ambivalence of Lawrence’s writings about Futurism, and to acknowledge the dialogic structure of Women in Love, is to access another dimension in thinking of the way Futurism may operate in the novel. From the time of Lawrence’s major reading of the Futurists in summer 1914, his attitude to them was divided: he admired their appetite for change, but distrusted their brashness. Lawrence’s divided attitude should warn us against attempting to find a unity and consistency in the way he alludes to Futurism in Women

in Love. Rather, we should look to trace the way

in which the divided aspects Lawrence perceived in Futurism manifest themselves in the text. In this chapter, then, I wish to argue that the positive struggles of Futurism enter Women in Love at the level of language, as had been the case with

The Rainbow,

but that Lawrence’s use of a futuristic

vocabulary is now subject to the later novel’s new self-consciousness, as Futurism becomes an artistic factor encountered at the conscious level by characters in the text. I will also argue that the violence and the destructive surface trappings of Futurism get associated in the novel with Gerald Crich. Lawrence’s ambivalent attitude to the Futurists will be seen to be reproduced in Women in Love. In a novel whose pessimism emerges out

®

of

the

general

inability

of

its

characters

to

move

through

David Lodge first pinpointed some of the polyphonic elements of Women

in Love in his essay “Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin: D. H. Lawrence and Dialogic Fiction”, published in Renaissance and Modern Studies, 29 (1985),

16-32. This essay was subsequently published in modified forms in Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990) and in Lodge’s own After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. Avrom Fleishman’s “Lawrence and Bakhtin: Where Pluralism Ends

and

Dialogism

Begins”,

also

collected

in

Rethinking

develops Lodge’s approach with specific reference to Although I do not wish to pursue a Bakhtinian approach discussion of the way that Futurist brashness is set against the text does suggest the presence of a dialogic principle in

129

Lawrence,

Women in Love. to the novel, my Futurist praxis in Women in Love.

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

destructiveness to new types of creativity, Futurism represents an impulse for creation out of destruction that ultimately remains largely unrealized.

In “Water-Party”, as elsewhere in the novel, Ursula and

Birkin come up against the difficulty of speaking of a new kind of relationship in a language full of old associations: “she knew, as well as he knew, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other” (WL, 186). To struggle with language in order to make words mean new things is to create out of this crisis; conversely, to go on using the same language is to willingly forfeit the chance of attaining some authenticity through articulation. My analysis of Women in Love will address the ways in which this tension between creative articulation and destructive inarticulacy is explored in the text. The Futurist literary project entailed a quest to revitalize an existing language in order to voice new states of being in the world. As we have seen, Lawrence’s engagement with the Futurists was strongly informed by his own struggles with language and the texts of his predecessors. The reading of the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” introduced Lawrence to the Futurist celebration of “Words-in-Freedom” (“Parole in liberta”) and the “Wireless Imagination” (“Immaginazione senza fili”): two ideals which sought a break with the solemn art of the past, abandoning syntax and punctuation in favour of mathematical symbols and chains of analogy.’ In Arundel Del Re’s translation of Marinetti’s May 1913 manifesto “Distruzione della sintassi — Immaginazione senza fili — Parole in liberta” as “Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty” for Harold

Monro’s

Poetry and Drama

of September

1913, it is stated

that the “intense life” and “new world-consciousness” resulting from the modernization of cities necessitate new means for capturing accelerated perceptions in literature. Syntax must be disregarded; adjectives must be dispensed with; “all mannerism or preciosity of

style” left behind. In their place will be thrown “handfuls of essential

7

See F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 84-89. 130

Women in Love

words” (verbs in the infinitive; onomatopoeic words to “vivify lyricism”; words connected by mathematical symbols and subject to a “typographical revolution” on the page, to invoke “the flux and reflux, the jerks and the bursts of style that are represented on it”®). The specific typographical experiments described in this manifesto interested Lawrence less than the potential they indicated for discovering a “new human phenomenon” (II, 183) in the dynamic forces of matter. The Futurist innovations in technique and style were proposed in order to move away from the old human feelings and to voice “the lyric obsession with matter [... to] divine its different governing principles, its forces of compression, dilation, cohesion, and disaggregation, its crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons”. Marinetti declares that the proposed innovations, “instead of

humanizing

animals,

vegetables,

minerals

(a

system

already

surpassed), [...] may animalize, vegetalize, mineralize, electrify, and liquefy style, making it, to a certain extent, live the same life as that of matter”.'° The Futurists embraced the changes in consciousness brought about by new electronic technologies by drawing an analogy between expression and the forces of matter. This chapter will propose a reading of Women in Love in which the vital Futurist enterprise to articulate the life of matter is seen to offset the pessimistic war-time narrative of fate of Gerald Crich’s decline. It will suggest a more crucial and creative role for Italian Futurism

the actual narrative structure of Women in Love. Initially, I want to historicize the opposed

tendencies

in

towards

renewal and destructive decline in Women in Love by relating them to

their immediate context: the First World War. Lawrence’s fascination with the Futurists’ break with tradition was heightened by the onset of a war which both the Futurists and Lawrence initially heralded as a way through to a new set of values and new forms of life. The “great 8

Poetry and Drama, \/3 (September 1913), 321-25.

10

Poetry and Drama, \/3 (September 1913), 323.

°F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 87.

131

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

kick at misery” (I, 459) in The Rainbow had involved the deployment of a Futurist vocabulary to capture the impersonal violence of Ursula’s movement away from Skrebensky. In Women in Love the war’s presence in the text elicits a quite different tone and atmosphere: one of “bitterness” (WL, 485). The Futurist process of coming through violence to new forms of life is now subordinated to a sense of tragic fate and wasteful destructiveness. We know that in late stages of composition Lawrence considered calling the novel “The Latter Days”

and that, later, Frieda

wanted

the title “Dies

Irae”,|!

These titles, however, stress a potential for eventual religious rebirth

that Women in Love cannot sustain.'” The final title, Women

in Love,

with its popular, almost cinematic connotations, conveys bleaker and more bitter resonances. In a society where old forms of expression and self-preservation prevail, people shun self-responsibility and submit private experiences to a devalued, cliché-ridden language." The violence associated with Futurism no longer forms a prelude to a new vision; rather, this violence is felt in stillborn, frozen, wounded

characters. "|

The

Futurist

violence

has

now

been

decontextualized.

The idea of the title Women in Love was communicated to J. B. Pinker on

13 July 1916. Before this Lawrence had intended to keep the old title, “The

Sisters”. On 3 October 1916, he wrote to Ottoline Morrell: “I shall call my novel, I think, ‘The Latter Days’.” A letter of 31 October 1916 reveals that

Frieda wanted the title “Dies Irae” (“Days of Wrath”), though it appears that Lawrence had settled upon Women in Love by this time. As he admitted in the letter of 13 July 1916, he was “not good at titles”. "2 Job 19: 25-27: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.” ‘3 Women in Love, of course, submits

the

conventional

connotations

of

“women” and “love” to close scrutiny. In “Snowed Up”, Loerke is happy simply to declare his hatred of the words: “Pah — l’amour. I detest it. L’amour, l’amore, die Liebe — I detest it in every language. Women and love, there is no greater tedium” (458).

132

Women in Love

Futurist works are to be found in the the Futurist declarations are abridged Loerke. The change in outlook can be of fullness by considering Lawrence’s his letters and discursive writings after

rooms of decadent bohemians; in the positions of artists like accounted for with some degree changing relation to the war in the “Study of Thomas Hardy”.

“The Crown” and the bitterness of the war It is an indication of the rapid development of Lawrence’s vision during the initial months of the war that even as he was typing up a draft of the “Study of Thomas Hardy” in December 1914 he was professing in a letter to Amy Lowell a desire to rewrite it (II, 243). Having just finished the final draft of The Rainbow in March 1915, he returned to his philosophy, but not as a rewriting of the earlier work. Instead, the new philosophy was a “revolutionary utterance” (II, 300), composed during breaks in the final months of correctional work on the novel. Lawrence considered a number of titles for the new project of philosophy — “The Signal”, “The Phoenix”, and “Morgenrot” — before settling on “The Crown”: a series of six essays which arose out of his proposed rewriting of the “Study”. Work on these began in earnest during April 1915, broke off for proof corrections to The Rainbow between late June and early July 1915, and resumed later in the month, when Lawrence worked steadily through to their completion in late September 1915. Three of the six essays were published in The Signature: a periodical in whose production Lawrence collaborated with Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, but whose sparse subscription list led to its demise after only three issues. Closer attention to “The Crown” will pinpoint the sources of the dishonesty which Lawrence considered an obstacle to progress beyond war, and will emphasize the importance of the honest and distinctly Futurist struggle with language in the life of Rupert Birkin in Women in Love. During the composition of the essays in “The Crown”, in mid June 1915, Lawrence was visited in Sussex by the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell, with whom he arranged to deliver anti-war lectures

133

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

in London in the autumn. The planned lecture on “Immortality” occupied Lawrence’s thoughts as he wrote “The Crown”, but before its completion in October he had quarrelled irreparably with Russell over the philosopher’s vision of a new democracy, and returned to him the outline of his lectures (entitled “Philosophy of Social Reconstruction”) with a number of scribbled criticisms; in September he would react angrily to Russell’s essay entitled “The Danger to Civilisation”, a submission to The Signature, littering the manuscript with scathing marginal comments.’ In a letter of 14 September 1915 he accused Russell of harbouring in repressed form the desires of war: “What you want is to jab and strike, like the soldier with the bayonet, only you are sublimated into words” (II, 392). This reaction against Russell, combined with Lawrence’s violent rejection of the Bloomsbury artists and the theory of Significant Form (and particularly Duncan Grant’s “silly experiments in the futuristic line” [II, 263]), strongly informs the argument of “The Crown”. Lawrence wrote of the Bloomsbury artists as harbouring the same repressed wishes for destruction as Russell, preaching a sermon on Significant Form whilst destroying the Impressionist concentration on light: “They [the Post-Impressionists] exploded the illusion, which fell back to the canvas of art in a chaos of lumps” (P, 565). A disastrous visit

with David Garnett and E. M. Forster to Grant’s studio in January

1915,'° and a similarly ill-fated one to stay with Russell in Cambridge

in March

1915, confirmed Lawrence’s sense of intellectual as well as

literal isolation in war-time England.

‘4 For a detailed account of Lawrence’s interactions with Russell, see Ray Monk, “The Tiger and the Machine: D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, XXV1/2 (1996), 205-46. 'S The visit to Grant’s studio on 22 January 1915 is documented in Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence:

Triumph to Exile 1912-1922, 184-85. See

also David Ellis, “Lawrence and Forster in 1915”, The Cambridge Quarterly, XXVII/1 (1998), 1-14.

134

Women in Love

Reacting combatively against the English intelligentsia, despairing of the war’s continuation, and soon to witness the suppression of a novel which had engaged him intensely over two turbulent years, Lawrence’s vision took a destructive turn. The optimism which he could still feel for the end of war when writing the “Study” arose from his belief that it was a necessary but short phase in Man’s revolt against the stifling of his essential impersonal self: war would help Men “realize once more that self-preservation is not the final goal of life”, and would clear the way for “a forward venture of life” (Hardy,

17). This optimism is no longer available to the author of “The Crown”, who is witnessing the protraction of the war and the postponement of constructive action in the universal deceit of social and religious forms, with people applying to discussions of war the terms of philanthropy. “The Crown” is a densely metaphorical work which establishes all life as a conflict and consummation of the Lion (darkness and sensuality) and the Unicorn (light and civilization). The one perceives the infinity of the past, “the vast original dark out of which Creation issued”,

and the other contains

the seeds

of a future eternity, “the

Eternal light into which all mortality passes”. The victory of either term (Lion or Unicorn, dark or light, past or future) implies the collapse of a self which is constituted by internal conflict. It is in the consummation of the two opposites, “the light projecting itself into the darkness, the darkness enveloping herself within the embrace of the light” (RDP, 258-59), that life finds its truest expression. Yet, since in the war-stricken world the old social forms and scales of value (the light) share a discordant relation to the impersonal forces constituting the self (the dark), Man is incomplete and panders to the void in his nature by siding exclusively with the Lion or the Unicorn. Lawrence locates this tendency in the individual’s self-conscious ego or will, which lays claim to an artificial and false completeness, belying the essential motivating void behind its acquisitiveness and its philanthropic pretensions.

135

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

The cabbage imagery associated with self-preservation in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” is encountered again in “The Crown”, but the outlook that it reveals is much more bitter and pessimistic. Speaking of the false assurance of those who consider themselves whole and preach peace in war-time, Lawrence writes: They

assert

themselves

as

important,

as absolute

mortals.

They are just liars [....] They are all just fat lies, these people, these many people, these mortals. They are innumerable cabbages in the regulated cabbage plot. (RDP, 273) In both the 1915 version of “The Crown”

and the 1925 altered text,

the imagery develops to show how those who are caught in the habit of self-preservation are unable to be born into self-responsibility: The pregnancy is accomplished, the hour of labour has come. Yet the labour does not begin. The loins of the past are withered, the young unborn is shut in. Thus the false I comes into being: the I which thinks itself supreme and infinite, and which is, in fact, a sick foetus shut

in the walls of an unrelaxed womb. (RDP, 279) Safe that And are!

we are! Safe as houses! Shut up like unborn chickens cannot break the shell of the egg. That’s how safe we are! as we can’t be born, we can only rot. That’s how safe we (RDP, 286)

The West African statue at Halliday’s flat in Women in Love, showing a negro woman in the “utter physical stress” of labour, clearly engages with this imagery. Gerald (at this stage in the novel quite explicitly connected with reduction through physical sensation) even sees the licentious and pregnant “Pussum” in the woman’s place, as he scrutinizes the piece (WL, 79).

136

Women in Love

This imagery of the unborn or stillborn receives a further inflection in the final two parts of “The Crown”. Those individuals who have gone off to war have received an antidote to the selfpreservation of their social lives and return fit for new life, as Lawrence had hoped they might in the “Study of Thomas Hardy”; they have had their consummation in the violence itself, but they must find a suitable environment into which they can be reborn if the processes of violent reduction are not to carry on inside them. These are the wounded individuals who bring glimpses of violent consummation back to England. Lawrence recounts having been at the coast and seen a maimed soldier who had lost a leg and was forced to walk on crutches. He describes him in the following terms: He was a handsome man of about thirty, finely built. His face

was sun-browned,

and extraordinarily beautiful, still, with a

strange placidity, something like perfection, abstract, complete. He had known his consummation. It seemed he

could never desire corruption or reduction again, he had had

his satisfaction of death. He was become almost impersonal, a simple abstraction, all his personality loosed and undone. He

was now like a babe just born, new to begin life. Yet, in a sense, still-born.

The response that the man receives from the onlookers (and especially from women) as he walks down the pier reveals in these spectators the desire for a similar experience of destruction: They could not look away from him. The strange abstraction of horror and death was so perfect in his face, like the horror

of birth on a new-born infant, that they were almost hysterical. They gravitated towards him, helplessly, they could not move away from him.

137

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism This wounded

soldier, however, is “in a sense, still-born”. Among

a

people unconsciously bent on destruction, his future seems uncertain. Lawrence sees only three bleak paths for him to tread: “waiting for death”, “continuing the sensational reduction process”, or fading “into a dry, empty egoism” (RDP, 291-92). In Women in Love the processes of wounding and reduction are traced through Gerald Crich, and for his exploration of Gerald’s tragic development Lawrence arrived at a Naturalist focus upon that character. We can see why this should be so by considering what Lawrence says in “The Crown” about the reductive process and its expression in art. The fight and struggle between light and dark which should bring consummation and wholeness gives way in Lawrence’s thought to reduction and a going apart of light to light and dark to dark. This

reduction is of the sort that Lawrence detected in Poe’s characters. °

What results is the reappearance in art of the tragic, of analysis, and of aestheticism (the readings of Thomas Mann and the Edwardian novelists are given a single theoretical focus here):

It is at this crisis in the human history that tragic art appears again, that Art becomes the only absolute, the only watchword among the people. This achieved self, which we are, is

absolute and universal. There is nothing beyond. All that remains is to state this self, and the reactions upon this self,

perfectly. And the perfect statement presumes to be art. It is aestheticism. Such analysis, Lawrence writes, “presupposes a corpse” (RDP, 280). Art becomes subject to the “scientific attitude” (Hardy, 76) that Lawrence perceived in Boccioni. There is no mention of Zola in “The Crown”, but Zola’s project for the experimental novel fits this picture consummately, with its brutally honest casting of the novelist as '©

See D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other

Essays, 284.

138

Women in Love

pathologist. The focus of the experimental novel, whilst it opposes earlier forms of realist aestheticism, is precisely that reduction of the human to its constituent elements which Lawrence diagnoses as the ultimate state of modern intellectual activity: “reducing the compound back to its parts” (RDP, 281). We have already seen how this reduction

works

at the narrative

level

in Zola’s

La Béte Humaine,

with individual characters’ energies giving way before a symbolic

realization of pure mechanical force. In tracing this process in Women in Love, then, it is unsurprising that the dynamic behind Zola’s deterministic novel should be echoed in Gerald’s succumbing to the forces of reduction, with his fate strongly suggesting the Naturalist fate of Oswald Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. The naivety of the Futurists in their attempts to come through destruction to new creation is in marked contrast here to Zola’s Naturalist position, which seeks merely to scrutinize the process of reduction and so traces the steady processes of disintegration and destruction in characters. Zola is such an important precedent in the treatment of character for the Lawrence of Women in Love precisely because he epitomizes the scientific, reductive attitude so completely. Conversely, Futurist naivety represents an unrealized source of hope for Gerald as a wounded character. It suggests the possibility of moving through violent consummation to a new form of life. For the Futurists, as for Lawrence,

destruction of the old social forms must

precede the creative rebuilding of a new consummation of the two principles of light and dark, intellect and body, Love and Law. Man must submit with honesty to the urge for destruction in the self and in the phase of society in order to secure future rejuvenation. This is the major source of Lawrence’s continuing interest in the Futurists: that they attempt to pull down the old forms of society and to rid art of its residual dependence on old and anachronistic forms of empathy and sentimentality. Far from seeing the Futurist enterprise as simply an embodiment of the reductive principle in art, the Futurist desire to come through destruction was used by Lawrence to highlight the struggles of the protagonists in Women in Love to arrive at new

139

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

forms of articulation and new values. Nowhere is this Futurist struggle for articulation and the breaking through of new forms of expression more evident than in the significant attention Lawrence gives to electricity and to the language of electricity in the novel. Electricity and the place of Futurism in Women in Love Futurism wrote many panegyrics to the spirit of electricity, still a relatively new and unexplored source of power for change in 1909. One of the names that was originally considered for the movement

was “Electricism”.'’ Indeed, in the September

1913 manifesto, “The

Variety Theatre”, Marinetti went so far as to claim that the Futurists

were

born

from

electricity.'*

Without

the

changes

in

mass

communication, travel, and pace of life, that electricity brought with it, the movement would have been literally unimaginable. As Marinetti declared in 1913:

Those who today use telegraphs, telephones, gramophones, cycles,

motor-cycles,

motor-cars,

transatlantics,

dirigibles,

aeroplanes, kinematographs, big daily papers (synthesis of the world’s day) do not realize that these different means of communication, of transit, and of information exercise a very

decisive influence on their psyche.'”

In J Poeti Futuristi, the collection of Futurist poetry that Lawrence consulted in summer 1914, there is a poem by Luciano Folgore entitled “Electricity” (“L’Elettricita”) which pays tribute to its mobility, and its ability to transform itself and the world.” In particular, the Futurists celebrated the reduced sense of distance that 7 See Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 9. The other name considered for the movement was “Dynamism”. '8 See F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 116.

'° Poetry and Drama, \/3 (September 1913), 319. 20 | Poeti Futuristi, 254-56. 140

Women in Love

electrical forms of lighting and communication facilitated. Brief histories of the development of electric lighting and wireless telegraphy will give some sense of the chronology involved. As early as 1801 Humphry Davy had produced a prototype electric arc lamp, and Faraday had discovered the basic means of producing and using electricity in the 1830s, although any widescale use of electricity would take several more decades to appear. In the late 1870s, efficient arc lamp systems were being developed with a view to lighting streets and factories. An arc lamp was a form of electric lamp whose extreme brilliance was caused by an electric arc in the ionized gas between two carbon electrodes. By 1880, Joseph Swan in England and Thomas Edison in America had devised forerunners of the modern light bulb. During the first decade of the twentieth century, developments in the handling of the metals tantalum and tungsten enabled their use in the production of filaments for light bulbs. In the field of wireless transmission, Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of

the spark method was superseded by the work of Guglielmo Marconi, who patented wireless telegraphy in 1897.7! In December 1901, he sent the first transatlantic message by wireless telegraphy from Poldhu in Cornwall, which was picked up in Newfoundland.

fascination dictum

with

telegraphy

“Immaginazione

is abundantly

senza

fili”,

which

evident Del

Re

in the

Futurist

famous

translated

for

Poetry and Drama as the “wireless imagination”. Futurist lyricism was to be “telegraphic”” since it would “reproduce [...] the analogical basis of life with the same economical rapidity that the telegraph imposes on the superficial narratives of reporters and war correspondents”.”? The metaphor is apt: essential words will connect

21 A “Marconi listening machine” (hearing aid) is mentioned by Lawrence in his 1924 short story, “The Last Laugh”. See The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 123.

22 Poetry and Drama, \/3 (September 1913), 324.

* Ibid., 322.

141

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

distant objects by harnessing the energies of matter. Telegraphy offered a radical challenge to writing (as photography did to painting) since it is a disembodied medium of communication. Correspondents must pare down their messages in order to communicate very simple information: a fact whose potential for muddling relationships is explored by E. M. Forster in Howards End, through its anxious

leitmotif of “telegrams and anger”.

Appearing in 1910, Forster’s novel is transitional in the sense that it nervously surveys an urban world of altered values; a world subject to the change of consciousness that Virginia Woolf ascribed to

December of the same year.”> Throughout the first decade of the

twentieth century in England, electric power was being introduced into cities for domestic use. Lawrence almost certainly enjoyed the benefits of electric power during his time as a teacher in Croydon. Croydon had its own electricity generator in the 1890s, and when Davidson Road School was built in 1907 all the indications are that electricity for lighting was fitted to the new buildings.”° Lawrence started teaching there in 1908. In contrast, gas was the principal form of lighting at Nottingham High School up to 1925, although the school had electricity for powering machinery from around 1909.7”

24 E. M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin, 1989), 41, 112, and 176.

In fact, the use of telegrams in fictional plots swiftly became a cliché in the period. When Lawrence used the device of an incorrectly-delivered telegram in his 1913 story “New

Eve and Old Adam”,

the mother of his typist took

such exception to it that the story remained untyped and unpublished until after his death. See John Worthen, “Short Story and Autobiography: Kinds of Detachment

in D. H. Lawrence’s

Studies, 29 (1985), 12-14.

Early Fiction”, Renaissance and Modern

25

Virginia Woolf, A Woman's Essays, Selected Essays, 1,70.

27

Thanks

26 My thanks go to staff from the Croydon County Council Education Department, who looked through council minutes in order to provide this information. are due to Marilyn Clark, librarian and archivist at Nottingham

High School, for her help in establishing these details.

142

Women in Love

The Brinsley Street school that Ursula teaches at in The Rainbow (between 1900 and 1902, according to the chronology) is lit by gas.”* The contrast between Croydon’s early use of electric lighting and its absence from outlying areas of the Midlands is brought out in Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock. Here, the narrator, Cyril Beardsall, exiled from his native Nethermere in the urban environ-

ment of Norwood (close to Croydon), describes the strange effects of the street lighting: The Spring came bravely even in South London, and the town was filled with magic. I never knew the sumptuous purple of evening till I saw the round arc-lamps fill with light, and roll like golden bubbles along the purple dusk of the high-road. Everywhere at night the city is filled with the magic of lamps: over the River they pour in golden patches their floating luminous oil on the restless darkness; the bright lamps float in and out of the cavern of London Bridge Station like round shining bees in and out of a black hive; in the suburbs the street-lamps glimmer with the brightness of lemons among the trees. I began to love the town. (WP, 264)

In Sons and Lovers, William Morel, working in London and writing a letter back to his proud mother in the Midlands, points up his newfound social mobility by asking that she should imagine him “seated on an ancient oak chair, with a latest pattern electric lamp in front of [me], on the table, writing to you” (SL, 115). These details are interesting when we consider the introduction of electricity to the Midlands world of Women

in Love. In “Class-room”’,

Rupert Birkin is already able to switch on “the strong electric lights” (WL, 36), and yet, at this time, Gerald Crich is only just “putting in a private electric plant, for lighting the house” (WL, 48) and fitting to

28 Taw.

See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 343: “The gas was lighted naked and ”

143

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

his mines “an enormous electric plant [...] both for lighting and for haulage underground, and for power” (WL, 230). Electricity is carried to every mine in the novel and new machinery brought from America: a process which took place in the Eastwood pits from 1906 (a power station being built by Barber, Walker and Co. in 1906-1907).”° In the internal chronology of The Rainbow the electrical vocabulary begins to appear in the final year of the action, which is 1905. In tracing these changes, Women in Love places the overwhelming emphasis not on strict chronological verisimilitude but on the psychological shifts which accompanied electrical modernization. These shifts are dealt with at the levels both of the miners’ new subjection to machinery and systematization, and of the changes in consciousness which this source of power brought about. One of the most startling markers of the modernity of Women in Love is its persistent striving to imagine and to recreate psychological realities in terms of the new electrical science. The temporal form of The Rainbow gives way before the changes in consciousness associated with the introduction of electrical lighting to spatialized form, in which the polarity of North (intellectualism and verbal articulacy) and South (“savagery” and gestural drama) organizes the action. Through this polarity, Lawrence registers the “struggle for verbal consciousness”, “the passionate struggle into conscious being” (WL, 486), as set out in the “Foreword to Women

in Love”, and connects

the spatial distinction to a broader historical one (Futurist verbal articulacy being played off against a primitivistic regression to gestural expression). The language that we currently have to describe certain sexual and psychological states draws heavily on the language of electricity. People

are

“turned

on”

or

switched

on

and

off;

situations

are

“charged” or “surcharged”; people are “shocked”. The Oxford English Dictionary lists “shock” as having once been used in the context of armed combat between opposing forces; to “charge” carries a similar 29

See D. H. Lawrence,

Women in Love, 557, footnote 230:28.

144

Women in Love

range of meanings. The electrical vocabulary brings with it an intimation of violence and conflict that points to the internalization of the bitterness of war in the characters. Women in Love struggles to create and to apply a vocabulary that for us no longer carries such a challenging weight of modernity: one that extended the connotative range of the words that it appropriated. This extension of an existing vocabulary can be seen at work in the description of Gerald Crich from the chapter entitled “Diver”, where he launches himself “in a white arc through the air” (WL, 46); we will also see how it is

developed through that character’s blue eyes, “firm in their sockets” (WL, 232) (Lawrence dwells on the pun), and in the electric blue eyes (like Lawrence’s*’) of Hermione, Gudrun, Halliday, and Leitner.*! In fact, the new “electrical language” of Women in Love almost invariably centres in the person of Gerald, who also exemplifies many of the passions of modernity so dear to the Futurists. Ursula sees quite clearly that he is “several generations of youngness at one go” (WL, 48). His desire is for “finding out things for myself — and getting experiences — and making things go” (WL, 57). When Gudrun runs her fingers over his form in “Death and Love” her hands come “upon the field of his living, radio-active body” (WL, 332). His “soldierly” bearing is repeatedly stressed: “how beautiful and soldierly his face was” (WL, 58); “his air of soldierly alertness was rather irritating” (WL, 162); “he stood, keen and soldierly, near to her” (WL, 327). He considers the proper function of education to be “really like

gymnastics, isn’t the end of education the production of a welltrained, vigorous, energetic mind?” (WL, 85), and he is interested in

boxing (a sport much loved by the Futurists) and skiing. In episodes from the film Futurist Life, part of the morning is given over to gymnastics, involving boxing and fencing.” Skiing in the Tyrol, 3°

Lawrence’s blue eyes are mentioned in John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence:

3

See D. H. Lawrence,

The Early Years 1885-1912, 288.

Women in Love, 422.

> See F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 135. 145

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Gerald inscribes, in the style of a Futurist painting or of Boccioni’s sculptures of the human form in movement,” “one perfect line of force” (WL, 421).** His overwhelming need after spending the night with Miss Darrington (“Pussum”) is for “pure separation” (WL, 80),

recalling Lawrence’s comments on Boccioni in the “Study of Thomas

Hardy”. Gerald fears inertia: “being bound hand and foot” (WL, 67). His battle is with the earth and its concealed minerals: “it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits of victory were mere results” (WL, 223). There is a specific and important connection being set up (through Gerald) between the energies of the Futurist paintings in the novel and the electrical vocabulary. The important point seems to be that the forces of electrical discharge are no longer connected in Women in Love to the creation of new values. Ursula’s “‘surcharged” (R, 445) tear is replaced by the

closed circuit formed by the nomadic pairing of Birkin and Ursula.*°

Gerald’s superficial Futurist trappings are purely destructive. The aspects of positive renewal implicit in the Futurists’ affirmation of the future (those aspects acknowledged by Lawrence when he stated of the Futurists that “if anyone would give them eyes, they would pull the right apples off the tree, for their stomachs are true in appetite” [I], 182-83]) may be traced through the application of the electrical vocabulary to the relationship between Birkin and Ursula. This distinction implies that Women in Love is a novel with a fascinating internal division. On the one hand, the novel strives to 33 Good quality black and white prints of Boccioni’s sculptures, “Spiral Expansion of Muscles in Movement” (“Espansione spiralica di muscoli in movimento”) and “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (“Forme uniche della continuita nello spazio”), are reproduced in Soffici’s Cubismo e

Futurismo, which Lawrence consulted in summer 1914.

4 In The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression, 124, Jack Stewart writes: “Gerald’s alpine sports exemplify Futurist cults of danger, speed, and physical exertion that ultimately obliterate identity.” 3

See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, 314.

146

Women in Love

create and apply the electrical vocabulary and to arrive at new psychological insights and states of being through Gerald, but on the other it fails to believe that new insights and states of being can be understood by the society to which he belongs, or sustained by that society’s values. The struggles associated with Futurism in Gerald’s case meet with resistance from an overarching narrative of fate. Gerald’s electrical energies give rise to no lasting human values; the new electrical vocabulary struggles to voice a new realization of impersonality through Gerald, but fails, just as the discrete chapters of Women in Love work up to an insight, but then just fail to capture it, emphasizing that this is a society of individuals struggling to give birth, or to be born (as if to underscore this sense of irresolution, the

novel begins and ends in mid-conversation). Birkin and Ursula must move in and out of this society in order momentarily to attain futuristic renewal through the electrical language. According to this reading of the text, Women in Love does not contain a critique of Futurism per se, but of the society in which Futurism is received and in which its potentially creative impulse is overlooked or misunderstood. In the close readings which follow, then, I want firstly to look at

the Futurist struggle towards new kinds of articulation in Women in Love. Then I will consider how this struggle is subordinated in Gerald’s case to a physiological, Zolaesque version of fate, in which Gerald becomes subject to the forces of reduction to primitivistic sensation outlined in “The Crown”, with the action reverting to gestural inarticulacy.

147

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

A Futurist striving for “verbal consciousness” in Women in Love The new self-consciousness concerning audience that manifests itself in the action of Women in Love, and the related struggle to articulate new states of consciousness through the written word, has received a thorough treatment in recent years in a critical work by Michael Bell.*° He makes many incisive observations concerning the novel’s exploration of the limits of language, and I wish to use one of these as the starting-point for my own treatment of the novel. In the chapter entitled “Gudrun in the Pompadour”’, Lawrence imagines one of Birkin’s letters (whose contents echo a section of “The Crown”) being read out in parodistic glee before a hostile audience. According to Bell’s analysis, the incident constitutes “a figure for the felt absence of commonality within which the novel is seeking to create its most radically new idiom”.”’ The incident, and Bell’s gloss of it, is vital for my own purposes, since it suggests the problem which Women in Love dramatizes both through its own language and in its action: the problem of creating and applying a new language to capture new psychological states. Since words come complete with a range of accumulated associations, and grammar fixes these in known forms of logic, it seems that the only way to voice something new resides in extending the range of associations a word possesses, or in attempting to eschew grammatical structures. The Futurists used both of these ploys in trying to revitalize language, and they revelled in the hostility and incomprehension this occasioned in their audiences. In the “Technical

proclaimed

Manifesto

of

Futurist

Literature”,

Marinetti

to the Futurist writers that they “must renounce

even

being

36 Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 97-132. Bell acknowledges the important work done on “The New Vocabulary of Women in Love” by Michael Ragussis in The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 37 Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, 105.

148

Women in Love

understood”.*® In 1916, Lawrence was barely clinging to a faith in the power of his writings to communicate new values to his readership after his experience of the banning of The Rainbow. In May 1916 he wrote that “a work of art is an act of faith, as Michael Angelo says, and one goes on writing, to the unseen witnesses” (II, 602). In Women in Love, the struggle to make language mean new things is compounded by the desire to apply this language to individuals who complacently accept the given terms. The struggles with language and audience structure the text both formally and thematically. In my analysis of Women in Love, | will consider one aspect of this process, looking at the manner in which the novel strives to voice the new electrical language consistently associated with Gerald. The references made to electricity in Women in Love are either literal (Birkin switches on an electric light, and Gerald introduces electricity to his home and the pits) or metaphorical (marking the interactions between characters). The latter types can set up complex chains of association in a chapter, as my discussion will show. The references are clustered around specific scenes and are surprisingly self-contained, inviting connections to be made between the relevant sections. It is quite possible, therefore, to treat each of the scenes which contains a significant reference to electricity or which uses an electrical vocabulary. “Class-room”

contains the first reference. Rupert Birkin, visiting

Ursula’s classroom in his role as School Inspector, switches on “the strong electric lights” (WL, 36). Towards the end of the chapter, these lights, and their power source, take on a symbolic meaning. What occurs in between is the intrusion of Hermione with her conscious and wilful pronouncements

on spontaneity in education,

usurping a

Lawrentian language for her own ends. The exchange is one more thematization of the dangers inherent in using a language which is inevitably shared. Once Hermione has finished, Birkin seeks to draw out a distinction between the content of Hermione’s pronouncements 38

FT. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 89.

149

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

(“spontaneity”) and the language and approach to language in which the pronouncements were made: “There’s

the

whole

difference

in the world,”

he said,

“between the actual sensual being, and the vicious mentaldeliberate profligacy our lot goes in for. In our night-time, there’s always the electricity switched on, we watch ourselves, we get it all in the head, really. - You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to learn not-to-be, before you can come into

being.” (WL, 44)

Hermione’s highly self-conscious use of language leads to a perceived divorce between the range of her actual consciousness and the type of spontaneous consciousness of which she had spoken. Birkin strives to articulate the distinction, and finds himself using the metaphor of the electric light switch. The narrative of The Rainbow had used a comparable image to describe Ursula’s emergence into impersonality: This inner circle of light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed and the factories ground out their machine-produce and the plants and the animals worked by the light of science and knowledge, suddenly it seemed like the area under an arc-lamp, wherein the moths and children

played in the security of blinding light, not even knowing there was any darkness, because they stayed in the light. (R, 405) The image conveys a strong ambivalence: in one sense it presents civilization as a small, fragile, and therefore precious, achievement to be maintained against the surrounding darkness, but in another it suggests that the bright light of civilization can blind one to the 150

Women in Love

enveloping darkness. Ursula intuits this impersonal outer darkness in the earlier novel. The ambivalence of the arc lamp image can be focused through a brief consideration of Futurist treatments of movement, light, and the energies of matter. The description of the area under the arc lamp, containing trains and factories, carries strong

intimations of various Futurist paintings that Lawrence would have had access to in Soffici’s Cubismo e Futurismo. In particular, Gino Severini’s “Train in a Landscape” (‘‘Treno in un paesaggio”), is typical of a series of paintings that he and other Futurist artists produced in which the speed of the train serves to break up the solidity of its surroundings, deconstructing objects along lines of force and filling space with signs of movement (see figure 5). Lawrence’s way of discussing the Futurist fascination with motion in terms of centripetal and centrifugal forces in his treatment of Boccioni in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” was almost certainly derived from his viewing of Carlo Carra’s painting “Centrifugal Force” (“Forze centrifughe”) in Cubismo e Futurismo (see figure 6). In Carra’s painting, a number-plate reveals the outward movement of a train, fracturing the surface of the painting. Lawrence views Boccioni’s concentration upon centrifugal forces in “Development of a Bottle in Space” (“Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio”) as the naive assertion of a male principle that betrays the compulsion to

“adhere to the conception of this same interlocked state of marriage

between centripetal and centrifugal forces, the geometric abstraction of the bottle” (Hardy, 75). Light breaks up the surface of the bottle along various planes, with the overall effect being of the release of energies from within the bottle into space and onto the plinth. It was in the

move

to express

the

creative

tension

(“interlocked

state”)

between centripetal inherence and centrifugal rupture that Lawrence located the major source of his fascination with Futurist art. In this state, forms remain but their apparent solidity is deconstructed to suggest underlying energies (the Futurists’ word is ““scomposizione”). Giacomo Balla produced a painting of a “Brunt” Model arc lamp (“Lampada ad arco”) in 1909, in which the extreme brightness of the 151

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

street lamp provides a focal point for the forces of the iridescent rays

it emits.*” These arrow-like rays are both centrifugal and centripetal:

the arrows

point

inwards,

but

circular rays

radiate

outwards,

also

revealing similar movements in the surrounding darkness. The moon,

the Futurist accumulator of sentimental and passéiste associations, is almost lost in the glare. In The Rainbow, Ursula is aware of the

different ways in which life may be viewed in strong light: the light may either reaffirm the complacency of those who live in it, or it may bring about a new apprehension of matter. The light of the arc lamp serves the opposite function for Ursula from the light of the microscope in her botany lab: it preserves the conscious surface of things, whilst the microscope light breaks apart the received forms of life in order to lay bare the forms of energy that animate all matter. Returning to the excerpt from Women in Love, Birkin clearly implies that Hermione’s spontaneous, sensual, night-time moments are always illuminated by her rigid self-consciousness, yet his pronoun implicates himself in the same process (“we watch ourselves”).

It was

Birkin who

had earlier switched on the electric

lights, and Ursula who was “scarcely conscious” that “the sky had come over dark” (WL, 35). Birkin’s classroom light, and the light of Hermione’s self-consciousness, merely confirms the surface forms of

life, whereas for Ursula bright light deconstructs those forms to reveal the energies of an outer darkness. Birkin is only able to articulate an idea of true spontaneity in abstract, negative terms: “You’ve got to learn not-to-be”. Finally, at the end of the chapter, answering a question put to him by Ursula, Birkin is interrupted by Hermione and forced to leave. His own subjection to the relationship with Hermione is stressed, and it is left to Ursula to “put out the ©

See Virginia Dortch Dorazio, Giacomo Balla: An Album of his Life and

Work (Venice:

Alfieri Edizioni D’Arte,

1969),

106. In a letter of 24 April

1954, Balla states that the “Brunt” Model arc lamps “‘were already in use in the principal streets of Rome in 1904, whereas in America and in England they still had not come into use”.

152

Women in Love

lights” (WL, 45), negating the switching on of the lights and so dramatizing Birkin’s “not-to-be”. Birkin’s dilemma provides us with a notable example of the frustration of an insight at the final moment that distinguishes the discrete chapters of Women in Love. A psychological insight is sought after but the process is complicated by the inadequacies of a language that must (to use Eliot’s formulation) be dislocated into meaning.*“” Chapters end with a feeling of dislocation and only an intimation of broader meanings (in this case, for instance, we can intuit Ursula’s own fitness for a relationship with

Birkin through her connection with a form of light that may deconstruct old forms of life and with the mysterious outer darkness of late afternoon). Further references to electricity in Women in Love connect it firmly with Gerald. One morning Ursula and Gudrun, by the side of Willey Water, hear the “fine electric activity in sound” coming from the valley, and see Gerald dive into the water to swim, “launched in a

white arc through the air” (WL, 46). Birkin, looking at him on the train to London,

sees that “Gerald was attractive, his blood seemed

fluid and electric” (WL, 60). The chapter entitled “Créme de Menthe”, in which Gerald meets “Pussum” and reduces himself and her to sensual experience, focuses this electrical language. Gerald discharges electricity in the manner of an arc lamp. On meeting Pussum in the London café of “Créme de Menthe”, Gerald responds to the model’s beauty, which makes “a little spark leap instantly alight in [his] eyes”. As he sits down, “a glow” comes over him. His eyes are “shining”, and possess a “cold light”. The description later has him “switching off’ (WL, 62-69). In “Water© The phrase is used by Eliot in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, where he argues that a modern poet, confronted by the “great variety and complexity” of his civilization, “must become more and more comprehensive, more

allusive,

more

indirect,

in order

to

force,

to

dislocate

if necessary,

language into his meaning”. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1976).

153

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Party”, “his eyes were lit up with intent lights, absorbed and gleaming” (WL, 171). According to Marinetti in “Electrical War (A

Futurist Vision-Hypothesis)”, from War, the World’s Only Hygiene,

“eyes and other human organs are no longer simple sensory receptors, but true accumulators

of electric energy”.”!

In this, Marinetti draws

also echoes the ancient medical theory that contact of a beam emitted from the human alluded to by Donne in “The Extasie”). potential of Marinetti’s assertion. He seems

sight was caused by the eye with objects seen (as Gerald demonstrates the to have inherited his eyes

from

eyes

upon Walt Whitman, author of “I Sing the Body Electric”,”” but he

white,

his

Gerald,

mother,

destructive we

are

Christiana,

light”

told,

(WL,

in his

whose

218)

own

in “The

encounter

with

possess

Industrial

Pussum,

a “terrible

Magnate”.

“felt

full

of

strength, able to give off a sort of electric power” (WL, 64). Yet, the discharging of this power (like the discharging of artillery in war) is connected with pure destruction and not the consummating destruction that Ursula experienced in the final scenes with Anton in The Rainbow. In Gerald, “the electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of the discharge” (WL, 65). Pussum, the victim of this electrical energy, is pregnant with a child she does not want, anticipating the imagery of painful and fruitless labour centred in the West African statue belonging to Julius Halliday, her lover. In the terms discussed in “The Crown”, Gerald is becoming subject to a sensual reduction, pointing to an essential void in his nature. In the taxi-cab

from the café to Halliday’s

flat, Gerald rubs up

against Pussum and “she seemed to become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness,

and

concentrated

at the base

‘| FT. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 106. ® See Walt Whitman, Everyman, 1995).

Leaves

of Grass

154

of his

and

spine

Selected

like a fearful

Prose

(London:

Women in Love

source of power.” It is a “black, electric comprehension in the darkness”. The formulation recalls the image of electric lights at night from “Class-room” that connected Hermione to Birkin in a destructive relationship that will soon break out in violence in “Breadalby”. The language, whilst striving to capture the “reduced” state of Gerald and Pussum,

carries with it these cumulative connotations.

Enduring the

sweeping of Pussum’s hair across his face, Gerald experiences “a subtle friction of electricity”, he “could feel the electric connection between him and her so strongly, as she sat there quiet and withheld, that another set of conditions altogether had come to pass [....] He trusted completely to the current that held them.” Most tellingly, Gerald goes to look again at “one of the pictures” in Halliday’s flat (almost certainly one of the “one or two new pictures in the room, in the Futurist manner”), and as he looks, “every one of his limbs was

turgid with electric force, and his back was tense like a tiger’s, with slumbering fire. He was very proud” (WL, 72-75). Gerald’s electric energies are being related to the Futurist picture, but Gerald is only a rather distracted observer. The Futurist striving to articulate a new, moder sensibility belongs firmly to the language which the novel applies to Gerald. Yet, Gerald as a character is not so articulate and as a consequence of this the language skirts around his psychological states and is unable to suggest broader realizations on his part. Birkin is the most articulate character on the subject of electricity, as we discover through his comments on a Japanese wrestler in “Gladia-

torial”.? Gerald’s lack of articulate consciousness is implied by the ending to ““Créme de Menthe”. The electrical vocabulary has brought him

to

this

crisis

point,

but

Pussum

immediately

rises,

has

an

altercation with the group of males, and leaves the room to retire to

8

See D. H. Lawrence,

Women in Love, 268 (“He was very quick and

slippery and full of electric fire”) and 269 (“But when they are hot and

roused, there is a definite attraction — a curious kind of full electric fluid —

like eels”).

155

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

bed. Gerald’s night of reductive sensual passion with her occurs in the gap between the end of Chapter Six and the start of Chapter Seven. Gerald’s sensual reduction to matter is mirrored by Hermione in her

attack

on

Birkin

in

“Breadalby”,

which

the

novel

similarly

recounts as a destructive discharge of electrical energy. Hermione’s

“voluptuous consummation” is of the same order as Gerald’s exper-

iences with Pussum. Hermione succumbs to the violence as Gerald had: “Terrible shocks ran over her body, like shocks of electricity, as if many volts of electricity suddenly struck her down.” When finally she brings the lapis lazuli paperweight down upon Birkin’s head, there is “a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning, and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, [as] she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head” (WL, 105).

The key word here is obviously “unutterable”. The novel had skirted over Gerald’s night with Pussum. The language of electricity is cut off by the distractions at the end of the chapter. Hermione’s destructive reduction is similarly imagined using this language, but the narration itself carries a strong awareness of its inadequacy to capture her psychological state. The violent electrical vocabulary does not work up to a new awareness of impersonality, opening up new insights and new forms of symbolism, as it had for Ursula in the final pages of The Rainbow. It recounts a form of destructive discharge that there is no getting beyond. Hermione

and Gerald, and also Gudrun,

are fleurs du mal: what

“The Crown” terms “angels of corruption”, connected symbolically in this essay with “the water-lilly, as reflected from below” (RDP, 278). Thus, when Gudrun is interrupted by the arrival of Gerald and Hermione from sketching water plants in “Sketch-Book”, “she perished in the keen frisson of anticipation, an electric vibration in her veins,

intense,

much

more

intense

than

that

which

was

always

humming low in the atmosphere of Beldover” (WL, 119). It is significant that Gudrun had previously struck up a flimsy relationship with Palmer, one of the electricians drafted in to Gerald’s 156

Women in Love mines

(WL,

117). Electricians tend to be connected

with a form of

cold emotional detachment and a yearning for warmth in Lawrence’s writings, and they consequently prey upon already established relationships. This marks the way in which the displacement of the miners’ traditional relationships in the pits by the introduction of electricity is encoded in Lawrence’s writings.“ In an early short story, “A Modern Lover” (written between

1909 and 1910), Cyril Mersham

returns to the Midlands after a period of two years working in London. He attempts to resume his youthful companionship and romance with a character named Muriel, only to find that she has taken his advice literally and found a lover, Tom Vickers, “a working

electrician in the mine” (LAH, 38). Cyril’s reappearance forces Muriel to realize her lack of sympathy with Tom, but she is left alone when Cyril (trying painfully to reconcile his physical attraction for Muriel with their intellectual friendship) informs her of his imminent return to the south. Later writings use the figure of the electrician in a more systematic manner to portray the displacement of relationships. In one of Lawrence’s plays, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (written and reworked between 1910 and August 1913*°), a colliery electrician named Blackmore is instrumental in underscoring the alienation of Elizabeth Holroyd from her miner husband, Charles. Blackmore has all of the advantages of the electrician at the colliery (he is a “gentleman” of sorts; he has “nice hands” [Plays, 64, 68]; he has job

mobility), yet he literally and figuratively needs the warmth of the

“ In the play Touch and Go, Gerald’s sister Winifred comments: “The colliers work awfully hard. The pits are quite wonderful now. Father says it’s against nature: all this electricity and so on. Gerald adores electricity. Isn’t it curious?” (D. H. Lawrence, The Plays, 380).

© The editors of the Cambridge edition of The Plays note that The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd may have been conceived late in 1909 (xxix). Mitchell Kennerley was sent the revised text of the play on 24 August 1913. The fate of this revised text, and the complex history of Lawrence’s subsequent proof alterations to the play, are recounted in the introduction to The Plays, xxxix-xli.

157

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

miner’s home.”° He offers Elizabeth and her children the prospect of a new life with him in Spain, but the death of Charles Holroyd emphasizes the flimsiness of their affair and brings a note of tragic irresolution into the life of the female protagonist. Similarly, in Mr Noon, Stanley, an engineer with a strong interest in electricity who joins Gilbert and Johanna for their trek “over the Gemserjoch”, is portrayed as an excitable, cold and detached man who moves between women and almost brings about a split between the couple.*” He arrives “from Odessa, where he had been vowing eternal love to a Russian girl” (MN, 256), but he soon initiates a sexual encounter with

Johanna before leaving on the train for Munich. The connection between Gerald and Gudrun carries a similar weight of need and irresolution. It is dangerously “magnetic” (WL, 120) and connected with the coldness of water and snow. She is attracted to Gerald’s “glistening, whitish hair”, which

“seemed

like

the electricity of the sky” (WL, 120). Gerald allows himself to be rowed by Gudrun during the water party: “He gave himself, in a strange, electric submission” (WL, 176). Likewise, in another interaction with Gudrun, from “Rabbit”, Gerald snatches at Bismarck’s

neck “swift as lightning” and, having subdued him, “he looked at her, and the whitish, electric gleam in his face intensified” (WL, 241). Holding her in “Death and Love”, it is “as if he were soft iron becoming surcharged with her electric life” (WL, 331). In the final “©

See D. H. Lawrence,

The Plays, 68, where Blackmore says to Elizabeth

Holroyd: “When I’m coming down the line to the pit in the morning — it’s nearly dark at seven now — | watch the fire-light in here - Sometimes I put my hand on the wall outside where the chimney runs up to feel it warm.” ‘7 In Mr Noon, 257, Stanley is “an engineer by training, he went into the little electric works by the stream, and examined the machinery and the dynamos. How quiet his touch was then. And what a still concentration there was in his interest. But the moment he had seen everything, and was through with it, he broke into his wails about being loved.” He is a fictional recreation of Harold Hobson, who became Chairman of the Central Electricity Board (see Mr Noon, 329, footnote 256:6).

158

Women in Love

chapters, Gerald is completely overcome by “fierce, electric energy” (WL, 399), and even manages to express, in a line that represents his only use of the electrical vocabulary, the experience of sensual reduction: “it’s blasting — you understand what I mean — it is a great experience, something final — and then — you’re shrivelled as if struck by electricity” (WL, 440). The dashes emphasize his inability finally to lay claim to this type of articulacy. The response which all of these references to Gerald and electricity finally produces in the reader is anticipated by Gudrun (an interested party) as early as the fourth chapter: “Certainly he’s got go,” said Gudrun. “In fact I’ve never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his go go to, what becomes of it?” If, as Ursula answers, it goes in “applying the latest appliances” ( WL, 48), it also appears to condemn Gerald to what Martha A. Turner has termed a “teleology of settlement”: he is seen to be “moving toward the achievement of predestined ends”.** Ursula immediately raises the spectre of Gerald having shot his brother by accident as a child. Birkin believes that the accident has some kind of universal significance, and that “it all hung together, in the deepest sense” ( WL, 26). Gerald’s inarticulate energies inhere in ways which condemn him to a physiological fate. Lacking any articulate take on the energies which motivate him, he is compelled by a fate that lies outside his control and that is concerned with finality. An allusion to Tennyson’s /n Memoriam (1850), which was first used by Lawrence in The Trespasser and then in a letter concerning H. G. Wells, and

48

Martha A. Turner, Mechanism

and the Novel: Science in the Narrative

Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137.

159

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

which also appears in “The Crown”, is relevant to Gerald’s position. ” In “Snowed Up”, Gudrun shrinks away from Gerald: What then! Was

whom

she his mother? Had she asked for a child,

she must nurse through the nights, for her lover. She

despised him, she despised him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don Juan. (WL, 466)

The original lines from Tennyson read: [W]hat am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

In

“The

Crown”,

these

lines

are

invoked

(LIV, lines 17-20) to

describe

a state

of

confusion concerning the relation between light and dark (Unicorn and Lion) in the life of the individual:

But certainly there is this crying aloud, this infant crying in

the night, born into a blind want. (RDP, 254)

Heaven is in the other dimension [....] And if in us the Heaven be not revealed, if there be no transfiguration, no consummation, then the infants cry in the night, in want, void, strong want. (RDP, 304)

“ The allusion appears in D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser, 128, and in a letter concerning Wells in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 74. The same allusion occurs in the following sources: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Il, 266; “Italians in Exile”, from D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, 137 and 202; and D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 25. Further sources of the allusion in “The Crown” are listed below.

160

Women in Love

The lines from Tennyson are suited to Lawrence’s purpose because they engage with the imagery of light and dark, and with the symbolism of the baby (the unborn, the stillborn, and the wounded). Gerald strives toward the light of consciousness and to take command of his

life (as we

see

in his

innovations

when

he takes

over

his

father’s pits), but he has no language with which to take charge of his energies. As a consequence, they finally structure his life for him, falling into the form of a predestined fate (just as the fiddle-bow structures the patterns in the sand of the Chladni figure). This brings us to the Naturalist aspect of Women in Love, but firstly 1 want to indicate one way in which the novel suggests how an articulate channelling of electrical energies results in a creative kind of closed circuit for Birkin and Ursula. Gerald and Gudrun discharged their electrical energies in random opposition to each other: “He and she were separate, like opposite poles of one fierce energy” (WL, 399). What sets Birkin and Ursula apart from Gerald and Gudrun is their ability to earth the current through their polarity. After their argument in “Excurse”, they form a

tight pairing through a release of electricity:~°

She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at

the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew

into herself.

She had established a rich new circuit, a

new current of passional electric energy, between the two of

°° As the title of this chapter of the novel, the word “Excurse” significantly carries various meanings. As the Cambridge editors of Women in Love point out, it may be a use of the verb “to excurse” (to wander); Lawrence may be “re-inventing a rare and obsolete noun, last used

1587, meaning

‘an ambush,

a raid, a mad sally’ (OED)”; and/or Lawrence may be making a play upon the word “excursus”, meaning the discussion of a special point in a book. See D. H. Lawrence,

Women

in Love, 565, footnote 302:2.

161

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

them, released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them both with rich

peace, satisfaction. (WL, 313-14)

In “The Reality of Peace” (a set of short essays finished in March 1917, which develop ideas originating in “The Crown’), such peace is achieved when “the primary law of the universe” (“a law of dual attraction and repulsion, a law of polarity”) is channelled to produce “that perfect consummation when duality and polarity is transcended into absolution” (RDP, 50-51).°'

It is in this moment that centrifugal

and centripetal forces balance and match each other: the centrifugal/ centripetal vocabulary echoes the discussion of Boccioni in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” (Hardy, 75). The moment is realized here in the kind of harmonious electrical pairing that “Class-room” had established as a possibility and dramatized, with Birkin switching on the electric lights and Ursula putting them out.’ What the establishment of this circuit between the two helps to figure forth is the “star-equilibrium” (WL, 319) which the narrative posits as a consummate balancing of self and other in creative opposition. Birkin and Ursula “re-state the real abstraction” of Male/Female or Centrifugal/Centripetal forces by embodying the abstraction in a new, concrete symbol of modernity. They achieve what Lawrence thought Boccioni was trying to achieve with the bottle in “Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio”. °! Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology, and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) contains a chapter entitled “Electrifying the Body” in which he remarks in passing that “Lawrence’s use of electrical metaphors suggests their easy applicability to sexual desire: electricity and magnetism are, as heterosexual desire is said to be, bipolar” (19). * In The Subterfuge of Art, Michael Ragussis notes that the consummation in “Excurse” presents “a perfect silence that, nevertheless, is dramatized as communication”: it is a silence “prepared for through language” and “underscored by words” (197-99).

162

Women in Love

Once more, Birkin and Ursula realize the potential of electricity for revealing new psychological states in their relationship by bringing about in the narrative a symbolic application of the new power source.” Driving his car after their reconciliation, Birkin enjoys “pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity” (WL, 318). His, and Ursula’s, victory on the “memorable battle-field” (WL, 311) is a victory in a typically Futurist struggle against old forms and values, and it ends in a typically Futurist

mention

fashion,

is made

with

Birkin

driving

of his “careless

them

in his

car

(earlier

on,

[...] very quick” driving, which

Ursula fears will involve them in “some dreadful accident” [ WL, 303],

recalling Marinetti’s account of his own dangerous driving in the 1909 founding manifesto™). The narrator of Women in Love states that: [T]o know, to give utterance, was to break a way through the walls of the prison, as the infant in labour strives through the walls of the womb. There is no new movement now, without the breaking through of the old body, deliberately, in knowledge, in the struggle to get out. (WL, 186)

3 Thomas scene from Apocalypse which was Thomas H.

H. Miles has interestingly traced the electrical language in this “Excurse” back to Lawrence’s reading of James M. Pryse’s The Unsealed and its description of natural electricity or kundalini, said to be concentrated at the base of the human spine. See Miles, “Birkin’s Electro-Mystical Body of Reality: D. H.

Lawrence’s Use of Kundalini”,

1976), 194-212.

4

See F. T. Marinetti, Selected

The D. H. Lawrence Review, 1X/2 (Summer

Writings, 39-40. Marinetti recounts how he

and his Futurist friends hear “the famished roar of automobiles” and ride out in his car only to be confronted by two cyclists: “I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air.” We might recall the slight comic touch of the passing cyclist who interrupts Birkin and Ursula during their argument in “Excurse” (D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, 308).

163

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Birkin and Ursula manage in this instance to attain a kind of new movement celebrated by Futurism: the movement of electricity through bodies which channel and direct the current. Gerald is unable to attain this new movement in his relationship with Gudrun. He may possess a futuristic vigour on the surface of things, but his expenditure of electrical energy achieves neither a new circuit nor clean destructiveness: it is spent in casual sexual liaisons and in the

exercising of a will that is shown to be dictated by the forces of a tragic fate. If the pairing of Ursula and Birkin in the circuit leads to a

kind of exclusiveness that Birkin finally laments, this is because the

struggle for new articulation is a struggle to get out of a language to which Gerald is fatally subject. Birkin and Ursula manage at times to break out with futuristic vigour through their electrical pairing. They break through the old and habitual forms of language for a time, just as Birkin momentarily broke through the reflection of the moon on the surface of Willey Water, “murdering the moonshine” (to borrow Marinetti’s phrase of April 1909%). In contrast to this process of breaking through, Gerald is trapped inside the old body and is therefore subject to its physiological decline. Gerald Crich and the narrative of fate The apocalyptic titles that Lawrence finally rejected for this novel in favour of Women in Love point to the central importance of illness and death in its fictional world.*© As an alternative to working towards new forms of verbal articulacy in the novel, characters either take Loerke’s detached stance (using several languages to construct a kind of playful conversational montage, “mischievous word-jokes” °° See F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 45-54. In fact, the phrase was inspired by Balla’s painting of the arc lamp. °° A ground-breaking and influential account of the processes of dissolution in Women

in Love may be found in Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D. H.

Lawrence and English Romanticism 1969).

(London:

164

Routledge and Kegan Paul,

Women in Love

[WL, 422], playing games of chess with the past, like T. S. Eliot®’) or

they succumb to illness and death, being silenced and forced out of

the narrative. This thematic connection is made in a late poem from Pansies which carries one of the rejected titles Lawrence had considered for Women in Love: “Dies Irae” (“Days of Wrath”). The poem argues that: our activity has lost its meaning, we are ghosts, we are seed; for our word is dead and we know not how to live wordless.

(Poems, 510)

Its sense of crisis over the dead word and its grim final embracing of “the fulfilment of nothingness” in a “world of mechanical selfassertion” (Poems, 511) gives further definition to the internal division within Women in Love. If individuals may be born through the extension of language in the novel, then, conversely, the death of

the word is to be connected to the death of inarticulate individuals in Women in Love.

There are five deaths either mentioned or described in the novel:

those

of Gerald’s

brother as a child,

young doctor (Brindell), Gerald’s himself. The connections between most explicitly at Breadalby in Ursula, Gudrun and the contessa:

one

of his sisters (Diana),

a

father (Thomas Crich), and Gerald death and inarticulacy are explored the piece of ballet improvised by they play Naomi, Ruth and Orpah in

a piece produced “in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and

Nijinsky” (WL, 91). Vaslav Nijinsky was a celebrated dancer in Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which was enormously popular with British audiences before the war. Nijinsky entered Lawrence’s

consciousness

through

the

connection

established

between

the

57 See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, 453, and the section entitled “A Game of Chess” in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).

165

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Russian Ballet and Ottoline Morrell in 1912. Morrell greatly enjoyed Nijinsky’s performances to the music of Stravinsky in Covent Garden that summer, and invited both him and Diaghilev to her house in Bedford Square.** Although Lawrence would not become friendly with Morrell until the spring of 1914, in July 1912 David Garnett (a member of Ottoline’s circle) visited the Lawrences

in Icking, where

he initiated an improvised Russian Ballet dance in which Frieda and Lawrence were energetic participants.” This event is fictionalized in

Mr Noon (MN, 255-56). There is a link between Italian Futurism and

Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet through Giacomo Balla. In the July 1917

“Manifesto

of Futurist

Dance”,

Marinetti

celebrated

the

husband,

chooses

to stay with

fact

that

Naomi,

her

“with Nijinsky the pure geometry of the dance, free of mimicry and without sexual stimulation, appears for the first time”. The spare geometry of this dance was extended by Balla with the aid of electric lighting. He designed a chromatic stage set for Stravinsky’s Fireworks (Feu d’Artifice) in 1917: the music was incorporated into a performance devoid of human participants, in which chromatic lighting was used to produce equivalents to the emotions invoked by dance. This kind of artistic depersonalization functions in Hermione’s home not as an attempt to move beyond conventional representations of human emotions, but as a complex psycho-drama. In the biblical story, Ruth, after the

widowed

death

of her

mother-in-law.

In the

absence

of new

kinds

of verbal

articulacy, such shows as that put on by Hermione point to the

ongoing processes of deathliness in the participants and the spectators. Gudrun is significantly cast as Ruth, since it is she whose

58

For

an

account

of

these

connections,

see

Sandra

Jobson

Darroch,

Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), 125-26.

°° See Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 19121922, 30.

6°

F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 137.

166

Women in Love

husband dies, anticipating the death of Gerald. Hermione gleans an insight from the spectacle: Hermione loved to watch. She could see the contessa’s

rapid, stoat-like sensationalism, Gudrun’s ultimate but treach-

erous cleaving to the woman in her sister, Ursula’s dangerous helplessness, as if she were helplessly weighted, and unreleased.

“That

was

very beautiful,”

everybody

cried with one

accord. But Hermione writhed in her soul, knowing what she could not know. (WL, 91-92)

The experience leaves her “knowing what she could not know”. That is to say, Hermione cannot bring the deathly sensationalism that she witnesses under the control of her conscious will, and her idea of knowledge. The insight into her own condition that the performance reveals cannot be stated in a final form: the truth about her own condition is not something for which Hermione has a vocabulary. The enactment of mourning is intended to be a communal text which seeks to heal an absence that threatens the structures of meaning available in any specific society. The pastiche ballet at Breadalby points up a

perceived absence in Hermione as host because the tensions it expresses reveal the lack of community among the guests viewing it as an entertainment. The narrative of Women in Love is punctuated with many such “dumb

show[s]” (WL,

186). A simple list would include Hermione’s

assault on Birkin with the paperweight, Birkin’s subsequent naked walk through the countryside, Gerald’s controlling of his mare at the train crossing, Gudrun’s eurhythmic dancing before Gerald’s Highland cattle, Gerald’s hitting of Winifred’s rabbit (Bismarck), Birkin’s stoning of the moon, the famous wrestling scene between Gerald and Birkin, and Gerald’s final walk into the snow. The actions

dramatize certain states of mind and supplement the straining language of the text in pointing to that which cannot satisfactorily be

167

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

conceptualized.

The dramas radiate out into the novel and help to

figure forth these states of mind, in the same fashion as the artefacts which fascinate the characters (the West African statuettes; the Futurist paintings; a thick volume of Thucydides; Birkin’s cat, Miciotto; a chair; a crucifix in the snow).

These gestural scenes illustrate the opposite extreme from the forging forward into new, Futurist ways of extending language’s range of meanings. Unable to voice their inner states, characters regress to primitive forms of communication. Lawrence was immersed in historical and anthropological works in 1916, reading about earlier stages of cultural development in order to understand developments in modern society during the war. Birkin, the novel’s most articulate character, reads Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Hermione’s boudoir (this was one of the books Lawrence read with interest in 1916°'), displaying a similar interest in discovering how articulation can proceed in an era of collapse (WL, 104-105). In a letter of 7 April 1916, Lawrence wrote to Ottoline Morrell, praising Edward B. Tylor’s anthropological study, Primitive

Culture:? “It is a very sound substantial book, I had far rather read it

than The Golden Bough or Gilbert Murray” (II, 593). This praise is repeated in a letter to Thomas Dunlop, written over three months later (Il, 630). Tylor’s work contains two lengthy chapters on the development of language in primitive cultures. In these, Tylor traces the emergence of language systems back to the expression of states of mind through shared gestures. He states that: [S]avages possess in a high minds directly in emotional straight to nature to furnish including reproductions of ances, ®| 62

as means

degree the tones and themselves their own

of expression

faculty of uttering their interjections, of going with imitative sounds, direct emotional utter-

of ideas, and of introducing

See The Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, Il, 614. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1903).

168

Women in Love

into their formal language words so produced. They have clearly thus far the means and power of producing language. He concludes: “It seems [...] that in the daily intercourse of the lower races, gesture holds a much more important place than we are accustomed to see it fill, a position even encroaching on that which

articulate speech holds among ourselves.”® The sense of these passages connects the savages with Gerald, who comments that on his trip to the Amazon the savages were “on the whole [...] harmless — they’re not born yet, you can’t feel really afraid of them” (WL, 66). We can compare and contrast the excerpts to what we have previously seen the Futurists to be doing with language. The Futurists are coming at the problem of language from an opposite position to Tylor’s savages. Far from attempting to move through gesture to create language, the Futurists try to learn a new way of embodying a preexisting language. Gerald may possess energetic qualities admired by the Futurists, but he ultimately falls on the savage side of the equation. Boccioni’s sculpture of a bottle was able to communicate to Lawrence a hidden impulse to restate the “old, perfect Abstraction” (an impulse realized through the circuit imagery in “Excurse”), whereas Gerald’s inarticulacy lacks this complexity. Recalling the several allusions to In Memoriam in “The Crown” and Women in Love, Gerald has “no language but a cry”. He regresses to a state in which language is struggling to be born through gesture, but ultimately he dies in this sensual state of savage megalomania. Deathly processes are felt to lie behind the dumb shows because without the power to articulate, characters disappear from the narrative. At each stage, the characters are threatened by an unreal world in which words are experienced as meaningless counters skirting an absence. As Michael Ragussis has written, “the danger the novel sees all along — of stasis, thingness, and materiality — hovers

®

Ibid., 163-64. 169

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

around all [...] decisions not to speak out, not to use ‘I’ and ‘you’”.™ A condition of nausea results from the falling away of things or states

of mind

from

language.

It

is

the

symptom

of

a crisis

that

acknowledges the Saussurean breach between signifier and signified. The Italian Futurists addressed this very crisis by looking for new ways of establishing connections between these two aspects of the sign.” The Italian Futurist desire to extend the connotative range of language entailed both a celebration of the forces of modemity and a response to the crisis in artistic communication that they created. The Futurist “words-in-freedom” illustrate this dual response. The rift between signifier and signified is acknowledged and actively em-

braced in the splashing of language across paintings and publications

(mimicking the accelerated communication of telegraphy and advertising), whilst a form of stress is sought through an attention to

typography and the speaking of the word, and in the importance

placed upon neologisms

and onomatopoeia.”

The need to force

Michael Ragussis, The Subterfuge of Art, 205. 6° As John J. White has recently noted in Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant Garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 25: “[A]t just the same time as Marinetti and his fellow Futurists were breaking new ground with various methods of language-intensification, Ferdinand de Saussure was defining language as being inherently characterized by the very features to which they were opposed. Compare, for instance, Saussure’s seminal emphasis on the ‘arbitrariness of the linguistic sign’ with Soffici’s declaration that for the Futurist the word would no longer be ‘a mute symbol of convention, but a live form among live forms, one that becomes one with the

material of representation’.”

6

Ezra

Pound’s

fascination

with

the

Chinese

ideogram,

and

the

close

attention he gave to Emest Fenollosa’s notes on the Chinese written character from 1912 onwards, emerges from a similar desire to bring signifier and signified into a new relationship. The ideogram in this account is seen as a stylized picture of the object or concept it represents and the writer pens the ideogram with a primitive, pictorial meaning at the front of his mind. See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era,

192-231.

170

Women in Love

language into producing meaning is felt by all of the characters of Women in Love. In an extended analogy, when language becomes disembodied, the characters’ physical health comes under threat. In Women

in

Love,

illness

is often

the

result

movement away from the struggle towards and Hermione both become ill in the course Crich’s protracted illness results in his become ill, they temporarily disappear from communicate with each other. After being

of,

or

pretext

for,

a

verbal articulation. Birkin of the novel, and Thomas death. When characters the narrative and cease to attacked by Hermione in

“Breadalby”, Birkin falls ill, “but he did not let Hermione know, and

she thought he was sulking, there was a complete estrangement between them” (WL, 108-109). He falls ill again during “Sunday

Evening”, takes to bed in “Man to Man”, and leaves the narrative for two chapters whilst he convalesces in the South of France (WL, 244).

Hermione attends Gerald’s water party, but then is absent for seven chapters before her reappearance in ““Woman to Woman”, in which we learn that she has “been away at Aix” (WL, 292) for health reasons. Gerald, who is rugged and healthy, and who “never had much illness in the house” (WL, 324), is nevertheless subject to a deep malaise: one that he cannot understand and against which his inarticulacy and lack of consciousness are helpless to act. Gerald’s steady decline is best understood by returning once again to the famous letter to Edward Garnett of 5 June 1914, in which Lawrence had articulated his new idea of character by saying that “the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form” (II, 183).

The comment applies directly to what Lawrence was trying to do with Ursula’s sense of otherness in The Rainbow: the Futurist vocabulary enabled Lawrence to articulate Ursula’s psychological movement outside the provincial Midlands of her parents and the possessive colonial maleness of Anton Skrebensky. This rhythmic form destroys the old and fights its way to a new vision in that novel. In Women in Love, the other rhythmic

form manifests itself as a kind of interior,

physiological fate that preys upon the inability of individuals to come to consciousness through language. Characters who cannot extend the 171

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

connotative range of language, or break through its old structures in their

actions,

remain

unborn

(like

the

maimed

soldier

in

“The

Crown”), fading into egoism (like Hermione), waiting for death (like Thomas Crich), or continuing to reduce themselves through sensation.

Gerald Crich falls into the latter category and his fate carries the kind

of inevitability that we have witnessed in the reduction of La Béte Humaine to a symbol of pure motor force. Gerald is reduced to pure inarticulate sensation in the final chapters of Women in Love. His development is determined at every stage by an abstract energy analogous to the energy of the fiddle-bow in the Chladni Plate experiment, producing resonant and consistent patterns in its single sweep across a thin metal tray strewn with sand. Gerald is presented causally, in symptomatic terms. His tragic family history is invoked in order to stress his subjection to a “purely destructive” (III, 143) momentum. He is the son of a spirited, strongtempered, but maritally-crushed mother and a father whose idea of Christian charity leads him to worship his colliery workforce even whilst he exploits it. Gerald directly inherits the silent, destructive energies of his mother: Strange, like a bird of prey, with the fascinating beauty of a hawk, she had beat against the bars of his [her husband’s] philanthropy, and like a hawk in a cage, she had sunk into silence. By force of circumstance, because all the world combined to make the cage unbreakable, he had been too

strong for her, he had kept her prisoner. And because she was his prisoner, his passion for her had always remained keen as death. (WL, 215) We learn that, as a child, Gerald accidentally shot his brother with an

old gun that had

lain loaded in a stable for years; he also takes

responsibility for a water party in the course of which his young sister (Diana) falls from a pleasure boat to drown in the arms of the doctor who tries to save her. The causal narration of Gerald’s demise 172

Women in Love

strikingly employs a form of Naturalist character analysis. Gerald’s situation heavily echoes the situation of Oswald Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. Lawrence attended two performances of this play during 1912. The first time was in Germany, some time during the summer. The important performance, however, took place in Italy in late December

of that

year,

and

from

accounts

in his

letters

and

in

Twilight in Italy, this performance appears to have had a profound impact on him.*’ In the play, Oswald is, like Gerald, the son of a mother whose spirited individuality is compromised by marriage; he too is subject to physiological ghosts that determine his actions; and he is unsuccessful in his attempt to save himself through a relationship with his half-sister, Regina. In the first version of “By the Lago di Garda III — The Theatre”, published in the English Review for September 1913, Lawrence emphasized just how transformed the play appeared to be by the Italian actors’ performances. His response to the depiction of Oswald is particularly striking: And then the son — he is the actor-manager, a man of forty or thereabouts, broad and thickset, ruddy and black — is a very human, decent fellow, not at all like a son of the house of Ghosts, but a convalescent, fretful, fanciful, who doesn’t

quite

know

what

ails him,

and

who

wants

somebody

to

comfort him, to reassure him, for he is frightened of himself.

He is childishly dependent on his mother. To hear him say “Grazia mamma!” would have touched the mother-soul in any woman living. (71, 71) This essay was revised by 6 September 1915 for publication in Twilight in Italy. The revision occurred at the very time before the 67

In a letter of 29 December

1912

to Edward

Garnett,

Lawrence

wrote:

“Yesterday we saw Ibsen’s Ghosts in Italian in the little theatre here. It was awfully well acted, and gave me the creeps” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 496).

173

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism writing of Women in Love when Lawrence was putting the finishing touches to “The Crown”. It expands the discussion of the actormanager’s portrayal of Oswald and in so doing it connects Oswald’s dilemma at this performance to what Lawrence considered to be the crucial dilemma of the divided war-time psyche in “The Crown”. Oswald’s character is seen to be split between light and dark, soul and sensuality. The revised version reads: [H]e was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not be the blighted son of Ghosts, the hectic, unsound,

northern issue of a diseased father. His flashy, Italian passion for his half-sister was real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would have in spite of his

own

soul,

something

which

fundamentally

he

did

not

want.

It was this contradiction within the man that made the play so interesting. A robust, vigorous man of thirty-eight, flaunting and florid as a rather successful Italian can be, there was yet a secret sickness which oppressed him. But it was no taint in the blood, it was rather a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at all. And

yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will.

His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul, he

was dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear him say, “Grazia, mamma!” would have tormented the mother-soul in any woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what? (77, 136-37) The quotation from Tennyson is once again present, consciously connecting Lawrence’s response to the character of Oswald Alving in

this production of the play with his delineation of Gerald’s character in Women in Love.

174

Women in Love

At the end of Ghosts, Oswald sinks into dementia, literally “crying for the light”. His final words are repeated: “The sun. The sun.” His final inarticulacy, and his absorption into the bright sunshine of the snow-capped Nordic glacial peaks, is reproduced in Gerald’s death in the snowy mountains of the Tyrol, where Gerald becomes “blank before his own words” (WL, 440). In the final analysis, the disjunction between

light and dark, soul and sensuality, intellect and body, that

Lawrence perceived in the portrayal of Oswald and in the intellectualizing tendencies of Naturalism more generally, is wholly evident in Gerald. Lawrence’s deployment of a Naturalist character analysis for Gerald reveals a totally characteristic use of external sources to structure his thought and inform his fiction. The separate places that Futurism and Naturalism occupy in the text demonstrate both the complex ways in which ideas function in Women in Love and the genuine idiosyncrasies of the novel’s form.

68

Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, trans. Michael

Meyer (London:

Rupert Hart-Davis,

1962), 94. In the essay “Italians in Exile” from Twilight in Italy, Lawrence is reminded of the “terrifying cry at the end of Ghosts: ‘II sole, il sole!’” (D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, 199).

175

Chapter Five “Futurist Long

Before

Futurism

Found

Paint”: The Allusions to Italian Futurism Studies in Classic American Literature

in

The final revision of Women in Love took place between March 1917 and September 1919, and the novel was first published in America by Thomas Seltzer in November 1920. Whilst Lawrence added the finishing touches to it, he wrote the “Foreword to Women in Love”, in which he presents his work to an American audience and strikes out against his reputation for eroticism in America. We should note that, by this time, Lawrence had already begun to write and publish the essays which, in their finished forms, would be collected in Studies in Classic American Literature. In the “Foreword to Women in Love’, he

writes:

In America the chief accusation seems to be one of “Eroticism.” This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty “amours,” or Eros of the sacred

mysteries?

And

if the latter, why

even venerate? (WL, 485)

accuse,

why

not respect,

Women in Love was written by an author who, in war-time England,

wrote “to the unseen witnesses” (II, 602); the author of the Foreword,

by contrast, is clearly imagining a new audience for his work. In this chapter, I will consider Lawrence’s attempts to imagine an American audience and the American psyche through his readings of American authors in the Studies in Classic American Literature essays. By way

of a study of the covert critique of Naturalism in the essay on Poe, and of the explicit allusions to Futurism in the essay on Melville, I will

Studies in Classic American Literature show how Lawrence established a connection between the American

literature he read and Women in Love, the book that he hoped would command respect in America.'

Lawrence reading the Americans The preceding chapters have illustrated how Lawrence’s readings of other writers are often propitious for his own developing themes or concerns. Lawrence, being a Bloomian strong reader, tends to “read only [himself]”,? but this does not mean that a text’s complexity is reduced by his reading. Rather, his critical writings reveal a struggle to understand the impulse — the compulsion — that gave rise to a particular work, and, in so doing, they reveal Lawrence’s struggle towards self-knowledge. In the

“Foreword

to

Women

in Love’,

dynamic model of his own development:

Lawrence

sets

out

this

Man struggles with his unborn needs and fulfilment. New unfoldings struggle up in torment in him, as buds struggle forth the midst of a plant. Any man of real individuality tries to know and to understand what is happening, even in himself, as he goes along. This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out in art. It is a very great part of life. It is not superimposition of a theory. /t is the passionate struggle into conscious being. (WL, 485-86)

' In fact, as the editors of the Cambridge edition of Women in Love note, “it was noticeable that the American reviewers of the book were much more open

to

it, much

less

willing

to

characterize

it as

absurd

or its author

a

madman, than their English counterparts” (D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, lii). The editors mention one review by John Macy in the New York Evening Post Literary Review of 19 March 1921, and one by Evelyn Scott in The Dial of April 1921. 2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 19.

177

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Art is an exploration (often an unconscious one) of certain underlying

needs in the artist, and it reveals a struggle to externalize, or articulate,

these needs. The needs will almost invariably, of course, remain concealed in a writer’s works, and may even be obscured by a conscious overlay of commentary (“superimposition of a theory”). Lawrence considers American writing to be particularly obscured by this overlay. He writes: [T]he Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. They revel in subterfuge. They

prefer their truth safely swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, and

deposited

among

the reeds

until

some

friendly

Egyptian

princess comes to rescue the babe. (SCAL, 4)

This insight leads Lawrence to his famous declaration on the function of literary criticism: The artist usually sets out — or used to — to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a tule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. (SCAL,

8)

Richard Swigg instructively connects Lawrence’s readings in American literature back to his reading of Hardy in the “Study of Thomas Hardy”: “What has concerned him [Lawrence] in Hardy’s novels continues to engage him in the work of Poe, Hawthorne,

Melville, and Cooper: that is, the problem of the conscious moralist at

odds with the unconscious

artist.”? By uncovering

3

Hardy,

moral

reveals

Richard

of

the

artist’s

Swigg, Lawrence,

unconscious,

Oxford University Press, 1972), 190.

178

what the tale’s

Lawrence

and American

accesses

Literature

a

(London:

Studies in Classic American Literature symbolic realm which

myth:

Because

is, as James C. Cowan

it emanates

has noted, a realm of

from the unconscious, the “art-speech”

of the true artist embodies a symbolic truth that transcends, and

may

even

be

at variance

with,

the artist’s

conscious,

didactic intentions. But the artist thereby becomes a mythmaker who recreates in his art the “trembling balance” of living existence and reveals the connection between the elemental “carbon” substratum of the self and the cosmos.* The mythical nature of the symbols that Lawrence uncovers in American writing may be accounted for, as Lydia Blanchard has suggested,’ by reference to Lawrence’s introduction to Frederick Carter’s The Dragon of the Apocalypse, written in January 1930. Here, Lawrence describes what he means by “symbols”: (T]he images of myth are symbols. They don’t “mean something”. They stand for units of human feeling, human experience. A complex of emotional experience is a symbol. And the power of the symbol is to arouse the deep emotional self, and the dynamic self, beyond comprehension. Many ages of accumulated experience still throb within a symbol. And we throb in response. It takes centuries to create a really significant symbol: even the symbol of the Cross, or of the horse-shoe,

296)

or the horns.

No

man

can

invent

symbols.

(P,

James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 84.

> See Lydia Blanchard, “Lawrence as Reader of Classic American Literature”, in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, eds Michael Squires and Keith Cushman (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 159-

75.

179

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism The classic American writers cannot, then, be said to have created the

symbols in their novels; instead, the writers, by tapping into the symbols in a predominantly subconscious way, insert themselves into a collective realm of experience. This enables their works to take on a level of significance that transcends their historical moment, bringing them into a vital and challenging relation to the productions of the reader’s own times. It is this symbolic meaning, with its weight of contemporary significance, that Lawrence consistently uncovers in the American writers, and the challenge to the contemporary reader is what gives Lawrence’s critical book its sense of urgency. Lawrence’s struggle to understand the underlying mythical structure of his own writings occurs through his attempts to understand the structure of the classic

American

literature. In Lawrence’s

essays, then, we can see him, in

the way he alludes to Futurism and externalizing the underlying structure of

undermines Naturalism, Women in Love and so

striving to understand his own work, whilst connecting this work to

its new audience.

A futuristic dual rhythm in American writing It is evident from a letter to the American poet Amy

November

Lowell of 14

1916, and the allusions made to Futurism in the early and

final versions of the essays from Studies in Classic American Literature, that Lawrence was thinking in rather specific terms about Futurism as he made final revisions to Women in Love. The allusions to Futurism refer us to the central structure around which Lawrence constructs the essays in Studies in Classic American Literature. This structure is stated most explicitly by Lawrence at the opening to his chapter on Edgar Allan Poe. Lawrence writes: [T]he rhythm of American art-activity is dual. (1) A disintegration and sloughing of the old consciousness. (2) The forming of a new consciousness underneath. (SCAL, 70)

180

Studies in Classic American Literature

In my reading of Women in Love | have emphasized the significance of this structure to the novel: the futuristic drive towards new forms of articulation is set against a disintegrative naturalistic fatalism. Women in Love depicts a world on the edge of these two tendencies. In the letter to Amy Lowell, then, written towards the end of the penultimate revision of Women in Love, Lawrence compares the evocation of sensation in Lowell’s poem “An Aquarium” to a futuristic desire to .

“[utter] pure sensation”:

6

You see it is uttering pure sensation without concepts, which is what this futuristic art tries to do. One step further and it passes into mere noises, as the Italian futurismo poems have done, or mere jags and zig-zags, as the futuristic paintings.

Then it ceases to be art, and is pure accident, mindless. — But

there is this to fulfil, this last and most primary state of our being, where we are shocked into form like crystals that take place from the fluid chaos. (III, 31)

Futurist art attempts to move away from the ideal to the actual, and

wants to give utterance to the sensations of matter. The fulfilment of this desire allows for the expression of the “last and most primary state of our being”, where man is “shocked into form”, just as Birkin

and Ursula achieved the form of the “rich new circuit” (WL, 314) in Women

°

in Love.

However,

where

the actual

self is unable

to find

“An Aquarium” is the fifth and final part of a poem entitled “Towns in

Colour”,

from

the

collection

Men,

Women

and

Ghosts,

published

on

October 1916. Lawrence quotes the opening of “An Aquarium” in his letter: Streaks of green and yellow iridescence Silver shiftings Rings veering out of rings Silver — gold — Grey-green opaqueness sliding down

18

(The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, 31). Lawrence had earlier informed Amy Lowell that he considered her poem “‘A Taxi” futuristic (The Letters of D. H.

Lawrence, II, 234).

181

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

utterance there is mindlessness (the more extreme Futurist paintings and the Futurists’ art of noise are here invoked with characteristic suspicion by Lawrence). Gerald Crich’s inarticulacy, and his asso-

ciation with a brash futuristic vigour in Women

state of disintegrative mindlessness.

in Love, reflects this

In the short “Foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature’,

Lawrence further highlights the division between his fascination for the advanced futuristic consciousness of matter and his scepticism concerning the Futurists’ brashness. There are two prominent mentions of Futurism in this Foreword. Lawrence writes: Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American. Let us leave aside the more brittle bits of French or Marinetti or Irish production, which are perhaps over the verge. Russian and American. And by American

I do not mean

Sherwood

Anderson, who

is so

Russian. I mean the old people, little thin volumes of Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman. These seem to me

to have reached a verge, as the more voluminous Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Artzibashev reached a limit on the

other side. The Futurism have

consciousness

furthest frenzies of French modernism or not yet reached the pitch of extreme

that

Poe,

Melville,

Hawthorne,

Whitman

reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them today. (SCAL, 4) Lawrence castigates the Futurists for being extreme reactionaries, but he once again connects their accelerated form of consciousness to a vital desire to cast off the old and create the new. This useful function of the Futurist enterprise, which lay behind the incorporation of Futurist ideas into

Women

in Love, is now

discovered in the classic

American authors, and in a form that avoids the Futurists’ reactionary excesses. The Futurist struggle to break down the old and to achieve new forms of articulation is read into the Americans, and henceforth

182

Studies in Classic American Literature

Futurism will not occupy so prominent a place in Lawrence’s fictional

writings.

In Studies

in Classic American

Literature,

however,

in a

manner that reflects the importance of the movement to the world of Women in Love, Futurism is invoked by Lawrence in order to contextualize for a European readership the turning-point in the dual rhythm of American writing.’ “America, Listen to Your Own” Lawrence senses that nineteenth-century American literature contains

advanced psychological insights that might reveal the processes of the

European mind to itself, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes has noted:

American ideas may relate to ours, but American “art-speech” has already, responding to an “alien quality” in the continent itself, begun symbolically to reveal the “incipient newness within the old decadence”.®

Futurism

newness”

was

drawn

in Women

upon

by Lawrence

in Love. Now,

to reveal

this “incipient

the American literature relegates

Futurism to a position of secondary importance. We can study the rather deliberate nature of this substitution of the American literature for Futurism on Lawrence’s part by considering the essay “America,

Listen to Your Own”, written in Florence during September 1920 and

first published in the New Republic in December 1920. Lawrence had considered using this essay as an introduction to Studies in Classic American Literature.’ In it, he argues against the tendency to worship and prize the antiquity of European art, in a manner startlingly

Studies in Classic American Literature was first published by Thomas Seltzer in New York in August 1923, but was published by Martin Secker in London during the following year, in June 1924. 8

Mark

Kinkead-Weekes,

D.

H.

Lawrence:

Triumph

to Exile

1912-1922,

447. ° See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 619, footnote 14.

183

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

reminiscent of numerous Futurist manifestos. He even expresses special contempt for Venice, the city that came in for a specific attack from Marinetti as a centre of passéiste tourism and art-worship.'° One contemporary contributor to the New Republic called Lawrence’s

essay a “Futurist rage against a museum world”.'' Yet, Lawrence

looks in his essay for a response to this “museum world” from outside Europe. He calls for the Americans to discover a new inspiration, saying: “you must first have faith. Not rowdy and tub-thumping, but steady and deathless, faith in your own unrevealed, unknown destiny.” It is to be a faith in their own soil and native history: America must “embrace the great dusky continent of the Red Man. It is a mysterious, delicate process, no theme for tub-thumping and shouts of Expositions.” These calls for the Americans to avoid tub thumping and noisy expositions constitute a deliberate rejection of the Futurist approach to moving beyond what is perceived to be a European decadence. The newness of the American continent and its people is celebrated by Lawrence as exercising a pervasive but unconscious and indeliberate influence upon American writers through the silent transmission of symbols: {Embracing the great dusky continent of the Red Man] theme upon which American writers have touched touched again, uncannily, unconsciously, blindfold as it [....] Now is the day when Americans must become fully reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life. must pass the bounds. (P, 90-91)

interesting

It

is

'0

See Marinetti’s declaration of 27 April 1910 entitled “Against Past-loving

“America,

Listen

that

Lawrence

to Your

Own”

should

as an

have

considered

is a and were selfThey They

introduction

Venice”, in F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 55-58.

using

to Studies

in

'' See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, 619, footnote 14.

184

Studies in Classic American Literature

Classic American Literature because it is approximately the same length as a Futurist manifesto, it uses remarkably similar persuasive strategies (employing rhetorical questions and short, exclamatory sentences), and it would have served the same purpose in relation to the essays as Marinetti’s “Giovani Italiani” did as proclama to I Poeti

Futuristi."” “America, Listen to Your Own”

is a futuristic manifesto-

piece which celebrates the Futurism potential among the Americans. It remains for us to follow out the ways in which Lawrence discovers the dual rhythm of Women in Love — previously explored through Futurism — in the American writers. In order to trace this process it is necessary to concentrate on three of Lawrence’s essays on American literature. In the following analyses, emphasis will be placed on the pieces he wrote about Edgar Allan Poe, about Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, and about Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The Poe essay discusses the process of disintegration of an old consciousness that can be connected back to Gerald Crich’s naturalistic demise in Women in Love. In various versions of the essay on Moby-Dick, Lawrence alludes to the Futurists in relation to that book and to Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, and suggests how the authors of these sea voyage narratives

reveal

a way

forward,

out

of a disintegrative

state

of

merging with the other into a condition which admits the materiality and otherness of the world.

'2 Lawrence quoted from “Giovani Italiani” in his letter to Arthur McLeod of 2 June 1914 (a detail that has been obscured by errors in footnotes to the Cambridge letters). See Andrew Harrison, “D. H. Lawrence’s Futurist Reading: Two Errors in Footnotes from the Second Volume of the Cambridge

Letters”, Notes and Queries, 243 (June 1998), 231-32.

185

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism Edgar Allan Poe: sensational reduction

Although no direct allusion is made to Naturalism in either version of the essay on Poe, it is clear that the disintegration that Lawrence traces in Poe’s tales resonates with what I have described as the naturalistic, regressive element of Lawrentian impersonality explored through the figure of Gerald Crich. It

is

no

surprise,

therefore,

to

find

that

we

can

trace

back

Lawrence’s commentary on disintegration and sensual reduction in Poe to comments made in “The Crown”, the metaphysical accomp-

animent to Women

in Love. Here, Lawrence

speaks of the “cruelty-

lust” of the civilized man, which, he says, “‘is directed almost as much against himself as against his victim”: He

is

immersing

himself

within

a

keen,

fierce,

terrible

reducing agent. This is true of the hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, Ligeia, or The Fall of the House of Usher. The man seeks his own sensational reduction, but he disintegrates the woman even more, in the name of love. (RDP, 284)

Significantly, when Lawrence wrote the first version of his essay on Poe, published in the English Review for April 1919 and reproduced in The Symbolic Meaning, the decomposition of the self in Poe was viewed as the symbolic disintegration of “the great white race in America” and was discussed as a kind of electrical decomposition. At the start of the essay, he wrote: What remains is the old tree withering and seething down to the crisis of winter-death, the great white race in America keenly disintegrating, seething back in electric decomposition, back to the crisis where the old soul, the old era, perishes in the denuded frame of man, and the first throb of the new year

sets in. (TSM, 116)

186

Studies in Classic American Literature

A later passage connects this electrical decomposition even more explicitly to Gerald Crich’s situation in Women in Love. Lawrence develops his argument: And in Poe, love is purely a frictional, destructive him, the mystic, spontaneous self is replaced by determined ego. He is a unit of will rather than a unit And the force of love acts in him almost as an attraction rather than as a communion between self (TSM, 119)

force. In the selfof being. electric and self.

This electrical vocabulary is absent from the final version of the Poe essay.

In both currently available versions of the essay, however, there is

the same focus upon the equation of love, possession, and murder in Poe: an equation which proves to be a motivating force behind Zola’s

La Béte Humaine. In fact, in the critical literature on Zola, frequently invoked as a precursor to, and influence upon,

Poe is Zola’s

macabre and scientific imagination.'? The connection between the two writers is suggested by Lawrence through his mention of them in the first version of a 1908 paper entitled “Art and the Individual”, where he lists Poe and Zola among those artists whose works may not excite pleasure, but who remain artists because they “express their deep, real feelings” (Hardy, 226). Lawrence refers to Poe’s “post-mortem

activity in disintegration” (7SM, 117), echoing his comments on Walt Whitman but also relating Poe to Zola’s Naturalism through, for instance, the Preface to the second edition of Thérése Raquin, where

Zola states that he had “carried out on two living bodies the same analytical examination that surgeons perform on corpses”. '@

3 See, for instance, Critical Essays on Emile Zola, ed. David Baguley (Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1986), 94 and 113, and Philip Walker,

Zola (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 83.

4

Emile Zola, Thérése Raquin, 2.

187

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Lawrence’s comments on “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of

Usher”

show

how

the equation

of love, possession

frequently found in Zola’s texts, operates argues that these two works are profane “mysterious vital attraction” between male the point where the individuals break down

and murder,

so

in Poe’s tales. Lawrence love stories that take the and female individuals to in their desire for oneness.

At the point where individuals desire to merge, there is a conflict of wills, a desire for possession, and ultimately death ensues, since “the

first law of life is that each organism is isolate in itself’ (SCAL, 71-

72). In his broader discussion of Poe’s tales, Lawrence shows how, in Poe, extreme love has the same consequences as extreme hate:

The lust of hate is the inordinate desire to consume and unspeakably possess the soul of the hated one, just as the lust of love is the desire to possess, or to be possessed by, the beloved, utterly.

In “transgressing [their] own bounds” (SCAL, 86), the individual selves dissolve. In “Ligeia”, according to Lawrence’s reading, the narrator loves Ligeia with a profane intensity: he desires to possess her and she desires to be possessed. The narrator’s relation to Ligeia is seen as akin to the relation between the chemist and a salt: What

he wants

to do with Ligeia

is to analyse

her, till he

knows all her component parts, till he has got her all in his consciousness. She is some strange chemical salt which he must analyse out in the test-tubes of his brain, and then — when he’s finished the analysis — E finita la commedia! At the point where they are approaching a state of oneness, the heroine dies, uttering her belief that the self can avoid this fate by an assertion of the will. The narrator, grief-stricken by her death, moves to England and remarries, but his new bride, Lady Rowena Trevanion,

188

Studies in Classic American Literature

similarly falls ill and dies, her body being pervaded by the will of Ligeia, who achieves rebirth through Rowena’s dead body. Lawrence considers Poe’s style of writing “meretricious”, but he admires what he considers to be the truthful and insightful depiction of the dynamics of the desire for oneness and the resulting death. Through a study of Poe, Lawrence arrives at the assertion that to know a thing fully you have to kill it, so that “the desirous consciousness, the SPIRIT, is a vampire” (SCAL, 74-75). Poe’s gothic and sensational, supernatural tale is thus seen to cover over an essential truth concerning the murderous qualities of an extreme love that does not acknowledge the necessary boundaries of the self. The author is considered to be a tragic sacrificial victim to this insight. Lawrence writes movingly of Poe’s “affliction”: Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe down his soul in a great continuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to register the process. And then doomed to be

abused for it, when he had performed some of the bitterest tasks of human experience, that can be asked of a man.

(SCAL, 70)

Lawrence’s sympathy for Poe against his moralizing critics is particularly resonant here. Lawrence was, as we have seen, conscious of the charges of eroticism levelled against his own novels in America, and in Women in Love he had, in a manner remarkably reminiscent of Poe, revealed the convulsion of disintegration in Gerald

Crich.

Numerous references to Gerald in his relationship with Gudrun in Women in Love reveal the same dynamic of love, possession and death that Lawrence uncovered in Poe. Their relationship subsides into a battle in which both parties struggle to possess, reduce and destroy the other. This struggle is most in evidence in the section entitled “Snowed Up”. At the opening of this section, Lawrence gives an account of the “contest” between Gerald and Gudrun:

189

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

When Ursula and Birkin were gone, Gudrun felt herself free in her contest with Gerald. As they grew more used to each other, he seemed to press upon her more and more. At first she could manage him, so that her own will was always left free. But very soon, he began to ignore her female tactics, he dropped his respect for her whims and her privacies, he began

to exert his own will, blindly, without submitting to hers. (WL,

441)

This conflict of wills is punctuated by moments of physical contact

where their individual selves threaten to break down and dissolve, as

in Poe. One particular scene from “Snowed Up” merits quotation at length because of the way it echoes a scene from “Ligeia”: He turned and gathered her in his arms. And feeling her soft against him, so perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her, she was as if crushed powerless in him. His brain seemed hard and invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him. His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly and impersonal, like a destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill

her, she was being killed. “My God, my God!” she cried in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing her, her breathe came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying. “Shall I die, shall I die?” she repeated to herself. (WL,

444)

Ligeia, in Poe’s tale, as she nears death, dictates a tragic poem to the narrator, and then, facing the truth that oneness is not possible and brings death, she meditates upon the transcendent qualities of a strong

190

Studies in Classic American Literature

“O God!” half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines [of her poem] — “O God! O Divine Father! — shall these things be undeviating so? — shall this Conqueror [of life] be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who — who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigour? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his

feeble will.”"°

Lawrence quotes these lines from “Ligeia” complete in Studies in Classic American Literature. Gudrun and Ligeia are both threatened by death because their lovers have transgressed the boundaries of selfhood: they are both forced into a grotesque assertion of will in order to avoid this death. Ligeia’s will, as the tale’s epigraph from Joseph Glanvill teasingly suggests, can transcend and defeat death; for Gudrun, her will, proving stronger than Gerald’s, enables her to keep from a deathly merger with him, and thus saves her from the clutches of death in his embrace later in the same chapter of Women in Love. The

fate of the

narrator

of “Ligeia”,

and

of Gerald,

reflects

a

reduction of the human self which relates to Naturalism through its similar obsession with the equating of love, possession and murder. In Lawrence’s

comments

on

“The

Fall

of the

House

of Usher’,

this

connection with Naturalism becomes more explicit still, since here Lawrence attacks the basis of naturalistic determinism. He refers to the atmosphere of doom that surrounds the Usher family: a doom which resembles that surrounding the Crich household. A sense of hereditary taint is felt by Roderick Usher to infiltrate his surroundings, lending to the inanimate environs of the house a kind of “sentience”, as the rather perplexed narrator reveals:

5

Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

44.

191

1992),

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

The belief [...] was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions

of the

sentience

had

been

here,

he

imagined,

fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones — in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi

which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood

around — above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this

arrangement,

tarn.

and in its reduplication in the still waters of the

The house is felt to be determined by the same forces that govern the family within: an analogy that Zola had, of course, promoted in “The Experimental Novel”, where he proposes a fiction in which “a like determinism will govern the stones of the roadway and the brain of man”.'’ Lawrence reacts against Usher’s fatalism, seeing it as a sign of lost individuality, and in so doing he sees a disintegrative aspect behind the cornerstone assertion of Zola’s Naturalist manifesto: It is the souls of living men that subtly impregnate stones, houses, mountains, continents, and give these their subtlest

form. People only become subject to stones after having lost

their integral souls. (SCAL, 84)

We should recall that the Crich home in Women in Love (Shortlands) stands at the top of Willey Water; the correlative to Poe’s “black and

lurid tarn”.'* Just as the stones of the House of Usher finally crumble

and sink into the tarn, so Gerald’s sister, Diana, drowns beneath the

dark surface of Willey Water, occasioning Gerald’s admission of his family’s dark secret:

‘8 [bid., 71. '7

Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, 17.

'8 Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales, 62.

192

Studies in Classic American Literature

“There’s one thing about our family, you know,” he continued. “Once anything goes wrong, it can never be put right again — not with us. I’ve noticed it all my life — you can’t put a thing right, once it has gone wrong.” It is beneath the surface of Willey Water that Gerald experiences an epiphany akin in its nihilistic insight to that of Forster’s Mrs Moore in the Marabar Caves of A Passage to India: “And do you know, when you are down there, it is so cold, actually, and so endless, so different really from what is on top, so endless — you wonder how it is so many are alive, why we’re all up here.” Gerald,

under

the

influence

of a

subterranean

fate,

fears

the

it’s over,

it’s

deathliness that lies beneath the waters in a line that carries indelible traces of the First World War: “If you

once

finished. Why

die,”

he

said,

“then

when

come to life again? There’s room under that

water there for thousands.” (WL, 184) Lawrence

places

to

characters:

connects

his

Poe’s

concern

for

fascination

the

fatal,

with

vaults

unconscious

and

subterranean

desires

of his

Hate is as inordinate as love, and as slowly consuming, secret, as underground, business in Poe only

as

as subtle. All this underground vault symbolizes that which takes place

beneath the consciousness. On top, all is fair-spoken. Beneath, there is awful murderous extremity of burying alive. (SCAL, 85)

Poe’s characters realize their deathliness in underground vaults; Gerald realizes his own deathliness beneath the surface of Willey Water; and, in the First World War, soldiers were fighting and dying in trenches. The symbolism of the Poe essay has a kind of power that

193

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

we can explain by relating back Lawrence’s argument to Women in Love. Not only do the analytical excesses of Poe’s stories reveal to Lawrence a disintegrative aspect that he had explored through Gerald Crich’s naturalistic fate; Poe’s symbolism

also accesses other, more

deeply encoded, aspects of Lawrence’s portrayal of Gerald, pointing to the presence of the war in the psyche beneath Gerald’s soldierly exterior. Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast The two writers whom Lawrence credits with having anticipated and achieved the Futurist project of moving from the ideal to a voicing of the actual are Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville. The connection between the two writers is a well-documented one: they were

sometime

acquaintances,

and

Dana’s

great work,

Two

Years

Before the Mast, has been cited as a major influence not only on

Moby-Dick, but also on Melville’s later work.'? The first versions of

the essays from Studies in Classic American Literature reveal that Lawrence had initially written a chapter entitled “The Two Principles”, which was to have been placed before the essays on Dana and Melville in order to contextualize his comments on them. An early version of the essay on Moby-Dick carries evidence of this original intention,

as

Lawrence

connects

the

two

writers

via

one

of the

allusions made to Futurism in the published versions of the essays currently available to Lawrence scholars.”” Lawrence writes: What the Futurists have tried hard to do, Dana and Melville

have pretty well succeeded in doing for them. These two are

'? The connection between the two writers is explored in Robert F. Lucid, “The Influence of Two Years Before the Mast on Herman Melville”,

American Literature, 31 (1959), 243-56.

20 The Cambridge edition of Studies in Classic American Literature is in preparation, edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. It will print (for the first time) all available versions of the essays.

194

Studies in Classic American Literature masters of the sheer movement of substance in its own paths,

free from all human postulation or control. (TSM, 237)

The two writers are felt to have shed an old human emotional perspective and become subject to more fugitive and material sensations and emotions. It is just such a futuristic quality of perception

that

Lawrence

Birkin

Ursula

had

called

for

from

the

Americans

in

“America, Listen to Your Own”.”' If we turn initially to Lawrence’s essay on Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, we can see how Lawrence incorporated this futuristic shift from the ideal to the actual into his reading of the symbolism of that novel. This essay echoes the futuristic symbolism of the electric circuit that is achieved between and

in

Women

in Love

(WL,

314),

suggesting

that,

through Dana, Lawrence is externalizing other important structural aspects of his novel: aspects of renewal. Lawrence’s reading of Dana’s novel stresses the fact that the author, who is also the narrator of this autobiographical narrative, is a highly self-conscious idealist whose narrative reveals, with remarkable subconscious integrity, the workings of a feared and reviled material universe. Lawrence incorporates the biographical background to the novel (mentioned very cursorily in an early chapter of Dana’s account) symbolically into this master narrative of the struggle between the idealist and the world of the elements. Dana had been studying as an undergraduate at Harvard before his increasingly poor eyesight forced him to seek a remedy through a short change of lifestyle. It is for this reason that he signed up to enter the ship “Pilgrim” as a common sailor for the two-year voyage from Boston to California in search of hides for the Massachusetts leather trade. Dana writes: As she was to get under weigh early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o’clock, in full sea-rig, and with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three years’ 2

See D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix, 91.

195

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from

books

and

study, a weakness

of the eyes,

which

had

obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.” After

a brief

introductory

section

in

Lawrence’s

essay,

Dana

is

introduced and these bare biographical facts are already incorporated as generating symbols revealing a subconscious conflict in the narrator: At a certain point, human life becomes uninteresting to men. What then? They turn to some universal. The greatest material mother of us all is the sea. Dana’s eyes failed him when he was studying at Harvard. And

suddenly,

he turned

to the sea, the naked

went to sea as a common sailor before the mast.

Mother.

He

The eyes become the symbols of the idealist, or the person concerned simply with “knowing”, as in Lawrence’s comments on Poe’s “Ligeia”. The sea symbolizes the opposite state of “being”, and Lawrence connects it with the blood, implying a comparison of its tidal movements with the systole-diastole of the heart. The two states, of being and knowing, are defined by Lawrence as being always opposed and mutually exclusive, and Man is thus in a continual state of oscillation between the two: KNOWING and BEING are opposite, antagonistic states. The more you know, exactly, the less you are. The more you are, in being, the less you know. This is the great cross of man, his dualism. The bloodself, and the nerve-brain self.

22

Richard

Penguin,

Henry

Dana,

Two

Years

Before

1986), 40.

196

the

Mast

(Harmondsworth:

Studies in Classic American Literature Knowing,

then, is the slow death of being. Man

has his

epochs of being, his epochs of knowing. It will always be a great oscillation. The goal is to know how not-to-know. Lawrence takes Dana’s avowed reason for going to sea (to cure his weak eyes) and finds in it a portentous subtext (his desire to overcome his physical, sensual self). Through knowing the sensual world of the

elements, Dana will overcome that world and restore the dominance of the visual, or intellectual, faculty: “he must watch, he must know,

he must conquer the sea in his consciousness” (SCAL, 120-22). Dana’s novel is thus construed to be the record of a man who confronts his sensual self in order to transcend it. Lawrence views Two Years Before the Mast as a book which captures the tragedy of the destruction of the sensual self which results from this transcendence, as Dana returns to “the old vulgar humdrum [....] [he] lived his bit in two

(SCAL, 138):

years,

and

knew,

and

drummed

out the rest”

Dana took another great step in knowing: knowing the mother sea. But it was a step also in his own undoing. It was a new phase of dissolution of his own being. Afterwards, he would be a less human thing. He would be a knower: but more near to mechanism than before. Yet, his narrative, which records the two years in which he confronted the elements, provides, for Lawrence, instances of unconscious

recognition

of

the

physical

world

that

give

poignancy

infrequent, and therefore remarkable, meditative moments.”

to

his

Throughout his essays on American literature, Lawrence insists that America is at the very end of an epoch of knowing, and that the 23 Lawrence particularly focuses on a wistful description of daybreak, a vision of an albatross asleep on the sea, and Dana’s lonely meditation on the Pacific coast. See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature,

121, 122 and 129-30 respectively.

197

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

symbolism of American writing suggests ways through to new states of being. Dana is, therefore, committed to knowing, but his art

achieves its greatness for Lawrence because it reveals, underneath its

documentary, matter-of-fact style, a strong sense of the mysteries of the material universe and their allure. Lawrence writes:

We must give Dana credit for a profound mystic vision. The best Americans are mystics by instinct. Simple and bare as his narrative is, it is deep with profound emotion and stark comprehension. Whereas the Futurists, for Lawrence, must insist at a conscious level

upon stark comprehension of the material universe as part of their reaction against an ideal culture, Dana is subject to this comprehension because of a subconscious conflict between the ideal and the actual in his divided psyche.” This means that Dana’s book, according to Lawrence’s argument, contains the insights of Futurism without their bombastic excesses, and that Dana is condemned to possess those impersonal traits of the

artist that the Futurists must peddle as reactionary virtues. Like the

Futurists, then, Dana, “writes from the remoter, non-emotional centres

of being — not from the passional emotional self” (SCAL, 121-23): “in him, self-consciousness is almost nearing the mark of scientific indifference to self’ (SCAL,

4

130). This echoes Marinetti’s call for the

This distinction is underlined by Lawrence in an early manuscript essay

entitled “X. Herman Melville”, in which, when referring to the Futurists, he

uses a significantly different wording to the later version printed in The Symbolic Meaning and quoted above. He writes: “Dana and Melville do unconsciously what the Futurists aim at doing.” See the Cambridge edition of Studies in Classic American Literature, eds Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, forthcoming at time of writing. My thanks go to Professor John Worthen for providing the information, and to the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at the Hallward Library for allowing me to consult the manuscript version of the essay (University of Nottingham Manuscript La L 13/6/2).

198

Studies in Classic American Literature Futurists to “Destroy the / in literature”, which Lawrence read in the

“Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, reproduced in J Poeti Futuristi.”> Lawrence also writes that Dana’s subconscious intuition of the patterns of the material universe makes him a particularly fine recorder of the movements of electric force, “the counterpart in the material-dynamic world of the life-force, the creative mystery, itself, in the creative world”. Lawrence, when writing about Dana, is particularly interesting on the topic of electricity. He notes that “nations that worship the material-dynamic world, as all nations do in their decadence, seem to

come inevitably to worship the Thunderer”. This is so because “electricity seems to be the first intrinsic principle among the Forces” (SCAL, 134-35). I have suggested that there is a strong connection in Women in Love between the allusions to Futurism and the repeated use of an electrical vocabulary. The comments in the Dana essay appear to support such a connection, since they implicitly relate the Futurists’ worship of “the material-dynamic world” to their celebration of electricity. According to Lawrence’s argument, Dana’s intuitive recording of an electric storm suggests a new state of being in his narrative by showing how the mysterious storm breaks down tensions and creates a new sense of equilibrium. Lawrence writes: There are lots of circuits. Male and female, for example, and

master and servant [....] It is a circuit of vitalism which flows between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment

to each,

and

keeps

both

quivering, vital equilibrium. (SCAL, 124)

in a

state of subtle,

Birkin and Ursula’s circuit — their “star equilibrium” (WL, 319) — had been achieved, as we have seen, in a passage from the “Excurse”

chapter of Women in Love, quoted in the previous chapter (WL, 313-

5 See F. T. Marinetti, / Poeti Futuristi, Marinetti, Selected Writings, 87.

199

18.

For the translation,

see F. T.

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

14). The circuit symbolism of Women in Love is now being externalized and explored through Dana, Lawrence’s proto-Futurist. The connection between Dana’s narrative and Lawrence’s developing understanding of Women in Love is revealed most clearly through Lawrence’s selective process of quotation. Lawrence quotes

at length Dana’s description of a tropical storm from Chapter Thirty-

Four of Two Years Before the Mast. In quoting Dana at such length, Lawrence’s text cuts out a large section describing the state of the ship’s rigging, shortens a few sentences, adds two paragraph breaks, and makes a number of small but interesting changes to odd words, the effect of which is to stress Dana’s concern with the material universe, and to make Dana sound decidedly more Lawrentian. In Dana’s novel the mate “told us to haul down the jib”, where in Lawrence’s version the mate “gave the command to haul down the jib” (an altogether more emotive action); in Dana’s novel we are asked to imagine the “grumbling thunder”, where Lawrence’s text invokes the “growling thunder”; and between one discharge of lightning and another in Dana’s novel there is a “moment” of anticipation,

which

Lawrence’s

version,

heightening

the

tension,

changes to a “minute” (SCAL, 135-36). The alterations and omissions can have a remarkable effect on the way we read Dana’s narrative, as I will show by a comparison of a sentence from Dana and its equivalent in Lawrence’s quotation. Dana’s sentence is characteristically long and tortuous: When our watch came on deck at twelve o’clock, it was as black as Erebus; the studding sails were all taken in, and the

royals furled; not a breath was stirring; the sails hung heavy

and motionless from the yards; and the perfect stillness, and

the darkness, ing

which was almost palpable, were truly appall-

6 Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 437-38. 27 Tbid., 437. 200

Studies in Classic American Literature

Lawrence’s text, positioning this sentence at the start of a long quotation, makes only a couple of changes, but their effect is striking: When our watch came on deck at twelve o’clock it was as black as Erebus; not a breath stirring; the sails hung heavy and

motionless

from the yards; and the perfect stillness, and the

darkness, which was almost palpable, were truly appalling.

Some of the maritime detail is omitted; a “was” is removed; and a comma is taken from the first part of the sentence. Yet, the narrator in this shortened version seems far more concerned with the elements and their effects than with the state of the ship, which

is of equal

importance in the original version. The remarkable formality of the narrator in respect of practical matters is set aside and a more engaging, metaphysical narrator emerges. When Lawrence concludes his quotation with a verbatim rendition of Dana’s lines on electricity, then, the reference to “electric fluid” seems all the more remarkably reminiscent of the electrical vocabulary from Women in Love:

A ship is not often injured by lightning, for the electricity is separated by the great number of points she presents, and the quality of iron which she has scattered in various parts. The electric fluid ran over our anchors, topsail-sheets and ties; yet no harm

was

done

to us. We

leaving things in the same state.

went

below

at four o’clock,

The flowing of the fluid electricity, which fascinates Dana, strongly

suggests the kundalini-like electricity that flows between Birkin and Ursula in Lawrence’s novel,” proving to possess, as Lawrence would write in the Dana essay, “a mystic power of readjustment”.

8

See Thomas H. Miles, “Birkin’s Electro-Mystical Body of Reality: D. H.

Lawrence’s

Use of Kundalini”,

1976), 194-212.

The D. H. Lawrence

201

Review,

{X/2 (Summer

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism In

Women

in

Love,

Lawrence

used

an

electrical

vocabulary

to

distinguish between the destructiveness of Gerald’s relationship with Gudrun and Birkin’s moments of creative readjustment with Ursula. Destructive electricity and the creative electric circuit are invoked and theorized in the essays on Poe and Dana, externalizing the structure of Women in Love and moving the context of the electrical vocabulary from the Futurists to the proto-Futurist American writers. Melville’s Moby-Dick Lawrence’s essay on Melville’s Moby-Dick drew upon, and contributed towards, the revival of Melville’s reputation in the 1920s and early 1930s,”? and, since around

1960, with the increasing critical

reputation of Studies in Classic American Literature, it has exercised a definite influence in Melville studies.”° In recent years, however, it has

come in for some strong criticism from Melville scholars for the way it dismisses Melville’s narrative self-consciousness in the novel as “clownish”. Modern day commentators on Melville are more likely to stress the positive subversive potential of this self-consciousness, and

particularly its potential to upset a British-centred literary canon.”!

9 In his editorial introduction to Melville: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), Watson G. Branch traces Melville’s revival to Carl Van Doren’s 1917 essay in the Cambridge History of American Literature. Van Doren, as Branch notes, inspired Raymond M. Weaver to write his important early study, entitled Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921). Lawrence asked for a copy of this book from Thomas Seltzer in September 1922: he received it early in October. Lawrence had some

awareness,

then, of how

evaluation. 30 Michael J. Colacurcio traces Classic American Literature to Love and Death in the American review essay, “The Symbolic

his essay

was

backing a critical

trend of re-

an upturn in the critical fortunes of Studies in “the boost it received from Leslie Fiedler’s Novel in 1960.” See Michael J. Colacurcio’s and the Symptomatic: D. H. Lawrence in

Recent American Criticism”, American Quarterly, 27 (October 1975), 487.

3! Paul Giles’ essay, ““Bewildering Entanglement’: Melville’s Engagement with British Culture”, collected in The Cambridge Companion to Herman

202

Studies in Classic American Literature

Lawrence emerges from such reappraisals as just another of the British anti-establishment figures who saw in Melville and America a convenient otherness.” The same approaches can leave Lawrence open to charges of racism, which, it is implied, implicitly connects him to a British colonial discourse on America.” These critiques form an interesting backdrop to a consideration of Lawrence’s desire to read Melville, like Dana, as an idealist who can,

nonetheless, give us “sheer apprehension of the world”. What Lawrence defines as Melville’s idealism invites more controversy than that

attributed

to

Dana,

since

the

latter’s

consisted

for

Lawrence

merely in a minute attention to description and to practicalities. Lawrence constructs Melville’s idealism as a form of clumsy selfconsciousness, dismissing the narrative complexities of his novel in much the same manner as he dismissed the complexities of Joyce’s Ulysses.** Lawrence writes: Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge 1998), contains a judicious exploration of this position. 2

Paul

Fabians,

Giles and

points

with

out

that

fantasists

Melville

like J. M.

was

a popular

Barrie.

University figure

It is interesting

Press,

among

the

to note

that

strong interest in Moby-Dick in Britain was fostered by Viola Meynell’s edition of the novel for the “World’s Classics” series, which appeared in 1921. Meynell had typed large parts of The Rainbow for Lawrence in 1915. 3 See, for instance, Bette S. Weidman’s essay “7ypee and Omoo: A Diverging Pair”, in A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986), which contains an aggressive call for Melville scholars to “disentangle Melville and Lawrence”: “It is grossly unfair to saddle [Melville] with Lawrence’s racism, a racism which had political consequences that Melville abhorred. Note, for example, Lawrence’s lumping of ‘renegades’ with those ‘reformers’ and ‘idealists’ who glorify the savages in America” (105). 34 In the “Foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature”, Lawrence

compares the Americans favourably not only to the self-consciousness of the Futurists

and

the

French,

but

also to “the

more

brittle

bits of [...] Irish

production”. Lawrence is surely referring here to Ulysses. Thomas Seltzer, Lawrence’s American publisher, had arranged to send a copy of Ulysses to

203

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick [sic]. He preaches and holds forth, often, so amateurishly. (SCAL, 153-54)

Lawrence, separating Melville the man from Melville the artist, views

the man as a typical self-conscious American but the artist as a sensitive and naive explorer of the material world. The essay on Moby-Dick naturally follows on from the essay on Dana not only because Melville’s novel was published eleven years after

Two

Years

Before

the

Mast,

but

because

the

allusive

self-

consciousness of Moby-Dick is said by Lawrence to mask a more extreme symbolic revelation of the American desire to overcome the sensual world. Where Dana was understood to be confronting the

sensual world in order to transcend it, Melville is understood to have

constructed a symbolic narrative in which the sensual human world is hunted down and killed, once more to the destructive detriment of the idealist American. Lawrence, however, uses Dana as a reference point

in the essay on Moby-Dick, comparing Dana and Melville’s descriptions of male bonding, of an albatross, and of an electric storm (anticipating later critical articles, like that by Robert F. Lucid, which suggest a line of direct influence*). Lawrence late in 1922.

He received it on 6 November, and on 28 November

he complained to Seltzer: “Ulysses wearied me: so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental” (The

Letters

of D.

H.

Lawrence,

\V,

345).

It was

around

this time

that he

was

finishing off a rewrite of the American essays and sending them to Robert

Mountsier (see The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, IV, 343). For a consideration of Lawrence’s dislike of Joyce’s fiction see William Deakin, “D. H. Lawrence’s Attack on Proust and Joyce”, Essays in Criticism, 7 (1957), 383-

403. 35

See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, and Robert

F. Lucid, Melville”,

“The Influence of Two American Literature, 31

Years Before the Mast on Herman (1959), 243-56. Lawrence writes of

204

Studies in Classic American Literature

Lawrence’s argument concerning Moby-Dick is constructed along the following lines. Moby-Dick, according to Lawrence’s reading of Melville’s symbolism, represents “the deep, free sacral consciousness in man” (TSM, 235): “the deepest blood-being of the white race” (SCAL, 169). Yet, he is hunted down by the “Pequod”, a ship manned by a maniacal multi-racial crew that stands for “the soul of an American” (SCAL, 158). The strict organization of the crew on board the “Pequod” disguises the insanity of its quest: America’s idealism has become excessive to the point of madness. The “tortured symbolism” of Moby-Dick concludes when the Pequod’s attack on the white whale leads to its own destruction: idealism, in destroying sensuality, disintegrates itself, leaving the dementia of Pip, the negro boy, to figure forth this state of psychic disintegration. In addition to current critical reappraisals of Lawrence’s attack on Melville’s self-consciousness, recent criticism has also addressed the

distortions involved in Lawrence’s symbolic reading of Moby-Dick. It points up Lawrence’s excisions, his mistakes, and the liberties he takes, in quoting Melville, as I have done in discussing the essay on Dana.”° It also traces certain of his assumptions in the essay to the edition of the novel that he read.*”

“Queequeg, [...] whom Melville loves as Dana loves ‘Hope’” (155); he writes that “it is interesting to compare Melville with Dana, about the albatross” (159);

and

his revelation

that

“it is the

Thunder-fire

which

Ahab

really

worships” (166), in the absence of the essay entitled “The Two Principles”, calls for the reader to connect this with the comments on the electric storm in the Dana essay. 36 See JoEllyn Clarey, “D. H. Lawrence’s Moby-Dick: A Textual Note”, Modern Philology, LXXXIV/2 (November 1986), 191-95. 37 Lawrence’s final version of the essay on Moby-Dick ends with the sinking of the “Pequod” and the drowning of Ishmael (the latter constituting an obvious factual error). JoEllyn Clarey traces this error, however, to the 1907

Everyman edition of Moby-Dick that Lawrence read for his essay. This edition does not contain the epilogue and so omits the statement that Ishmael survived the wreck.

205

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Aided by his 1907 Everyman edition of the novel and by his habitual lack of editorial rigour, Lawrence uncovers Melville’s symbolism in the novel, to which he attributes a truthfulness profound for its diagnosis of the tragedy of the American psyche. The drama of the unconscious Lawrence deems

symbolism, which functions to be Melville’s “deliberate

in spite of what transcendentalism,

deliberate symbols and ‘deeper meanings’” (7SM, 237), confers upon Moby-Dick a raw and tragic immediacy. Lawrence writes that “as a revelation of destiny the book is too deep even for sorrow. Profound beyond feeling” (SCAL, 157). The unevenness of Melville’s writing fascinates Lawrence because,

in a more explicit way than with Dana, it reveals the tension between

man

and

artist,

the

recorder of sensation:*®

self-conscious

idealist

and

the

unconscious

He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when

he ceases to be American, when

he

forgets all audience, and gives us sheer apprehension of the

world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.

Immediately following these lines comes the reference to Futurism in this final version of the Moby-Dick essay: 38 In the early version of the essay on Moby-Dick published in The Symbolic Meaning, Lawrence commits more space than in the final version to his treatment of the unevenness of Melville’s style, which obviously interested him at the outset. He writes that “in beginning Moby Dick [sic], we must be prepared for the curious lurid style, almost spurious, almost journalism, and yet not spurious: on the verge of falsity, still real. The book starts off with a semi-metaphysical effusion about water, and about the author’s attraction to this element; it goes on with some clumsy humorisms, till it arrives in the

sea-town of New Bedford. Then actual experience begins. It is curiously like cold material record, touched-up into journalese: neither veritable nor created [....] Yet something glimmers through all this: a glimmer of genuine reality” (D. H. Lawrence, The Symbolic Meaning, 236).

206

Studies in Classic American Literature

In his

“human”

self, Melville

is almost

dead.

That

is, he

hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out. He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do. In this he is like Dana. It is the material elements he really has to do with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist long before futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human soul experiencing it all. So often, it is almost over the border: psychiatry. Almost spurious. Yet so great. (SCAL, 154) In an early version of this essay, simply entitled “X. Herman Melville”, what follows the equivalent passage to this one is Lawrence’s plot summary of Moby-Dick, but in both the later version of the essay collected in The Symbolic Meaning and in the final version, Lawrence goes on to liken Melville’s recording of the vibrations of the physical world to the vibrations of the receiving instrument in a wireless station, where telegram messages are received and decoded.’ It seems likely that this simile was introduced into an added paragraph in order to substantiate the reference to Futurism. Lawrence writes: [The Americans’] ideals are like armour which has rusted in,

and will never more come off. And meanwhile in Melville his

bodily knowledge moves naked, a living quick among the stark elements. For with sheer physical vibrational sensitive-

©

Volume Four of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1986) notes three usages of “wireless station”, dated 1909, 1926 and 1978 respectively, all of which use the term to describe the place

where telegrams were received. None of these sources hyphenates the term as Lawrence does.

207

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism ness,

like

a

marvellous

wireless-station,

effects of the outer world. (SCAL, 155) We

he

registers

the

should recall that, in the only English translation of a Futurist

manifesto

available when

Lawrence

read the Futurists, Arundel

Del

Re had translated Marinetti’s ““Distruzione della sintassi — Immaginazione senza fili — Parole in liberta” as “Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty” for Harold Monro’s journal, Poetry and Drama

(see figure

7).“° It has been

assumed

that Lawrence

read this

translation. If so, his essay on Moby-Dick provides evidence of a particular appropriation of Futurist language on Lawrence’s part.*! Marinetti had defined “wireless imagination” as “an entire freedom of images and analogies, expressed by disjointed words and without the connecting wires of syntax”.** Lawrence was not overtly interested in Futurism’s attack on grammatical structures, but he was interested in

the way the Futurist writings, by eschewing such structures, attempted

to evoke

the movements

of the material universe.

Here, Marinetti’s

language directly suggests the language that Lawrence used to discuss Melville. Marinetti announces that: The sole preoccupation of the narrator [when he seeks to relay his impressions of “a zone of intense life”] is to render all the shocks and vibrations of his ego. If, in addition to the power of lyrical expression, he has a mind full of general ideas, he will, involuntarily and at every moment,

link

up

his

sensations

with

those

of the

whole

universe he knows and feels. To render the exact value and proportions of the life he has lived, he will create an immense “© “Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty: The New Futurist Manifesto”, Poetry and Drama, 1/3 (September 1913), 319-26. ‘| Interestingly, Lawrence would go on to use “wireless” as an idiosyncratic adjective in The Lost Girl. There, the understanding between James Houghton and Miss Pinnegar is described as “tacit, wireless” (13). “Poetry and Drama, 1/3 (September 1913), 322.

208

Studies in Classic American Literature

net of analogies with which to envelop [sic] the world. In this way he will reproduce telegraphically the analogical basis of life

with

the

same

analogical

rapidity

that

the

telegraph

imposes on the superficial narratives of reporters and war correspondents. [Italics are my own] Lawrence’s Melville, like Marinetti’s “narrator”, “registers the effects

of the outer world”; he does it with “sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness”; and he does it “involuntarily”, just like the wireless station, which receives vibrations and turns them automatically and rapidly into morse code. Lawrence’s description of Melville’s “wireless-station” (SCAL, 155) sensitivity to the world of matter, since it occurs in the paragraph immediately following his allusion to the Futurists, demonstrates the way Lawrence transformed the Futurist discourse as he read into the American writers the Futurists’ concern for the attainment of a physical consciousness. It also provides the only real textual evidence we have that Lawrence might have read Arundel Del Re’s translation of a Futurist manifesto in the September 1913 edition of Poetry and Drama. Lawrence’s self-revelation: imagining or creating an audience? John Middleton Murry, writing about Lawrence’s essay on Moby-Dick in his book Son of Woman, published in 1931 (shortly after Lawrence’s death), commented that: He

[Lawrence]

is not

concerned

with

Melville

in and

for

himself, in his own quiddity. Melville exists only as a paradigm for Lawrence. But the projection of himself that Lawrence makes by means of Melville is amazing [....] It does

not matter in the least whether this is a true interpretation of

8 Tbid., 321-22. 209

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Moby-Dick;,

Lawrence.“

its

importance

lies

in

the

self-revelation

of

Murry’s reference to a true interpretation dates his essay, and he views Lawrence’s self-revelation from a wholly biographical perspective, based upon his own tortuous and strained friendship with the late author.

However,

close textual

attention paid to Studies

in Classic

American Literature bears out his central assertion. Lawrence discovers in, or projects onto, Melville’s novel (just as he does in the case of the other American

novelists, to a greater or lesser extent) a

symbolic paradigm that helps him towards an understanding of the structure of his own recent masterpiece, Women in Love. Since the Lawrence of September 1919 was looking for a new audience for this novel in America, we can perhaps see that the attempt to understand the Americans and, through them, his own work, implied an incipient desire to imagine an audience for his major novel. Moby-Dick’s submerged revelation of a Futurist physical consciousness in the classic American literature can be seen to necessitate Birkin’s conscious realization of Futurist circuit symbolism in Women in Love.

Yet,

Lawrence

does

not

innocently

write

himself into

the

lineage of the American novel. In his struggle with variant texts, and in his occasionally studied excisions from the works of the Americans, we can see how the desire to imagine an audience can become transmuted into a desire to create an audience. This tension between

“* John Middleton Murry, Son of Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), 286. “S As if to emphasize this point, in The First ‘Women in Love’ Lawrence has Birkin recommend Moby-Dick to Ursula as an “astonishingly good” novel which suggests an advanced process of abstraction in the American literature; Ursula replies with the hope that, once this abstraction has seeded down, “something else will come in its place” (135). This something is the physical consciousness in Moby-Dick, soon to be realized by Ursula and Birkin in Lawrence’s novel. The reference to Moby-Dick was cut from the final version

of Women in Love.

210

Studies in Classic American Literature

the desire to imagine an audience and the desire to create one is (as critics have noticed”) wholly evident in Lawrence’s post-war novels,

The Lost Girl and Mr Noon, but it is beyond the scope of this book to

pursue that theme into Lawrence’s writings of the 1920s.

4© See, for instance, Lydia Blanchard, “D. H. Lawrence and his ‘Gentle Reader’: The New Audience of Mr Noon”, The D. H. Lawrence Review,

XX/2 (1988), 223-35.

211

Conclusion

Studies which attempt to chart Lawrence’s relation to artistic or literary movements are notoriously fraught with difficulties. Lawrence is, on the one hand, to be listed among Harold Bloom’s “great deniers of influence”! because of the way he continually reads against the grain of his predecessors and contemporaries. On the other hand, the range of allusion in his works and the enthusiasms he professes in his letters call for us to read his works alongside these sources and interests. In general, other writings cannot be said to have initiated themes or concerns in Lawrence’s work, but they can be said to have given a particular inflection to these themes and concerns as they developed. Paul Eggert stresses this point in an essay published in 1982: It is probably true, in general, that Lawrence in his reading, at

least from the early 1910s, was not so much “influenced” as

“ignited”. He would shoot off on a tangent along his own highly individual train of thought. Although his response was often all wrong academically — grossly disproportionate to its stimulus, unpredictably selective, not “comprehensive” or “adequate” — he could, on the other hand, be a highly original and creative reader, brilliantly re-shaping his borrowings almost beyond recognition.”

' Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 56. Paul Eggert, “Lawrence and the Futurists: The Breakthrough in his Art”,

Meridian, | (1982), 24.

Conclusion

Lawrence once wrote of his use of external sources that “I only remember hints — and I proceed by intuition”:’ he was selective, and he was intuitive. Throughout my discussion of his engagement with Italian Futurism I have sought to indicate just how selective and intuitive Lawrence was in his understanding of the movement. He distrusted its reactionary bombast, but he valued its “appetite”: he admired the Futurists’ desire to turn from “the old stable ego of the character” in order to pursue “that which is physic — non-human, in humanity” (II, 182-83). Their youthful rejection of the past clearly fascinated him, and was invoked by him in his ongoing argument against the materialism of the old Edwardian novelists. Even their celebration of war as a way through to a new set of values struck a chord with the writer of the “Study of Thomas Hardy”, and their manifestos suggested a “destructive-consummating” (III, 143) vocabulary for the final draft of The Rainbow. In Women in Love, Lawrence intuitively uncovered from Marinetti’s assimilations a pessimistic Naturalist impersonality for his depiction of the wounded psychology of Gerald Crich, playing this off against a futuristic electrical vocabulary and impersonality that represents a source of hope for Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen. Finally, in Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence read the Futurists’ obsession with the movements of the material universe, and their conscious progression from the ideal self to the actual self, into the works of Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville. The transferral of the Futurist themes to the American writers marks the end of Lawrence’s serious engagement with the movement. His single allusion to Italian Futurism after Studies in Classic American Literature occurs in the third chapter of Aaron’s Rod, but here pieces of Futurist art are placed in the drawing room of a decadent bohemian’s house and the allusion simply contributes to the 3

DH.

Lawrence, “Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious”, in Fantasia

of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis worth: Penguin, 1971), 12.

213

and the Unconscious

(Harmonds-

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

novel’s critique of a stagnant post-war artistic bohemia for which avant-garde pre-war art has become decorative.‘ I believe that to trace Lawrence’s engagement with Italian Futurism it is necessary to follow out the broader movements in his writing life. I propose that, even in the process of penning the now famous letters of summer 1914, Lawrence did more than simply borrow from the Futurist declarations: he intuitively reshaped the Futurists’ writings by uncovering the movement’s repression of a pessimistic and biological Naturalist impersonality. In his subsequent critical and creative writings, his fascination with the “non-human, in

humanity” led him to invoke the Futurists in order to approach and understand this central theme in his own works. In a monograph first published in 1973, Frank Kermode wrote that Lawrence’s “relationship to the history of ideas in his time is so far below the surface that to write it would be to engage in very delicate and also very speculative excavations”.° The challenge remains as great three decades later, but recent textual scholarship on Lawrence is enabling critics to carry out these excavations in a more informed manner, and the current academic interest in interdisciplinarity and writings which resist easy classification can only work to increase Lawrence’s profile. I intend this book to contribute to a process of reevaluation that is already well under way.

4

See D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, 27. Frank Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana,

214

1985), 29.

Select Bibliography

D. H. Lawrence Alldritt, Keith, The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence (London: Edward Amold, 1971). Baron, Carl E., “Two Hitherto Unknown

Pieces by D. H. Lawrence”,

Encounter, XXXIII/2 (August 1969), 3-6. Bell, Michael, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). — “D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann: Unbewusste Briiderschaft’, Etudes Lawrenciennes, 10 (1994), 187-97.

Black, Michael, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works. A Commentary (London: Macmillan, 1991). — “‘Theorizing Myself Out’: Lawrence after Sons and Lovers: ‘The Burns Novel’ and ‘Elsa Culverwell’”, The Cambridge

Quarterly, XXVY/3 (1997), 242-62.

Blanchard, Lydia, “D. H. Lawrence and his ‘Gentle Reader’: The New Audience of Mr Noon”, The D. H. Lawrence Review, XX/2 Brown,

(1988), 223-35.

Keith,

ed.,

Rethinking

University Press, 1990).

Lawrence

(Milton

Keynes:

Open

Brunsdale, Mitzi M., The German Effect on D. H. Lawrence and his Works 1885-1912 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1978).

Cardy,

Michael,

“Beyond

Documentation:

Emile

Zola

and

D.

H.

Lawrence”, Neohelicon, XIV/2 (1987), 225-31. Cianci, Giovanni, “D. H. Lawrence and Futurism/Vorticism”, Arbeit-

en aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, VII) (1983), 41-53. Clarey, JoEllyn, “D. H. Lawrence’s Moby-Dick: A Textual Note”, Modern Philology, LXXXIV/2 (November 1986), 191-95.

Clarke, Colin, ed., The Rainbow and Women in Love: A Selection of Critical Essays (Nashville: Aurora, 1970).

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).

Colacurcio, Michael J., “The Symbolic and the Symptomatic: D. H. Cowan,

Cushman, Das,

G.

Deakin,

Lawrence in Recent American Criticism’, American Quarterly, 27 (October 1975), 486-502. James C., D. H. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance

(University

Park

and

University Press, 1990).

London:

The

Pennsylvania

Keith, D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence Prussian Officer Stories (Sussex: Harvester, 1978).

K.

and

G.

Salgado,

eds,

(London: Macmillan, 1988).

The

Spirit

of D.

H.

State

of the

Lawrence

William, “D. H. Lawrence’s Attack on Proust and Joyce”, Essays in Criticism, 7 (1957), 383-403. Delavenay, Emile, “Lawrence and the Futurists”, in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, eds Lawrence B.

Gamache

De

and

Ian

S.

MacNiven

(London:

Associated

University Press, 1987), 140-62. Zordo, Ornella and Davis Ellis, eds, D. H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments, I-IV (Sussex: Helm Information, 1992).

Donaldson, George and Mara Kalnins, eds, D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England (London: Macmillan, 1999). Draper, R. P., ed., D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). Eggert, Paul, “Identification of Lawrence’s Futurist Reading”, Notes and Queries, 227 (August 1982), 342-44. “Lawrence and the Futurists: The Breakthrough in his Art”, Meridian, \ (1982), 21-32.

Eggert, Paul and John Worthen,

eds, Lawrence

and Comedy

(Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ellis, David, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). “Lawrence and Forster in 1915”, The Cambridge Quarterly, XXVII/1 (1998), 1-14.

216

Select Bibliography Ellis, David and Howard

Thought

and

Press, 1988).

Mills, D. H. Lawrence’s Non-Fiction: Art,

Genre

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

University

Fernihough, Anne, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Freeman, Mary, D. H. Lawrence: A Basic Study of His Ideas (Gaines-

ville: University of Florida Press, 1955). Gordon, David J., D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1966).

Harrison, Andrew, “D. H. Lawrence’s Futurist Reading: Two Errors in

Footnotes from the Second Volume of the Cambridge Letters”, Notes and Queries, 243 (June 1998), 231-32.

“Electricity and the Place of Futurism in Women in Love”, The D. H. Lawrence Review, XXIX/2 (2000), 7-23.

Harrison, Andrew and Richard Hibbitt, “D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann”, Notes and Queries, 241 (December 1996), 443. Herzinger, Kim, D. H. Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915 (London: Associated University Press, 1982). Hoare, Peter and Peter Preston, eds, D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1989).

Hyde, G. M., D. H. Lawrence and the Art of Translation (London: Macmillan, 1981). D. H. Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1990).

Ingersoll, Earl G., “Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence: Exploring the Dark”, English Studies, 71 (1990), 125-32. Kalnins, Mara, ed., D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays (Bristol:

Bristol Classical Press, 1986). Kermode, Frank, Lawrence (London: Fontana, 1985).

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, “The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination

of D.

H.

Lawrence”,

in Imagined

Worlds:

Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, eds Ian Gregor and Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1968), 371-418. “Re-Dating ‘The Overtone’”,

25 (1994), 75-80.

217

The D. H. Lawrence Review,

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Kushigian, Nancy, Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre-War Novels of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Peter Lang, 1990).

Lawrence,

———— — ——— —

D. H., Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge:

Cam-

bridge University Press, 1988). The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, eds Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) The First ‘Women in Love’, eds John Worthen and Lindeth

Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). — The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ——— _ Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). —

—

——

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, |, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, eds George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University

—

Press, 1981). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence,

Ill, eds James T. Boulton

——_

Press, 1984). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence,

IV, eds James T. Boulton,

——— ————

and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Warren Roberts and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 218

Select Bibliography

———— ———— ———

— —

——— — ———— —

——

— ——

———— —

Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1967).

The Plays, eds Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The

Rainbow,

ed.

Mark

Kinkead-Weekes

(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989). Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Sons

and

Lovers,

eds

Helen

Baron

and

Carl

Baron

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Studies in Classic American Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The Symbolic Meaning, ed. Armin Arnold (Arundel: Centaur Press, 1952).

The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

The

White Peacock,

ed. Andrew

Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Robertson (Cambridge:

Women in Love, eds David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John

Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Leavis, F. R., D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Pelican, 1981). Leavis, L. R., “Wells, Lawrence, and Literary Influence”, English

Levy,

Studies, LXXIX/3 (May 1998), 224-39.

Mervyn,

ed., Paintings

of D.

Adams and Mackay, 1964).

219

H. Lawrence

(London:

Cory,

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Michaels-Tonks, Jennifer, D. H. Lawrence: The Polarity of North and South — Germany and Italy in His Prose Works (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann,

1976).

Miles, Thomas H., “Birkin’s Electro-Mystical Body of Reality: D. H.

Milton, Monk,

Lawrence’s Use of Kundalini’, The Review, [X/2 (Summer 1976), 194-212.

D.

H.

Colin, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987).

Lawrence

Influence

Ray, “The Tiger and the Machine: D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, XXVI/2 (1996), 205-46. Murry, John Middleton, Son of Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931).

Norton,

David,

“Lawrence,

Wells

and

Bennett:

Tradition”, Journal of Australasian

Influence

and

Universities Language

and Literature Association, 54 (1980), 171-90. Page, Norman, ed., D. H. Lawrence: Interviews and Recollections, I (London: Macmillan, 1981). Pinkney, Tony, D. H. Lawrence (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,

1990). Poplawski, Paul, The Works of D. H. Lawrence: A Chronological Checklist (Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence Society, 1995). D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996).

ed., Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality (Connecticut:

Greenwood Press, 2001). Ravilious, C. P., “Lawrence’s ‘Chladni Figures’”, Notes and Queries, Ross,

218 (September 1973), 331-32.

Charles

L., “The

Revisions

of the Second

Generation

in The

Rainbow”, Review of English Studies, 27 (August 1976), 277-95. The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). 220

Select Bibliography Women

Sagar,

Twayne,

in Love: 1991).

A

Novel

of Mythic

Realism

(Boston:

Keith, The Art of D. H. Lawrence (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966). D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of his Works (Austin: Texas University Press, 1979).

The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography (Lon-

Sanders,

don: Eyre Methuen, 1980). Scott, D. H. Lawrence: The

World

of the Major

Novels

(London: Vision Press, 1973). Squires, Michael and Keith Cushman, eds, The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

Stewart, Jack, The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence:

Vision and Expression

(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).

Swigg, Richard, Lawrence, Hardy, and American Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).

Torgovnick, Marianna,

The

Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel:

James, Lawrence, and Woolf (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Widdowson, Peter, ed., D. H. Lawrence (Essex: Longman,

1992).

Worthen, John, D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (London: ———— — — —

Macmillan, 1979).

“Short Story and Autobiography: Kinds of Detachment in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Fiction”, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 29 (1985), 1-15. D. H. Lawrence: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1989). D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). D.H. Lawrence (London: Edward Arnold, 1991).

221

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Italian Futurism There is a synopsis of key writings on Italian Futurism in TwentiethCentury Literary Criticism, 42, 269-354.

Relevant articles are to be

found in Modernism/Modernity, V/3 (1994): a special issue on “Marinetti and the Italian Futurists”. The journal Quaderno, 9 (1979), entitled “Futurismo/Vorticismo”, contains a good bibliography of articles revealing the interaction between the Italian and Anglo-American avantgardes, 1910-1915. Andreoli-DeVillers, Apollonio,

Jean

Pierre,

Futurism

and

the

Arts:

Bibliography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). Umbro,

Flint,

J.

ed., Futurist Manifestos,

C.

Higgitt,

C.

Tisdall

A

trans. R. Brain, R. W.

(London:

Thames

and

Hudson, 1973). Blum, Cinzia Sartini, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futur-

ist Fiction of Power (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:

University of California Press, 1996). Boccioni, Umberto, Pittura, Scultura Futuriste (Dinamismo Plastico)

(Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1914).

Carrieri, Raffaele, Futurism, trans. L. Von Rensselaer White (Milan: Edizione del Milione, 1963). De Maria, Luciano, ed., F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e Invenzione Futur-

ista (Milan: Mondadori, 1968). Dorazio, Virginia Dortch, Giacomo Balla: An Album of his Life and Work (Venice: Alfieri Edizione D’ Arte, 1969). Ferrall, Charles, “‘Melodramas of Modernity’: The Interaction of Vorticism and Futurism before the Great War”, University of Toronto Quarterly, LXIV/2 (1993/4), 347-68. Gullentops, David, “Verhaeren and Marinetti”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, XXXIV/3 (1996), 107-18. Hanson, Anne Coffin, ed., The Futurist Imagination:

Word and Image

in Italian Futurist Painting, Drawing, Collage and FreeWord Poetry: Exhibition Catalogue (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery).

222

Select Bibliography I Poeti Futuristi, con un proclama di F. T. Marinetti e uno studio sul Verso libero di Paolo Buzzi (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di

“Poesia”, 1912). Kirby, Michael, Futurist Performance (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1971). Marinetti,

F.

T.,

Selected

Writings,

trans.

R.

W.

Flint

and

A.

A.

Coppotelli (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972). Martin, Marianne W., Futurist Art and Theory 1909-1915 (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1978). Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre,

and the Language of Rupture Chicago Press, 1986). Poetry and Drama, V/3 (September 1913).

(London:

University

of

Poetry and Drama, 1/4 (December 1913).

Poggi, Christine, Jn Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism and the Invention of Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Rye, Jane, Futurism (London: Studio Vista, 1972). Sickert, Walter, “The Futurist ‘Devil-among-the-Tailors’”,

Review, 11 (April 1912), 147-54.

English

Soffici, Ardengo, Cubismo e Futurismo, con 32 illustrazioni di Balla,

Boccioni,

Braque,

Carra,

Cézanne,

Picasso,

Russolo,

Taylor,

Severini, Soffici (Florence: Pubblicato Dalla Libreria Della Voce, 2a edizione, 1914). Joshua C., Futurism (New York: Museum of Modern Art,

Tisdall,

Caroline

Wees,

1961).

and

Angelo

Bozzolla,

Futurism

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978).

(New

York

and

William C., “England’s Avant-Garde: The Futurist-Vorticist Phase”, Western Humanities Review, 21 (Spring 1967), 117-

28. Weisstein, Ulrich, “Futurism in Germany and England: Two Flashes in the Pan?”, Revue Langues Vivantes, 44 (1978), 467-97.

White, John J., Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant Garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 223

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Other texts cited

Abercrombie, Lascelles, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (New York: Russell and Russell Reprint, 1964).

Armstrong, Tim, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974). Baguley,

David, ed., Critical Essays on Emile Zola (Boston:

G. K.

Hall and Company, 1986). aecenennn= Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Bell, Anne Olivier, ed., 4 Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1990).

Bell, Quentin, Bloomsbury (London: Futura, 1976). Bennett, Arnold, Anna of the Five Towns (Harmondsworth:

Penguin,

1936). wonnnnne=- Literary Taste: How To Form It (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913). Bithell, Jethro, ed. and trans., Contemporary Belgian Poetry (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Bradbury,

M.

and J. McFarlane,

eds, Modernism

Penguin, 1991).

Branch,

Watson

Brooks,

Peter, Reading For the Plot: Design Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1985).

Bryant,

G.,

ed., Melville:

The

Critical Heritage

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).

John,

ed.,

A

Companion

to

(Harmondsworth:

Melville

and

Studies

(London:

Intention

in

(Westport,

Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986). Burckhardt, Lucius, ed., The Werkbund: Studies in the History and

Ideology

of the

Deutscher

Werkbund

1907-1933,

Pearl Saunders (London: The Design Council, 1980).

224

trans.

Select Bibliography

Coffman, Stanley K., Jmagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).

Cox, R. G., ed., Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Rout-

ledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). Dana, Richard Henry, Two Years Before the Mast (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Darroch, Sandra Jobson, Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976).

Dasenbrock, Reed Way, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). De Bolla, Peter, Harold Bloom:

De

Towards Historical Rhetorics (Lon-

don: Routledge, 1988). Man, Paul, “Review of The Anxiety

of Influence

by

Harold

Bloom”, Comparative Literature, 26 (1974), 269-75. Edel, Leon and Gordon N. Ray, eds, Henry James and H. G. Wells: A

Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958).

Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1976). wennonee-- Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).

woececenee

ed., Literary Essays Faber, 1960).

of Ezra Pound

(London:

Faber and

Forster, E. M., Howards End (London: Penguin, 1989). Frierson, William C., “English Controversy Over Realism in Fiction

1885-95”,

Publications

of

the

Modern

Language

Association of America, 43 (1928), 533-50. Furbank, P. N., E. M. Forster: A Life, 11 (London: Secker and War-

burg, 1978).

Garnett, Edward, ed., Letters from John Galsworthy 1900-1932 (Lon-

Gissing, Grant,

don: Jonathan Cape, 1934). George, The Private Papers Harvester, 1982).

of Henry

Joy, Harold Monro and the Poetry Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). 225

Ryecroft

Bookshop

(Sussex: (London:

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism

Gray,

Tony,

A Peculiar Man:

A Life of George Moore

(London:

Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996). Hammond, J. R., H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel (London: Macmillan, 1988). Harrison, Jane, Ancient Art and Ritual (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1969).

Hulme, Hynes,

T. E., Speculations 1987).

Samuel,

1991).

Ibsen, Henrik,

The

(London:

Edwardian

Routledge

Turn

of Mind

Ghosts, trans. Michael

and

Kegan

(London:

Meyer (London:

Paul,

Pimlico,

Rupert Hart-

Davis, 1962). Jones, Peter, ed., Jmagist Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).

Laforgue, Lavrin,

Jules,

Oeuvres

Complétes

de Jules Laforgue:

Posthumes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913).

Janko, Aspects of Modernism: (London: Stanley Nott, 1935).

Levine, Robert S., ed., The Cambridge Lewis,

Lodge,

From

Wilde

Companion

Mélanges

to Pirandello

to Herman Mel-

ville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Wyndham,

ed.,

Blast,

1-2,

1914-1915

Reprint Corporation, 1967). David, After Bakhtin: Essays

on

(New

Fiction

York:

and

Kraus

Criticism

(London: Routledge, 1990). Lucid, Robert F., “The Influence of Two Years Before the Mast on Herman Melville”, American Literature, 31 (1959), 243-56. Masterman, C. F. G., The Condition of England (London: Methuen,

1909). Maurer, John H., The Outbreak of the First World War: Strategic Planning, Crisis Decision Making, and Deterrence Failure (London: Praeger Publishers, 1995). McNees, Eleanor, ed., Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments (Sussex: Helm Information, 1994). Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (London: Penguin, 1986).

226

Select Bibliography Moore, wonnnno=--

Newton,

George,

Literature

At

Nurse,

or

Circulating

Morals:

A

Polemic on Victorian Censorship (Sussex: Harvester, 1976).

Confessions of a Young Man (London: Heinemann, 1926). William,

“Hardy

and

the

Naturalists:

Their

Use

Physiology”, Modern Philology, 49 (August 1952), 28-41.

of

Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan,

1995). Nordau, Max, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1913).

Orel, Harold, ed., Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (London: Macmillan, 1967).

Parrinder, Patrick, ed., H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Fontana, 1964).

Studies in Art and Poetry (London:

Peppis, Paul, “‘Surrounded by a Multitude of Other Blasts’: Vorticism and the Great War’, Modernism/Modernity, TV/2 (April 1997), 39-66. Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Poetry and Drama, \/2 (June 1913). Pound, Ezra, Selected Poems 1908-1959 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). Ragussis, Michael, The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Russell, Bertrand, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1] (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968). Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General

Linguistics,

trans.

Roy

Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983). Sontag, Susan, ///ness as Metaphor (London: Penguin, 1983). Tennyson, Alfred, The Works of Alfred Tennyson (London:

Kegan

Turner,

in

Paul and Co., 1878). Martha A., Mechanism

Narrative

Process

Press, 1993).

and

the

(Cambridge:

227

Novel:

Science

Cambridge

the

University

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism Tylor, Edward B., Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1903). Verdi, Richard, Cézanne (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).

Wells, H. G., The New Machiavelli (London: John Lane, 1911).

Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (London: Everyman, 1995).

Woolf, Virginia, weesenee=weeeeenen-

The Moment and Other Essays (London:

Press, 1947).

Hogarth

Collected Essays, 11 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966). A Woman's Essays: Selected Essays, 1, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1991). Zola, Emile, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, trans. Belle creeeeeeemennennnn=

M. Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964).

Thérése Raquin, trans. Andrew Rothwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). La Béte Humaine, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1977).

228

Index

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 103-104 Adam, Paul, 63

Boot, Sir Jesse, 59 Bourget, Paul, 60

Alldritt, Keith, xxii n.25 Anderson, Sherwood, !82 Armstrong, Tim, 162 n.51 Artzibashev, Michael, 182

Branch, Watson G., 202 n.29 Brooks, Peter, 52, 54 Burns, Robert, xiii, 9, 74, 75, 77 Burrows, Louie, xiii n.1, 22, 40 Buzzi, Paolo, 37, 64, 88

Balla, Giacomo, Ballets Russes,

151-52, 166

Capuana, Luigi, 45

165

Balzac, Honoré de, 14, 18, 36

Cardy, Michael, 35 n.12 Carra, Carlo, 93, 151 Carswell, Catherine, 36 n.13, 74 n.2 Carter, Frederick, 179

n.13, 50, 52

Baron, Carl E., 40 Baudelaire, Charles, 42-43

Beardsley, Aubrey, 12 n.12 Bell, Michael, 12 n.11, 148

Cassell’s Weekly, 4

Bennett, Arnold, xviii, 1-7, 10,

18, 22, 24, 27, 29, 30, 63

Anna of the Five Towns,

13-17, 19, 21, 62, 78

10,

Cavacchioli, Enrico, 123 Cézanne, Paul, 45

Chambers, Jessie, xiii n.1 Chekhov, Anton, 26, 36, 182

Bernard, Claude, 47-49 Bernhardt, Sarah, 62

Chevreul, M. E., 3

Black, Michael, 76

Cianci, Giovanni, xx, xxvi n.33, 88 n.17, 1270.3

Bithell, Jethro, 40-42

Blanchard, Lydia, 179, 211 n.46 Bloom, Harold, xv-xvii, xix, 1, 6,

7, 177, 212

Bloomsbury, Blue Review,

134 The, 10

Boccioni, Umberto, xxii, 37, 92,

109, 115, 138, 146, 151, 162, 169

Bolla, Peter de, xvii n.10

Chladni Plate experiment, 68, 161, 172

Clarey, JoEllyn, 205 n.36 and

n.37 Clarke, Colin, 164 n.56 Colacurcio, Michael J., 202 n.30 Collings, Ernest, xiv, 38 n.17, 77 Comte, Auguste, 63 Conrad, Joseph, 13

Contemporary Belgian Poetry, 40

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism Contemporary German Poetry, 40 Cooper, James Fenimore,

English Review, xiii, 18, 19, 32,

40, 95, 173, 186 Evening Standard, 6

178

Cowan, James C., 179 Crichton, Kyle, 60 Criterion, 5 Cubism, 38 Cubismo e Futurismo, xxii, 38 n.19, 93, 151

Faraday, Michael, 141 Fernihough, Anne, 69 Ferrall, Charles, 89 n.18 Fiedler, Leslie, 202 n.30 Figaro, Le, 39, 46, 126

Cushman, Keith, 90, 95 n.30

Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 10, 11, 14, Dana, Richard Henry,

25, 27, 28, 44, 60

182, 194-

202, 203-206, 213

Two

Fleishman, Avrom, 129 n.6

Flint, R. W., 67 n.80

Years Before the Mast,

185, 194-202, 204

Folgore, Luciano, 68, 140

Darroch, Sandra Jobson, 166 n.58 Darwin, Charles, 63, 69

Ford, Ford Madox, 18 Forster, E. M., 20, 59, 102 n.42,

Daugherty, Beth Rigel, 2 Davy, Humphry, 141

134, 142, 193

France, Anatole, 27 Frank, Waldo, 108 Freeman, Mary, xix

Deakin, William, 203 n.34 Delavenay, Emile, xx-xxi, 67, 88 n.17, 110 n.54, 111, 127.3 Del Re, Arundel, 130, 141, 208,

Frierson, William C., 61

Furbank, P. N., 102 n.42 Futurism (Italian) Analogy, 35, 93-94, 117 Art of Noise, 94, 182

209

De Man, Paul, xvi-xvii, xix Diaghilev, Sergei, 165-66

Electricity, 122-23, 140-41, 154, 199

Dickens, Charles, 14, 18, 20 n.20

Donne, John, 154 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5, 65, 182 Duckworth, xiii, 9, 59 Dunlop, Thomas,

And England, 31-34 Interpenetration, 51, 93, 118 And Language, 36, 49, 69,

168

130-33, 148-49, 155, 168-69, 170-71, 208209, 213

Edison, Thomas, 141 Eggert, Paul, xx, xxii n.25 and

Lines of Force, 110, 118,

n.26, xxiv, 212

Eliot, T. S., 6, 67, 153, 165 Ellis, David, 134 n.15, 183 n.9, 184 n.11

119, 122, 124, 146, 151 And Telegraphy, 87, 141, 207-209

230

And War, 39, 55, 93-94, 111, 209, 213 Galsworthy, John, xviii, 1, 2, 3, 5,

7, 18, 26-29, 62, 119 n.68

Garnett, Edward, xiii, 9, 26, 29,

65, 67, 72, 75, 89, 171

Garnett, David, 134, 166 Garuti, Giuseppe, 109 n.53 Gertler, Mark, 128

Giles, Paul, 202 n.31, 203 n.32 Gissing, George, 22 Golden Bough, The, 168 Grant, Duncan, 134 Grant, Joy, 33 n.7 Gray, Tony, 62 n.77

Greek drama, 43, 105 Greek sculpture, 44 n.36, 101 Gullentops, David, 41 n.26 Hammond,

J. R., 19

Hardy, Thomas, 17, 21, 23, 25,

28, 58, 60, 76, 103-105

Harrison, Austin, 19 Harrison, Jane, xxii n.26 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 36 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 178, 182 Heinemann, xiii, 19, 59, 72 Henley, W. E., 74 n.2 Hertz, Heinrich, 141

Herzinger, Kim, xx, 90 n.19, 101

Hopkin, Sallie, 77

Hueffer, Ford Madox, see Ford, Ford Madox Hulme, T. E., 96

Hyde, G. M., 17 n.16, 118 n.66 Hynes, Samuel, 2

Ibsen, Henrik, 36-37 Ghosts, 37, 139, 173-75 Imagism, xxiv, 89, 96-98 Ingersoll, Earl G., 30 n.34 I Poeti Futuristi, xxii, 37, 38 n.19, 68, 123, 140, 185, 199 James, Henry, 18-19 Jarry, Alfred, 63 Joyce, James, 203

Kahn, Gustave, 63 Keats, John, 22 Kenner, Hugh, 97, 170 n.66 Kermode, Frank, 214 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 38, 82,

84, 85 n.14, 103 n.45, 108,

109 n.53, 113, 126, 134n.15, 166 n.59, 183 Kirby, Michael, 94 n.29

Kushigian, Nancy, xx-xxi Laforgue, Jules, 3 Lang, Andrew, 74 n.2 Lavrin, Janko, 34 Lawrence, D. H.

Aaron’s Rod, 213 “America, Listen to Your

Own”, 183-85, 195 “Art and Morality”, 8

“Art and the Individual”, 187

“Burns Novel” Fragments, xxv, 74-77, 79, 84

“By the Lago di Garda III The Theatre”, 173

“Crown, The”, xxv, 107, 108,

133-38, 147, 148, 154,

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism 156, 160, 162, 169, 172, 174, 186

Prussian Officer and Other

Stories, The, 59, 84, 86,

88, 89, 92 n.24, 98, 102, 105, 108

“Dies Irae”, 165

“Elsa Culverwell’, 9, 77-82,

84

Rainbow,

210 n.45 “Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious”, 213 n.3

“Foreword to Sons and Lovers”, 72-73, 82, 83

“Reality of Peace, The”, 162 “Scargill Street”, 72, 73 “Second-Best”, 90, 98-100,

“Foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature’, xxv, 182

102

“Foreword to Women in Love’, 126, 144, 176,

“Sisters, The”, 9, 17, 21, 28,

177

73, 78, 79, 82, 85, 103, 109, 110 “Sisters II, The”, 85, 101

“German Books: Thomas

Mann”, 10-13, 44

Sons and Lovers, xiii-xv, xix, xxiii, xxv, 1, 7n.9, 8, 9,

“Goose Fair”, xiii n.1

“Green”, 97 “XX. Herman Melville”,

n.24, 207

The, xiv, xxiv, 7, 9,

27, 35, 48-49, 55, 69, 73, 78, 85, 86, 88, 103, 107, 108-109, 111-25, 126, 129, 132, 133, 143, 144, 149, 150, 152, 154, 156, 171, 213

First ‘Women in Love’, The,

23, 25, 26, 30, 42, 44, 51-52, 59, 61-62, 70, 7175, 77, 84, 86, 108, 143

198

“Insurrection of Miss Houghton, The”, 78, 85 Lost Girl, The, xiv, 78, 81-

Studies in Classic American

Love Poems and Others, xiv

“Study of Thomas Hardy”,

Literature, xxiii, xxv, 87,

82, 208 n.41, 211

176-211, 213

17, 28, 58, 85, 109, 111, 115, 124, 128, 133, 137, 146, 151, 213 Symbolic Meaning, 207

“Modern Lover, A”, 157

Mr Noon, 158, 166, 211

“New Eve and Old Adam”,

86-88

“Overtone, The”, 82-84, 86 Pansies, 165 “Paul Morel”, 9, 13, 59, 72 “Prelude, A”, xiii n.1 “Prussian Officer, The”, 86,

92, 102116, 118, 135, 136, 162, 178, The, 186,

“Thorn in the Flesh, The”, 86

“Tickets Please”, 55-57, 63

90-93, 94-96, 102

Touch and Go, 157 n.44

232

Index Trespasser, The, xiii, xiv, 9,

Mansfield, Katherine, 10, 133 Marconi, Guglielmo, 141 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, xix, XXli, XXiV-xxvi, 29, 31-33,

12 n.12, 59, 159 Twilight in Italy, 173-74

“Two Principles, The”,

194

35, 37-39, 41-42, 45, 46, 48, 53, 54, 63-69, 73, 88, 90, 93, 110, 111-12, 116-18, 121, 125, 130-31, 140, 148, 163, 164, 182, 185, 198, 208-209,

“Wedding Ring, The”, 29,

33, 85, 103, 115

White Peacock,

The, xiii, xiv,

9, 12 n.12, 50, 59, 62, 76, 79, 143 Widowing of Mrs Holroyd,

213

Marsh, Edward, xxii Masterman, C. F. G., Maupassant, Guy de, Maurer, John H., 106

The, 157-58

Women in Love, xiv, xix, XX,

xxv, 9, 27, 35, 37, 54-55, 61, 63, 69, 77, 78, 85, 99, 107, 108, 126-75, 176-77, 182-83, 185, 186-87, 189-94, 195, 199-202, 210, 213

n.26 20 n.20 26, 36, 60 n.49

McLeod, Arthur, 19, 21, 74, 110

Melville, Herman, 178, 182, 185, 194, 202-10, 213 Moby-Dick, 87, 185, 194, 202-10 Merrill, Stuart, 41 Messager de |’Europe, Le, 47

Lawrence, Frieda, 85, 103, 110,

132, 166

Leavis, F. R., 113, 125 Leavis, L. R., 18 n.17 Lewis, Wyndham, xxii n.26 Lindsay, Jack, xix-xx Lockhart, J. G., 74 Lodge, David, 124 n.74, 129 n.6 Lowell, Amy, 133, 181

n.40

Methuen,

103, 111

Meynell, Viola, 203 n.32 Michaels-Tonks, Jennifer, xxi, 127 n.3 Miles, Thomas H., 163 n.53, 201 n.28

Lucid, Robert F., 194 n.19, 204

Monk, Ray, 134.14

Monro, Harold, 32-34, 37-38,

130, 208

Macy, John, 177 n.1 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 39, 64 Mallarmé, Stephane, 39 Mann, Thomas, xviii, 10-12, 14,

Moore, George, 58, 61-62 Moréas, Jean, 41

Morrell, Ottoline, 166, 168 Mountsier, Robert, 203 n.34 Murray, Gilbert, 168 Murry, John Middleton, 10, 133,

17, 25, 28, 44, 85, 104, 138

Der Tod in Venedig, 10-12,

14

209-10

233

D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism Nation and Athenaeum, 5 Naturalism, xix, xxv, 35-37, 40,

Ross, Charles L., 103 n.46, 108, 120

Nevinson, C. R. W., 32

Sadler, Michael T. H., 41 Sagar, Keith, 68 n.82, 111.55 Saint-Point, Valentine de, 121

45-47, 55, 57-70, 139, 161, 173, 175, 176, 180, 185, 187, 191-94, 213-14

Russell, Bertrand, 112, 133-34 Russolo, Luigi, 94

New Republic, 183-84 Newton, William, 59 n.67

Sanders, Scott, 127 n.3 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 170

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 39, 63

Nijinsky, Vaslav, 165-66

Savage, Henry, 101

Nordau, Max, 49 n.47

Nottinghamshire Guardian, xiii

Scott, Evelyn,

177 n.1

Secker, Martin, 183 n.7 Seltzer, Thomas, 176, 183 n.7,

202 n.29, 203 n.34

Observer, The, 32

Severini, Gino, 151 Shakespeare, William, 105

Palazzeschi, Aldo, 37 n.14 Pater, Walter, 44 n.36, 101 Pavlova, Anna, 165

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 62

Sickert, Walter, xxii n.26, 32-34

Signature, The, 134

Pinker, J. B., 27

Pittura, Scultura Futuriste, xxii,

Soffici, Ardengo, xxii, 37, 64, 88

38 n.19

Some Imagist Poets, 97 Sorel, Georges, 63

Poe, Edgar Allan, 53, 140, 176,

178, 180, 182, 185, 18694, 202

Standard, The, 59 Sterne, Laurence,

18

Stewart, Jack, xxi, 146 n.34

“Fall of the House of Usher,

Stravinsky, Igor, 166 Strindberg, August, 36

The”, 186, 188, 191-93 “Ligeia”, 188, 188-91, 196

Poesia, 39

Swan, Joseph,

Poetry and Drama, xxii n.25 and n.26, 32, 37, 38, 42, 130, 141, 208, 209

141

Swift, Jonathan, 18

Swigg, Richard, 178 Symbolism, 12, 39-41, 64

Pope, Alexander, 44 Pound, Ezra, 4 n.5, 96-97, 100,

Taine, Hippolyte, 46, 63 Taylor, Joshua C., 140 n.17 Tennyson, Alfred, 159-61, 169,

170 n.66

Ragussis, Michael, 148 n.36, 162

n.52, 169

174

Thucydides, 168

Rainey, Lawrence, 31 n.2

234

Index Times Literary Supplement, 2, 4 Tolstoy, Leo, 26, 65, 182 Torgovnick, Marianna, xx Turgenev, Ivan, 26, 65 Turner, Martha A., 159

Werkbund, 127-28 White, John J., 170 n.65 Whitman, Walt, 63, 154, 182, 187 Wilde, Oscar, 12 n.12 Winckelmann, Johann, 44 n.36,

Tylor, Edward B., 168-69

101

Woolf, Virginia, 1-7, 9, 14, 19,

22, 26, 30, 142

Van Doren, Carl, 202 n.29 Verga, Giovanni, 45 Verhaeren, Emile, 40-45, 63 Verismo movement, 45 Verlaine, Paul, 39, 41, 42 Vizetelly, Henry, 60, 61

Worthen, John, 25 n.31, 43 n.34,

44 n.36, 48 n.45, 86, 101 n.40, 142 n.24, 145 n.30, 198 n.24

Vorticism, xxiv, 31, 89, 100, 127

Yeats, W. B., 22

n.3

Zach, Natan, 89 n.18

Zola, Emile, xxiv-xxv, 35-37, 39-

Walker, Philip, 187 n.13

41, 45-55, 56, 57-61, 63, 65-69, 138, 147, 187-88

Weaver, Raymond M., 202 n.29 Wees, William C., 89 n.18

Weidman, Bette S., 203 n.33 Wells, H. G., 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 159

“Experimental Novel, The”,

45, 47-50, 138, 192

New Machiavelli, The, 10,

La Béte Humaine, 50-55, 63,

18-26, 103

139, 172, 187

235