The Bloomsbury Handbook to D. H. Lawrence [1 ed.] 9781350253742, 9781350253735, 9781350253759, 9781350253766

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO D. H. LAWRENCE

ii

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO D. H. LAWRENCE Edited by Annalise Grice

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Annalise Grice and contributors, 2024 The editor and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xiii–xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Rebecca Heselton Cover image © D. H. Lawrence on board a boat on Lake Chapala in Mexico in 1923. University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, La Wb 1/11. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grice, Annalise, editor. Title: The Bloomsbury handbook to D.H. Lawrence / edited by Annalise Grice. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic. 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023030708 (print) | LCCN 2023030709 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350253742 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350253735 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350253759 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350253766 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR6023.A93 Z5687 2024 (print) | LCC PR6023.A93 (ebook) | DDC 823/.912–dc23/eng/20230816 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030708 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030709 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-5374-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-5375-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-5376-6 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

N otes on C ontributors A cknowledgements L ist of A bbreviations

viii xiii xv

Introduction 1 Annalise Grice Part I  Transnational/Cosmopolitan Lawrence 1 Dwelling, travel and tourism Lee M. Jenkins

17

2 Sentimentalism and European literature Michael Bell

35

3 ‘Then there’s Frieda’: D. H. Lawrence and German radicalism John Turner

53

4 D. H. Lawrence, Émile Zola and the bodily unconscious Andrew Harrison

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5 Cultural difference: Writings on the American south-west and Mexico 89 Neil Roberts

viCONTENTS

6 Australia and the Australians David Game

107

Part II  Ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality 7 Race and empire Laura Ryan

129

8 Regional drama: Lawrence and Joyce James Moran

147

9 Money and revolution Jeff Wallace

165

10 Performing gender Helen Wussow

183

11 Bachelors, husbands, fathers, sons Stewart Smith

197

12 Gay, lesbian and queer theory Richard A. Kaye

217

Part III  Interdisciplinary approaches 13 Mental health and bibliotherapy Philip Davis

245

14 Language and style Violeta Sotirova

265

15 Attachment theory Ronald Granofsky

291

16 Sustainability and balance Fiona Becket

309

17 Animality and the paintings Carrie Rohman

327

CONTENTS

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Part IV  Material cultures 18 A material poetry Holly A. Laird

347

19 Poetry in the magazines Christopher Pollnitz

367

20 Modernity and new media: 1920s journalism, cinema, radio Annalise Grice

383

21 D. H. Lawrence, influence Sean Matthews

403

B ibliography I ndex

423 433

CONTRIBUTORS

Fiona Becket is Professor of Contemporary Poetics at the University of Leeds, UK. Her first book on Lawrence was D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997), and she wrote The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence (2002). She has written many articles and book chapters on Lawrence and other modernists, most recently in Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment and Nature in Literary Modernism, edited by Jeremy Diaper (2022). She and Terry Gifford co-edited Culture, Creativity, Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism (2007). Fiona is currently writing a book on visual poetry for publication in 2024. Michael Bell is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. He has written mainly on literary and philosophical themes from the European Enlightenment to modernity. His book-length publications include Primitivism (1973), The Sentiment of Reality: Truth of Feeling in the European Novel (1983), F. R. Leavis (1988), D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (1992), Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity (1994), Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (1997), Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (2001), Open Secrets: Literature, Education and Authority from J-J Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee (2007) and The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, edited volume (2012). Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool where he was director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS). His publications include Memory

CONTRIBUTORS

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and Writing: From Wordsworth to Lawrence, Reading and the Reader, Reading for Life, Arts for Health: Reading (with Fiona Magee), Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life and most recently, My Reading: William James. He is an editor of two Oxford University Press series: The Literary Agenda and My Reading, and general editor of the Anthem Studies in Bibliotherapy and Wellbeing. David Game was from 2010 to 2023 a visiting fellow in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has contributed articles to the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and the D. H. Lawrence Review and is the author of D. H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire (2015). In 2017, he received the Biennial Award for a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies from the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. Ronald Granofsky is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. He serves as president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America until January 2025. Granofsky is the author of numerous articles and two books on Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence and Survival: Darwinism in the Fiction of the Transitional Period (2003) and D. H. Lawrence and Attachment (2022), both published by McGillQueen’s University Press. Annalise Grice is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is the author of D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings (2022) and several other book chapters and articles on Lawrence, including essays for the D. H. Lawrence Review and D. H. Lawrence in Context. In 2020, she received the Biennial Award for a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies from the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. Andrew Harrison is Associate Professor of English Literature and Director of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on Lawrence. His books include The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography (2016) and the edited volume, D. H. Lawrence in Context (2018). Lee M. Jenkins is a Professor of English at University College Cork. She is the co-editor of three Cambridge University Press collections, Locations of Literary Modernism (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007) and A History of Modernist Poetry (2015). Her monograph, The American Lawrence, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2015 (paperback edition

xCONTRIBUTORS

in 2020). She is currently completing a book for Bloomsbury’s ‘Historicizing Modernism’ series on Lawrence, H. D., and Richard Aldington. Richard A. Kaye is a Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College and in the PhD Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. His edited collection of essays on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2023. He is the editor of the journal The D. H. Lawrence Review. Holly Laird, Frances W. O’Hornett Chair of Literature, has authored Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence; Women Coauthors, a study of collaborative writing from the Victorian period to 1999, and numerous essays on D. H. Lawrence and other modern and Victorian writers. She is the guest co-editor of ‘The Poems’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and guest editor of ‘The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence’, D. H. Lawrence Review. She is co-editor (with Kaye Mitchell) of Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford); co-lead transcription editor for the Online Michael Field Diaries and editor of Palgrave’s The History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 7, 1880–1920. Sean Matthews teaches at the University of Nottingham. He was Director of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre from 2005 to 2010, and then he was seconded to the university’s campus in Malaysia. Since 2018, back in the School of English at Nottingham, UK, he teaches contemporary fiction, cultural and critical theory and, of course, D. H. Lawrence. His current research is concerned with contemporary women writers’ engagement with Lawrence’s influence. James Moran is a Professor of Modern English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham. His recent books include Modernists and the Theatre (2022); The Theatre of Fake News (2022) and Forms of Drama: Modern Tragedy (2023). He is also the editor of Bernard Shaw’s Playlets (2021). Christopher Pollnitz is an honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. He has edited The Poems in three volumes for the Cambridge University Press edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence. He is a regular contributor to the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. Neil Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English literature at the University of Sheffield, where he taught for thirty-eight years. He has written and edited fifteen books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature including D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (2004), D. H. Lawrence: ‘Women in

CONTRIBUTORS

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Love’ (2007) and Sons and Lovers: the Biography of a Novel (2016) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on Lawrence. Carrie Rohman is Professor of English at Lafayette College. She has published widely in animal studies, modernism, posthumanism and performance. She is the author of Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (2018) and Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2009) and is co-editor with Kristin Czarnecki of Virginia Woolf and the Natural World (2011). Rohman is currently co-editing a volume of essays addressing gendered abuse in academia, with Mary K. Holland and Carlyn Ferrari. Laura Ryan is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow at the University of Galway, pursuing a project titled ‘Writing Homelessness: Down and Out in Modernist Literature’. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester for a thesis on D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance, and she is currently developing a monograph based upon her doctoral research. Her work has been published in English Language Notes, Literature Compass, Études Lawrenciennes, Resources for American Literary Study and The Modernist Review and she has contributed chapters to Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story (2021) and Ethical Crossroads in Modernist Studies (2023). Stewart Smith is an independent scholar. He has published in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and is the author of Nietzsche and Modernism: Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett (2018). He is currently working on a book-length study of Lawrence’s moral psychology. Violeta Sotirova is Associate Professor in stylistics at the University of Nottingham. She has published two books: D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint (2011) and Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study (2013). She is also the editor of The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics (2015) and a co-editor of Linguistics and Literary History (2016). She has published chapters and articles on D. H. Lawrence’s stylistic techniques. She is also assistant editor of the journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association Language and Literature. John Turner was formerly Senior Lecturer in English at Swansea University. He has written a book on Wordsworth, co-authored two books on Shakespeare and a book on Lawrence and Psychoanalysis, together with a score of essays on Lawrence. He has a particular interest in the writings of Otto Gross, and is currently preparing a translation of his hitherto untranslated works.

xiiCONTRIBUTORS

Jeff Wallace is Professor Emeritus at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman (2023), Beginning Modernism (2011) and D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005), and the co-editor of volumes on Gothic Modernisms, Raymond Williams and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. His most recent publications on Lawrence include essays on technics (2022) and on Lawrence’s painterly criticism (2020). He is a co-editor of the book series, New Literary Theory. Helen Wussow is an Associate Professor in Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York City. She has published widely on D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and feminist literary traditions, including The Nightmare of History: The Fictions of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (1998).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My grateful thanks are due to every contributor for their enthusiasm for this project and for writing such fascinating chapters. It has been a genuine pleasure to work closely with all of you and to be the first reader of the research contained within this book. One of the real joys has been our personal email communications, which have brightened up many a day and reminded me how fortunate we are to work within such a generous and kind academic community. I am also fortunate to be involved in a very active and dynamic research community at Nottingham Trent University, and I thank all my colleagues within English, Creative Writing and Linguistics, particularly Catherine Clay, who has for some time acted as an informal mentor and a caring friend; Neil Turnbull and James Walker for their interest in talking about ‘local Lawrence’, and my office mate Sarah Carter, for her humour and wise pragmatism. I am also grateful to my students at all levels for their thoughtful responses to Lawrence during seminar discussions. Most of all, my gratitude is due to Andrew Harrison, for believing that I could take on – and (importantly) see through – this project in the first place, and for offering his eminently knowledgeable and experienced advice along the way. Special thanks also to my parents, Linda and Clive Grice (in loving memory of my father, 1948–2023), for reminding me what is most important. I am grateful to Ben Doyle for his support and interest in the initial proposal, and to the three anonymous readers who supplied encouraging and helpful feedback; I thank Laura Cope for all her assistance as the editorial process progressed and Dhanujha as Project Manager for the copy-editing stage. I must acknowledge the support of Manuscripts and Special Collections at

xivAcknowledgements

the University of Nottingham for supplying the cover image, and I thank Katy Loffman for her help in securing copyright permissions. Extracts from the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence © Cambridge University Press 1980–2018 are reproduced by permission of Paper Lion Ltd., The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli and Cambridge University Press.

ABBREVIATIONS

Quotations provided are from the Cambridge University Press edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence (unless stated otherwise).

LETTERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE 1L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume I: September 1901–May 1913. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.

2L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume II: June 1913–October 1916. Ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

3L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume III: October 1916–June 1921. Ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

4L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume IV: June 1921–March 1924. Ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

5L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume V: March 1924–March 1927. Ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

6L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume VI: March 1927–November 1928. Ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

xviAbbreviations

7L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume VII: November 1928–February 1930. Ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

8L

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume VIII: Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE A

Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.

AR

Aaron’s Rod. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

BB

The Boy in the Bush. With M. L. Skinner. Ed. Paul Eggert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

EME

England, My England and Other Stories. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

FLC

The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels. Ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Fox

The Fox, the Captain’s Doll, the Ladybird. Ed. Dieter Mehl. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

FWL

The First ‘Women in Love’. Ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

IR

Introductions and Reviews. Ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

K

Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

LAH

Love among the Haystacks and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

LCL

Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

LEA

Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

LG

The Lost Girl. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

MEH Movements in European History. Ed. Philip Crumpton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. MM

Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays. Ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

MN

Mr Noon. Ed. Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Abbreviations

xvii

PFU

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Plays

The Plays. Ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

PM

Paul Morel. Ed. Helen Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

PO

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

1Poems, 2Poems D. H. Lawrence: The Poems, Volumes I and II. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 3Poems

D. H. Lawrence: The Poems, Volume III: Uncollected Poems and Early Versions. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018.

PS

The Plumed Serpent. Ed. L. D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Q

Quetzalcoatl. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

R

The Rainbow. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

RDP

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Ed. Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

SCAL

Studies in Classic American Literature. Ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

SEP

Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays. Ed. Simonetta de Filippis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

SL

Sons and Lovers. Ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

SM

St. Mawr and Other Stories. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

SS

Sea and Sardinia. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

STH

Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

T

The Trespasser. Ed. Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

xviiiAbbreviations

TI

Twilight in Italy and Other Essays. Ed. Paul Eggert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

VicG

The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

VG

The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories. Ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

WL

Women in Love. Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

WP

The White Peacock. Ed. Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

WWRA

The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Introduction ANNALISE GRICE

D. H. Lawrence is back in vogue. Phoenix-like, he appears in the 2020s to be rising again both in academic circles and in the popular imagination, where his presence has always been most keenly felt. In less than three years, since 2020, monographs on Lawrence have been published on topics including his interventions in ecofeminism and nature writing, theories of attachment, theoretical and historical investigations into psychoanalysis, the literary marketplace, pedagogy and his revisionary writing practice; scholars have also examined his broader dialogues with modernist contemporaries on subjects such as his interests in non-human life, his entanglement with censorship and obscenity laws and his representations of disability.1 A substantial edited collection has considered Lawrence’s engagement with the arts, aiming ‘to make the strongest possible case for his ongoing aesthetic power, and his relevance to a world experiencing several of the problems of his own time in intensified forms’.2 The wider marketplace has witnessed the publication of (often female-authored) novels which have taken inspiration from Lawrence’s life, relationships and writings; following Annabel Abbs’s Frieda: A Novel of the Real Lady Chatterley (2018) and John Worthen’s Young Frieda (2019) came Alison MacLeod’s historical novel Tenderness (2021), dealing with the censorship and prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its broader cultural influences on the ‘sexual revolution’, and Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize), which acknowledges a debt to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos. Frances Wilson’s biography Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence (2021), described by Wilson herself as ‘a work of non-fiction which is also a work of imagination’ (p. 3), has also

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to D. H. Lawrence

succeeded in drawing renewed attention to the author outside academia, as has Lara Feigel’s Look! We Have Come Through! Living with D. H. Lawrence (2022), which interweaves literary criticism with biography and memoir. On screen, a well-produced Sky Arts documentary entitled D. H. Lawrence: Sex, Exile and Greatness aired on 4 March 2021 supported by five Lawrence experts and, garnering still larger audiences, a new adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover starring Emma Corrin (dir. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre) was released on Netflix on 2 September 2022.3 Earlier that year, the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America (DHLSNA) hosted the 15th International D. H. Lawrence Conference in New Mexico and in April 2023 Paris Nanterre University held its 36th International D. H. Lawrence Conference. The 2022 ‘Hopeful Modernisms’ conference in Bristol, organized by the British Association of Modernist Studies, included six papers solely on Lawrence, and there is an annual Lawrence panel at the Modern Language Association conference in the United States. This demonstrates his renewed prominence in relation to modernist studies and the discipline of English studies more broadly. The oscillations in Lawrence’s reputation barely need repeating. From F. R. Leavis’s championing of Lawrence in the 1950s as a central figure in the ‘Great Tradition’ of the English novel, to his position as an iconic harbinger of the sexual liberation in the 1960s following the famous public prosecution trial of Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (which was used as a test case for the 1959 Obscene Publications Act), to the post-1970 dip in his academic reputation following the publication of that timely touchstone for Second Wave Feminism, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Lawrence’s writing has been lauded and reviled in line with key changes in literary studies and society as a whole. Having faced opprobrium in his lifetime from reviewers and censors, he might have anticipated his own conflicted reception history. In November 1921, he confided to Mabel Dodge Sterne, ‘I feel hopeless about the public. Not that I care about them. I want to live my life, and say my say, and the public can die its own death in its own way’ (4L 111). The phrase ‘I don’t care’ recurs throughout his letters, but it stems from the frustration of caring too much: about the rejection of his work by publishers, for example, or about the attempts of the authorities to silence him through the prosecution of The Rainbow, the impounding of copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover sent out to subscribers, the confiscation of two typescripts of Pansies and the police raid on an exhibition of his paintings. A number of obituaries were shockingly personal and vituperative, dismissing the bravery of a writer who was outspoken about what he considered the most challenging aspects of his times – power dynamics, sex, gender – even while he knew his candour would be unpalatable. In 1925, he stated his belief that ‘a book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in a crowd’, and the author ‘should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment’ (5L 201). Lady Chatterley’s

Introduction

3

Lover was branded ‘evil’ in the populist ultra-conservative penny magazine John Bull; the commentator claimed that ‘the sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness. The creations of muddyminded perverts, peddled in the back-street bookstalls of Paris are prudish by comparison … Mr. Lawrence has a diseased mind.’4 In the decades that followed the reception of Sexual Politics, a small but stable number of tenacious international scholars, most now in or nearing retirement, stood by Lawrence, publishing some of the finest scholarship – editorial, biographical, bibliographical, contextual, theoretical – afforded to any modern author. This legacy means we are now in the best possible position to reassess the impact Lawrence made, and continues to make, on literary culture: scholars are able to draw on eight volumes of the Cambridge edition of his Letters (1979–2000), with further newly located letters being published routinely in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, and forty carefully edited volumes of his Works (1980–2018). Taking full advantage of the Cambridge edition, scholarly biographies by John Worthen (1992), Mark Kinkead-Weekes (1996), David Ellis (1998) and Andrew Harrison (2016) have enriched and added new details and complexity to the existing accounts of his life. New archival finds that were located too late to be included in the edition provide fertile grounds for fresh inquiry, and the editorial apparatus, annotations and appendices to these volumes are so detailed that criticism is only just beginning to re-examine in light of them Lawrence’s complex habits of revision. Paul Eggert has recently made the case that Lawrence’s writing would benefit from representation in a digital edition, and Christopher Pollnitz suggests here that the poetry would be an ideal starting point for such an approach.5 The imminent centenaries in 2028 and 2030 respectively of the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lawrence’s death will undoubtedly attract further attention to him. It is now apposite, then, to gather newly commissioned criticism by early career researchers and established scholars that reflects upon the key trends in Lawrence studies and outlines the most recent approaches to the man and his writing, offering grounds for a reappraisal of Lawrence for the twenty-first century. He continues to attract extensive critical attention on a global scale, and – as an international panel on ‘Lawrence and Pedagogy’ recently attested – students still respond with deep attentiveness to his writing in all genres.6 We are now better equipped than ever before to discuss the implications of his work with clear-sightedness and without hagiography. The volume is divided into four parts, with subheadings that draw out significant strands of current criticism; there are, however, inevitable overlaps and dialogues between sections, and although coverage is wide-ranging, as befits a ‘handbook’, it cannot claim to be comprehensive (there is, for instance, no discussion here of Lawrence and disability studies, though as noted earlier, critical conversations are now beginning to emerge on this topic). My

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to D. H. Lawrence

intentions for the volume are fourfold: to stress the significance of Lawrence’s cosmopolitanism and position as a global citizen and transnational author; to address his interventions in the intersections of identity, particularly ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality; to consider developments in the study of his writing across disciplinary boundaries and, emerging out of this, to examine in detail ‘material cultures’, or how Lawrence engaged with and shaped the culture of which he was a part. One of the reasons Lawrence has generated so much biographical and critical interest – and so much disagreement – is the sheer range of his work, and the ease with which one can locate different ‘versions’ of him. Regrettably, the dominant version among the wider public is of Lawrence the provincial writer of ‘dirty books’: a perspective promoted in his own time in the most damaging way not only by commentaries such as that in John Bull, but also by respected writers such as T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s first published assessment of Lawrence in 1927 noted that ‘when his characters make love … they not only lose all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in order to make love-making tolerable; they seem to reascend the metamorphoses of evolution, passing backward beyond ape and fish to some hideous coition of protoplasm’.7 But as Lawrence himself noted, he was no simple ‘lurid sexuality specialist’ (5L 611).8 Another popular version of Lawrence is as the agitator or anarchist, compare Wilson’s hot-headed (and often absurd) ‘Burning Man’, a figure who was continually oppositional and offensive. As Richard Lovatt Somers, the Lawrence figure in Kangaroo, asserts, ‘some men have to be bombs, to explode and make breaches in the walls that shut life in’ (K 165). Lawrence as radical literary terrorist might seem appealing to younger readers, but it glosses over the stridency and deeprootedness of his more conservative thought. In the past, the best qualities of Lawrence’s work have tended to be co-opted in other distorting ways, such as in accounts of him as a ‘prophet’, or more often, as a ‘genius’, an interpretation which implicitly reduces what was a long, painful acquisition of knowledge and skill to a matter of miraculous talent – a critical fate often conferred upon working-class writers. Taken as a whole, the Bloomsbury Handbook tempers such strong readings, tending often to concur with the more balanced account of Lawrence given in a sympathetic unsigned notice in the Manchester Guardian on 4 March 1930 announcing his death. The obituary describes Lawrence as: Endowed with an intense physical and mental sensitiveness … seeking fanatically to recover unity and health … He sought the unity of an instinctive life, untainted by self-conscious thought, among the Indians, in beasts and birds, reptiles, fish, and even mosquitos. He sought it in trees and flowers and fruits. And the finest of his writings, whether in poetry or prose, are

Introduction

5

those which evoke the hot, bright, throbbing life of unconscious things, of the primitive dance, the sleek stallion, or the fireflies in the corn.9 Fiona Becket terms Lawrence’s ecological attentiveness his ‘ethos of care’. Readings of the more empathetic and intuitive side to Lawrence, which recur across several contributions in this volume, may have been influenced by the context out of which this Handbook emerged: it was conceived, proposed and written during and just after the COVID-19 pandemic, when critical responses observant of psychological and physical health and affect, familial, gender and human relations, and post-human concerns in conversation with the environmental humanities about how best to engage with nature and animals perhaps felt more urgent and intensified than ever before, resulting in the coincidence of a refreshed appreciation of those significant strands of thought in Lawrence’s life and work. Michael Bell, however, offers an important warning against ‘any too ready assimilation of Lawrence to the cultural mainstream’; the author’s ability to continue to arouse vehement disagreement testifies to the capacious and provisional, often contradictory, nature of his ‘thoughtadventures’ and the ways in which his writing ultimately resists foreclosure. Lawrence’s travel writings, which have for a long time been underappreciated, receive here renewed attention amid recognition that his career and even the form of his novels are often shaped by his travels. Contributors to this Handbook work across genres, including the plays, paintings and journalism, all of which have traditionally been understudied or even altogether neglected (in the case of the journalism), and the recently edited poetry provides an expansive new corpus. Part I, ‘Transnational/Cosmopolitan Lawrence’, provides an image of the author as a figure who travelled both physically (dwelling in multiple places, and visiting various destinations as a tourist, explorer, dweller and travel writer) and imaginatively (by reading and responding to writing and ideas in different languages and about cultures other than his own). It considers the depictions of foreign characters and places in his work, the ways in which his writing responds to literary aesthetics, cosmopolitan cultural trends and influences, and his position within (and contribution to) modernism from a transnational perspective. While the locations chosen for inclusion in this section are necessarily selective, they are indicative of the places in which he stayed for an extended period and the cultures that had the greatest impact on his work. In the opening chapter, Lee M. Jenkins complicates Lawrence’s English, regional identity (so praised by Leavis) by recognizing him as the epitome of the nomadic international modernist. Collapsing the false dichotomy between the competing discourses of roots and routes, between the ‘English’ Lawrence and the peripatetic exile, the chapter demonstrates the mutual imbrication of ‘dwelling’ and ‘travel’ in Lawrence’s oeuvre. Jenkins reads Lawrence under the

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rubric of translocalism, mapping his serial ‘dwellings’, from Cornwall to Italy and northern New Mexico, with reference to his creative and critical reflections on place and on dwelling in places and assessing Lawrence’s critique of and, arguably, his complicity in the slippage between ‘travel’ and ‘tourism’ that is most fully explored in the essays collected in Mornings in Mexico. Neil Roberts also draws heavily on the travel writings, focusing his attention on Lawrence’s depiction of the American south-west and Mexico. Observing that Lawrence arrived in New Mexico in 1922 primed by the works of James Fenimore Cooper for a transformative experience of the land and its indigenous people, his initial response was to recoil from what he considered the sentimental idealism of the white sympathizers he was pitched among. His encounter with the cultural and racial difference of Native Americans was shaped by conflicting imperatives: to find a corrective to what he considered the mechanized consciousness of European civilization while preserving his identity as a European. But, Roberts explains, the still more challenging context of Mexico enabled him to create major fiction out of his experiences, resulting in The Plumed Serpent and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’. David Game moves beyond the travel writings to explore Lawrence’s personal and imaginative response to ‘Australia and the Australians’, locating an identifiable Australian period in Lawrence’s writing between 1920 and 1925, which includes five major works of fiction: The Lost Girl, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Boy in the Bush and St Mawr. Tracing a progression from Lawrence’s early detached, generalized view of Australia as a remote corner of the British Empire, to his later unrealized hope that Australia might offer a place of spiritual regeneration, Game brings into sharp relief the contradictory elements of Lawrence’s Australia: his celebrations of the continent’s landscape, and his critique of the new world society which occupied it, examining along the way his shifts in attitude to ideas of gender, nation and ethnicity while also considering his reading of popular bushranger adventure novels, such as those written by Rolf Boldrewood (T. A. Browne). Within this section contributors also chart a range of European literary and cultural influences on Lawrence. Michael Bell contextualizes Lawrence’s loathing of self-indulgent emotionalism by outlining the history of the suspicion within European culture of the emotional domain until the early to mid-eighteenth century, when a widespread cult of ‘sentiment’ saw feeling becoming supremely prized. The extravagance of the literature of sentiment, however, produced a critical reaction by the 1770s and the ensuing cultural conflict has continued. Bell outlines that during the nineteenth century, the word ‘sentimental’ took on its modern, purely critical, meaning of mawkish, cheap, indulgent feeling, and examines how, in finding his own understanding, Lawrence engaged critically and eclectically with the emotional myths of the great European writers so that his writing ‘resist[s]‌sentimental co-option’. Andrew Harrison explores Lawrence’s critical engagement with Émile Zola, a

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topic which has received minimal critical coverage. Examining the thematic and stylistic similarities which contemporary reviewers discovered between Zola’s fiction and Lawrence’s writing (concentrating in particular on the short stories in the Prussian Officer collection, and the novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love), Harrison examines how Zola provided a crucial model for the exploration of self-division in characters who project a social persona while being subject to unconscious bodily drives linked to heredity. Lawrence’s early work is found to tread similar ground to Zola in exploring this self-division, but where Zola charts the violent disintegration of his characters under the impact of life in the France of the Second Empire, Lawrence accentuates his characters’ quests for wholeness in response to the damaging psychological and mechanistic forces of modernity. Frieda Lawrence has, alas, frequently been the subject of derision in the biographical record and in critical writings on her husband. Attention has variously been directed towards her weight and supposed immorality, and she has been accused of (among other things) promiscuity, ‘vulgarity’ and neglectful parenting. Her significance in Lawrence’s life and thought is given long overdue attention in John Turner’s chapter, which is the first to consider at length Lawrence’s relationship to German radicalism through his wife and her liberal background. Turner observes that when Lawrence met Frieda Weekley in the spring of 1912, he was confronted with a sexual, artistic and political counterculture; Frieda had had love affairs with two prominent German anarchists – Otto Gross in 1907–8, and Ernst Frick in 1911 – and hankered after the sexual freedom enjoyed by her sister Else Jaffe and her old school friend Frieda Schloffer, Otto Gross’s wife. This chapter, grounded in analysis of sections of Twilight in Italy, Women in Love, Mr Noon and Aaron’s Rod, shows how Lawrence met the immediate sexual challenge presented by Frieda, and highlights the striking similarities between German radical beliefs and those that Lawrence went on to develop for himself about sexual freedom, property, patriarchy, capitalism, education, equality and government by institution. It demonstrates the processes of idealization by which Lawrence, always more conventional than Frieda, preserved his own sense of self against the disintegrative threat implicit in accepting a fully anarchist position. Part II, ‘Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Sexuality’, explores the latest scholarship on some of the key critical debates on Lawrence’s work associated with his representation of multiple, often intersectional, vectors of identity. Laura Ryan further investigates some of the debates about cultural difference raised by Roberts and Game, exploring and re-evaluating Lawrence’s depictions of ethnicity and the impacts of empire and colonialism on his writing, and providing new research which reveals his influence on several of the most prominent Black writers of the twentieth century (including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Richard Wright). Indeed, as recently as March 2023, the

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novelist Derek Owusu recalled his love affair with literature as having started with his reading of a battered university library copy of St Mawr, ‘I don’t have the words to describe what happened to me while turning the pages of that short story, but I know language became something three-dimensional, and everything around me seemed connected by an unexpressed narrative.’10 In pressing his thinking to its limits, ‘often to the point of fear and discomfort’, Ryan outlines (through assessments of works including Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent, travel writings, essays and Studies in Classic American Literature) how Lawrence’s responses to racial difference remain among the most problematic aspects of his work, today undoubtedly considered racist and colonialist, but also constantly in flux and often contradictory. Lawrence’s working-class upbringing in an aspirational mining village and the depiction of regional communities and dialect, particularly in his plays, is a significant feature of his writing which would repay greater attention in dialogue with current work on regional modernism and the rural humanities. Accordingly, offering his expertise in regional modernist drama, James Moran provides a rare comparison of James Joyce’s 1901 translation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang (‘Before Sunrise’), which is set in an unnamed mining district, with Lawrence’s first play, A Collier’s Friday Night (1909), set in a Nottinghamshire mining community. These plays show how Joyce and Lawrence shared a theatrical interest in articulating the distinctive nature of working-class life, and particularly working-class female experience. Moran explores how such theatrical expression, ostensibly focused upon regional mining communities, relied on the authors’ cosmopolitan fascination with contemporary European theatrical innovation. Lawrence’s subsequent experiences as an ‘outsider’ who moved within and across social circles is addressed in Jeff Wallace’s account of Lawrence’s attitudes to and depiction of ‘Money and Revolution’ in his works. Wallace discusses the ‘complex conceptual life’ of money and reveals Lawrence’s acute awareness of it in his writing: money as necessity, and the necessary critique of money. As well as locating key traces in the earlier work (from the little-known short sketch ‘Lessford’s Rabbits’ to the foundational trauma of the young Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers as, in a ritual of public humiliation, his father’s wages are counted out to him), Wallace argues for the late florescence of a revolutionary critique of money in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in a range of essays and in the poetry collection Pansies. For Lawrence, the revolutionary imperative ‘was not to forsake the human world and its money, but to reimagine it’. In two complementary chapters, Helen Wussow and Stewart Smith consider Lawrence’s depiction of gender and his literary representations of femininity and masculinity (respectively), setting up a broader debate about the extent to which Lawrence was constructivist or essentialist in his depiction of gender. Wussow returns to Lawrence’s drama, exploring how he redefines the physical

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sexual body by questioning the performance of gender roles, particularly the cultural female, and especially in his plays, wherein he scrutinizes the sexed body and reverses its expected appearance. Wussow argues that Lawrence’s fiction more broadly presents multiple examples of extra-binary sexual definitions and problematizes established gender roles, with many of Lawrence’s ‘female’ characters becoming more than ‘just women’. Smith provides a distinctive analysis of Lawrence’s depiction of masculine subjectivities and their ‘affective failings’ in his chapter on ‘Bachelors, Husbands, Fathers, Sons’, examining the male characters in Lawrence’s fictional worlds who express the fearful restrictive emotionality he sought to challenge. Arguing that Lawrence problematizes valourized forms of emotional realization, Smith studies the major novels (including the three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover) to assess Lawrence’s representation of multiple masculinities, highlighting pathological structures of male feeling on the one hand and analysing Lawrence’s nuanced presentation of alternative modes of masculine emotionality on the other. In line with Wussow’s view that Lawrence’s most forceful writing occurs when he departs from heterosexual erotics, Richard A. Kaye explores the nuances of Lawrence’s very complex attitudes towards homosexuality and bisexuality and discusses the critical and biographical fortunes allied to this topic. Analysing texts including ‘The Crown’, the ‘Prologue’ to Women in Love and the play David, Kaye argues that Lawrence is thoroughly absorbed in the thematics of same-sex desire, yet he could be pitiless in his treatment of male–male erotic relations, and frequently disavowed homosexuality in his personal life. Kaye observes that Lawrence’s conflicted perspective on same-sex erotics, in which male homosexuality is often expressed in violent scenarios, has made him a difficult figure for Gay and Lesbian Studies, which has often sought out socially positive fictional models; yet his forceful and evocative emphasis on erotic fluidity, unstable identity, visionary and even utopian human arrangements makes him a perfect subject for Queer Studies. Kaye also explores Lawrence’s influence on the post-1960s New Counterculture which sustained a popular culture version of Lawrence’s ideas and values (through appropriation by the likes of Susan Sontag) and discusses Lawrence’s queer literary afterlife as the inspiration for writers including Christopher Isherwood and other members of the W. H. ‘Auden Group’. In Part III, scholars showcase fresh approaches to literary studies that intersect with cognate disciplines. In an entirely new methodological approach for Lawrence studies, Philip Davis conducts ‘investigations in all that gets to a reader’, using specific case histories of raw response in a reading group of twelve serious non-academic readers to argue for Lawrence’s dangerous, challenging value in the field of bibliotherapy. Davis considers that perhaps nothing could have enraged Lawrence more than talk of ‘mental health’: he loathed the merely mental and despised the hygienic, and he would not have admired a therapeutic

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programme of ‘books on prescription’. Lawrence does not write of creating health, but of shedding sicknesses. One of the pleasures – and trials – of reading Lawrence turns out to be that, in the shedding of these sicknesses, his writing has therapeutic potential; Davis records his readers’ sensitive and fascinated responses to Lawrence’s formation of character and innovative writing style as they experience his ‘hectoring intensity’ and trace his characters working through the varieties of ‘common unhappiness’ (managing depression, anxiety, and familial ties and conflicts), causing readers to respond with varying levels of empathy, alarm and critical self-reflection. Violeta Sotirova also attends to the quality and style of Lawrence’s writing. She reads Lawrence’s writing at the interface between language and literature, applying current approaches in stylistics to his novels, poetry and short fiction and finding that the ‘dialogicity’ of Lawrence’s free indirect style is his ‘most significant stylistic achievement’. Making use of manuscript material and the evidence it provides of extensive authorial revisions, Sotirova offers a richer and linguistically more nuanced understanding of techniques that may in the past have been deemed excessive and redundant, such as his heavy use of repetition, and (like Moran) she emphasizes Lawrence’s sensitivity to sociolinguistic codes such as his representation of dialect. The chapter, like Davis’s, reveals that the power of Lawrence’s writing resides in the linguistic arrangement of his texts, which offer an in-depth engagement with character and consciousness. Extending Smith’s analysis of wounded Lawrentian males, Ronald Granofsky observes that Lawrence’s fiction, with its focus on the personal growth of the individual and his or her relationships with others, is thoroughly regulated by his early attachment difficulties. Assessing a number of fictions including ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ and the often neglected novel The Boy in the Bush to assess themes such as homecoming and hollow selfhood, Granofsky argues that what we find in Lawrence are insecurely attached individuals struggling to find a balance between the attraction of a fortifying relational merger that threatens the submersion of the self and a hard-won autonomy that may slide into feelings of isolation. The result, Granofsky claims, is some of the most remarkable expressions in literature of the kind of relational complications we all face in the journey from symbiosis to individuation. As well as in the psychoanalytical, it is in the areas of ecological and environmental studies that work on Lawrence is currently thriving, given the urgency of the climate crisis. Fiona Becket analyses Lawrence’s literary and philosophical contribution to notions of sustainability, or living in a way that avoids the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance. How ecologically shrewd was Lawrence, and what can be taken from the example of his life and work about living sustainably? Becket avers that Lawrence’s writing constitutes a unique act of attention to his environments, long before a discourse was established about the importance of maintaining

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ecological balance, the management of finite resources or accelerated rates of species extinction. But, Becket maintains, this is not to argue uncritically that Lawrence was an early ‘Green’: not only was the political context absent for such an assertion to be meaningful, but there are many examples in Lawrence’s writing that demonstrate a response to the non-human which is difficult to align with current ethical mores and discourses. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s recent work on ‘multi-scalar relationality’, Becket’s chapter interrogates Lawrence’s attentiveness to the non-human world and language in ways that help to shape our understanding of the importance of sustainability on a personal and, therefore, planetary scale. Examining Lawrence’s thinking on the place, meaning and ethical status of animals is another area in which studies on the author are currently tending. Carrie Rohman extends her foundational work within modernism and animal studies to consider human–animal relations in Lawrence’s paintings. Rohman considers that a bioaesthetic critical framework suggests that the artistic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species: that is, art has its roots in creatural, bodily becomings first and foremost, not in human cognitive assessments of beauty. Moreover, Rohman contends, if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance (as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world), the ways we experience, theorize and value literary art fundamentally shift. Considering work by Elizabeth Grosz, who in turn responds to Deleuze, Rohman discusses Lawrence’s modernist, bioaesthetic sensibility by highlighting the entanglement of and, at times, distinctions between human and non-human aesthetic forces, specifically in his artwork. Finally, Part IV explores ‘Material Cultures’, another fruitful strand of recent research on the author, and opens with contributions by two of the leading experts on Lawrence’s poetry. In continued dialogue with the environmental humanities and Lawrence’s early articulation of the post-human, Holly A. Laird considers work on new materiality by scholars such as Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman to model an intensive forensic materialist reading of Lawrence’s early poem, ‘The Wild Common’. Laird observes that, at the same time as Lawrence was being acclaimed for modernist novels that attacked the modern age as an era of mindless machines and ravenous materialism, he was writing poetry that viewed the material and the human as radically entwined and embedded in each other. In what Laird terms Lawrence’s pioneering re-visioning of the relationships between ‘I’ and the ‘other’, ‘I’ and the social, ‘I’ and animal, ‘I’ and objects, and ‘I’ as in, and of both matter and space, Lawrence was writing what can now be understood as a post-humanist, new materialist verse. Recent criticism has explored the range of writing Lawrence produced as he developed his career as a professional writer. Christopher Pollnitz utilizes his unrivalled knowledge of the poetry as editor of the three volumes of the

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Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s Poems (2013, 2018) to discuss Lawrence’s inclusion in various poetry publications between 1909 and 1930; the chapter demonstrates how Lawrence’s network extended as he engaged with wellconnected and experimental practitioners and editors such as Ezra Pound, H. D., Amy Lowell and Marianne Moore, assessing how such involvements played a part in the development of his poetry. Pollnitz observes that Lawrence’s magazine poems are of textual interest – and provide fertile grounds for further study – because most versions are very different from those collected in volumes. Lawrence also found journalism an enjoyable and fruitful way of earning money, writing pithy and provocative articles on topics such as modern marriage, flapper culture and gender and intergenerational relations late in his career. This is the subject of my chapter on 1920s journalism, cinema and radio, in which I explore what the new media of this decade signified to Lawrence about ‘modernity’ and gender relations. While he was known to ‘foam’ about cinema, averse to the maudlin nature of popular ‘love-films’ and their uncritical reception by the general public, Lawrence was arguably more creatively engaged with radio and journalism. He collaborated with Nancy Pearn, the ‘golden … magazine girl’ (6L 459), who placed his topical articles in metropolitan publications such as Vanity Fair and mainstream newspapers, and he explored what might be considered a ‘radio voice’ in his most uncanny short fiction of this decade. The chapter argues that Lawrence’s engagement with new media is more intensive and nuanced than might be conventionally assumed and calls for more critical attention to the Lawrence that captured the zeitgeist of the ‘Roaring Twenties’. While my chapter examines how Lawrence creatively repurposed popular culture in his late writings both thematically and formally, Sean Matthews concludes the volume with a valuable synoptic overview of Lawrence’s farreaching influence – as both a provocation and a resource – on generations of creative writers and on critical currents, not just within the academy (such as his role in the development of literary and cultural criticism in works such as Studies in Classic American Literature and in influencing the establishment of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline) but across specific social and cultural movements. His influence extends to the emergent field of law and literature, and the history and theory of censorship, obscenity and pornography. Matthews outlines Lawrence as an important touchstone for contemporary developments in the flourishing genre of ‘Autobiografiction’, in particular, and he ends the volume where this introduction began, with a reflection on the fact that it is women creative writers, writing in ‘self-reflexive, mixed, palimpsestic and hybrid modes match[ing] Lawrence’s own restless generic and formal experimentation’ who are finding Lawrence a valuable imaginative model, particularly given the deeply personal – even confessional – nature of much of his writing.

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What seems evident is that Lawrence is not going away any time soon; he remains too much our contemporary, too stimulating an agitator, too variable to be easily defined or dismissed. As Feigel attests, ‘it’s because of the partisanship of our own times that we have so much need of him. We need someone capable of holding every side of the argument within his mind as real, energetically alive propositions, someone capable of questioning his own thoughts, even as he allows himself to be polemical.’11 The mark he made on British literature and culture is indelible, and this volume makes the case for his continued value clear as we approach those significant centenaries.

NOTES 1 See, for example, Terry Gifford, D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (New York: Routledge, 2023); Ronald Granofsky, D. H. Lawrence and Attachment (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022); Ben Stoltzfus, D. H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022); John Turner, D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2020); Annalise Grice, D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021); Benjamin Hagen, The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2020); Elliott Morsia, The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Rachel Murray, The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020); William Simms, Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature: Lawrence and Joyce on Trial (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2022); Martina Simone Kübler, White Male Disability in Modernist Literature: Reading Lawrence, Hemingway and Faulkner (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2023). 2 Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 1. Two years earlier, Andrew Harrison edited D. H. Lawrence in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), which offers a full and wide-ranging contextualization of Lawrence’s engagement with his contemporary culture. 3 D. H. Lawrence: Sex, Exile and Greatness, dir. Adrian Munsey, Sky Arts with Odyssey Television, 4 March 2021 (48 minutes). The academic interviewees were Catherine Brown, Santanu Das, David Ellis, Andrew Harrison and Hugh Stevens. 4 [unsigned] ‘Famous Novelist’s Shameful Book’, John Bull, 20 October 1928, xliv, p. 11. Reproduced in R. P. Draper, ed., D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 278–80. 5 See Paul Eggert, The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 6 Audra Belmore, Shirley Bricout, Annalise Grice, Julianne Newmark, Marina Ragachevskaya convened by Catherine Brown, ‘Lawrence and Pedagogy: Teaching Lawrence in Universities Today’, Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group, 27 October 2022.

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7 T. S. Eliot, from ‘The Contemporary Novel’ (‘Le Roman Anglais Contemporain’), La Nouvelle Revue Français, 1 May 1927, pp. 669–75. Reproduced in Draper, ed., D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, pp. 275–277. Later in his career Eliot modulated his opinions on Lawrence and was prepared to offer a deposition at the Penguin Books v. Regina trial in support of the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 8 David Ellis is inclined to agree with Lawrence’s assessment: see his Love and Sex in D. H. Lawrence (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2015). 9 [unsigned] ‘A Genius Pain-Obsessed’, Manchester Guardian, 4 March 1930, p. 12. Reproduced in Draper, ed. D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, pp. 324–6. 10 Derek Owusu, ‘A Moment that Changed Me: I Was a Personal Trainer – then My Teenage Cousin Pushed Me to Go to University’, The Guardian, 8 March 2023, https://www.theg ​ u ard ​ i an.com/lifea ​ n dst ​ y le/2023/mar/08/a-mom ​ e nt-that-chan​ ged-me-i-was-a-perso​nal-trai​ner-then-my-teen​age-cou​sin-pus​hed-me-to-go-to-uni​ vers​ity (accessed 8 May 2023). 11 Lara Feigel, Look! We Have Come Through! Living with D. H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), p. 16.

PART I

Transnational/ Cosmopolitan Lawrence

16

CHAPTER ONE

Dwelling, travel and tourism LEE M. JENKINS

Lawrence’s travelling trunk, on display at the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum in Eastwood, is a material symbol of the close imbrication of dwelling with travel and of travel with tourism in Lawrence’s lived experience and in his writing. In his critical reception, however, dwelling and travel present competing rather than complementary rubrics, under which Lawrence is read either as a writer who ‘spiritually remained rooted as a Hobbit in his native Shires’ or as a deterritorialized nomad who belongs only ‘in transit’.1 In the 1950s, Lawrence’s canonical status was coterminous with his Englishness: in repurposing Lawrence’s declaration that ‘I am English, and my Englishness is my very vision’ as an epigraph to his D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, F. R. Leavis copper-fastened his anterior claim that Lawrence is the modern heir to ‘the great tradition of the English novel’ represented, in the nineteenth century, by the regional fiction of George Eliot (2L 414).2 But, as Tony Pinkney points out, the epigraph from Lawrence which Leavis offers ‘as a celebration of Englishness’ is ‘in fact its repudiation’.3 In the October 1915 letter to Cynthia Asquith, in which he asserts his Englishness, Lawrence also announces his intention to ‘go away’ from an England which, in prosecuting the First World War, is committing the ‘ultimate wrong’: in a letter of April 1915, in which he reflects on the death earlier that month of Rupert Brooke, Lawrence tells Ottoline Morrell ‘I wish I were going to Thibet – or Kamschatka – or Tahiti – to the Ultima ultima ultima Thule’ (2L 414, 330). The Lawrence who did go

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away, after the war, in 1919, would be labelled the archetype of the itinerant modernist exile who flies by the net of nationality.4 Bypassing the binary between roots and routes, this chapter maps Lawrence’s explorations, in his travel writing and adjacent texts, of the psychospatial qualities of what he called the spirit of place, and of what James Clifford, in his discussion of late-twentieth-century travel, calls ‘everyday practices of dwelling and traveling, traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling’.5 In the last two decades, New Modernist Studies has put a transnational and a translocal spin on older models of international modernism and on long dominant definitions of modernity as a condition of ‘unhousedness’.6 Recent modernist scholarship, Jahan Ramazani notes, ‘reconfigures our understanding of how localities are enmeshed in the global’.7 This chapter aligns Lawrence with locational approaches which, as Hannah Freed-Thall and Dora Zhang explain, attempt ‘to theorize the curious place of “place” in the modernist period’.8 As Jessica Berman notes, ‘recent theory has moved the spatiality of texts to the forefront’ of modernist studies, but Lawrence’s texts have for the most part been left behind, although his own theory of place or ‘nodality’ prefigures the spatial discourse of cultural geography on which new modernist and geomodernist scholarship draws.9 Reassessing Lawrence’s relevance to these critical paradigms as a topophile and as a traveller, this chapter also considers Lawrence’s critique of and complicity in the twentieth-century declension of travel into what Paul Fussell terms ‘the tourism that apes it’.10 British literary travelling between the wars ‘begin[s]‌in the trenches’, according to Fussell, who places Lawrence in ‘the vanguard of the British Literary Diaspora’ of the post-war decade. Although he was a non-combatant, Lawrence’s ‘experience in wartime England and his almost continuous flight from it thenceforth … are emblematic of the behaviour of many others propelled on their post-war travels as if by a wartime spring tightly compressed’.11 The very vocabulary of his 1915 letter to Morrell shows that, for Lawrence, going away to the ‘ultima Thule’ was indeed a direct recoil against the ‘ultimate wrong’ of England and the war; ‘ultima’ is the root of ‘ultimate’, their shared etymology denoting the tensile relationship between these extremes. The tripartite epizeuxis, or successive repetition of the same word, in Lawrence’s ‘Ultima ultima ultima Thule’ not only underscores the urgency of his imagined getaway but also pre-empts the iterative quality of the spirit of place in the various Ultima Thules to which Lawrence would, eventually, go away. ‘The spirit of the place is a strange thing’, Lawrence asserts of Sardinia: ‘Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end, the strange, sinister spirit of place, so diverse and so adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens’ (SS 57). Yet the lapse of the definite article between the ‘spirit of the place’ and ‘spirit of place’ in this passage exposes a wider slippage between Lawrence’s vivid observations of particular places and peoples

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and his portable, transposable, theory of the spirit of place. Lawrence, who was influenced by Leo Frobenius’s concept of cultural diffusion – the survival in ‘primitive’ societies of a scattered ‘world-people’ – finds the ‘same difference’, as it were, in the spirit of ‘diverse’ places (SS 9; SCAL 291).12 For instance, in an uncanny manifestation of what Ramazani calls ‘the translocalization of locality’, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairy people of Irish mythology, are also the genii locorum of Sicily (see 3L 480).13 Neil Roberts rightly points out that in Lawrence’s writing ‘repetition’ and difference or ‘otherness’ form a polarized dyad. Nonetheless, the post-war quest for ‘the mystery of the other’ that would take Lawrence ‘outside the circuit of civilisation’ in search of the spirit of place would also lead him in something of a hermeneutic circle (SCAL 228, SS 9).14 Lawrence stopped at various way stations in the course of his decade-long ‘savage pilgrimage’, making extended sojourns in places from Taormina to Taos and consolidating a reciprocity between travel and dwelling in his writing life which antedates the First World War (7L 620). Sons and Lovers (1913), the autobiographical novel which would ‘underpin’ Lawrence’s ‘identity as a regional author’, was completed not in the Nottinghamshire mining country in which the book is set but at Riva and Gargnano on Lake Garda in northern Italy.15 At the Villa Igéa in Gargnano, Lawrence also completed three travel sketches, printed in the English Review in 1913 under the series title ‘By the Lago di Garda’, which Lawrence revised in ‘the real winter of the spirit in England’ in 1915–16 for his first book of travel writing, Twilight in Italy (2L 393). As Paul Eggert explains in his introduction to the Cambridge edition, ‘Lawrence was clearly unable to separate it from his attempts to get to grips with what he was coming to see as his culture’s death-wish – the War’ (TI lii). In consequence, Twilight in Italy exemplifies what John Heywood Thomas, in a hostile appraisal printed in the Criterion after Lawrence’s death in 1930, diagnoses as ‘The Perversity of D. H. Lawrence’ (TI lxiii). Thomas’s point that in Twilight in Italy Lawrence ‘deprives things and persons of their identity and submerges them in a flux of abstract principle’ is proved perhaps by the contraction of the title of his 1913 English Review essay, ‘The Lemon Gardens of the Signor di P.’, to ‘The Lemon Gardens’ of the corresponding 1916 book chapter (TI lxiii). Both versions begin with a domestic vignette in which Lawrence, for the benefit of his landlord or ‘padrone’, Pietro di Paoli, translates into their lingua franca of French the instructions for fitting an American-made door spring (TI 114). In the event Lawrence himself affixes the spring to the door in the Casa di Paoli, but in the 1916 version the task is deferred while Lawrence speculates, over several pages, on the polarity between northern European knowing and Mediterranean being, an opposition that in the 1913 version is largely implicit in Lawrence’s greater facility with modern gadgets than the keeper of the ancient lemon gardens. In Twilight in Italy Lawrence retrofits his original travel sketch, splicing his wartime meditations

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on national character into the homely anecdote of fixing the door. Lawrence emerges from the later version of ‘The Lemon Gardens’ as a bricoleur in the everyday and in the anthropological senses of the term: a handyman, Lawrence is also skilled in cultural bricolage, or the innovative recombination of disparate discursive materials. Twilight in Italy, as one contemporary reviewer understood, is ‘no ordinary tourist’s notebook’ (TI lxii). Appropriately, the book would be reprinted in 1926 in Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library series: ‘designed for the small home and for the pocket’ – marketed both to the armchair and the actual traveller – Cape’s eclectic list included Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a ‘satire’ that, Lawrence explained to Jessie Chambers, ‘begins as a book of travel’ and which, L. D. Clark suggests, may have sowed ‘the seed of later commentary of his own in similar form’.16 More broadly, modernist exile has been defined in terms of the anagrammatic title of Butler’s book as a form of nowhere-ness or ‘atopia’ and indeed, in the ‘By the Lago di Garda’ essays, Eggert notes, Lawrence ‘was constructing an Italy of his imagination’.17 ‘But’, Eggert continues, Lawrence’s imagined Italy was ‘fed by his everyday experiences of Italian village life’ (TI xxxvii). The pretexts for these essays are Lawrence’s local–global excursions, his forays to the nearby church of San Tommaso, the lemon gardens and the theatre which are also philosophical explorations of the ‘macrocosm’ of otherness. In ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ chapter, for example, Lawrence counterpoints his self-awareness that ‘the macrocosm is that … which I am not’ with the unselfconsciousness of the old woman who, spinning her wool on the sunny terrace, does not doubt that she ‘was herself the core and centre to the world’ (TI 107). The hub of Lawrence’s own daily life in Gargnano was the kitchen in the Villa Igéa: ‘there’s a great open fireplace, then two little things called fornelli – charcoal braziers – and we’ve got lots of lovely copper pans, so bright. Then I light the fornello and we cook’ (1L 458). Despite the first-person plural of ‘we cook’, it was Lawrence and not Frieda who did the lion’s share of the cooking in the early years of their relationship; due to childhood illness, Elaine Feinstein explains, Lawrence was often housebound and so entered ‘into his mother’s daily life, acquiring many skills conventionally thought of as female’.18 Lawrence would never forget ‘that tiny little kitchen I was so at home in’ when, as a teenager and young adult, he visited the Chambers family home, Haggs Farm (6L 618). Kitchens are a recurring feature in Lawrence’s letters and travel writing from his first stay in Italy to his final sojourn in New Mexico, where, at his Kiowa Ranch, he built a traditional horno or ‘clay oven’ in which to bake bread (RDP 355). ‘Modernism is domestic’, Deborah Clarke posits, and allegations of his toxic masculinity notwithstanding, like the modernist women writers who were his contemporaries, Lawrence, too, ‘reimagined domesticity’ in his daily life, letters and travel texts, contesting ‘the ideology of separate spheres’.19

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The more expansive itinerary of Lawrence’s second travel book, Sea and Sardinia (1921), written in Sicily, takes him ‘out of the circuit of civilisation’ (SS 9). That ‘splendid word’, ‘Andiamo!’ (let us go), is the keyword of Sea and Sardinia, the opening words of which, ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move’, are, for Fussell, indicative of a narrative which ‘celebrate[s]‌sheer kinesis’ (SS 189, 7). As Barbara Korte likewise observes, ‘the position of the verb at the very beginning of the [opening] sentence’ marks an ‘urgency in style’ that is mimetic of the imperative ‘to move’.20 ‘One must dash away’, Lawrence reiterates, but not before he busies himself in the ‘little blue kitchen’ of the Villa Fontana Vecchia (3L 494), making bacon and scrambled egg sandwiches to sustain himself and Frieda, ‘the queen bee’, as far as Palermo, and packing the essentials for their onward journey to Sardinia: Fill the little bag we call the kitchenino. Methylated spirit, a small aluminium saucepan, a spirit-lamp, two spoons, two forks, a knife, two aluminium plates, salt, sugar, tea – what else? The thermos flask, the various sandwiches, four apples, and a little tin of butter. So much for the kitchenino, for myself and the queen bee. Then my knapsack, and the q-b’s handbag. (SS 10) The urge ‘to move’ may be primal, but in his humorous self-presentation here, Lawrence, whose final note to self is to ‘hastily wash up, so that we can find the house decent when we come back’ (SS 10), is also a good house husband who provisions himself and the q-b with the comestibles and culinary wherewithal for what we would term today ‘wild tourism’ in a then undeveloped Sardinia. On leaving the kitchen, Lawrence carries its surrogate with him: his diminutive ‘kitchenino’, a material and mobile signifier of travel as a home from home. Sardinia ‘lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation’ (SS 9), but Lawrence’s journey itself is a round trip which brings him, as the title of the final chapter of Sea and Sardinia tells us, ‘Back’, or nearly back, to his point of departure: the narrative ends in Palermo, where Lawrence had started out on the sea leg of the voyage from Sicily to Sardinia. Sea and Sardinia, then, almost conforms to Fussell’s definition of the interwar travel book as a subset of ‘quest romance’ in which the traveller ‘returns to his starting point’, albeit that, as Roberts notes, the starting point of Lawrence’s post-war pilgrimage was not in fact Sicily but England.21 Whether it is a return journey or a side trip on a longer haul, Sea and Sardinia charts Lawrence’s first attempt to get outside of the circuit which is formed, in the opening and closing chapters, by feminine avatars of ‘the old European civilisation’ (SS 9). Presiding over the first chapter there is Mt Etna, a ‘wicked witch’ who traps men in her ‘deadly net’ and whom Lawrence likens to the enchantress Circe in Europe’s foundational travel narrative, Homer’s Odyssey. Completing the circuit, the last chapter circles back to the ‘symbolic old ghoul-female’, now embodied in the ‘witch-puppet’ in the marionette

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show Lawrence attends in Palermo. Bookending Lawrence’s narrative, the puppet show is a vernacular survival of the Carolingian legend cycle satirized in another canonical European text, and another travel narrative of sorts, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (SS 7, 8, 190). Sardinia, Lawrence says, ‘lies within the net of this European civilisation, but it isn’t landed yet’, and in this respect, in addition to their common maritime heritage as sardine fisheries, it is ‘like Cornwall’ (SS 9, 71). Like Sardinia, and unlike the feminine Sicilian spirit of place, the sea is a masculine space: sailing on the Palermo to Cagliari steamer in the company of his wife, Lawrence appears to confirm rather than complicate what Clifford calls the binary between women’s ‘dwelling’ and men’s ‘traveling’ in his desire to ‘find three masculine, worldlost souls, and world-lost saunter, and saunter on along with them, across the dithering space, as long as life lasts!’ (SS 48).22 In ‘The Sea’ chapter, Lawrence, who had recently emended the essays for Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), is still under the homosocial spell of Melville, the ‘greatest seer and poet of the sea’ (SCAL 122). Similarly, in Sardinia, the ‘lonely naked road’ in the island’s interior in the ‘Mandas’ chapter is ‘familiar’ to Lawrence because it is reminiscent not only of Cornwall or the Derbyshire uplands of his youth but also of Whitman’s open road: ‘it is all so familiar to my feet, my very feet in contact’, Lawrence insists (SS 81–2). The male bonding Lawrence identifies in American ‘bromance’ is a motif of his own post-war mode of picaresque, deployed in his novel Aaron’s Rod (1922) and rehearsed, in a lighter and more ludic register, in Sea and Sardinia. In the latter, the bus driver and his mate who take Lawrence and the q-b to Terranova and the steamer are ‘like man and wife’, a ‘Rochester’ and his Jane (SS 148). Earlier in the narrative, at the inn in Sorgono, Lawrence encounters another ‘male pseudo-couple’, the ‘girovago’, a ‘wandering peddler’, and the travelling companion he calls his ‘wife’ (SS 107).23 Anticipating the language of cultural difference in Mornings in Mexico (1927), Lawrence says of the girovago that ‘there was a gulf between me and him, between my way and his’. Nonetheless, Lawrence recognizes him as ‘a kindred spirit’, and, as per his shipboard reverie of sauntering off in a masculine trio, even flirts with the notion of making up a roving threesome with the girovago and his ‘wife’ (SS 106). The girovago enquires of Lawrence and the q-b ‘where were we domiciled’, and, incredulous that they have come to Sardinia ‘per divertimento’, asks Lawrence ‘what do you sell’? Lawrence explains that ‘we have come to Sardinia to see the peasant costumes’, thereby differentiating the tourist from the commercial traveller: ‘to see’ is not to ‘sell’ (SS 104). But of course, as a working writer, and as a travel writer, Lawrence will have his own wares to peddle in the form of Sea and Sardinia itself, which would be published in December 1921 and marketed ‘as a Christmas gift book’ (SS xxviii). With its generous 9 ¼ × 6 ¼ inch format, eight tipped-in-colour plates of illustrations

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and Lawrence’s hand-drawn black-and-white maps of Sardinia and Sicily, the American first edition of Sea and Sardinia is a coffee table rather than a pocket book – as Lawrence insists in the ‘Cagliari’ chapter, ‘I am not Baedeker’ and nor is his book a Baedeker guide (SS 59).24 Displaying what Peter Merringham views as their shared ‘aesthetic primitivism’, South African artist Jan Juta’s illustrations feature the peasant costumes which Lawrence has come to Sardinia to see.25 Juta himself makes a cameo appearance in Sea and Sardinia, when in a brief encounter at the railway station in Rome, he discusses with Lawrence the ‘mixed’ book on which they will collaborate when they visit Sardinia together (SS 172). Juta made his own trip there, but in common purpose with Lawrence, his quest – a quintessentially modernist quest, made more urgent by the war and its aftermath – is for modernity’s authentic Other. The wearing of the traditional stocking cap signifies, to Lawrence, that Sardinian men ‘are not going to be broken in upon by world-consciousness’, by the ‘hateful homogenous world-oneness’ sponsored by the League of Nations and manifested in ‘world-alike clothes’ (SS 88). ‘I see my first peasant in costume’, Lawrence tells the reader, and he compares the black and white of the traditional shirt, bodice and kilt to the plumage of a magpie (SS 62). Lawrence again anticipates the language of his New Mexico essays, in which bird imagery is applied to Native American dancers. The message he extrapolates from the Sardinian peasant costumes, however (‘How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression. – And how perfectly ridiculous it is in modern clothes’), reads more like a dress rehearsal for the sartorial-cum-sexual programme of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928): ‘If the men wore scarlet trousers’, Oliver Mellors avers, they would no longer be ‘limp’ (SS 62, LCL 299).26 As for the Sardinian women, their ‘bird-like’ movement aligns them with their magpie men, but they have a ‘static, Demeter splendour’, too, a quality captured in Juta’s flat colour illustrations (SS 66, 199). The Sardi peasant costumes prove a vivid exception to the ‘khaki all-alikeness’ rule brought in by the war, but there is khaki even in Sardinia: the girovago’s mate wears ‘khaki clothes’, while the ‘urchin’ who carries the Lawrences’ luggage from the bus to the steamer at Terranova is dressed in ‘a cut-down soldier’s tunic’ (SS 89, 106, 161). Sardinia may lie outside the circuit of civilization, but the repercussions of the war are felt there: the war has ‘consumed’ the flocks of donkeys and cattle herds, depleting the island’s agrieconomy, and young Sardinians – like the bus driver’s mate, whose aspiration is to be a chauffeur in London – are ‘restless’, impelled by that same post-war imperative to move that has brought Lawrence to Sardinia to find out if he ‘liked … to live’ there (SS 64, 123; 3L 647). The war irrupts into the narrative even on the outbound sea voyage, when the ship’s carpenter talks of the iniquities of ‘the exchange! il cambio’: ‘the English and the Americans flocked to Italy, with their sterline

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and their dollari, and they bought what they wanted, for nothing, for nothing’ (SS 50). Lawrence’s response is that ‘I am not England. I am not the British Isles on two legs’, but he is implicated in the post-war tourist boom nonetheless (SS 50). Lawrence despises ‘the tourist-parasites of these post-war days’ who feed off foreign visitors, but in the carpenter’s eyes, Lawrence himself is indistinguishable from those tourist-expatriates of the 1920s whom Malcolm Cowley labelled ‘parasites of the exchange’ (SS 55).27 The competing values of the tourist economy and an autochthonous folk culture are signified by the bercole, the traditional Sardinian saddlebags which fascinate Lawrence and the q-b. Decorated with ‘peasant patterns … some wonderful gay with flowery colours on their stripes, some weird with fantastic, griffin-like animals’, the saddlebags are ‘a whole landscape in themselves’, a synecdoche of Sardinia (SS 69). These ‘carrying bags’ are travelling objects which combine the use value of Lawrence’s knapsack with the aesthetic value of folk art, but the only saddlebags Lawrence can find for sale are ‘plain, quite plain’ and so ‘won’t do’ as a souvenir of the trip (SS 83).28 The Lawrences see fellow passengers embarking on the steamer back to Sicily ‘with saddle-bags – the q-b lamenting she has not bought one’ (SS 165). On the outbound steamer, Lawrence had delivered an apostrophe to the island he was temporarily leaving behind: ‘oh painted carts of Sicily, with all history on your panels!’ (SS 28). The ‘polar opposition with Sicily’ in Sea and Sardinia is tangible in the difference between the material culture of the two places: the ‘landscape’ art of its saddlebags affirms that Sardinia has ‘no history’, whereas the painted panels of its wagons illustrate that Sicily is ‘all history’ (SS 9).29 Frieda Lawrence may have failed to procure a Sardinian bercole, but when she and Lawrence left Europe altogether, they carried with them, via Sri Lanka and Australia to the New World, a Sicilian painted cart panel: ‘Ecco la Sicilia in viaggio per I’India’, as Lawrence put in a shipboard letter (4L 206). The cart panel, which was ‘some five feet long and two feet high’ and ‘vividly decorated with two scenes of medieval jousting’, combines what Lawrence deemed as the antithetical properties of motion and of history, indicating that Lawrence may be bringing the baggage of ‘the old European civilisation’ with him in his journey to ‘America, the continent of the afterwards’ (SS 9, MM 98).30 Damaged on its arrival, the Sicilian cart panel would be left at the writer Witter Bynner’s home in Santa Fe when the Lawrences travelled on to Taos. According to Bynner, Frieda wanted ‘to keep the panel even with its crack’ and although he suspects that Lawrence ‘would have liked to keep it, too’, Bynner suggests that ‘the homing instinct was at that time, probably always, more alive in Mrs. Lawrence than in her husband’, who ‘would flee from each harbor’ in a succession of ‘escapes from escape’.31 As Rupert Birkin says in Women in Love, ‘One should never have a home’ (352). Northern New Mexico was nonetheless the location of the only home that Lawrence and Frieda would ever own: the Kiowa Ranch, in the foothills of

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the Sangre de Cristo mountains, was given to Frieda in 1924 by Lawrence’s sometime patron in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan. In return, the Lawrences gifted Luhan the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. A later Nottinghamshire novelist, Alan Sillitoe, has suggested that ‘in leaving his own acres behind’ – the home ground of Eastwood and its environs, fictionalized as ‘Bestwood’ in Sons and Lovers – Lawrence ‘inherited the wider expanses of the earth’. In a more closely situated instance of that local-for-global transaction, in swapping the manuscript for the ranch Lawrence was also exchanging ‘the magic circle of which Eastwood was the centre’ for the ‘Enchanted Circle’ around Taos in which much of the writing from his New Mexico period is set.32 Mabel Dodge Luhan had invited Lawrence to Taos in 1921, convinced by extracts from Sea and Sardinia she had read in the Dial that he, alone, could describe ‘this Taos country and the Indians … so that it is as much alive between the covers of a book as it is in reality’.33 Lawrence, who arrived in New Mexico in September 1922, at first envisaged working there with Juta on another amalgamate travel book, but Mornings in Mexico (1927) would be a solo effort, an amalgamation of the visual and the verbal only insofar as the dust jacket of the English edition features Lawrence’s own sketch of Pueblo Indian dancers (4L 138).34 Mirroring Lawrence’s residencies on both sides of the United States–Mexico border between 1922 and 1925, Mornings in Mexico is bifurcated between four chapters set in Mexico, in Oaxaca City and its environs and a second quartet of chapters focusing on Native American ceremonial dances in New Mexico and Arizona in the south-western United States. Lawrence had floated ‘Sardinian Films’ as a title for Sea and Sardinia (SS xxi), and the first chapter of Mornings in Mexico, ‘Corasmin and the Parrots’, opens with the verbal equivalent of a tracking shot, moving from nation to town to house to garden to culminate in a close-up of ‘a person with a pen’: One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town way south in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbling adobe house built round two sides of a garden patio: and of this house, one spot on the deep, shady verandah facing inwards to the trees, where there is an onyx table and three rocking chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen. (MM 11) The garden patio is both a scene of writing and a performative space, in which ‘two tame parrots’ mimic the yapping of the little white dog, Corasmin, and the whistling of Rosalino, the ‘mozo’ or servant, who ‘goes with the house’ (MM 11, 45). The parrots ‘listen intently. And they reproduce’, parroting back what Wyndham Lewis, in Paleface (1929) interprets as the bird-brained racial politics of Mornings in Mexico itself (MM 11–12). ‘Mr. D. H. Lawrence shows us all

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creatures whatever, in a position of servitude or defeat, “taking it out” of their oppressors, successors, or masters’, Lewis says, in a critique of Lawrence which prefigures, although to very different ideological ends, Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry: ‘thus the parrots “take it out of ” the little dog, Corasmin, or out of his masters (Rosalino or Mr. Lawrence), with their perpetual imitations’.35 Lawrence, in Lewis’s diagnosis, is a sentimentalist, a ‘highbrow’ who propagates a Paleface inferiority complex vis-à-vis Native Americans, this notwithstanding Lawrence’s own barbed remarks about ‘highbrow palefaces’ in his New Mexico essays and in Studies in Classic American Literature (MM 107).36 A more common criticism of Lawrence’s travel writing is its tendency to assimilate indigenous people to the land on which they live.37 In Mornings in Mexico, Rosalino’s ‘black saurian eyes’ make him one with the Oaxacan landscape, which is ‘Like some splendid lizard’ (MM 24, 22). ‘The Mozo’ chapter, however, situates Rosalino, with his ‘black, reptilian gloom’, in Mexico’s political as well as natural environment: In the last revolution – a year ago – the revolutionaries of the winning side wanted more soldiers, from the hills. The alcalde of the hill-village was told to pick out young men and send them down to the barracks in the city. Rosalino was among the chosen. But Rosalino refused, said again No quiero! He is one of those, like myself, who have a horror of serving in a mass of men. (MM 43) Lawrence’s own horror of military conscription in the war years leads him to identify with Rosalino. There is a ‘gulf ’ between them, however, and unlike the ‘gulf ’ between Lawrence and the Sardinian girovago, this is ‘the gulf of the other dimension’, which cannot be bridged ‘with the foot-rule of threedimensional space’ (MM 17). In contrast to Sea and Sardinia and in a ramping up of the planetary vocabulary of Twilight in Italy, ethnic difference in Mornings in Mexico is computed according to the Mesoamerican cosmology of successive suns also projected in Lawrence’s Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926). The tension in these closely related texts between mythic and ‘ “modern” ’ time, between ahistorical space-time and contemporary Mexican history and lived experience, is resolved in Mornings in Mexico, L. D. Clark proposes, by the ‘image of cosmic as well as social circularity’ in the ‘Market Day’ chapter.38 The opening of ‘Market Day’, the last of the Mexico chapters in Mornings in Mexico, brings us back round to the beginning of the book, to Lawrence on the patio of his ‘hermitage’, where he observes the ‘roundward motion’ of the trees coalesce into ‘a larger roundward motion’ in which ‘everything seems slowly to circle and hover towards a central point’ (MM 21, 49). ‘From the valley villages and from the mountains the peasants and the Indians are coming

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in with supplies’ to the market: ‘the road is like a pilgrimage’, Lawrence says, with ‘a great stream of men flowing to a centre, to the vortex of the marketplace’, from which the lines of the vendors’ stalls ‘go off in straight lines’ like spokes from the hub of a wheel (MM 53). What ‘matters’, Lawrence concludes, is ‘the spark of exchange’ in the ‘moment’ of interpersonal ‘contact’, not the exchange of money for goods, although ‘Market Day’ is richly descriptive of the wares on offer in the Oaxaca market, from flowers and foodstuffs to woven blankets and huaraches (MM 55). As Clark notes, the Mexico essays ‘are filled with Lawrence’s customary delighted observations of the world about him, but he takes the agile leap from this to cosmology in the manner employed since Twilight in Italy’. In Clark’s judgement, Lawrence achieves in Mornings in Mexico what ‘he had attempted to do in Twilight in Italy: to see ultimate reality through observation of a locality’.39 Three of the four New Mexico chapters in Mornings in Mexico – ‘Indians and Entertainment’, ‘The Dance of the Spouting Corn’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ – were written between April and August 1924 at the Kiowa Ranch north of Taos. In the fourth and final chapter, ‘A Little Moonshine with Lemon’, Lawrence looks back from Italy to ‘the little ranch in New Mexico’ (MM 97). Uncollected essays and articles from Lawrence’s first New Mexico phase between September 1922 and March 1923, like the final version of Studies in Classic American Literature, chart the difficult acculturation to the south-western ‘contact zone’ and hostile spirit of place which had preceded Lawrence’s close engagement, in Mornings in Mexico, with Native American belief systems.40 In ‘Indians and an Englishman,’ for instance, published in the Dial in February 1923, Lawrence deploys an idiom of ‘buffoon stunts’ and ‘comic opera’ as he figures himself as a ‘lone lorn Englishman, tumbled out of the known world of the British Empire onto this stage’ (MM 113). In a twist on the travel writing trope of ‘the observer observed’, Roberts notes that ‘Lawrence exempts himself from one aspect of the imperial gaze: its one-directionality, the authority it derives from invisibility, from its perspective being taken for granted’: ‘If, dear reader, you, being the audience who has paid to come in, feel that you must take up an attitude to me, let it be one of amused pity’, Lawrence says in ‘Indians and an Englishman’ (MM 114).41 A very different tone is taken in ‘Indians and Entertainment’, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in November 1924 and is positioned as the first of the four New Mexico chapters in Mornings in Mexico. Here, the tribal quality of Indian ceremonial dance is differentiated from the Western ‘conception of entertainment’ (MM 62). ‘We go to the theatre’, Lawrence explains, ‘to become spectators at our own show’, to see ‘the little individual consciousness lording it’ over the ‘world of actuality’ (MM 59). As in ‘The Theatre’ chapter of Twilight in Italy, Lawrence’s target here is Hamlet (or ‘Amleto’) which he interprets as ‘the tragedy of the convulsed reaction of the mind from the flesh,

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of the spirit from the self ’ (TI 144). In contrast, in the deer-and-corn dances of the Pueblo Indians, in which the men ‘move with the soft, yet heavy bird-tread which is the whole of the dance’, ‘There is no drama’ – ‘There is no spectacle, no spectator’ (MM 63). In keeping with the immersive quality of the ritual, Lawrence’s syntax – his ‘dithyrambic prose-poetry’ – takes on the cadences of ‘the song to make the corn grow’: ‘following on down the mysterious rhythms of the creative pulse, on and on into the germinating quick of the maize that lies under the ground’ (MM 63).42 Drawing on Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), Lawrence says that Western drama ‘has developed out of these ceremonial dances’, but ‘the difference between Indian entertainment and even the earliest form of Greek drama’ is that in the former ‘there is no onlooker’ because ‘the Indian is completely embedded in the wonder of his own drama’ (MM 67). Lawrence is himself an onlooker, of course: insisting that he is ‘no ethnologist’ and yet acutely aware of the ‘tourist gaze’, Lawrence typifies Clifford’s argument that literary travel ‘was articulated against an emerging ethnography’ on the one hand and ‘against tourism’ on the other (MM 116, 127).43 ‘Look at our three thousand tourists, gathered to gaze at the twenty lonely men who dance in the tribe’s snake-dance!’ Lawrence exclaims in his chapter on ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, which opposes the superficiality of ‘the crowd’s desire for thrills’ to the profundity of the ritual they are witnessing: ‘how deep, how deep the men are in the mystery they are practising’ (MM 92, 86). ‘Tourists dislike tourists’, as MacCannell puts it. Lawrence himself was labelled in a review of Mornings in Mexico as ‘a super-tourist … a kodaker of spiritual knicknacks’, and he did send photographic postcards of Hopi Snake priests to friends and family on his return journey to New Mexico from Arizona (MM lxix, see 5L 100–1). Nonetheless, Helen Carr reminds us that, in contradistinction to tourists’ trips, Lawrence’s ‘travels were energised by a passionate quasi-primitivist quest’.44 Like his travel writing, Lawrence’s New Mexican novella St. Mawr (1925) is a quasi-primitive quest romance, set in its concluding chapters in a loosely fictionalized surrogate for his own Kiowa Ranch. Yet, the ‘wild spirit’ of this ‘wild America’ is only an automobile journey away from the tourist mecca of Santa Fe. When she sees an advertising billboard welcoming ‘Mr. Tourist’ to the annual fiesta, the protagonist, Lou Carrington, acknowledges her own connivance, and that of her mother, in the south-western tourist trade: she ‘said in her own mind: “Welcome also Mrs and Miss Tourist” ’ (SM 88, 132–3). Through Lou, Lawrence engages in what Ramazani defines as ‘self-ironizing literary tourism, which recognizes its complicity in mass tourism yet also distinguishes itself from some of its forms and effects’.45 In his 1924 essay ‘Climbing Down Pisgah’, written at the Kiowa Ranch, Lawrence remarks on the encroachment of mechanical modernity in ‘the “takeoff phase” of globalization’:46 ‘the aeroplane descends and lays her egg-shells of

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empty tin cans’, Lawrence complains, even ‘in the Ultimate Thule’ (RDP 226). Likewise, in his retrospective article ‘New Mexico’, ‘the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourist trots around you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park’ (MM 175). Wireless radio is a sonic indicator of time–space compression in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Lawrence also insists that ‘ “Home!” ’ is ‘a word that has had its day’, its meaning ‘cancelled’ by the Great War (62). But Lawrence did discover a ‘living nodality’ in northern New Mexico: the place that gave him ‘the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had’ was where Lawrence came closest to breaking out of both the ‘vicious circle’ of modernity and his own hermeneutic circle (MM 125, 176; RDP 229). Indeed, Clark asserts that the writing Lawrence produced there constitutes ‘one of the most outstanding achievements in response to place’ in modern literature.47 As his friend and biographer, Richard Aldington, says of Lawrence’s Kiowa Ranch, ‘to realise what that mountain-side and his ownership of those American acres meant to him, read the last fifteen pages of “St. Mawr” [and] the last essay of Mornings in Mexico’.48 In the last essay, ‘A Little Moonshine with Lemon’, the spatial deictics of ‘here’ and ‘there’ locate Lawrence as he writes, from the Villa Bernardo in Spotorno, Italy, of his ‘Heimweh’ for the Kiowa Ranch in New Mexico and its ‘home-ghosts’, like Susan the cow (MM 97–8). Lawrence renovated the cabins there, working alongside Taos Pueblo Indian Trinidad Archuleta and a Hispano-American carpenter, Pablo Quintana, known as ‘Richard’ (see 5L 38). Lawrence’s cow, Susan, and other ‘loyal subjects of my rancho’, flesh out the philosophical speculations of the essays, written or revised at the ranch, which were published in 1925 as Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (RDP 337). For example, the killing of the porcupine in the title chapter illustrates Lawrence’s philosophy of natural hierarchy, but at the same time is ‘part of the business of ranching’ (RDP 354). Reflections also includes Lawrence’s revision of ‘The Crown’ essays, first written in England in 1915, which are intermediate between ‘the original travel sketches of Twilight in Italy and the book version with its admixture of philosophy’ (RDP xix). The leitmotif of Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine is not travel, however, but emplacement, or being ‘in place’: ‘we travel in order to arrive’, Lawrence says in the ‘Love’ chapter (RDP 373, 7). In Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine Lawrence pays what Michael Herbert calls ‘a remarkable tribute to life on the ranch’, grounding his philosophy in the domestic space of his own ‘backyard’ (RDP, xxxviii, 337). Back in Italy, Lawrence domesticates death itself in his last ‘travel’ book, the posthumously published Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932). The first Etruscan tomb he visited, at Cerveteri, is a ‘house’, ‘a home’, according to Lawrence, who would make an item of Etruscan funerary art – a travelling object which also has the quality of ‘homeliness’ – the vehicle for his self-elegy in ‘The Ship

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of Death’ (EP 16). ‘Build the ship / of death to carry the soul on the longest journey’, Lawrence writes and like the travel writer who had packed up his kitchenino so carefully in preparation for the sea voyage to Sardinia, he ensures that his ship of death is stocked with ‘little cooking pans’ and ‘food / and little dishes, and all accoutrements / fitting and ready for the departed soul’ (P 631–2). In Etruscan Places, Lawrence complains about the removal of Etruscan things to the Florence Museum: ‘they could take the more homeless objects for the museums, and still leave those that have a place in their own place’ (EP 171). His own travelling trunk, accessioned by the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum in the 1980s, is at once a ‘homeless object’ and one which has a ‘place’ in its ‘own place’, although the trunk also has its place in other places to which Lawrence travelled and in which he lived. It is appropriate that the initials embossed on his trunk – DHL – now form the acronym of an international courier service. It is no less appropriate that the D. H. Lawrence Memory Theatre project is seeking to ‘replicate’ Lawrence’s trunk in a bid ‘to curate Lawrence’s life through artefacts’, material and verbal artefacts by means of which we may ‘retrace his routes across the globe’. At the first stop on the site’s digital pilgrimage, we visit Artefact 1, which comprises Aldous Huxley’s memory of Lawrence as an adept in the everyday arts of dwelling-in-travelling: ‘He could cook, he could sew, he could darn a stocking and milk a cow, he was an efficient woodcutter and a good hand at embroidery, fires always burned when he had laid them and a floor after he had scrubbed it was thoroughly clean.’49

NOTES 1 Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence and Modernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 6; Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 12. 2 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), p. 39. In the same way that Leavis’s book on Lawrence ‘carries on from The Great Tradition’, so Lawrence himself carries on – and, as ‘our last great writer’, culminates – the tradition of the English novel. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), p. 9. 3 Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence, p. 6. 4 See Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 31. 5 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 36. 6 George Steiner, qtd in William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-Housley, Geography and Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), p. 4.

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7 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), p. 55. For an overview of recent modernist scholarship, see The New Modernist Studies, ed. Douglas Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 8 Hannah Freed-Thrall and Dora Zhang, ‘Modernist Setting’, Modernism/Modernity Volume 3, Cycle 1, https://mod​erni​smmo​dern​ity.org/for​ums/modern​ist-sett​ing (last accessed 23 July 2023). 9 Jessica Berman, ‘Modernism’s Possible Geographies’, in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 281. Lawrence uses the term ‘nodality’ in Kangaroo (1923) and in his essay ‘Taos’ (1923); see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theories (London: Verso, 1989), p. 149. On the spatial turn in modernist studies, see: Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005); Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Regional Modernisms, ed. Neal Alexander and James Moran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Of the above, only Alexander and Moran’s Regional Modernisms engages with Lawrence. 10 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 37. 11 Fussell, Abroad, pp. 4, 11. 12 Marianna Torgovnick alleges that Lawrence ‘slips – too easily – into using “the primitive” as a shorthand for his terms’, for instance in his conflation of sexual with ethnic ‘otherness’. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 169. 13 Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age, p. 75. 14 Neil Roberts, D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 16. 15 Andrew Harrison, ‘The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce’, in Regional Modernisms, ed. Alexander and Moran, p. 49. 16 https://ser​ieso​fser​ies.owu.edu/tra​vell​ers-libr​ary/; Lawrence, qtd in Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by E. T. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 120; L. D. Clark, The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), p. 113. 17 Mihai Spariosu, Modernism and Exile: Liminality and the Utopian Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2014), p. 30. 18 Elaine Feinstein, Lawrence and the Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 22; on Lawrence as a domestic god, see John Middleton Murry, Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), pp. 41–2; Eleanor Farjeon, qtd in D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography.

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Volume One, 1885–1919, ed. Edward Nehls (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 293; Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography (London: Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 174. 19 Deborah Clarke, ‘Modernist Domesticity: Resolving the Paradox in Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen’, in A History of the Modernist Novel, ed. Gregory Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 193; Thomas Foster, qtd in Clarke, ‘Modernist Domesticity’, p. 193. 20 Fussell, Abroad, p. 158; Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from the Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 139. 21 Fussell, Abroad, p. 208. 22 Clifford, Routes, p. 6. 23 See Fredric Jameson, ‘Agons of the Pseudo-Couple’ in Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 35–61. 24 See Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 74. 25 Peter Merringham, ‘Cape to Cairo: Africa in Masonic Fantasy’, in Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism, ed. Graeme Harper (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 147. 26 See Lawrence’s 1928 London Evening News article, ‘Red Trousers’ (LEA 135–8). 27 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 82.

Literary

Odyssey

of

the

1920s

28 On travelling objects, see Alexandra Peat, Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (London: Routledge, 2012). 29 Roberts, D. H. Lawrence, p. 47. 30 Witter Bynner, Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (New York: John Day, 1951), pp. 1–2; see David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 61. 31 Bynner, Journey with Genius, pp. 2, 4. 32 Alan Sillitoe, ‘D. H. Lawrence and His District’, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed. Stephen Spender (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), pp. 44–5. 33 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos: The Story of D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico (London: Martin Secker, 1933), p. 15. 34 Lawrence’s line drawing was first published in Theatre Arts Monthly in 1924 to accompany his article ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’, and it would be reprinted in 1926 in the special D. H. Lawrence number of Laughing Horse, a little magazine of local New Mexican modernism, in which the final chapter of Mornings in Mexico, ‘A Little Moonshine with Lemon’, was first printed. Juta’s portrait of Lawrence would be reproduced to accompany the latter’s essay ‘Indians and an Englishman’ in the Dial in February 1923.

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35 Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting-Pot’ (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), p. 264. 36 Lewis, Paleface, p. 174; see (SCAL 43). 37 See Roberts, D. H. Lawrence, p. 4. 38 Andrew F. Humphries, D. H. Lawrence, Transport and Cultural Transition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 16; Clark, Minoan Distance, p. 336. 39 Clark, Minoan Distance, p. 333. 40 The term ‘contact zone’ refers to ‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. 41 Roberts, D. H. Lawrence, p. 46. 42 The Saturday Review of Literature praised ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ for ‘a dithyrambic prose-poetry as consummate as anything in the English language’ (MM lxix). 43 See John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze: 3rd edn (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011); Clifford, Routes, p. 65. 44 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 10; Helen Carr, ‘Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 83. 45 Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age, p. 81. 46 Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age, p. 17. 47 Clark, Minoan Distance, p. 307. 48 Richard Aldington, Portrait of a Genius, but … : The Life of D. H. Lawrence, 1885– 1930 (London: Heinemann, 1950), p. 291; Aldington includes an extended extract from ‘St. Mawr’ in his 1944 anthology of Lawrence’s prose, The Spirit of Place. 49 James Walker, ‘The D. H. Lawrence Memory Theatre’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5.3 (2020): 254. During the Coronavirus pandemic, James Walker and Paul Fillingham’s project tracked Lawrence’s digital footprint: www.memory​thea​tre. co.uk. In Izaac Bosman’s artwork for ‘Artefact 1’, Lawrence is photoshopped as ‘Mr Muscle’, a superhero embodying a brand of cleaning products. Lawrence’s trunk was donated to the Birthplace Museum on 11 June 1986 by the Ripley Scout Group; Lawrence’s sister Ada, who had inherited the trunk on his death, had given it to the scouts, who purportedly used it as a toboggan. Carolyn Melbourne, Museums & Collections Officer, D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum, email to the author, 16 February 2021.

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CHAPTER TWO

Sentimentalism and European literature MICHAEL BELL

Lawrence loathed the false, self-indulgent emotionalism we call sentimentality not just as a matter of literary taste but as a dangerous proclivity widespread in his contemporary world. ‘The most evil things in the world, today, are to be found in the chiffon folds of sentimentalism. Sentimentality is the garment of our vice. It covers viciousness as inevitably as greenness covers a bog’ (RDP 285). Lawrence’s imagery has an analytic precision and the clothing metaphor here points to sexuality as a primary domain of sentimentality, although for a peculiarly vicious public evil he would doubtless also instance the nationalistic feeling whipped up by sections of the press during the Great War. Through much of his career he suffered from sentimental moralism and factitious patriotism in the public sphere, yet there was also a personal dimension. A man of such intense and volatile feeling as Lawrence was always in danger of letting his emotions get the better of him, as indeed they often did. The present chapter will be mainly concerned with the larger implications of sentimentality but also with how Lawrence drew on his own emotional energy without repressing it or becoming merely its victim. Consider some relatively brief examples of his response to sentimental occasions. Lawrence’s disposition was to live fully in the present, with a courageously trusting orientation towards the future, and he was especially critical of any impulse to nostalgia as a sentimental desire to dwell on the past. His early poem ‘Piano’ presents a Proustian moment in which the speaker, listening to a classical performance with voice and piano, is overwhelmed by

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the emotional memory of listening as a small child to his mother’s playing. Unlike the Proustian narrator, however, who prizes the sudden immersion in time past, Lawrence’s speaker resists its seduction. His ‘manhood’, he says, is ‘cast down’ (1Poems 108). Yet his mode of resistance is to acknowledge and express the power of the feeling; only then can he leave it behind. Much as he said apropos Sons and Lovers: ‘one sheds ones sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them’ (2L 90). The poem seems a way of escaping not emotion, as T. S. Eliot put it, so much as the power of this particular emotion over him.1 By an ironic, or perhaps rather a fitting, chiasmus, the emotion is triggered by a high-level aesthetic experience, and it is through aesthetic recreation that emotional poise is recovered. Late in his life after an evening’s singing with friends, he had a similar emotional memory of the hymns that, as a pious youth, he had sung at the local Congregationalist chapel. In the late essay ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’, he reflected on how their emotional power for him still exceeded that of the great European art songs with which he was now familiar (LEA 130–4). Once again, as the essay’s title suggests, he reflectively impersonalizes the experience. These two brief instances already raise large questions of emotional authenticity; of the temporality of feeling, and of the place of emotion in art and religion. Lawrence had a considered and distinctive understanding of these questions informed by a wider historical context. He was a highly cultured man with an inward appreciation of the major European literatures and art, all of which he critiqued primarily in terms of their representation of feeling. He understood how, although the emotions are often thought of as the most spontaneous, and therefore unmodified, aspects of personality, they are culturally relative and subject to historical transformation. History for him was most essentially a history of the feelings and therefore a living force in so far as it has formed present-day emotional habits and assumptions. So, the achieving of an impersonal understanding of emotion encompasses a historical as well as an aesthetic dimension. Like many European thinkers, he sought to understand modernity as a new stage in a long process of internal change and a radical shift in the value ascribed to emotionality as such is a foundational element in the experience of modernity as can be seen very clearly in the historical fortunes of the word ‘sentimental’.2 Although Lawrence in the quotation cited earlier uses the terms ‘sentimentality’ and ‘sentimentalism’ interchangeably, for purposes of historical analysis it is as well to distinguish them. While ‘sentimentality’ expresses a trans-historical critical judgement, ‘sentimentalism’ refers more neutrally to a complex cultural-historical phenomenon of modernity. European culture has had a long-standing suspicion of the emotional domain: the classical world feared the passions while Christianity sought spiritual transcendence of bodily desire. But the Enlightenment brought a seismic shift

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in attitude whose effects can be felt to this day, as when news interviewers on occasions of personal triumph or tragedy ask as a matter of course, ‘and what did you feel?’ The mid-eighteenth century saw, in both literature and philosophical thought, an optimistic cult of sentiment in which feeling was supremely prized. In effect, the attempt to create a post-religious conception of man and society sought a basis for moral being in human benevolence rather than divine authority. Challenging the view that human beings are, in the words of the penny Catechism, ‘prone to evil’ from their very childhood, Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed original goodness rather than original sin. This progressive ambition, and its possibly fatal weakness, are directly reflected in the contemporary ambiguity of the word ‘sentiment’. If a modern term is substituted for its multiple uses in different contexts, it will mean either feeling or general moral principle, with many elusive gradations in between. The word catches the optimistic elision or identification whereby spontaneous feeling and moral principle are treated as one despite the long human experience of their conflict. The word was, moreover, a rapidly moving target. For Samuel Richardson in the 1740s, it still meant predominantly ‘principle’, while for Laurence Sterne in the 1760s it meant ‘feeling’. The term ‘sentiment’ arguably kept feeling in some relation to moral principle, but as it modulated into ‘sensibility’ it became increasingly a value in itself, to the extent that the hero or heroine of sensibility was likely to become a social outsider. By the 1770s the extravagances, social as well as literary, of the cult of sentiment, and latterly of sensibility, were attracting critique. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), argued that virtuous actions impelled by feeling were questionable: only when such actions are performed from duty can they be known to be truly moral. But readers caught in the fashionable response could hardly see, let alone appreciate, critique. J. W. von Goethe’s The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774) was meant to be a warning of the excesses of sensibility but was read as a sentimental tragedy and Goethe soon modified the text in an attempt to make the intended critique of Werther more evident. Yet a measure of emotional identification with the hero’s first-person narrative was fundamental to the book’s power, and this text became one of many more in which questions of authentic feeling are inextricable from narrative modality. Likewise, Laurence Sterne discovered in the course of writing Tristram Shandy (1759–67) the popular vein of sentiment in the figure of Uncle Toby and went on to write A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). His narrative humour threw a quizzical light on the moral claims of the sentimental episodes but, once again, this was not generally evident to contemporary readers for whom he became the European exemplar of sensibility. The cultural war over sentiment has in various ways persisted ever since and its extreme positions are of limited interest. As usual, the most productive dialectic arises from acknowledging the truth of both sides. Accordingly, the

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most significant medium for this cultural work was not the analytic clarity of discursive philosophical thought so much as the ambivalent shadings of fiction. Two of the most influential novels of sentiment, Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and Rousseau’s The New Heloise (1761) dramatized a psychological complexity somewhat beyond their author’s conscious intentions. These authors effectively explored the internal strains of their own moral ideals and in this respect they pointed forward to the European novel of the nineteenth century. The great moral struggles in Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Choderlos de Laclos involve villains who are conscious and deliberate deceivers whereas in the nineteenth century the characteristic emphasis, as pre-eminently in George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy, falls on varieties of self-deception. These long fictions allow for characters’ emotions to be tested in multiple ways and over the course of a lifetime. The novel was the pre-eminent medium for close and extended analysis of unwittingly false feeling, and between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries the word ‘sentimental’ underwent a complete reversal in value. From being the highest moral accolade as the expression of humane feeling it became the byword for cheap, factitious, self-indulgent emotionalism. One might be tempted to suppose that this shift indicates a descent in the value accorded to emotion as such but it is, of course, the opposite. It indicates an internal discrimination in the domain of feeling which has occurred precisely because emotional authenticity and fulfilment have become so central to modern conceptions of the self and of the social good. It represents a shift of focus from intensity to quality of feeling as the underlying impulse of the cult of sentiment is absorbed into mainstream European culture and transformed in the process. Romanticism, which includes some of the high points of European art and literature, developed the impact of sentiment in the next generation, but the weaker side of sentiment constantly shadows even these high achievements. Truth of feeling is not like a scientific formula which can be discovered, preserved and put to reliable use: it is a constant, moment-by-moment struggle like staying afloat. Charles Dickens typifies the ambivalence of sentiment in fiction. Along with subtle and profound representations of false feeling, such as in Pip of Great Expectations, he has scenes of now notorious sentimentality such as the death of Little Nell which were sometimes derided even at the time as in Anthony Trollope’s caricature of Dickens in The Warden (1855) as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’. Of course, such judgements are in themselves strongly governed by changes in taste and circumstances. It may be that Dickens’s invitations to mourn fictitious children had a cathartic value for the many Victorian readers who lost their own children with little opportunity to mourn them directly. But by the turn of the new century, sentimentality was becoming the clichéd byword for the Victorians generally: a shift memorably enshrined in Oscar

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Wilde’s remark that one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing. The early-twentieth-century writers we now think of as modernist, such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, were in significant respects quite divided from each other, and Lawrence in turn was sharply at odds with all of these. But one thing they all shared was a loathing of sentimentality: indeed, a primary ambition of their different literary techniques was the critique and avoidance of this. But sentimentality could be variously conceived. For several modernists, the reaction was not just against Victorian sentimentality but against the whole spirit of Romanticism from which it derived, and perhaps of the emotional domain as such. Sentimentality for them was not just a possible vice of Romanticism but intrinsic to it. Some, therefore, promoted an opposing spirit of ‘classicism’ for which the title of Joyce’s Ulysses indicates the most striking creative instance and for which T. S. Eliot made the bestknown defence.3 In what is arguably the summative achievement, and de facto manifesto, of European modernism, Joyce subjects to comic dissection the sentimentalities of love, sex, nation, religion and literature. But in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot’s unguarded remark that poetry is an ‘escape from emotion’ let slip an attitude to emotion in general. Lawrence, by contrast, was critical of this ‘classical’ stance as being itself a symptom rather than a solution: ‘this classiosity is bunkum, but still more, cowardice’ (4L 500). For him, the classicist pose was an overreaction arising from fear of feeling and he instead kept faith quite consciously with the Romantic tradition including its modulation into novelistic examination of feeling. His first editor, Ford Madox Hueffer, was astonished at his knowledge of this literature.4 It is important to note, too, that whether perceived emotionality is rejected or celebrated, it has always been ideologically loaded in respect of both class and gender. The eighteenth-century ‘man of feeling’ was one who took on the stereotypical qualities of the female while Werther’s suicidal despair is partly triggered by his sense of being disdained at a society event. The ‘classical’ versus ‘romantic’ dichotomy mapped on to the long-standing view of women as emotional rather than rational and therefore properly subject to male authority. It also underwrote a conception of the lower orders as a potential mob if not suitably governed by their social superiors. It is significant in this regard that Lawrence, initially appreciated for his representation of working-class life, was assumed by some early reviewers to be a woman; he collaborated with women in the writing of several novels, and Carol Siegel has placed him squarely within a tradition of women writers.5 He also maintained throughout his life close friendships with highly intelligent, strong-minded women. The assertions of masculine authority to be found especially in some of his later works are clearly a compensatory reaction to these female powers as the great revolution of

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eighteenth-century sentimentalism continued to work itself out within as well as around him. By Lawrence’s time, however, the conflict over the feelings had taken on new dimensions: rather than Rousseau and Kant, the opposition is focused by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud as the question of whether and how to trust the feelings opened on to a more radical questioning of their relation to a real or supposed rationality. Reason itself was put under a new scrutiny. Freud illuminated the subterfuges of reason while Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) had reversed the Enlightenment’s conception of ancient Greek culture summarized in J. J. Winckelmann’s formula ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. The serene perfection of form seen in ancient statuary was for Nietzsche not an expression of the Greek reality but the necessary dream or ideal to which they aspired as the counter-weight to their wild Dionysian unity with nature. The gods, moreover, were mythic beings not reducible to rational ideas or allegorical interpretation, and it was only as myth that the Dionysian could be celebrated. Apollo as the god associated with order and rationality took his value from the orgiastic Dionysian vitality he sought to contain but, when it was subjected to rational analysis, the Dionysian power could only shrivel. On this account, early Greek culture intuitively celebrated vital energies, and unity with nature, which were increasingly extirpated by the power of order and reason. For Nietzsche, modernity had lost the capacity to experience myth and had developed a fear of instinctual life. He expressed the point later in The Gay Science (1882, rev. 1887), a title echoed by Lawrence in Le gai savaire, his original title for the Study of Thomas Hardy. I find those people disagreeable in whom every natural inclination immediately becomes a sickness, something that disfigures them or is downright infamous: it is they that have seduced us to hold that man’s inclination and instincts are evil. They are the cause of our great injustice against nature, against all nature. There are enough people who might well entrust themselves to their instincts with grace and without care, but they do not, from fear of this imagined ‘evil character’ of nature. That is why we feel so little nobility among men; for it is always the mark of nobility that one feels no fear of oneself.6 Early in Women in Love, the ‘Lawrencean’ character Rupert Birkin puts a similar point to Gerald Crich: ‘I think it was perfect good form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the church door. It was almost a masterpiece in good form. It’s the hardest thing in the world to act spontaneously on one’s impulses – and it’s the only really gentlemanly thing to do – provided you are fit to do it.’

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… ‘And I’, said Gerald grimly, ‘shouldn’t like to be in a world of people who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it. – We should have everybody cutting everybody else’s throat in five minutes.’ ‘That means you would like to be cutting everybody’s throat’, said Birkin. (WL 32) Although Birkin is often subjected to authorial irony, at this point he expresses the Lawrencean view with calm authority. The classic modern representative of the opposite view is Sigmund Freud who was the object of sustained critique by Lawrence, most notably in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). In the late work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud makes most explicit the understanding that pervades his oeuvre throughout. In his tragic conception, the continuity of civilized community depends on the sublimation or repression of instinctual being. As a Jew living in the German lands he had, of course, abundant empirical evidence of humankind’s dark proclivities when restraints are removed. But as Birkin tries to suggest to Gerald, the empirically common sense does not always see its own premises. Of course, the opposition just sketched is not so clear cut. Freud would have agreed with Nietzsche and Lawrence that much destructive behaviour or unhappiness is the consequence of instinctual denial and repression. Indeed, it was his life’s work to understand and repair such damage. More significantly, perhaps, the remarks of both Nietzsche and Lawrence are highly conditioned. Birkin affirms the difficulty of acting spontaneously. Those who can do so are rare beings, and his terms ‘good form’ and ‘gentlemanly’ suggest that this capacity is itself a matter of social training and practice. Indeed, the term ‘masterpiece’ pushes the notion of form from the social towards the aesthetic. So, too, Nietzsche makes no moral condemnation as such. He affirms his distaste and appeals to the rarer principle of nobility. Birkin and Nietzsche see that these fundamental dispositions, to which they are deeply committed, are not capable of proof or demonstration; a recognition that is perhaps obscured from Freud by his scientism. The great modern reader of myth was not always aware of his own myths for these two opposed views are essentially mythic perceptions of the world which will tend, if put to a conscious test, to be self-fulfilling although both can have value as heuristic models and aids to understanding. In sum, as the cultural war over sentiment enters the twentieth century, its previously defining structures are themselves changing: gender, social authority and the status of reason. The transformations of sentiment since the eighteenth century have further dimensions important to Lawrence. In a classic essay, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795–6), Schiller gave an important new twist to the notion of the sentimental as a defining quality of modernity. His two major

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terms, ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ had technical, neutral meanings quite different from their customary normative uses. From a close reading of ancient and modern poetry, he sought to show a different kind of self-consciousness, a hyper-consciousness, that typifies modernity. The ancient naivety meant a oneness with the emotions whereas modern man experienced even his feelings with an inescapable self-awareness. Sentimental man does not just have the feelings, he is aware of having them in a way that is potentially alienating. In the words of Hamlet, the archetype of modern self-consciousness, ‘the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ In principle, these two states are a neutral anthropological distinction but Schiller clearly feels nostalgia for the older, more integral, mode of being. In that respect, this theory joins many other such accounts of modernity as an internal psychic change, seemingly irreversible, in which there is loss as well as possible gain. T. S. Eliot’s once influential espousing of the notion of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ occurring over the course of the English seventeenth century is within this tradition.7 By the early twentieth century, the new discipline of anthropology, in the era of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1910), seemed to give an even more powerful account of the psychic oneness and unity with the natural world experienced by ancient humans. It may be that these theories are not ultimately capable of demonstration either way, and, indeed, that their historical truth value is not really the point. What they indicate is a persistent attempt to define a perceived malaise in modern culture through the projected image of its opposite. By the early twentieth century this critique was more urgent, and Lawrence provides a classic instance of damaging self-consciousness in Hermione Roddice in Women in Love. When she makes an apparently Lawrencean plea to escape the dominance of mind and mental knowledge, Birkin rounds on her: ‘ “You are merely making words,” he said; “knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them” ’ (WL 41). Here is Lawrence’s great theme of ‘sex in the head’. Hermione, it seems, cannot help herself even when she mentally deplores the general condition. Although Birkin speaks, once again, quite directly for the author in this early episode, he is aware that he himself suffers, albeit unwillingly, the same condition. He is constantly embarrassed by his own articulacy, his own mental command, and when Hermione a little later strikes him over the head with a lapis lazuli paperweight he accepts the justice, and the precise symbolism, of her action. Towards the end of the novel, Gudrun and Loerke are the sophisticated exemplars of this condition which Lawrence locates historically: ‘They delighted most either in mocking imaginations of destruction, or in sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the past. It was a sentimental delight to reconstruct the

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world of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller and poverty and faithful love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his quakings’ (WL 453). The use of the word ‘sentimental’ here neatly conflates historical and modern meanings. Sentimentality in the sense of alienating self-consciousness was for Lawrence the great modern blight for which he sought remedies in all his travels and reading. The early-twentieth-century vogue for Russian literature and spirituality was eventually a disappointment for him because its extraordinary psychological exploration was ultimately inturned, a highly sophisticated form of this ‘sentimentalised disintegration’ (RDP 285). He turned instead to American literature, much of it then thought to be merely adventure stories for the young, because it conveyed the experience of the new continent unwittingly. Its apparent lack of high literary status allowed its deepest implications to remain unselfconscious. Lawrence’s pithy advice here, ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (SCAL 14), summed up what was perhaps the greatest twentieth-century revolution in literary criticism. But he arrived at this not through ideological critique: rather through a running response to the quality, the authenticity, of the feeling in all his reading. The definition of the sentimental as hyper-consciousness bears upon another important Lawrencean theme. If he saw much modern feeling as mental self-stimulation, it is not surprising that he found a particular consequence of modern sentimentalism in pornography. As he put it in Pornography and Obscenity: ‘Sentimentality is a sure sign of pornography’ (LEA 247). In ‘Introduction to These Paintings’, he describes great changes in attitudes to sexuality in the early modern period. He attributes these to the prevalence of syphilis but, whatever its ultimate aetiology, he effectively notes how pornography arises from sentimentalizing the erotic. To the Restoration dramatists sex is, on the whole, a dirty business, but they more or less glory in the dirt. Fielding tries in vain to defend the Old Adam. Richardson with his calico purity and underclothing excitements sweeps all before him. Swift goes mad with sex and excrement revulsion. Sterne flings a bit of the same excrement humorously around. And physical consciousness gives a last song in Burns, then is dead. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brontës, are all post-mortem poets. The essential instinctive-intuitive body is dead, and worshipped in death – all very unhealthy. Till Swinburne and Oscar Wilde try to start a revival from the mental field. Swinburne’s ‘white thighs’ are purely mental. (LEA 186) Lawrence’s summary suggests how the long tradition of erotic writing becomes sentimentalized over the eighteenth century. The frank bodily humour of Boccaccio and Chaucer, in stories told to entertain mixed company, gives way to an imaginative privatizing. The transition to which he refers is strikingly apparent in

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John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1749) in which an older tradition of humorous, cavalier eroticism meets the novel of sentimental love. As episodes of erotic ebullience are enfolded in the literal voyeurism of being watched through peepholes, Cleland’s first-person female narrative makes explicit what Lawrence called the ‘underclothing excitements’ of Richardson. If Lawrence hated pornography as doing dirt on sex this was less a matter of objective actions represented than of taking the experience so much into the mind, into the solipsistic imagination (LEA 241). While ‘pornography’ in its original meaning of prostitute writing could promote an outward-directed eroticism, Lawrence defined it for modernity as an emotional self-enclosure, another form of the sentimental. Much of the emphasis so far has been on the negative development of sentiment since the eighteenth century but shortly before his essay on naïve and sentimental poetry Schiller wrote what is perhaps his most influential treatise, his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), which gave a positive, and revolutionary, value to modern self-consciousness. Although all human cultures appear to have artistic expression, and reflection on art dates from the early history of European thought, only in the late eighteenth century did there develop the idea of the aesthetic as a special condition or state. In the first half of that century, response to imaginative literature was understood in predominantly literalistic terms with an assumed identity or continuity between emotion in the work and in the reader. The emotion was as if contagious. Hence the constant anxiety that villains should be punished and virtue promoted while Denis Diderot remarked, apparently without irony, that after reading Richardson’s Clarissa he felt as if he had spent a day in virtuous actions. But with the cult of sentiment, in which feeling was the effective basis of the moral action, and intense response was prized as the exercise and evidence of humane feeling, the authenticity of this response was newly significant and scrutinized. In his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre (1757) Rousseau, who prized ‘natural’ feeling, poured scorn on the sentimental response to theatrical fictions as illusory and self-indulgent. It made the audience feel good, not be good. It entrenched emotional and moral hypocrisy. Schiller combined the insights of Rousseau and Kant. Kant, who was generally hostile to the excesses of sentiment, had devised in his Critique of Judgement (1790) the idea of the aesthetic as ‘purposiveness without purpose’; in other words, the work of art, though purposively created, had no immediately practical purpose or impact. Aesthetic experience as such is not a direct stimulus to action either good or bad. Schiller, who was sympathetic to the literature of sentiment, used this notion of the aesthetic to preserve and to transmute the value of the emotional response. In life human beings constantly exercise evaluative preferences ranging from the usual physical preference for staying alive up to complex moral discriminations. Yet precisely because human beings are caught in the unceasing, but largely unwitting, process of evaluation

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it is difficult to focus on values in and for themselves. For Schiller, the aesthetic state was, uniquely, a provisional freedom from practical judgements in which values could be experienced and weighed per se. So, for example, the aesthetic condition allows us to understand, or enter the mind, of a Macbeth without the emotional contagion of identifying with him. This reflective capacity is not in the first instance confined to art. It is the condition on which human civilization is built: the capacity for moral freedom that defines humanity as such. But the aesthetic condition is unique in allowing this fundamental capacity to be experienced purely and exercised consciously. By the same token, one can fully enter the emotion of the work without being taken over by it as in the effusions of sentiment. In that respect, the self-consciousness of the aesthetic response had a homeopathic impact on the feeling. Only a few years after Schiller’s essay, one of the foundational poets of Romanticism, and indeed of the modern era, William Wordsworth, pursued a similar line of thought in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798). Where the philosophical German develops an important new concept, the British poet makes no use of such intellectual superstructure but reflects pragmatically on the effect of metrical language on feeling. Metrical language provides the reflective distance in which painful experience can be understood dramatically rather than just undergone personally. He remarks how reluctant every reader is to reread the distressful episodes of Richardson’s Clarissa.8 And indeed, one reason for the gripping popularity of the epistolary form in the literature of sentiment was its effect of intimate reality. The reader is encouraged to respond as if to real-life events. In an early intimation of the epoch of sentiment, Richard Steele, in his Spectator paper of 10 March 1712, quotes a presumably fictitious letter as a moral exemplum. But he introduces it as follows: It is often said, after a Man has heard a Story with extraordinary Circumstances, it is a very good one if it be true: But as for the following Relation, I should be glad were I sure it were false. It is told with such Simplicity, and there are so many artless Touches of Distress in it, that I fear it comes too much from the Heart.9 Here in a nutshell is the sentimentalist blurring of fact and fiction for emotional, and presumptively moral, effect along with the consequent downplaying of art. Against the tide of sentiment, both Schiller and Wordsworth honoured the value of feeling by transposing emotional contagion into reflective response. But the notion of the aesthetic was itself to prove deeply problematic. It is clear from Schiller’s extended thesis that the aesthetic suspension is a provisional state which exercises, strengthens and clarifies moral judgement in life. But there developed from this same definition a sense of the aesthetic as a remove from life, as an autonomous value rather than a mode of experiencing

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value. And indeed, Schiller’s enthusiasm for his important new concept already lent itself in places to such one-sided understanding of the complex double state he was seeking to define. Although plenty of people have been capable at all times of properly aesthetic response, many are not and the nineteenth century saw running cultural skirmishes between naively moralistic reading of literature and proponents of the aesthetic as a supposedly pure value in itself. And literature was written in apparent accordance with these beliefs. The opposed impulses of Aestheticism and Naturalism constituted powerful literary movements at the turn of the century and one way of understanding what we now think of as the modernist generation is their overcoming of this apparent dichotomy. Once again, Ulysses is a classic instance of placing a day’s ostentatiously mundane life in a consciously aesthetic eternity. But whereas Joyce assimilated the aestheticist spirit into his own synthesis, Lawrence was deeply suspicious of it, as in his dismissive response to the Bloomsbury notion of ‘Significant Form’ which he capitalized to mock its reification of the aesthetic (LEA 199–201). Maybe this was because, like Schiller and Nietzsche in their different ways, he saw the aesthetic as working not only at the high points of human cultural consciousness but also as its secret daily bedrock. Lawrence frankly acknowledges the inextricability of art and life: these realms are mutually porous and dependent. Moreover, in Lawrence it is particularly striking how, just as autobiographical experience often provides the substance of his fiction, his daily life, such as writing letters or performing household chores, seems to have been conducted with the quality of attention recorded in his fiction and poetry. Here he is on washing up: The actual doing things is itself a joy. If I wash the dishes I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and roll and poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness or slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts. Nimble faculties hover and play along my nerves, the primal consciousness is alert in me. Apart from all the moral or practical satisfaction derived from a thing well done, I have the mindless motor activity and reaction in primal consciousness, which is a pure satisfaction. If I am to be well and satisfied, as a human being, a large part of my life must pass in mindless motion, quick, busy activity in which I am neither bought nor sold, but acting alone and free from the centre of my own active isolation. … Not watching my own reactions. If I wash dishes, I wash them to get them clean. Nothing else. (RDP 151) If aesthetic experience is defined not by its object but by its mode of contemplation, it seems appropriate to call this an aesthetic way of being. But rather than the usual meaning of detachment, Lawrence seeks to yield himself

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to the sensory continuum with a minimum of mental awareness. Yet nor does he just sink into the sensory. What he calls the ‘nerve centre of active isolation’ is a point of relation to the world, not of merging with it. In its own way, the state he describes is highly self-aware through the body. In effect, to think of Lawrence in this way recaptures the very early history of the aesthetic for the word originally came into European thought with Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) which was a philosophical treatise on sensory experience. In its subsequent development through Kant and Schiller, the concept rapidly became something more abstract and associated with high art. The repeated word ‘quick’ in Lawrence’s paragraph suggests the underlying continuity with his fiction and poetry for which the hallmark is its catching the momentary quick of life. By contrast, for Lawrence, the characters Gudrun and Loerke, when taking ‘sentimental delight’ in Rousseau, Goethe and Schiller, are modern avatars of aestheticism as Loerke affirms explicitly in his exchange with Ursula about his sculpture of the young girl on a horse. He seems to see the girl and the horse as material on which the artistic will is imposed, analogously to the way Gerald Crich imposes his will on the Arab mare or the material world of the coal mines. For Lawrence, it is the artistic will that vitiates the creative process. For him, art is responsiveness in which the great artist becomes a medium giving dramatic existence to emotional and evaluative possibilities which may well lie beyond the reach of the artist’s everyday personality. His adage to trust the tale rather than the artist takes its full force from its being not just a critical diagnosis of failed art but a positive conception of art as discovery; a notion that applies, of course, only to art of a certain magnitude and quality. The abnegation of personal will is caught in his view of the novel as ‘the trembling instability of the balance’, an expression which echoes Schiller’s original notion of the aesthetic condition as invoking a plenitude of possibilities within a speculative freedom. The great failure of the novel is for the author to put a thumb in the scale. ‘But when the novelist has his thumb in the pan, the novel becomes an unparalleled perverter of men and women. To be compared only, perhaps, to that great mischief of sentimental hymns like Lead Kindly Light! which have helped to rot the marrow in the bones of the present generation’ (STH 175–6). The aesthetic, then, is a counter to sentimentality, always re-enacting its historical origin in countering the tide of eighteenth-century sentiment. Instead of the emotion inviting the observer or reader to literalistic identification, it is fed back into the internal dynamic of the work. The feeling then partakes of an inter-subjective order of significances. But the heuristic aspect of the aesthetic, the sense that its exploratory openness may yield insights not found in everyday life, merits further thought. Art for Lawrence was pre-eminently a matter of bringing new feelings into consciousness, and as an early-twentieth-century thinker he was aware of the possibility that human consciousness is only a small

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part of the psyche. And this is perhaps what makes him peculiarly resistant to common forms of sentimentality. Sentimentality is usually a matter of rehearsing familiar tropes of feeling, of sliding along ready-made grooves, whereas Lawrence, even when on the ostensibly familiar ground of sexual and love relationships, seems always to be creating his own terms – listening, as he put it, to the ‘low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny’ (STH 205). He expressed something of this in his famous letter to Edward Garnett while working on what was to become The Rainbow, the first full-length fictional expression of his mature ‘metaphysic’: ‘that which is physic – non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element’ (2L 182). In the same letter, however, he makes the important qualification that his interest nonetheless still encompasses the human. He criticizes Marinetti and his futurist celebration of the machine for losing the human element. And The Rainbow bears this out. For all the emotional extremes and openness of the characters to non-human powers, it is an eminently humane work. But the exploration of the non-human may involve more than a complex model of the psyche in its world. It might encompass points of view at odds with the ethical orders by which the human is commonly defined. ‘The Fox’, for example, has always troubled readers as the character Henry Grenfell effectively kills Banford, the woman who stands in the way of his marriage to March. The tale makes no condemnation of his action, and readers are left to wonder how to view it. As Lawrence puts it in the essay ‘The Real Thing’, It is when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead of things kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins … And then there is nothing for men to do but to turn back to life itself. Turn back to the life that flows invisibly in the cosmos, and will flow for ever, sustaining and renewing all living things. It is not a question of sins or morality, of being good or being bad. It is a question of renewal, of being renewed, vivified, made new and vividly alive and aware, instead of being exhausted and stale, as men are today. (LEA 310) Such an outlook might itself be accused of sentimentality, and certainly it could be adopted in a sentimental spirit. But it also suggests the tough realism of his remark that you have to have ‘something vicious in you, to be a creative writer’ (IR 324). And this aspect of Lawrence, his pursuit of a cosmic rather than human morality, can perhaps be more widely appreciated in the twentyfirst century. Over the course of the twentieth century, the great post-Copernican revolutions of thought which had displaced man from the centre of the cosmos

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continued to evolve to the point where many thinkers across a variety of disciplines have come to speak of the ‘post-human’. Ecological concern has given a special force to this shift and it seems that Lawrence had begun to anticipate something of this development. The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, drew heavily on Lawrence in developing his notion of ‘becoming animal’ by which he meant neither a literal transformation nor an identification but an inner modulation of being for which a story like ‘The Fox’ gives a clue.10 It is possible to take Henry’s association with the fox as no more than a misogynist assertion of masculinity, but Lawrence seems to be thinking beyond this ethical frame. His interest in the non-human, rather than being simply inhuman, anticipates the post-human standpoint of the late twentieth century to which Deleuze’s speculations belong. Over the course of the twentieth century, the ancient tradition of human exceptionalism and superiority vis-à-vis other animal life have been radically changed so that we are now more concerned with what we have in common with them. But animals, so far as we know, have no ethical consciousness which means that human beings must inevitably engage with them on human terms. Respecting the otherness of the animal is itself an ethical imperative even if only felt from one side. Lawrence’s poetry expresses time and again the paradox, if it is one, that the otherness of the animal can be encountered only through relationship, through the attempt to imagine the animal being. An intrinsic part of such imagining must be to imagine the nonethical and in that regard one might have to say that the human viewpoint as such is a sentimentality. In the spirit of his critique of Marinetti, Lawrence’s emotional imagination works most commonly to modify the ethical consciousness as in the wellknown remarks in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘it is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives … the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening’ (LCL 101). But, as a necessary part of its freedom and integrity, his exploration of feelings also pushed at the boundaries of the ethical. In ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, Lawrence imagines a white woman driven by an emotional imperative to leave her materially comfortable life as a mine owner’s wife and to become a sacrificial offering of the Chilchui Indians. The Indians’ treatment of her is not depicted as inhuman so much as non-human. Of course, they see her as human or the sacrifice would have no point, but the order of significances by which they act is a cosmic, non-human, one. They wish to recover their proper relation to the cosmos. The story does not endorse this belief: that perhaps is why the narrative is suspended at the moment of sacrifice. What matters is the psychological significance to the principal actors: the individual desolation of the white woman and the collective bereftness of the tribe. Although the woman feels isolated, her desolation has, of course, a representative value. She feels with stark purity and intensity a more general condition not usually

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perceived as such and commonly given other explanations, psychological, social or material as the case may be, which may well serve to disguise it. In seeking to catch this feeling, or this level of feeling, Lawrence pushes beyond the boundaries of literary realism and ethical norms. It is especially important here that the emotions of the tale are to be understood aesthetically: not as promoting a course of action, that is to say, but as registering a new or unacknowledged dimension of feeling. This may be the aspect of Lawrence which most removes him from the realm of the sentimental. In another work of speculative anthropology, The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence imagines the collective emotions underlying a revival of preColumbian religion in modern Mexico. For most readers the religious episodes seem hollow and artificial, more authorial will than dramatic substance, and it would be appropriate in a general way to call them sentimental. But the conscious drive against the grain, the challenge to the reader, make this misleading. Whatever the book does, it is not a comfortable experience, sliding easily into the expected emotional grooves. Indeed, here, as elsewhere, Lawrence maintains an edgy relation to the reader which is integral to the meaning of the work. And this relation should be reciprocal: identification and discipleship are not the most appropriate responses to him. In the early 1960s, Lawrence had a brief period of being a widely acknowledged classic and moral authority. For the new generation of widely educated post-war workingclass children in Britain, his depiction of social and emotional relations was compelling. And as the 1960s modulated into a broader rejection of the old orders, he seemed yet again a trailblazer. But there is a danger that such responses sentimentalize him and it may have been not a wholly bad thing that from around 1970 until the turn of the next century he fell into ideological disfavour principally on perceived grounds of gender and of an anthropology dating from the imperial era. Although these latter responses were largely misguided in themselves, they may have acted as a corrective to any too ready assimilation of Lawrence to the cultural mainstream. If over the nearly hundred years since his death he has continued to excite the disapproval of readers from a variety of moral standpoints, this perhaps testifies to the capacity of his work to resist sentimental co-option.

NOTES 1 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1961), p. 21. 2 I discuss this more fully in my Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (London: Palgrave, 2001). 3 Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 26–8.

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4 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 121–2. 5 Carol Siegel, Lawrence among the Women (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991). 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 236. 7 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 288. 8 William Wordsworth, preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798) in Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 264. 9 Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Others, The Spectator, Vol. III, ed. Gregory Smith (London: Dent, 1945), p. 3. 10 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987).

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CHAPTER THREE

‘Then there’s Frieda’: D. H. Lawrence and German radicalism JOHN TURNER

SISTERS When D. H. Lawrence arrived in Metz with Frieda Weekley on 4 May 1912, he may have been making his first trip abroad, but he was not entering terra incognita. He was already familiar with much of German literary and musical culture, and deeply curious about it. Not only had he studied German at school, he had read intensely writers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hauptmann; he was well versed in Wagner, and knowledgeable about nineteenth-century German poetry and lieder; he had published three reviews of German poetry anthologies and he had been fondly hoping to find a year’s work as Lektor in order to earn money and gain the experience necessary to further his literary career.1 Yet the country itself was new to him, a challenge, which he met immediately with four journalistic accounts of his first impressions. Characteristically, he also used these new experiences to take the measure of himself. In the retrospect of Mr Noon, we may feel that what Lawrence found in Germany was an opening perspective on the richness and variety of human cultures, of human manners, food and dress; that he quickly unEnglished himself. Yet, the 1912 essays emphasize particularly the constraints of his Englishness. The appreciation of the new and the urge towards self-expansion are countered by an anxious fear of insufficiency. Lawrence contrasts the puritanical self-sacrifice of the English with the German

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capacity to relish life. The German, he says, ‘has a warmth and generosity of living, like a full fire roaring, that makes us look very pale’; where the English starve themselves, the Germans ‘take their fill’ (TI 10). If this view owes as much to national stereotypes as to observation, it also suggests Lawrence’s awareness of Nietzsche’s affirmation of Jasagen, his horror of Christian asceticism, and it tells us something too about the woman with whom Lawrence was venturing abroad. ‘I know a certain woman wants to love me, I know I want to love her. I can do without loving her, she can do without loving me – just as I can deny myself of something I need. But love is life, both to her and to me. Is it better to live or to forgo life?’ (TI 9). Frieda was certainly not the woman to forgo life or love; and her livsglaede, together with the Gemütlichkeit of German culture, confronted Lawrence with the great challenge of his life, the challenge whose vicissitudes he would dramatize again and again in the years to come. Could he slough off his Englishness and become the man he wanted to be? The chapter of those first weeks in Germany might well be called The Test on Lawrence. The challenge was laid down primarily by Frieda and the people he met through her – those members of the minor aristocracy, military and liberal academia who made up the extended von Richthofen family, people whose lives in their different ways set aside the norms of respectable bourgeois life. In particular, Lawrence was dazzled by the three von Richthofen sisters, Else, Frieda and Johanna, and the way they conducted their sexual lives. ‘Love is life’: as in so many European countries, and especially in Germany, Eros was the weapon of choice in resisting the moral codes and economic structures that bore down so heavily upon the young. In the name of all that was joyous, natural and healthy, a radical movement developed against the restrictiveness of Wilhelmine Germany that ranged across the political spectrum from indifference to activism. Here was something exhilarating to the young Lawrence, with his belief in love and his desire to escape from his puritanical upbringing, the treadmill of teaching and the conventional life it required. Like Aaron Sisson facing the Marchesa, he was ébloui (AR 249): the von Richthofen sisters possessed, each in her own way, an ease and freedom of sexual living that he relished. As he told Edward Garnett: You should see the Richthofens at home – three sisters – one, the eldest, a professor of psychology and economics – left her husband, gone with two other men (in succession) – yet really good – good, the sort of woman one reverences. Then there’s Frieda. Then the youngest sister, very beautiful, married to a brute of a swanky officer in Berlin – and, in a large, splendid way – cocotte. Lord, what a family. I’ve never seen anything like it. (1L 395) So excited was he that he spelt it out all over again to Garnett two weeks later, adding for good measure that while the father was ‘a fierce old aristocrat’, the

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mother was ‘utterly non-moral, very kind’ (1L 409). Because of the father’s gambling and philandering, however, the family was perpetually short of money, and the daughters had been left without the dowry necessary to marry well in military circles. Each of them had dealt with this problem differently, each outside the norms that governed the lives of German middle-class women. Lawrence indeed had never seen anything like it. The youngest, most beautiful daughter, Johanna, had married early with a rakish officer who also gambled; quickly she had become bored and, exploiting her stylishness and beauty, lived off his allowance and such money as she could make out of the men she took as lovers. Hence Lawrence’s description of her as ‘cocotte’ and his portrayal of her in his short story ‘Once –!’ (1912). It was a sexually liberated, apolitical life of a traditional kind, reaching its typical conclusion when she finally separated from her husband in 1923 and settled down with an elderly banker. The more intellectual Else, by contrast, had been politically engaged; she had pioneered a life as a woman scholar, as an activist in the feminist movement and then as the first female factory inspector in Germany, responsible for enforcing the legal statutes governing the working conditions of an almost entirely female workforce of 60,000 in the cigar, textile and jewellery industries.2 Like the Kathedersozialisten, whose political attitudes she shared, she felt great sympathy for the poor, whom she wanted to help and to educate; yet for all the success of her pioneering feminism – career, writings, lectures, public meetings – she was dissatisfied. She longed for a home, marriage and children, but could not afford to set up house with the man she loved. To the dismay of her feminist colleagues, she resigned her job and, in June 1902, married the inhibited, exceedingly wealthy businessman and property speculator, Edgar Jaffe, by whom she had two children before the marriage broke down in 1904. In 1907, she had an affair with the Austrian psychoanalyst and cocaine addict, Otto Gross, and had a child by him. In a brief reconciliation with her husband, she then had a fourth child, but in late 1909 went on to establish a lifelong relationship with Alfred Weber while continuing to live on her own and remaining married to her husband. She managed the two men so adeptly that she secured for herself a luxurious lifestyle, care of the children and generous financial support that placed her amongst the top 1 per cent of German wealth-owners. Clearly, she was a woman of power. Eberhard Demm notes how, when Lawrence fictionalizes her as Louise in Mr Noon, his hero senses the sadistic element in her sexuality: perhaps she ‘loved to torture him – and loved him because she could torture him’ (MN 172).3 Max Weber, Alfred’s brother, thought her an erotic woman and was also in love with her, and when finally in 1918–20 she consented to a secret affair with him, her list of provisos suggests she had lost nothing of her power. Interestingly, however, as he noted resignedly in 1919, she always kept a special place in her heart for Otto Gross; he alone of all men, impossible as he was, could lift

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the depression to which she periodically succumbed. Her failure to achieve a satisfactory compromise between bourgeois security and erotic pleasure left her discontented and guilty. Lawrence grasped this when he characterized her as a ‘beautiful woman who was all the time stealing from Athena to give to Aphrodite, or stealing from Aphrodite to give to Athena’ (MN 117). Hence the ‘touch of irony’ and ‘touch of pathos’ in her (MN 114), darkening at times into cynicism; and hence too the initial wish of this ‘infallible diplomat’ (MN 171) to manipulate others into accepting the same compromise that she herself had made. Then there was Frieda, the woman who announced herself extravagantly to Garnett’s son in November 1912 by proclaiming: ‘of course I am an anarchist, and a beastly “aristo” at the same time’ (1L 476). At the age of twenty, she had married an English academic in his mid-thirties, by whom she had three children; yet life in middle-class Nottingham she found dull and unfulfilling. In flaunting herself as an anarchist and an aristocrat, she was deliberately flouting middle-class morality: bourgeois she was not and, among all the contradictions of her character, she had a powerful recklessness, an insouciance and joyous spontaneity that would carry her further from a conventional life than her sisters would ever go. She had already had a number of affairs which, unlike Else, she had kept secret from her husband. She had had a passionate affair with Otto Gross in 1907–8, at the same time as her sister, and in 1911 an affair with Ernst Frick – both of them believers in free love, implacable opponents of patriarchal morality and living lives in the countercultural interstices of bourgeois society. It is not surprising that, in November 1912, separated from her family and committed to an uncertain future, Frieda should reassert her aristocratic background; for the rest of her life, she intended to live openly in the glory of herself. John Worthen comments amusingly on how, when she wrote ‘Not I, But the Wind …’ to cash in on the Lawrence boom in the early 1930s, she never mentioned Lawrence on the title page: what leaps out at the reader is her own name, Frieda Lawrence geb. Freiin von Richthofen and, facing that, the blazon of her family coat-of-arms. What is more, he adds, ‘when she signed the private press edition of the book, she signed right across the coat-of-arms, as if validating a stamp or seal’.4 Equally importantly, however, Frieda declared herself an anarchist – ‘of course’. Her nonchalance is a badge of her aristocracy, of an inbred disdain that delegates the ordinary concerns of morality and politics to lesser mortals. It was against this self-image that Lawrence reacted when, in response to ‘an aristocratic fit’, he drew his own coat-of-arms: ‘a pick-axe, a school-board, a fountain pen with two lions rampant’.5 It was the symbolic gesture of a déclassé writer who understood the need for work: the self-image that Frieda brought into her relationship with Lawrence was one that he would have many reasons to resist over the years to come – and no one had done more to shape that self-image than her former

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lover, Otto Gross, a man whom Lawrence never met but whose ideas were a constant presence in his marriage.

RADICALS Otto Gross was a charismatic, highly intelligent follower, and critic, of Freud whose childhood had been traumatized by having to sleep in his parents’ bedroom and regularly witness their sexual intercourse: ‘as a five-year-old I linked it with an image of stabbing chicken to death, and I had a sense of rape’.6 It was a trauma that would shape his behaviour and cultural analysis, and contribute to the mental illness and drug addiction in which he sought its relief. He belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum, the same privileged social class as the Webers and Else Jaffe; his father was a professor of criminology, and he was an only child, brought up as a Wunderkind in an oppressive atmosphere of parental supervision that led him eventually to rebel against the repressive power of patriarchy in the name of matriarchy and free love – two ideas in which he saw no contradiction. He married Frieda Schloffer in 1904, a close school friend of Else Jaffe and subsequently of her sister Frieda too, and by 1907 was advocating free love as a weapon in his fight against the bourgeoisie, whom he thought ‘gesundheitsschädlich’, damaging to health.7 Gross’s charisma was widely felt: Max Weber sensed it, and Else too acknowledged ‘that tremendous power of suggestion which emanates from him’8 – she thought him ‘incomparable’ as a lover. Frieda Weekley’s response was equally powerful. She fell in love with him on her annual German holiday in Munich in spring 1907; they spent a week together there, and he accompanied her as far as the English coast on her journey home. The following March they spent further time together when Else gave them the use of her house for four weeks. In the meantime, they wrote letters which Frieda treasured and kept always; hence their survival today. Gross’s ideas sustained her for the rest of her life; her affair with him in 1907–8 launched her on an erotic career that led to a failed attempt to set up a free-love group among her friends in Nottingham, an affair in 1911 with Gross’s friend, Ernst Frick, and eventually her love affair with Lawrence. Gross believed that repression causes neurological damage, and that each individual should therefore be left free to satisfy desire in free and open relationship with others. Internal conflict, he thought, was caused by the deformation of those relationships by a patriarchal society, provoking a clash between that which belonged properly to the self (das Eigene) and that which was introjected into the self by repressive alien authority (das Fremde). He ignored the Oedipus complex, believing that conflict was not inherent in family or social life; mental illness, like manifestations of childhood sexuality, were the result of parental abuse. It is a Romantic ideology, paranoid rather than neurotic in character. In his absolute insistence that repression caused

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neurological damage, however, Gross left no room for restraint, renunciation or compromise, and as early as 1907 this absoluteness bred scepticism in Else: ‘we really do not know how much of what makes your ideas unacceptable to us – the absence of discrimination, the total lack of nuances and the capacity to distinguish between individual human beings – is ultimately caused by morphine’.9 With this use of the first person plural, Else aligned herself with the liberal academic world of Heidelberg and the Webers, from whom the decisive criticism came: that Gross was guilty of a category error in grounding morality in the needs of mental health rather than in the mores of the social group. Morality was not a branch of hygiene: ought cannot be derived from what is. Else found Gross’s thinking unreal, messianic, morphine-induced; her sister Frieda, less intellectual, thought ‘he did not have his feet on the ground of reality’.10 Again and again Gross’s friends called him fanatical, implying that his belief system served the defensive function of safeguarding him against selfdoubt: in the metaphor of Ibsen’s Brand, his eyes were scarred at the very point of seeing. Gross himself, of course, was familiar with any such challenge, and found it intolerable ‘that all the striving of my life, everything for which I have lived, is devalued as pathological, that the motives that govern my life are not taken seriously’.11 His ideas found an immediate response in Frieda in 1907–8. Even a quarter of a century later, describing her meeting with Lawrence, Frieda began with Gross and fell naturally into his language to describe her suffering and isolation in Nottingham: ‘I was living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life and he awakened the consciousness of my proper self.’12 Four years later, in 1912, Frieda was still struggling to find that ‘proper self ’ (das Eigene). Did she want to leave her husband, the security of her home life, her much-loved children? Did she want a life particularly with Lawrence or did she envisage a life of free love beyond that, a life such as that lived since 1907 by Frieda Gross in Ascona? For all her uncertainties, Frieda’s self-image in 1912 was very largely sustained by Gross’s vision of her; it was, as her husband said, Gross who had ‘put these “ideas” into her head’ that she would use to justify her affair with Lawrence (1L 424). Frieda, of course, was no fool and knew that Gross idealized her; yet his vision of her helped give her the courage she needed to resist her family and ally herself with Lawrence. Gross had described her in Nietzschean terms as ‘the woman of the future’, whose sunny joy and unashamed sexuality enabled her to transcend the age in which she lived: ‘the only human being who already, today, has remained free from the code of chastity, from Christianity, from democracy and all that accumulated filth – remained free through her own strength’.13 When Garnett in 1912, probably not without irony, described the affair between Frieda and Lawrence as ‘making history’, he was responding to their joint sense, derived from Gross, that their love had historical significance, that it heralded a freer age to come. Certainly, the phrase resonated with

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Lawrence, who used it three times in his letters, even while acknowledging the relatively ‘mild’ nature of any possible future historical impact (1L 395). Gross had been less restrained: Frieda, he wrote, held the sacred therapeutic power ‘to redeem us from all that is past’,14 and the new age she prefigured would be, again in Nietzschean terms, an age of aristocratic magnificence. She possessed ‘the noble expressiveness of gesture and the high art to create, and to go on creating, yourself, out of your own beauty’.15 This account of her ‘magnificent nature’, as Gross called it,16 was echoed by Lawrence himself, when he rather grandly informed Ernest Weekley in May 1912 of the threat to her well-being if she could not inherit the freedom to which she was born: she must be permitted to live ‘largely and abundantly’, whereas in Nottingham she was ‘afraid of being stunted and not allowed to grow’ (1L 392). The ‘jealous monogamistic fashion’ of her husband’s love, as Lawrence described it to Garnett (1L 388), must not constrict her. This process of individuation, however, as Jung would later call it, can only be fulfilled through relationship, through the creative third thing (das Dritte) that two people build together between themselves out of their innate sociability, their empathy and their sexual desire. In the years when he and Frieda Weekley were lovers, Gross’s faith lay in the creative power of free love, in the multiple erotic relationships that might be built up among individuals outside the pale of bourgeois patriarchy, in such countercultural places as Ascona. Patriarchal marriage, he thought, was mutilated by the rape constellation (KonstellationVergewaltigung) that dominated bourgeois life; this was the source of sadism and masochism alike, both of which he thought social products, the consequence of arrangements that gave men exorbitant power over the person and possessions of their dependents, particularly of women and children. He wrote movingly of the necessity for parents to empathize with their children to safeguard them against bullying and loneliness, and he longed for the return of a matriarchal society. The time in which we live, he told Frieda, ‘has been appointed the Epoch of Decadence which will be the womb of a great future’17 and that future would finally secure the emancipation of women through free love – a view dismissed scornfully by Max Weber as ‘an ethics that would benefit only men’.18 Gross was adamant that the authority structures of Wilhelmine Germany must be overthrown, and he dedicated his psychoanalytic practice to that end, removing it from the formality of couch and clinic into cafés and bars where he could also experiment with mutual and group analyses. His aim, Jung reported to Freud, was to turn his patients, mainly women, into ‘sexual immoralists’,19 and to dispel the transference, which he saw as a monogamy symbol, he was prepared to sleep with them himself. These interlocked struggles – to become oneself, to overthrow patriarchy and to emancipate women – were common contemporary themes which Lawrence explores in The Rainbow and Women in Love in ways both shaped by Gross and critical of him, and it is no surprise

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to learn that he asked his publisher to post a copy of Women in Love to Frieda Gross in Ascona (4L 39). The political tendency underlying Gross’s hostility to bourgeois patriarchy, in so far as he had one in 1907–8, was anarchistic – a familiar stance at that time for someone who shared Nietzsche’s belief in the full flowering of the aristocratic individual as the precondition for superseding the decadence of the modern age. Gross had been friendly since 1905 with the two prominent anarchists, Erich Mühsam and Johannes Nohl, whom he had met in Ascona, and during the rest of the decade he gradually developed a fully fledged anarchist position. Frieda Weekley would have known of this, through Frick, Frieda Gross, Else or her husband Edgar Jaffe, who frequented the same Schwabing cafés as Gross and shared his belief in free love; and in declaring herself in 1912 ‘an anarchist, and a beastly “aristo” ’, she was announcing her pedigree, her loyalty to Gross. By spring 1912, just as she and Lawrence were arriving in Metz, Gross had come to feel that ‘only within revolutionary literature’ was there scope to explore ‘ethical-psychological problems’ along psychoanalytic lines.20 He was already considering the possibility of publishing a ‘Journal for Psychological Problems of Anarchism, as a kind of inner revolutionary preparation’; and now, stimulated further by a new friendship with Franz Jung dating from 1911, he resolved finally ‘to put my talents in the service of anarchism’. Accordingly in 1913, he published a series of committed political articles in Die Aktion, and later that year declared: ‘I have only mixed with anarchists and I declare myself to be an anarchist … since I want everything changed, I am an anarchist’.21 But if the social critique that inspired Gross’s anarchism is clear, its positive content is less so. It may be that he engaged in saccharin smuggling and minor armed robbery, but Mühsam was right to sense the lack of a real political programme in Gross’s thinking: ‘the essence of jealousy and the compulsory character of the patriarchal family came very close to my own ideas on these matters, without though integrating them fully into a vision of a future society in its entirety’.22 He would perhaps have agreed with Frieda that Gross ‘did not have his feet on the ground of reality’, that it was the dream itself that enchanted him. The novelist Franz Werfel made the same suggestion sardonically when, in Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit, he pictured him credulously believing it possible to blow up the whole of Vienna in a single act, and then smiling with ‘a familiar, transfigured enthusiasm’ that lit up his toothless face.23 Even towards the end of his life, when espousing communism during the Bavarian revolution of 1918– 19, his focus remained largely on the psychological question of liberation from repressive internal authority rather than on external political structure. Alongside Otto Gross, we must set Frieda’s more recent lover, the silent, depressive Ernst Frick.24 Frick began life in poverty as a Swiss foundryman, involved himself in trade union activity and, after travelling around Europe, went on to play an important role in the Swiss anarcho-syndicalist group Weckruf.

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In 1904–5, he travelled to France to avoid military service and, on his return, known to the police as an active anarchist, he was sentenced to a fortnight’s imprisonment for antimilitarist activities. He subsequently fell ill and, on a rest cure in Ascona in 1906, met Otto Gross and fell under his spell. Together with Mühsam, Nohl, Leonhard Frank and Sophie Benz, he planned to establish an anarchist school there, according to police reports. In 1907, he was implicated in an attack on police barracks in Zürich, though subsequently acquitted in a jury trial, and then, the following year, he and his brother were involved in an attack on a Zürich tram. In 1909, he helped set up the Tat Gruppe in Munich, where he met Frieda Gross and began a long unsatisfactory relationship with her that dragged on until 1919–20. It was through Frieda Gross that Frick met Else Jaffe and Frieda Weekley. In 1910, though in a relationship with Sophie Benz, he had a child by Frieda Gross; but Sophie’s suicide the following spring, with an overdose of drugs provided by Otto Gross, led to a rupture with Gross and produced a deep depression which Frieda tried to relieve by encouraging Frieda Weekley to sleep with him. This brief affair culminated in a holiday for Frick in England in 1911, paid for by Frieda and Else. In 1912, however, shortly before Frieda and Lawrence arrived in Metz, Frick was once again arrested and imprisoned in Zürich for the earlier attacks on the barracks and the bus. It was now that Frieda described Lawrence to Frieda Gross as ‘like Otto and Ernst’ (‘er sei wie Otto und Ernst’) and looked for projects on which Lawrence and Frick might collaborate.25 Frieda Gross asked her to send reading matter to Frick, and she offered to visit him in prison; characteristically, however, in her letter she praised prison life as an opportunity for inner freedom, which infuriated Frick, and he absolutely refused to see her. In July he was briefly released, then imprisoned again, tried in November, convicted and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and five years’ deprivation of civil rights. Alfred Weber, a character witness at his trial, thought him a melancholy, inactive man who had renounced all desire for political action; to Frieda Weekley, he was a man ‘with the most ferocious ideas’ who ‘looked as though he would not hurt a fly’.26 Since 1911, he had been pursuing a career as an artist, completing his self-transformation from a rough working-class youth into a cultured, highly educated man. Though he remained true to his anarchist ideals, continuing to believe that society was fundamentally evil and could only be saved by free love – by what Max Weber satirically called the ‘acosmistics of the erotic’27 – he gave up political activism altogether and became, in his brother’s words, ‘nur anarchistischer Theoretiker’.28 Then, at the hub of all these people, there was Frieda Gross. She had had a passionate relationship with Else in their teenage school years, and returned home, in the eyes of her conventional brother, more or less an anarchist (‘mehr oder minder als Anarchistin’), hostile to capitalist and aristocratic lifestyles.29 Else’s friendship with her was lifelong; she kept her letters, and supported

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her emotionally and financially through crisis after crisis. Of the same social class as her husband, Frieda Gross was an attractive and charming woman, but weak-willed and passive, longing for a love she never found. Nor did her acceptance of her husband’s belief in free love in spring 1907 bring any relief. On the contrary, there was a pattern of diminishing returns through affairs with Ernest Jones in 1908, Erich Mühsam in 1909 and finally, until 1919–20, Ernst Frick, with other relationships along the way. The weight of Gross’s beliefs lay heavy on her. Freud, who knew her through Otto, felt compassion for her: ‘I feel great sympathy for his wife: one of the few Teutonic women I have ever liked.’30 Jung, however, characteristically blunt, found her masochistic, tied to her husband by a neurosis of her own: ‘Despite her admirable points she is one of those people who won’t listen to reason but prefers to be hurt.’31 Certainly, like many vulnerable women found in radical circles at the time, she was treated abusively by the powerful men around her, not least by Gross’s father who, determined not to let his grandchild be brought up in anarchist circles, pursued her for years through the courts to gain custody of the child. Frieda Gross, however, even in the midst of her troubles, retained her capacity to charm: Else stood by her, whilst even Max Weber came to her aid in 1913– 14 and went to great lengths to provide her with legal advice. In 1912, though, when Frieda Weekley arrived in Germany with Lawrence, these legal troubles still lay ahead. Frieda Gross, despite her anxiety, was still hopeful for happiness with Frick after his release; and it is likely, as John Worthen has argued, that, in contemplating a future outside her marriage with or without Lawrence, Frieda Weekley hoped to establish herself as a free woman ‘as her sisters were free, and Frieda Gross was free, and the people she knew in Ascona were free’.32 All these women, of course, were ‘free’ in different ways; yet Frieda Gross, in Ascona with her children, must have suggested an attractive possibility. Torn between the comfort and security of her own home, the prudent freedoms of Else and the open nonconformity of Frieda Gross, it was no foregone conclusion in 1912 that Frieda Weekley would commit herself to Lawrence or even remain with him. He had a fight on his hands to take the measure of her radical lovers and friends, and combat their influence upon her: the weight of Otto Gross’s ideas lay heavy on him too.

LOVERS ‘Love is life, both to her and to me’: Lawrence’s account of Frieda and himself in May 1912 was the manifesto of their shared belief in the meaning of the love that for the moment held them together – a belief originating for Lawrence in Schopenhauerian ideas of the will, and for Frieda in what she knew of Nietzsche, through her own reading and through Gross’s appropriation of him. In his letters to her, Gross had quoted from the chapter ‘Von Kind und Ehe’ in

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Also Sprach Zarathustra, where Nietzsche celebrates the creative potency of love and marriage for the Übermensch as a hammer with which to belabour the sterility of his bourgeois contemporaries. It was the ‘creative will’ of such love that Gross claimed to share with Frieda: do you know what Nietzsche says: ‘the will of two people to create something higher than those who created it – it is this will that I call a good marriage –?’ Children and deeds: higher, infinitely higher still, in the belief that the eternal drive to reach upwards in the creation of new forms is the deep and most essential principle of life itself – in this belief, that you and I share.33 This belief in free love as a revolutionary creative principle, a way of ‘making history’, was widespread among German radicals; and it was a belief that Lawrence shared with Frieda, and to which he dedicated his art. ‘I’ll do my life’s work, sticking up for the love between man and woman’, he told Sallie Hopkin, declaring himself ‘a priest of love, and now a glad one’ (1L 492–3); his work would do ‘better than the suffrage’ in furthering the cause of women (1L 490). This heady mixture of free love, art and political regeneration provided Frieda with a cause in which she too felt she had a part to play, and she praised Lawrence’s art accordingly. He was, she thought, pace Gross and Frick, ‘the only revolutionary worthy of the name, that I know’ (1L 479); at a time when the form of English life ‘wants smashing in almost any direction’, he alone had the ‘free mind’ to ‘reach upwards’, as Gross had demanded, ‘in the creation of new forms’. Yet it was clear to Lawrence from the start that there were significant differences between Frieda and himself about both love and politics, where the complexities of his own experience resisted the simplifications of German radicalism. Many of these differences are clearly visible in the letters of 1912, and went on to shape the course of his future development as a novelist. The fundamental issue between Lawrence and Frieda was fought over initially in terms of marriage – a fraught question that exposed the inequalities of need and power between them. Nor would their actual wedding in 1914 end the matter. Both scorned marriage as a mere social institution, and both agreed it was the inner life of love that mattered. Yet in comparison with patriarchal marriage, free love by its nature gave no security and acknowledged no discipline. Frieda acknowledged only the rights of desire in the first months of their relationship and did not hesitate to sleep with other men; she was the avatar of a world-historical revolution, and felt affronted when Lawrence forgave her. She strongly resisted the restrictiveness of marriage, the subordination and bullying it authorized. Lawrence, however, wanted to nail ‘Frieda’s nose to my wagon’ (1L 430); he wanted the security and commitment entailed by marriage – and of course upheld by patriarchal law. ‘I feel I’ve got a mate’, Lawrence told Garnett, ‘and I’ll fight tooth and claw to keep her.

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She says I’m reverting, but I’m not – I’m only coming out wholesome and myself ’ (1L 427). Need and feeling were being fought over in the name of history. Sometimes, Lawrence wrote of marriage metaphorically to denote serious commitment, as when he told Frieda: ‘it is my marriage, after all, and a great thing’ (1L 401). At other times, he meant the word literally, as when he teasingly but seriously told Frieda: ‘we are going to be married, respectable people, later on’ (1L 406). He immediately added the rider, however: ‘if you were my property, I should have to look after you, which God forbid’. He knew that he had met his match in Frieda, in every sense: ‘I like the way you stick to your guns. It’s rather splendid. We won’t fight, because you’d win, from sheer lack of sense of danger’ (1L 406). There is apprehension here besides admiration; he appreciated that Frieda was too vital a force to be nailed down. Her energy, health and truculent exuberance confronted him with those areas in which, as an introverted inhibited Englishman, he felt most deficient; and there is a sense in which his whole life would remain a defensive rearguard action against her dominant personality and sexuality. In the years to come, he would return again and again to the search for metaphors to demonstrate the inner laws that constitute true marriage, and that by the same token would nail Frieda’s nose to his wagon – metaphors of gravitation or polarization, solemnizing what he called in Mr Noon ‘the deep accustomedness of marriage’ which was ‘the secret of the English greatness’ (MN 191). It was a secret, he wrote in an idealized version of Ernest Weekley’s judgement of 1912, quite foreign to those ‘unscrupulous German theorisers’ who had almost succeeded in corrupting Frieda (MN 161). In 1912, Frieda was attempting, in Gross’s words, ‘to be a real human being and at the same time to live out an idea’;34 yet the idea she was trying to live out was simplified out of all recognition of the facts and left her, by her own later account, both fanatical in her beliefs and ‘unbalanced’ in her self.35 She was, Lawrence thought, one of those ‘Messiany people’ who ‘saves me, but can’t save herself ’ (1L 462); and in The Married Man and The Fight for Barbara he implies that she is narcissistic. ‘You love only yourself’, Wesson tells Barbara (Plays 269): she performs her emotions, sentimentally, capriciously, and her spontaneity resembles skittishness. Like Barbara, Frieda also tended to inhabit her current emotion without trying to integrate it with its fellow contrary. The ironic awareness of self-division, of the complexity of the self and its uneasy negotiations between aspiration and performance, so natural to the introverted Lawrence, is more or less absent in her – an absence that helps explain the dominance of her personality, her ‘sheer lack of sense of danger’ and her selfabsorption at the expense of others. Lawrence’s needs and feelings often clashed with hers, and the letters show her struggling to assimilate his criticisms. She had, for instance, thought over his accusation of narcissism: ‘He has taught me the feel and the understanding of things and people, that is morality, I think’

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(1L 439). Again, she had argued – with Gross – that ‘Love is sex’ and ‘ought to find its expression in the proper way’ (MN 127); but Lawrence distinguished the wildness and instability of sexual passion from the steadiness of ‘real love’ (1L 403), and Frieda reflected this when she told Garnett in September that ‘yes and it is love, but thank the Lord it is passion as well’ (1L 449). Similarly, she had believed with Gross that free love should rise above jealousy; yet both of Lawrence’s plays depict their heroines as jealous, and foreshadow the later assertion in Mr Noon that, despite all theory, ‘jealousy is as natural as love or laughter’ (MN 165), and has a place in any debate about free love and commitment. These ideas had already been argued over with Garnett at the Cearne; and in one letter, a chastened Frieda reassured him that, because of Lawrence’s influence, ‘I don’t even prance theories or anything else of the sort any longer’ (1L 439). A little later she even acknowledged an inner discipline to her love: ‘my theories have sadly altered, there are 2 sides to human love, one that wants to be faithful, the other wants to run, my running one was uppermost, but it’s going to be faithful now’ (1L 498). Lawrence was gradually gaining a foothold, however precarious, in his struggle against those ‘German theorisers’ whose unscrupulousness was, in Else’s words, characterized by ‘the absence of discrimination, the total lack of nuances and the capacity to distinguish between individual human beings’. It was not until 1915–16, however, with Twilight in Italy and Women in Love, that Lawrence first fully took the measure of Gross’s ideas, in each case by empathic identification with what he knew of the man. As Frieda would have recognized, if not the common reader, Birkin embodies aspects of both Gross and Lawrence himself. He is a new man, bisexual, hostile to the structures of a dying patriarchal world and struggling to understand the meaning of sexual relationships in the transcendent future that he hopes will succeed the Decadenceepoche of the present. Gross wrote of such relationships, heterosexual and homosexual alike, as a source of joy, a sacred third thing created between two people (‘als Drittes, als Religion’);36 and Birkin too rejoices in ‘the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but as an absolute consummation of his being and of her being in a new One, a new, paradisal oneness’ (FWL 338). For Birkin, however, unlike Gross, love entails commitment, both with Gerald and with Ursula; to Gerald he speaks of Blutbrüderschaft and to Ursula of the orbit established between twin stars attracted and repelled by each other in equal measure. But Gerald walks away, and Ursula is enraged by her sense of the bullying implicit in the magnetic power of the male. It was a battle that in real life Frieda never regretted: ‘she was glad she had fought him in the past. He had insisted in his male arrogance that man was the master and woman had to submit to him’.37 Lawrence’s struggle with her was driven partly by his need to establish himself as a separate being, related to her but nevertheless independent; and it was a struggle in which he

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felt his manhood was at stake. Where Gross was happy to yield the priority to Frieda, Lawrence was not. Paradoxically both his homosexual feelings and the masculinism of his sexual and political thought express his need to enter the man’s world, to integrate a sense of manhood within himself; and it is this masculinism that reveals the furthest point of his reaction against Frieda, against the self-image fostered in her by Gross and the feminism, matriarchy and anarchism of Gross’s radical politics. When Frieda bragged to Bunny Garnett that ‘of course I am an anarchist, and a beastly “aristo” ’, Lawrence had interjected ‘a fool!’ (1L 476). Her claim had this truth, that she was happy to live outside the conventions of polite society; she would have liked Ascona. But to Lawrence, who valued the pickaxe, the school board and the fountain pen, who lived by the discipline of paid work and knew that the great questions of property, capital and labour needed to be addressed, such anarchist posturing was foolish. There is little trace in his work of the anarchism of the German radicals whom Frieda knew; and the places in which they typically lived – Munich or Dresden – appear in his novels not as centres of anarchism but of anarchy. Even his wartime letters and writings, hectic as they are with fugitive opinions fished out of the great pool of contemporary political debate, never align themselves with anarchism; and anarchists, when they do appear in his fiction, do so only stereotypically, with bombs, emblems of the rage generated by the idealism of modern life. In Twilight in Italy, however, again for Frieda’s eyes only, Lawrence’s narrator assumes the identity of Gross’s son, in an act of Oedipal rivalry that directly enables him to take the measure of, and once again reject, the politics of his predecessor in Frieda’s affections. The narrator, like Gross himself, is a man who ‘was always wandering about’ (TI 209), vainly and restlessly scouring the external world in search of inner peace; and most recent among his disappointments is that provided by the Italian anarchists whom, in the previous chapter, he had watched rehearse a play. He confesses to a real liking for them, but cannot share their beliefs in ‘the perfectibility of man’ and ‘infinite harmony among men’ (TI 202). As Lawrence would tell Trigant Burrow years later, men are not ‘fully societal – and they never will be in the future’ (6L 113). The narrator feels a deep nostalgia for the simplicity of the Italians’ beliefs; but he knows there is no going back. Though his feelings are mixed, his judgement is clear, and it is one that recapitulates the book as a whole, including its references to Godwin and Shelley about whom Lawrence had recently been reading: the Italians, like the narrator himself, embody the contemporary sterile cross-fertilization of Northern and Southern Europe, and their anarchism – like the psychoanalysis that Gross also professed38 – inhabits the dead end of post-Renaissance rationalism. No theory of life, Lawrence is telling Frieda, can comprehend the creativity, diversity and inequality of living human beings. All his life, Lawrence was attracted by small marginalized communities of collaborative activity where friendship could ripen into purpose and purpose

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relax into friendship. Some were actual, like that of the Italians in Switzerland; some were fictional, like the Natcha-Kee-Tawara troupe in The Lost Girl; and some fluctuated between the two, like those imagined communities grouped together by Lawrence scholars under the name of Rananim. But none of those communities was circumscribed by an anarchist programme. The appeal of the Italians lies not in their theory but in the warmth and fun of their play-acting. It is in this fictional space between worlds that they feel truly free, and the same is true of the narrator. Giuseppino had attacked the government for taxing the people to build roads when ‘we could make our own roads’ (TI 201); but next morning, as the narrator leaves town, he thanks God ‘for the blessing of a road that belongs to no man, and travels away from all men’ (TI 204). The irony is clear: the idealized road, laid down by the imaginative writer for his own needs, is the one place where he feels provisionally free to explore the playful fictions permitted within the constraints of his society. If Frieda and Lawrence were united in their belief that ‘love is life’, they were also united, crucially, in their respect for art, for the work done with a fountain pen in ‘the creation of new forms’. In May 1912, Frieda told Garnett: ‘it’s fearfully exciting when he writes and I watch while it comes and it is a thrill’ (1L 410); and after his death she testified: ‘I read every day what he had written; his writing was the outcome of our daily life.’39 She was happy that he, as a man, should ‘go ahead and face the unknown’; but nevertheless as a woman, she must fight against the unrealities of his thinking, against his abstractions and absurdities like his masculinist politics, to ‘put his feet on the firm ground again’.40 While Lawrence resisted the threat to his marriage implicit in the ‘horrible German theorising’ of her radicalism (MN 272), she in turn would resist the fantastical idealism and chauvinism of those ideas by which he sought to maintain his independence of her. Marriage, Lawrence came to think, was ‘a terrible adjustment of two fearful opposites’ (MN 226); and amidst their love, their relish in one another’s liveliness and their shared respect for the playful creativeness of art, of real work done in real time, their marriage would remain both stimulated and endangered by this lifelong struggle to recreate one another in the image of their own needs and beliefs.

NOTES 1 For a full exploration of Lawrence’s possible interactions with German culture, see Carl Krockel, D. H. Lawrence: The Politics of Influence (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2007). 2 For an account of Else’s life, which I have drawn on here, see Eberhard Demm, Else Jaffé-von Richthofen: Erfülltes Leben zwischen Max und Alfred Weber (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2014). 3 Ibid., p. 91.

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4 John Worthen, Experiments: Lectures on Lawrence (Nottingham: CCCP, 2012), p. 260. 5 Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, but the Wind …’ (London: Heinemann, 1935), p. 37. 6 See Gottfried Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague/Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’: The Suppressed Psychoanalytic and Political Significance of Otto Gross (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 161. 7 John Turner, with Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, ‘The Otto Gross– Frieda Weekley Correspondence, Transcribed, Translated and Annotated’, in D. H. Lawrence Review, 22.2 (Summer, 1990): 212. 8 See Martin Green, The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), p. 53. 9 See Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague/Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’, p. 176. 10 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. E. W. Tedlock (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 91. 11 Otto Gross, ‘Letter to Maximilian Harden’, in Raimund Dehmlow, ed. Otto Gross: Von geschechtlicher Not zur sozialen Katastrophe (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2000), p. 74. 12 Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, but the Wind …’, p. 3. 13 Turner, Rumpf-Worthen Correspondence’, p. 165.

and

Jenkins,

‘The

Otto

Gross–Frieda

Weekley

14 Ibid., p. 174. 15 Ibid., p. 171. 16 Ibid., p. 167. 17 Ibid., p. 189. 18 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: John Wiley, 1975), p. 373. 19 The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Mannheim and R. F. C. Hull (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 90. 20 For this and the following two quotations, see Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague/Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’, p. 134. 21 Ibid., p. 119. 22 Ibid., p. 134. 23 Franz Werfel, Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit (1929) trans. Geoffrey Dunlop as The Pure in Heart (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), p. 357. 24 For an account of Frick’s life, which I have drawn on here, see Esther BertschingerJoos and Richard Butz, Ernst Frick 1881–1956: Anarchist in Zürich, Künstler und Förscher in Ascona, Monte Verità (Zürich: Limmat, 2014).

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25 Esther Bertschinger-Joos, Frieda Gross und ihre Briefe an Else Jaffé: Ein bewegtes Leben im Umfeld von Anarchismus, Psychoanalyse und Bohème (Marburg: LiteraturWissenschaft.de, 2014), p. 157. 26 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 83. 27 Bertschinger-Joos, Frieda Gross, p. 231. 28 Ibid., p. 171. 29 Ibid., pp. 24, 32. 30 The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 141. 31 Ibid., p. 160. 32 John Worthen, ‘The Biographer and Perspective’, in Writing the Lives of Writers, ed. W. G. Gould and T. F. Staley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 199. 33 Turner, Rumpf-Worthen Correspondence’, p. 168.

and

Jenkins,

‘The

Otto

Gross–Frieda

Weekley

34 Ibid., p. 188. 35 Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, but the Wind …’, p. 3. 36 Otto Gross, ‘Notiz über Beziehungen’, in Otto Gross: Von geschechtlicher Not zur sozialen Katastrophe, ed. Raimund Dehmlow (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2000), p. 72. 37 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 398. 38 For an account of Lawrence’s interactions with psychoanalysis, see my D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2020). 39 Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, but the Wind …’, p. 108. 40 Frieda Lawrence, Memoirs, p. 398.

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CHAPTER FOUR

D. H. Lawrence, Émile Zola and the bodily unconscious ANDREW HARRISON

The influence of Émile Zola, the founding figure of French naturalism, on Lawrence has received only minimal critical coverage. The major biographies contain little or no mention of Zola. Emile Delavenay is alone in listing Zola among the European authors from whom Lawrence learnt his craft; he suggests that the ‘novelist’s technique’ in Sons and Lovers (1913) was based in part on ‘the study of his English and French predecessors, from Balzac and Zola to George Moore, Gissing and Rutherford’.1 Criticism has also largely ignored the links between the two writers. There is just one mention of Zola, for instance, in the Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, and his name is invoked here simply in order to insist on his difference from Lawrence.2 David Trotter is the only critic to address in any detail the importance for Lawrence of the naturalist novel, with its ‘plot of decline, of physical and moral exhaustion’.3 He has referred to The Trespasser (1912) as ‘Lawrence’s neo-Naturalist Edwardian divorce-drama’ and noted how Winifred Inger in Women in Love (1920) ‘disappears into the downward spiral of Zolaesque tragedy. Ursula escapes’.4 Jack Stewart has discussed the striking similarities between the endings of The Rainbow (1915) and Germinal (1885), suggesting that Lawrence’s reading of Zola ‘may have prompted him to draw analogies

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between the life of plants and human development’.5 The current chapter is the first, however, to offer an account of Zola’s wider importance for Lawrence, and the influence he exerted on Lawrence’s writing. My starting point is a comment Lawrence made about Zola in an interview of August 1925 with a twenty-eight-year-old American journalist and aspiring author named Kyle Crichton. Crichton spoke to Lawrence at his then home, the Kiowa Ranch near San Cristobal in Taos County, New Mexico. He was an inexperienced interviewer but Lawrence seems to have warmed to him, and their ensuing discussion (recorded in a piece published in the New York World for 11 October 1925, which was enlarged in the mid-1950s for publication in the second volume of Edward Nehls’s Composite Biography) is peculiarly revealing of Lawrence’s attitudes to writers and writing at that date.6 Crichton grew up in Pennsylvania as the son of a miner, which probably accounted for Lawrence’s unusual willingness to recount his early life in Eastwood, his first attempts at writing and his entry into London literary circles. Lawrence mimicked Ford Madox Hueffer’s mannerisms for Crichton’s benefit and mentioned the kindness of Edward Garnett as ‘a good friend and a fine editor’.7 He made reference to several literary contacts, defending Violet Hunt’s work as a novelist (comparing her favourably to May Sinclair) and saying how much he and Frieda had enjoyed a recent visit from Willa Cather. In contrast, he offered satirical accounts of the literary pretensions and behaviour of Compton Mackenzie, Michael Arlen and John Middleton Murry (dismissing Murry’s excessive claims – as Lawrence saw it – for Katherine Mansfield’s literary reputation). He famously declared that his own motivation to write came not from ‘Egotism’ (as Frieda bluntly suggested) but from ‘a deep moral sense’: he suggested that writers ‘don’t write for anybody’, but for ‘the race, as it were’.8 Lawrence evidently enjoyed wrongfooting Crichton through the emphasis he placed on his pragmatic approach to writing and the disdain he displayed for what he liked to call ‘literairy’ culture.9 It is in this context that we must understand the admiration he expressed for Émile Zola: We first spoke of Harvey Fergusson’s Women and Wives because he was a New Mexican author and Lawrence said somebody had sent him the book. He said he thought it was ‘thin’ and then, probably out of a feeling he was being harsh with a young author and possibly my friend, he added hastily that early reviewers of his novels used to refer to them contemptuously as ‘Zolaesque’. ‘Zolaesque!’ I said in surprise, for it seemed the last thing anybody would say about a Lawrence novel. ‘They thought it would put me down’, said Lawrence, ‘but I took it as a compliment. I thought highly of Zola then, and I still do.’10

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Lawrence may have been recalling reviews of The White Peacock (1911) which compared his ‘needlessly frank’ writing to Zola and referred to his attempt ‘to write about English rural life and colliery villages in the style of the French naturalists’.11 These comments were occasioned by the ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ motif in The White Peacock and its emphasis on George Saxton’s physical degeneration and descent into alcoholism following his rejection by Lettie Beardsall. One review of Sons and Lovers used Zola as a point of reference too, noting that Lawrence’s analysis of characters used ‘not the scalpel like Zola and Flaubert, but the microscope’; another saw the novel as being indebted to the work of George Moore, Zola’s most significant acolyte writing in the English language.12 And Clement Shorter’s censorious review of The Rainbow – which was cited in the court proceedings when it was successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act in November 1915 – had suggested that ‘Zola’s novels are child’s food compared with the strong meat’ of Lawrence’s novel.13 Lawrence’s early short stories were also associated by reviewers with the subject matter and outspokenness of Zola’s writing: one reviewer of The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) referred to the ‘ugly world’ depicted in Lawrence’s tales, while another noticed in them ‘an inclination towards a rather hideous form of naturalism’.14 These references to Zola and naturalism were intended to ‘put [Lawrence] down’ because the publisher of the first translations of Zola’s works in English, Henry Vizetelly, had been tried and jailed under obscenity laws in 1889, and Zola’s name was still a byword for literary obscenity in England in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In mentioning Zola to Crichton, Lawrence was alluding with defiance to these reviewers’ censorious discovery in his early work of Zola’s morbidity and eroticism, but he did so with a knowledge of how unfashionable Zola’s kind of realist writing had become by the mid-1920s and of the ridicule that Zola’s name attracted at this time. In an essay on Lawrence first published in the Dial in 1916, Edward Garnett had argued that The White Peacock contains nothing of ‘Zola’s “false naturalism” or of his “scientific reporting” ’, as if the falseness of Zola’s realist method and the absurdity of his claims to scientific objectivity were recognized facts.15 Garnett would have had in mind Zola’s long essay of 1880 entitled ‘The Experimental Novel’ (Le roman expérimental), which served as a manifesto piece not only for his own RougonMacquart series of novels, but for literary naturalism more generally. Here Zola draws an analogy between the aims of the naturalist author and the scientific ambitions of experimental medicine as they are set out in Claude Bernard’s essay ‘Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine’ (Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale), which was first published in 1865. Zola explains how modern science has replaced the mysticism of earlier times with a rational account of the ways in which both inanimate and animate bodies are determined by ‘physico-chemical properties’. Laws established in chemistry and

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physics which have been applied to physiology should (in Zola’s view) also be brought to bear on human nature. For Zola, then, the aim of the experimental novel should be the same as the aim of experimental medicine, namely to find ‘the relations which unite a phenomenon of any kind to its nearest cause, or, in other words, … determining the conditions necessary for the manifestation of this phenomenon’.16 The analogy Zola wishes to draw between the doctor conducting medical experiments in order to prove or disprove a working hypothesis in the field of medicine and the novelist’s desire to discover laws of human nature by tracing behaviour back to the influence of environmental and hereditary factors attracted widespread derision. Zola argues that both doctor and novelist must not deviate from the ‘laws of nature’, but it is difficult to see how the scientific standards by which experimental medicine is judged can be replicated in the realms of fiction to produce objective ‘knowledge of the man, scientific knowledge of him, in both his individual and social relations’.17 Crichton’s surprise that Lawrence’s writing could be considered ‘Zolaesque’ perhaps reflects Zola’s association with this quasi-scientific approach to recording social issues and family histories, and with low-life subjects and a drily factual documentary style. In seeking to trace the influence of environment and heredity on his characters, Zola often had recourse to working-class life and to the poverty and squalor experienced by manual labourers and those at the margins of society. Lawrence was never simply concerned with recording deprivation in the same way as the writers of slum fiction such as Arthur Morrison and Hubert Crackanthorpe, who were in vogue in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, nor with exploring the ‘Woman Question’ in the sensational manner of George Gissing, George Moore, Arnold Bennett or H. G. Wells (contemporary writers who were influenced by this slum writing, and by Zola), though we know that he admired these writers as a young man.18 Social deprivation and its consequences are only one small part of the ‘mosaic of moods’ in Lawrence’s early novels, and his concern with female emancipation is primarily psychological, traced through the urgent and contradictory desires of specific female characters rather than through their material circumstances.19 His early writing could hardly be charged with being drily factual, since it is characteristically lyrical and full of purple passages. Lawrence’s expression of admiration for Zola, then, clearly went beyond simple matters of approach, subject and style. On one level, by embracing his association with Zola, Lawrence sought to underline his difference from what he had earlier termed ‘the fashionable folk under French influence’ (1L 417) who belonged to the ‘accurate-impersonal school of Flaubert’ (1L 169). Hueffer had been particularly insistent that the young Lawrence should shed his prolixity and discover the accurate formal qualities and economy of the French writing he admired. Lawrence resisted the pressure to conform to the ‘school of Flaubert’ and expressed distaste at the impersonal aesthetics of the high modernists. In

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1913, he described Thomas Mann as ‘the last sick sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert’. He claimed to find the ‘fine’ expression in Mann’s work ‘banal’ and asserted that young writers should instead be ‘sufficiently aware of the fulsomeness of life’ (IR 211). In 1923, he had reiterated his disdain for the refined self-consciousness of his high modernist contemporaries James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Marcel Proust, noting that ‘the purely emotional and self-analytical stunts are played out in me. I’m finished. I’m deaf to the whole band’ (STH 154). Zola’s brand of naturalism offered Lawrence a more congenial model for his writing, precisely because of the formal imperfection of Zola’s work, his engaged political stance and his concern for ‘the fulsomeness of life’. On another level, however, Lawrence’s admiration for Zola indicates a more significant indebtedness to his novels. Here we need to exercise a degree of caution. Lawrence was, of course, thoroughly conversant with naturalist fiction and drama from the very start of his career, but the evidence for his reading of Zola is sparse and contradictory. Jessie Chambers makes no mention of Zola in her otherwise very detailed account of Lawrence’s early reading. In a paper he read to the Eastwood Debating Society on 19 March 1908, Lawrence listed Zola among a number of authors and artists who do not excite ‘pleasurable’ feeling or ‘show Divine purpose’ but can be said to be Art all the same because they ‘express their deep, real feelings’ (STH 226). In a letter of 11 November 1908, Lawrence praised Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833) for its ‘level headed, fair, unrelenting realism’ and lack of sentimentality and melodrama, comparing it favourably to De Maupassant and Zola, who ‘inevitably light on a wound, or a festering sore’ (1L 91–2). Both comments seem to reflect a serious engagement with Zola’s work. However, while in April 1911 Lawrence told Louie Burrows that he had La Débâcle (1892) and L’Assommoir (1877) to give away, in November 1916 he asked Catherine Carswell for a copy of L’Assommoir and claimed only to have read Germinal (1885).20 Lawrence’s reference in The Rainbow to the ‘Zolaesque tragedy’ (R 322) of the miners’ lives in the pits run by Ursula Brangwen’s Uncle Tom in Wiggiston confirms his knowledge of Germinal. Ursula is fascinated by the ‘terrible gaunt repose’ of the miners’ bearing: ‘like creatures with no more hope, but which still live and have passionate being, within some utterly unliving shell, they passed meaninglessly along, with strange, isolated dignity’ (R 321). In Zola’s novel, the miners at Le Voreux and the other nearby pits are rendered powerless by market forces which leave them close to starvation, trapped in dilapidated rented accommodation and subject to the whims of a local store owner who gives credit in exchange for sexual favours. A strike initiated by the central character, Étienne Lantier, who aligns himself with the International, unleashes the rage of the starving miners who murder and emasculate the offending store owner and attack the pit machinery, but this does nothing to change their

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conditions of work. Analogies are constantly drawn between the workers and insects or animals. Jeanlin, a young son of the Maheu family with whom Étienne lodges, responds to the conditions of mining life and the strike by adapting in a degenerative manner, leading a group of children and stealing to survive before retreating into a disused mineshaft like a rodent and killing one of the sentries sent by the authorities to police Le Voreux following the strikers’ attacks on it. The miners who survive the ordeal of the strike eventually return to work beaten and humiliated. The anarchist Souvarine’s desperate act of sabotaging Le Voreux at the end of the novel results in further death and destruction as the mine workings collapse and are flooded. As Jack Stewart has noted, the ending to Germinal is in some respects comparable to the ending of The Rainbow, since both authors offer consoling utopian visions of the overthrow of industrial modernity. Stewart shows how both Zola and Lawrence employ botanical vocabulary and symbolism throughout their respective novels to explore the ways in which characters are stunted by their social, spiritual and intellectual contexts, and their potential for self-realization. As Étienne leaves Le Voreux on a bright April day, he imagines all his beleaguered former comrades hacking away at the coal seams underground like so many seeds with the power to create a new world order: Everywhere seeds were swelling and lengthening, cracking open the plain in their upward thrust for warmth and light. The sap was rising in abundance with whispering voices, the germs of life were opening with a kiss. … Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.21 Ursula Brangwen feels a similar potential in the ‘stiffened bodies of the colliers’ (R 458) at the end of Lawrence’s novel: She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. (R 458–9) Stewart observes how ‘Zola puts the accent on social liberation, Lawrence on flowering of being’, but he argues that ‘their visions of a vital future are complementary’.22 Behind the complementary vitalism, however, lies a more pessimistic shared preoccupation with damaged and conflicted characters. Lawrence’s writing up to Women in Love, like Zola’s, frequently lighted on

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‘a wound, or a festering sore’ in his characters. Lawrence explored these psychological wounds with a frankness which makes comparisons to Zola inevitable and enlightening. Zola’s sensational and sometimes melodramatic handling of the hereditary taints in his characters provided Lawrence with one powerful model for how to narrate self-division. I will argue here that Lawrence is indebted at some level to Zola’s distinctive handling of the bodily unconscious as a means to explore the conflict between inherited traits or instinctual drives and environmental conditioning. Zola’s treatment of heredity in his novels is often quite self-contained, lying beneath the primary emphasis on environment. In Germinal, Étienne has inherited from his father, Auguste Lantier, a murderous bloodlust which he knows is activated by the consumption of alcohol or by being placed in situations where his temper is pushed beyond reasonable limits. Early in the novel, Zola briefly refers back to Étienne’s family history, as it is set out and explored in L’Assommoir, mentioning his father and his mother (Gervaise Macquart) as a way of accounting for this consciously suppressed aspect of his identity: Whenever he thought about these things a pale flicker came into his dark eyes, as he glimpsed the terrifying hidden flaw in his fine youthful vigour. For a moment he gazed unseeing into the darkness of the mine, and there, in these depths, under the suffocating weight of earth, he saw his childhood again – his mother, still pretty and stout-hearted, abandoned by his father, and then taken up again after marrying another man; living between the two of them who both preyed on her, and finally rolling with them in drink and filth down to the gutter. It was away yonder … Yes, the street and all the details came back to him now – the dirty linen lying all over the shop, the drunken orgies stinking all over the house, the jaw-breaking blows.23 The tendency towards degenerative violence which is passed down to Étienne is felt both in the aggressive nature of his limited intelligence and in his extraordinary capacity for violence in extremis. Zola foregrounds how Étienne’s initial sense of injustice about the treatment of his fellow workers is complicated by an aggressive and selfish desire to improve his own circumstances and to humiliate and defeat the more moderate Rasseneur, who argues for mediation between miners and mine-owners. At one point, Étienne comes close to hitting Rasseneur, but ‘to resist the temptation he worked off his fury on the seats, striding down the hall and knocking them out of the way’.24 The wife of his landlord, Maheude, disparages ‘his violent language’ when he speaks of the clash between labour and capital, and thinks he is ‘aggressive’.25 We quickly realize that behind the veneer of socialist sympathy lies a powerful and ruthless will to survive. There are two scenes in the novel where Étienne’s hidden aggression emerges in a murderous fashion. In these scenes, his body takes on a life of its own,

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expressing the violent impulses which he has tried so hard to control. The first is when Étienne’s love rival (Chaval) taunts him in Rasseneur’s pub, and the two men fight. Étienne pins Chaval to the ground: A horrible, deafening voice was rising within him, coming up from his very entrails and banging like a hammer in his head. It was a sudden insane desire to murder a man, a lust for blood. He had never had it so badly before, and yet he was not drunk this time. He fought against his hereditary taint with the frantic paroxysms of a man mad with lust struggling on the verge of rape.26 The body here is an almost unstoppable force, and the mind is powerless to control it. In David Baguley’s formulation, heredity is shown to be ‘the invisible, deific force which provides a pattern of necessity revealed, of law unfolded’.27 Zola uses the analogy with madness to identify Étienne’s lack of conscious agency and the shocking urgency of his physical impulses. In the second scene, from towards the end of the novel, Étienne, who is trapped underground with Chaval and Catherine (the innocent but physically and psychologically stunted woman whom he loves), turns on Chaval and kills him: Then Étienne went mad. A red mist swam before his eyes and blood surged up to his head. The blood-lust was upon him, as imperious as a physical need, as a lump of phlegm in the throat that makes you cough. It rose up in him and his will-power was swept away before the onrush of his hereditary taint. He laid hold of a flake of shale in the wall, tugged it from side to side until it came away. Huge and heavy though it was he raised it in both hands, and with superhuman strength brought it down on Chaval’s skull. Having killed Chaval, we are told that ‘though his hair stood on end at the horror of this murder, though all his upbringing cried out in protest, his heart was beating faster with sheer joy, the animal joy of an appetite satisfied at last. And then there was pride, the pride of the stronger.’28 This moment underscores the novel’s critique of Étienne’s socialist convictions as little more than rhetoric driven by an unconscious desire for power and precedence. Étienne’s conflicted identity is explored through external description and free-indirect discourse, as Zola dissects the division in his nature between his overweening consciousness and his suppressed bodily unconscious. Jessie Chambers records a discussion with the young Lawrence in which he asserted that George Eliot was the first author who ‘started putting all the action inside’. He explained how ‘before, you know, with Fielding and the others, it had been outside’ and wondered ‘which is right? … You know I can’t help

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thinking there ought to be a bit of both.’29 Despite the fact that it is Lawrence’s only first-person novel, The White Peacock narrates the divisions in George Saxton’s nature from the outside, describing (for instance) how he is violently sick after his final separation from Lettie (WP 216), and how he degenerates into a drunken sot following marriage to his cousin Meg. The Trespasser, in contrast, is entirely internalized, exploring Siegmund MacNair’s desperate illicit longing for Helena Verden within the context of his dissatisfaction with his home life with his wife and children. It was only with Sons and Lovers that Lawrence combined external and internal perspectives, exploring Paul Morel’s conflicted identity through vivid dramatic scenes and the use of free-indirect discourse. It is here, if anywhere, that we can trace Zola’s influence on Lawrence, as he finds ways to articulate the impact of environment/upbringing and heredity on his central character. Lawrence once referred to Sons and Lovers as having been written in ‘that hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation’ (2L 132). The violence of the working-class male figures in the novel (Walter Morel and Baxter Dawes) is presented as their involuntary response to disempowerment and humiliation within their failing marriages. Paul Morel consciously reacts against such violence, pleasing his mother by developing a strangely hybrid persona based partly on his progress in employment at Jordan’s and partly on his art work and interest in French literature. Yet Lawrence is also at pains to show how this persona is a brittle façade which swiftly breaks down when his mother dies. At another, more deeply embedded and unconscious, bodily level, Paul inherits his father’s passionate nature and violent tendencies, and even shares with his father a deep feeling of furious resentment towards his mother.30 Zola’s narration of the moments of violence when his characters’ hereditary traits surface employs a shockingly outspoken frankness which shades into melodrama. In creating similar scenes in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence also risked descending from an earnest exploration of internal tensions into sensationalism and bathos. The outbursts of hereditary violence in Zola are introduced in a very conscious, self-contained manner: even as we involve ourselves in a character’s plight, we feel that the incidents have been introduced to support or prove a hypothesis about the power of inherited traits. The scenes in Lawrence’s novel are far more fully embedded in the wider exploration of conflicted identity, and they are perhaps less obviously melodramatic because the writing itself seems to combine a conscious and deliberate thematic force and use of language with less obvious forms of significance which the author may not have been fully aware of, or in control of, as he wrote. Lawrence prepares the way for the scenes by showing how Paul’s veneer of cultured respectability gives way in unguarded moments to violence which exposes unresolved inner conflicts vis-à-vis his parents. The young Paul burns his sister Annie’s doll, Arabella, to exorcise his guilt at having accidentally

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damaged it (SL 82–3); he gives himself up to physical experience when playing on a swing at Willey Farm, and he is blind to Miriam Leivers’s fear of losing control of her own body (180–2); and his blood boils when Miriam struggles to grasp algebra, and he throws a pencil in her face (189). Paul’s barely repressed passion is explored in an explicit way in the scene with Clara Dawes at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham, where they are attending a stage adaptation of the novel La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. The scene is particularly powerful because Paul’s desire in this case emerges in response to French literature and performance, two things which have hitherto underpinned the cultured persona he has carefully cultivated for his mother’s benefit. Lawrence uses a distinctly naturalist language to describe Paul’s heightened attraction to Clara as the lights go down and she leans into him: ‘he could smell her faint natural perfume, and it drove him wild with hunger. All the time, his blood kept sweeping up in great white-hot waves, that killed his consciousness momentarily’ (SL 375). As he responds to the passion on the stage, and the captivating performance of Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role, he becomes disorientated and uncertain whether his identity is rooted in desire itself (centred in the body) or in performance: The drama continued. He saw it all in the distance, going on somewhere, he did not know where, but it seemed far away inside him. He was Clara’s white, heavy arms, her throat, her moving bosom. That seemed to be himself. Then away somewhere the play went on, and he was identified with that also. There was no himself. The grey and black eyes of Clara, her bosom coming down on him, her arm that he held gripped between his hands were all that existed. Then he felt himself small and helpless, her towering in her force above him. (SL 375–6) Paul’s dissociated consciousness here carries echoes of his father’s drunken state when he pushes his wife (Paul’s mother, Gertrude) out into the garden. In this early scene in the novel, Walter Morel, overcome with rage at his powerlessness, ‘came up to her, his red face, with its blood-shot eyes, thrust forward, and gripped her arms’ (SL 33). The exploration of self-division in Paul continues in the scene where Clara’s estranged husband, Baxter Dawes, attacks him at Daybrook train station. The scene is narrated in a manner reminiscent of Zola: He heard Dawes’ heavy panting, like a wild beast’s. Then came a kick on his knee, giving him such agony that he got up and, quite blind, leapt clean under his enemy’s guard. He felt blows and kicks but they did not hurt. He hung onto the bigger man like a wild cat, till at last Dawes fell with a crash, losing his presence of mind. Paul went down with him. Pure instinct

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brought his hands to the man’s neck, and before Dawes, in frenzy and agony, could wrench him free, he had got his fists twisted in the scarf and his knuckles dug in the throat of the other man. He was a pure instinct, without reason or feeling. His body, hard and wonderful in itself, cleaved against the struggling body of the other man. Not a muscle in him relaxed. He was quite unconscious, only his body had taken upon itself to kill this other man. For himself he had neither feeling nor reason. He lay, pressed hard against his adversary, his body adjusting itself to its one pure purpose of choking the other man, resisting exactly at the right moment, with exactly the right amount of strength, the struggles of the other, silent, intent, unchanging, gradually pressing its knuckles deeper, feeling the struggles of the other body become wilder and more frenzied. Tighter and tighter grew his body, like a screw that is gradually increasing in pressure, till something breaks. (SL 410) The writing here is tentative and experimental in the way that it attempts to describe Paul’s state of being. He becomes ‘pure instinct’, like a wild cat, without ‘presence of mind’, ‘without reason or feeling’. He is also ‘quite unconscious’. At this level, reflection is lost and the body takes over. Lawrence’s free-indirect discourse charts the change in Paul’s being, as Dawes becomes simply ‘the other man’, ‘his adversary’, ‘the other body’. The short sentences and numerous clauses capture the quick and deliberate movements of Paul’s body, as it overcomes the enemy, Dawes. Nothing in Paul’s actual behaviour up to this point has prepared the reader for his murderous intentness in this scene. We have hitherto witnessed his capacity for detachment and cruelty, violence and recklessness, mainly in domestic or symbolic scenes. Here we directly witness the hereditary bond that Paul shares with his father. For the first time in the novel, Paul is described as ‘Morel’: his dominance in the fight reminds us of his father’s tendency to lash out when challenged or humiliated. We are made to see Paul’s link with his father at the level of the bodily unconscious or the blood. In Germinal, Étienne Lantier’s intellectual pretensions are undercut by his violent attack on Chaval, and his brutal murdering of Chaval underground. He seems fated to kill his love rival. Zola’s interest lies in the inevitable split between our conscious, social and purposive personae and our unconscious, selfish and murderous drives. Lawrence also shows how Paul’s cultured persona is displaced by his passionate, violent, cruel and reckless drives, but in the later chapters of Sons and Lovers the emphasis falls on Paul’s attempt to integrate the two aspects of his identity, as he befriends Baxter Dawes and facilitates Baxter’s reunion with Clara in a move which seems to reflect an underlying desire for reconciliation between his own father and mother. This is the key difference between Lawrence and Zola’s explorations of conflicted identity. The bodily unconscious in Zola is murderous and antisocial,

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and characters caught up in it become mere agents of destruction and selfdestruction. Like Zola, Lawrence explores the violence and destructiveness of the bodily unconscious, but his own emphasis is invariably on the desperate struggle to attain wholeness, or to integrate the body’s drives into a renewed sense of self which exists in the social realm while participating in an eternal realm linked to nature, religion and myth. We can trace Lawrence’s concern with the violence of the bodily unconscious, and characters’ struggles to attain a wholeness of being, in two short stories from the Prussian Officer volume. In ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, military discipline and the performance of duty are contrasted with the emotional lives and sexual needs of two young soldiers. In the title story, ‘The Prussian Officer’, the young orderly attains a sense of intactness, apart from military duty, through silent physical contact with his ‘sweetheart, a girl from the mountains, independent and primitive’ (PO 5). Their love for one another gives the orderly an air of being free and self-contained. This irritates the captain, who seeks to destroy the young man’s self-containment through the sadistic bullying of him. Lawrence makes it clear that the captain’s nature is suppressed and that military hierarchy and routine only exacerbate his conflicted identity. His capacity for emotional connection has been replaced by the need to dominate and control, and his only way to truly feel an affective bond is through violence. While his body punishes the orderly and feels illicit passion, ‘at once a thrill of deep pleasure, and of shame’, his mind refuses to understand the situation: he ‘would not know that his feeling for his orderly was anything but that of a man incensed by his stupid, perverse servant’. At one point, the captain apparently seeks to heal the agony created in him by the sight of the orderly by going away with a woman, but the days he spends with her are only ‘a mockery of pleasure’ because he does not want her; he returns in ‘an agony of irritation, torment, and misery’ (PO 6). The intensification of his bullying eventually causes the orderly to lose his own sense of wholeness and neutrality. At this stage, the orderly’s bruised body acts instinctively, and without premeditation, to break the officer’s neck. The bodily unconscious emerges here in a murderous capacity which we can certainly understand as Zolaesque. The officer fails to attain wholeness by mimicking the orderly’s relationship with his sweetheart, while the orderly loses his wholeness by unconsciously imitating the officer’s physical brutality. Having killed the officer, the orderly feels ‘divided’ from his fellow soldiers and dies ‘astonished at the pain and his lack of balance’ (PO 16). Despite its stark analysis of destructive degeneration, ‘The Prussian Officer’ offers a complex, layered depiction of the body. The wholeness which the orderly attains through contact with his sweetheart is overcome by the officer’s brutalizing behaviour, so that his body is in some sense owned by the officer and by the military authorities. His murder of the officer is only partly, then,

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the realization of his own unconscious drive; it is primarily an expression of violence encouraged by the system he serves and has been forced to embody. Lawrence distinguishes between the body as a social object and as a site of being with a transcendent religious significance. The contrast here is between, on the one hand, the body that obeys military orders ‘so humbly and mechanically’, and on the other the unconscious ‘core’ in ‘the centre of his chest’ which ‘was himself, himself, firm, and not to be plucked to pieces’ (PO 13). In an inversion of the plot of ‘The Prussian Officer’, the sacred, inviolable body wins out against the social body in the second military tale, ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’. This is another story which pivots around the bodily unconscious through an involuntary act of violence on the part of a young soldier whose wholeness of being is threatened by military discipline. Bachmann suffers from vertigo, so when he is forced to scale ramparts as part of a military drill he wets himself through fear. This is the kind of bodily detail – like George Saxton’s vomiting in The White Peacock – which reviewers would have linked to naturalism. Feeling deep shame, Bachmann then suffers the humiliation of being lifted off the ladder and onto the top of the ramparts by an officer, who proceeds to berate him. Lawrence uses an extraordinarily emotive language to describe Bachmann’s feelings: he feels ‘shame, blind, deep shame and ignominy’, and stands ‘shrunk over himself, trying to obliterate himself ’ (PO 25). We are told that ‘the brutal, hanging face of the officer violated the youth’ (PO 26). The sexual term here identifies the same feeling that the orderly had in ‘The Prussian Officer’ of being physically and psychologically possessed and owned by military authority. Bachmann’s response is to raise his arm ‘involuntarily, in self-defence’, but in doing so he strikes the officer ‘a brutal blow’ (PO 26). The act is richly ambivalent: the bodily unconscious acts to defend the integrity of the self while also striking out in a murderous fashion against that which threatens it. Bachmann gets away by wandering into the nearby city of Metz, and ultimately he decides to place himself in the hands of his sweetheart Emilie, who is in service at the house of a Baron. Emilie allows him to take refuge in her room. As a Roman Catholic, she has a crucifix by her bed. Bachmann’s identification with the Christ figure gives the title of the story its full significance; he is the suffering Christ mortified in the flesh, and his subsequent sexual experiences with the virginal Emilie constitute a kind of mutual awakening or resurrection. He is born into a self-possessed adulthood, while she is drawn (at least for a time) out of her cold aloofness. When Bachmann is apprehended by soldiers and taken into custody, he has attained a kind of wholeness which military authority cannot affect. Only ‘the shell of his body’ stands to attention; as he is led away, he does not even need to look at Emilie, since he is assured that ‘they knew each other. They were themselves’ (PO 38). In his next novel, The Rainbow, Lawrence explicitly addresses his heroine Ursula Brangwen’s experience of entering the social mechanism in order to

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show her resisting the self-division it enforces. In the chapter entitled ‘First Love’, Ursula reflects on her need to move from the ‘Sunday world’ of feelings and yearning to the ‘week-day world’ of social responsibility and routine. She initially feels that she must renounce the ‘Sunday world’: the old duality of life, wherein there had been a week-day world of people and trains and duties and reports, and besides that a Sunday world of absolute truth and living mystery, of walking upon the waters and being blinded by the face of the Lord, of following the pillar of cloud across the desert and watching the bush that crackled yet did not burn away, this old, unquestioned duality suddenly was found to be broken apart. The week-day world had triumphed over the Sunday world. The Sunday world was not real, or at least, not actual. And one lived by action. (R 263) A visit to her Uncle Tom’s colliery in Yorkshire, however, arouses in her a spirit of rebellion. The colliers have given way to the ‘Zolaesque tragedy’ of their lives, learning to accept that ‘marriage and home is a little side-show’ and ‘the pit … all that really matters’ (R 323). In rebelling against the status quo, and refusing to accept tragic, Zolaesque self-division, Ursula learns to embrace a lonely freedom: ‘she had departed. No more would she subscribe to the great colliery, to the great machine which has taken us all captives. In her soul, she was against it, she disowned even its power’ (R 324). Her subsequent journey entails renouncing work, education and marriage as things which threaten her individuality and integrity, and insisting upon the primacy of her feelings and her need for emotional fulfilment in a transformed social world. The optimism of The Rainbow and its exploration of Ursula’s brave and principled integrity and search for wholeness give way to pessimism and bitterness in Women in Love. Here, as part of his analysis of the war machine and the war spirit, Lawrence addressed the triumph of mechanization and self-division, and depicted in shocking detail the unconscious violence that he felt they had unleashed. Elsewhere I have argued that Gerald Crich is a Zolaesque figure caught up in mechanism and a tragic, suicidal determinism.31 Hermione Roddice’s attack on Rupert Birkin in her boudoir, bringing a lapis lazuli paperweight down on his head, uncannily echoes Étienne Lantier’s killing of Chaval in Germinal. Lawrence had arguably come full circle: in Sons and Lovers and the Prussian Officer stories, he explored the conflictedness of the self and its struggle for wholeness; in The Rainbow, he had critiqued the ‘Zolaesque tragedy’ of capitulation to the social mechanism; now, in Women in Love, he analysed the consequences for his society of what Zola had depicted in the France of the Second Empire, namely the triumph of the industrial complex and the ubiquitous nature of divisions in the self.

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Lawrence’s association of Zola with the exploration and articulation of violent self-division is made clear in his short story ‘The Princess’, which was written between late September and early October 1924, less than a year before his interview with Kyle Crichton. The central protagonist of this story, Dollie Urquhart, is one of Lawrence’s most stark studies in self-division. Indeed, in her case the separation of the bodily unconscious from the overweening mind or spirit has disastrous consequences for both herself and the Mexican with whom she journeys into the New Mexican wilderness. Lawrence makes it clear that Dollie’s reading of Zola in her youth has shaped her way of viewing the world and encouraged the divisions in her nature and the disgust she feels regarding the body and sex: ‘when she was in her teens she read Zola and Maupassant, and with the eyes of Zola and Maupassant she looked on Paris. … She could look at a lusty, sensual Roman cabman as if he were a sort of grotesque to make her smile. She knew all about him, in Zola’ (SM 162, 163). Zola teaches Dollie to view the bodily unconscious as grotesque and absurd, so when her own body calls out to Domingo Romero in the middle of the night, and they sleep together, she later recoils from it in a cold and detached fashion which seals both of their fates. Domingo is convinced that she wants him despite the regret she expresses about the experience; he imprisons and rapes her before being shot and killed by a man from the Forest Service. The action of the bodily unconscious in this story results in the violent death of Romero and it precipitates Dollie’s descent into a ‘slightly crazy’ (SM 196) state of denial. In a letter to Edward Garnett written sometime between 30 October and 2 November 1912, Lawrence described the naturalist playwrights August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen as ‘the Writers among the Ruins’. He felt that they – and writers influenced by them, such as Joseph Conrad – were too fatalistic: ‘I can’t forgive Conrad for being so sad and for giving in’ (1L 465). Zola was in many ways the ultimate ‘Writer among the Ruins’. His fictional world of the Rougon-Macquart novels is one in which mechanistic forces have overwhelmed the individual; he traces, piece by piece, the mechanics of war, industry and consumerism, exploring the dehumanization of the individual at a social level and the collapse of the conscious and purposive self into violent social and hereditary drives. Yet, while Lawrence found Strindberg ‘unnatural, forced, a bit indecent’, and Ibsen ‘a bit wooden … a bit skin-erupty’ (1L 465), Zola was another matter altogether. In him, Lawrence discovered an important literary precedent for exploring self-division through the bodily unconscious. We have seen how the ‘hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation’ which Lawrence came to criticize in Sons and Lovers owed something to Zola’s dramatic presentation of violent scenes to explore hereditary forces. Lawrence’s primary interest lay in tracing his characters’ striving after forms of self-integration and wholeness, but Zola’s analysis of the collapse of the divided self showed him how one might set about articulating the absence or

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loss of wholeness and charting its consequences. For this reason, we might say that Zola’s fiction haunts Lawrence’s writing up to and including Women in Love. Lawrence expressed his admiration for Zola in his interview with Kyle Crichton. In 1908, he had placed Zola alongside Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, describing them as writers who expressed their ‘deep, real feelings’. He might have said of Zola’s novels what he had said of Poe’s tales: that they needed to be written ‘because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass’ (SCAL 66).

NOTES 1 Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work, The Formative Years, 1885–1919, trans. Katharine M. Delavenay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), p. 117. 2 Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 250. 3 David Trotter, The English Novel in History: 1895–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 114. 4 David Trotter, The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2010), p. 91; Trotter, The English Novel in History, p. 192. 5 Jack Stewart, ‘Germinal, Germination, and The Rainbow’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 37.1 (2012): 18–36, 18. 6 See D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Vol. II, ed. Edward Nehls (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), pp. 410–19. A very slightly modified account of the interview is provided in Kyle Crichton’s autobiography, Total Recoil (New York: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 217–31. 7 Composite Biography, Vol. II, p. 413. 8 Ibid., p. 414. 9 John Worthen and Andrew Harrison, ‘Further Letters of D. H. Lawrence,’ Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 2.2 (2010): 13. 10 Composite Biography, Vol. II, p. 411. 11 R. P. Draper, ed. D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 3. The reviews in question appeared in Athenaeum (25 February 1911) and the Nottinghamshire Guardian (21 February 1911). 12 Critical Heritage, p. 62 and SL lxvii. The reviews appeared in the Daily Chronicle (17 June 1913) and the Irish Times. 13 Critical Heritage, p. 96. The review appeared in Sphere (23 October 1915). 14 See PO xxxiii–xxxiv. The reviews appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (3 December 1914) and Standard (4 December 1914).

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15 Critical Heritage, p. 117. The essay, entitled ‘Art and the Moralists: Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s Work’, was published in the Dial on 16 November 1916. 16 Émile Zola, ‘The Experimental Novel’, in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (New York: Cassell, 1893), pp. 1–54, p. 3. 17 Zola, ‘Experimental Novel’, p. 9. 18 See, for example, E. T. [Jessie Chambers], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 121. 19 E. T., Personal Record, p. 104. 20 See 1L 258 and 3L 38. 21 Émile Zola, Germinal, trans. L. W. Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 498–9. 22 Stewart, ‘Germinal, Germination, and The Rainbow’, 25. 23 Zola, Germinal, p. 57. 24 Ibid., p. 232. 25 Ibid., p. 223. 26 Ibid., p. 388. 27 David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 107. 28 Zola, Germinal, pp. 477–8. 29 E. T., Personal Record, p. 105. 30 For a fascinating exploration of Paul’s suppressed affiliations with his father, see Ronald Granofsky, ‘ “His Father’s Dirty Digging”: Recuperating the Masculine in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers’, Modern Fiction Studies, 55.2 (June 2009): 242–64. 31 See Andrew Harrison, D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 172–5.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Cultural difference: Writings on the American south-west and Mexico NEIL ROBERTS

Of all the authors D. H. Lawrence discusses in Studies in Classic American Literature, James Fenimore Cooper is the one for whom he betrays the most spontaneous affection: ‘I have loved the Leatherstocking books so dearly’ (SCAL 52). Cooper and Walt Whitman are the only ones of these authors whom Jessie Chambers mentions as significant for Lawrence in the ‘Literary Formation’ chapter of D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, and the reading of the Leatherstocking novels seems to belong, with such books as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, to an earlier, pre-critical phase.1 Other American writers such as Whitman and Herman Melville may have had a greater influence on Lawrence’s work, but it was Cooper who supplied the template for the expectations about contact with Native Americans that Lawrence brought to New Mexico in September 1922. That declaration of love for the Leatherstocking novels is followed by the exclamation ‘Wish-fulfilment!’ The final version of Studies was written between October and December 1922, the period when Lawrence was most sceptical about Cooper, Native Americans and above all whites who were sympathetic to Native Americans. The book registers the shock that the actual experience of cultural difference delivered to the mindset with which he approached America, as expressed in a letter written two months after receiving an invitation to visit

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New Mexico from Mabel Dodge Luhan: ‘I believe in America one can catch up some kind of emotional impetus from the aboriginal Indian and from the aboriginal air and land, that will carry one over this crisis of the world’s soul depression, into a new epoch’ (4L 157). What Lawrence most valued in Cooper’s novels, at least when he reread them in 1916, was the portrayal of the relationship between the white scout Natty Bumppo and the Mohican chief Chingachgook. ‘His whole soul embraces the dark aboriginal soul with unceasing, fertile love’; ‘He yearned mystically to the soul of his Red brother’; their relationship is ‘true marriage with the aboriginal psyche … the ultimate atonement between races’ (SCAL 216, 217). At this stage, Lawrence shares the ‘wish-fulfilment’ of the American novelist. As we have seen, this was to change, but he remained true to one of the dominant themes of the first, 1917–19 version of Studies, the importance of recognizing ‘otherness’ both in people and in nature, of maintaining one’s own integral self and never ‘merging’ with the other. In the same chapter, he describes the friendship of Natty and Chingachgook as the ‘unknowable intercommunion of two untranslatable souls’, and insists that Natty ‘must remain true to his own way, his own mystery. But now at last he acknowledges perfectly and in full the opposite mystery – the mystery of the other’ (SCAL 222, 228). Natty provides the perfect model of cross-cultural relations for someone of Lawrence’s predilection. In The Last of the Mohicans, perhaps the most important of Cooper’s novels for Lawrence, though not the one he most admired (this was The Deerslayer), Natty, or Hawkeye as he is called in this book, insists obsessively and repetitively that he is a man with ‘no cross in his blood’, that ‘being a white-skin, I will not deny my nature’.2 When Chingachgook kills and scalps a young French soldier whom his white companions had courteously conversed with, Hawkeye comments, ‘’Twould have been a cruel and an inhuman act for a white-skin, but ’tis the gift and natur [sic] of an Indian, and I suppose it should not be denied!’3 When Chingachgook identifies the tribe of a scalp acquired by his son Uncas, Natty observes, ‘what right have Christian whites to boast of their learning when a savage can read a language that would prove too much for the wisest of them all?’4 Cooper, then, provided a model for Lawrence to establish a relationship with Native Americans which both respected their difference and protected the integrity of his own cultural identity. As he wrote to Mabel Dodge Sterne (as she was then named) soon after receiving her invitation to visit Taos, ‘I also believe in Indians. But they must do half the believing: in me as well as in the sun’ (4L 152). He arrived in Taos on 11 September 1922. In November and December he drastically revised Studies in Classic American Literature, turning it into the slangy, provocative, abrasive polemic that was thrown like a bomb into the American literary world the following year. Now, for Lawrence, ‘there is no mystic conjunction between the spirit [sic] of the two races’; ‘As far as

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we are concerned, the Red Man is subtly and unremittingly diabolic … He is dispossessed in life, and unforgiving’ (SCAL 43, 42). In the first version, he mocked Cooper’s wife for saying that her husband dwelt ‘on the better traits of [Indians] rather than on the coarser and more revolting’. For Mrs Cooper, he wrote, Natty Bumppo would be ‘almost a renegade of the great white civilisation’ (SCAL 216–17). In the final version, by contrast, ‘She had to look things in the face for him. The coarser and more revolting, and certainly more common points, she had to see’ (SCAL 54). Now Lawrence himself accuses ‘the white man – rather highbrow – who “loves” the Indian’ of being ‘Renegade’ (SCAL 56). Lawrence has not, in late 1922, entirely abandoned the hopes with which he travelled to America. He can still write that the white man’s spirit ‘can cease to be the opposite and the negative of the red man’s spirit. It can open out a new great area of consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit too.’ But now ‘the Natty and Chingachgook myth must remain a myth. It is a wish-fulfilment, an evasion of actuality’ (SCAL 56). Something has happened to shock Lawrence out of his optimistic expectations. His first shock came when he stepped off the train at Lamy near Santa Fe and met Mabel Sterne and Tony Luhan. They were not yet married, but it was evident that they were lovers. As David Ellis surmises, this probably accounted for Lawrence’s ‘agitated, fussy, distraught, and giggling’ demeanour. ‘It became an important problem for him whether there ever could, or should, be a sexual relationship between two people of different races.’5 It is important to emphasize that Lawrence was not unusually reactionary in this respect. In its theoretical aspect, hostility to miscegenation has its origin in nineteenthcentury racial (we would now say racist) science, but it was still common in liberal circles in the 1920s,6 and fifteen states had laws specifically forbidding Indian-white marriage, including New Mexico’s neighbour Arizona, which Lawrence visited with Mabel and Tony in 1924.7 Lawrence’s strong awareness of physical presence and sensitivity about touch would have intensified this response. In his chapter on Melville’s Typee and Omoo, he wrote of South Sea Island women, whom he had recently briefly encountered on his voyage from Australia, ‘I like her, she is nice. But I would never want to touch her … She has soft warm flesh, like warm mud. Nearer the reptile, the Saurian age. Noli me tangere’ (SCAL 127). Lawrence’s discomfort with Mabel and Tony’s relationship undoubtedly influenced the passage of the revised Studies in which he writes about interracial marriage: Supposing an Indian loves a white woman, and lives with her. He will probably be very proud of it, for he will be a big man among his own people, especially if the white mistress has money … But at the same time he will subtly jeer at his white mistress, try to destroy her white pride … Not only is it the sex resistance, but the race resistance as well. (SCAL 44)

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Within less than three weeks of arriving in Taos, Lawrence was taken to see two Native American ceremonials, on the Jicarilla Apache reservation about seventy-five miles north-west of Taos and the San Geronimo fiesta at Taos pueblo itself. He was also made aware of the Bursum Bill (a burning issue in Mabel’s circle) which threatened the Pueblo Indians’ title to their land, opening it to white settlers. He wrote a long essay, ‘Pueblos and an Englishman’, which was subsequently divided into three for publication: ‘Indians and an Englishman’, about the Apache visit, ‘Taos’, ostensibly about San Geronimo, and ‘Certain Americans and an Englishman’, about the Bursum Bill. ‘Indians and an Englishman’ opens with a nervously facetious confession of the author’s strangeness and ignorance, and a characterization of the American south-west, with its conscious performance of contrasting cultural identities, as ‘like comic opera played with solemn intensity’ (MM 113). It develops however into a fascinating revelation of Lawrence’s intense sensitivity to and psychological investment in cultural difference, above all that of Native Americans. He gives a lengthy, vivid and multifaceted description of the effect on him of Indian singing and drumming, anticipating the more poised and developed accounts in later essays such as ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’: ‘as the sun went down, the drums began to beat, the drums with their strong-weak, strong-weak pulse that beat on the plasm of one’s tissue’ (MM 115). When he listens to the call and response between what he calls kivas (actually tree-bough structures) he hears ‘the humanness, the playfulness’, but his response is unsurprisingly coloured by stereotype: ‘beyond that, the mockery and the diabolical, pre-human, pinetree fun of cutting dusky throats’ (MM 116). Above all, the essay suggests a sense of vulnerability: what is the feeling that passes from an Indian to me, when we meet. We are both men, but how do we feel together? … It was not what I had thought it would be. It was something of a shock. Again something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror. (MM 116) That question, ‘how do we feel together’, is not often asked in travel writing. Lawrence came to New Mexico with large and perhaps unrealistic expectations, but these were not merely, as many commentators have claimed, a matter of his own subjective experience. He cared about how the indigenous people responded to him. One consequence of this is a feeling of being jeered at. He had earlier reported this in Sri Lanka (‘I find all dark people have a fixed desire to jeer at us: these people here’ (4L 225)) and it recurs in this essay: ‘The dark Indians passing in the night peered at me. The air was full of a sort of sportiveness, playfulness, that had a jeering, malevolent vibration in it, to

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my fancy’ (MM 117). This feeling is personal, but not merely subjective. As Lawrence was to write soon afterwards in Studies in Classic American Literature, The Red Man died hating the white man. What remnant of him lives, lives hating the white man. Go near the Indians, and you just feel it. As far as we are concerned, the Red Man is subtly and unremittingly diabolic. Even when he doesn’t know it. He is dispossessed in life, and unforgiving. He doesn’t believe in us and our civilisation, and so is our mystic enemy, for we push him off the face of the earth. (SCAL 42) Lee M. Jenkins contrasts Lawrence’s perspective with those of American writers such as William Carlos Williams who claimed that ‘we are men of [the Native Americans’] world’ and Gary Snyder who believed that we can ‘become “Native Americans” ’. As Jenkins argues, the continuity they envisage is ‘a serene narrative of inheritance’ whereas ‘for Lawrence, the return of the native is the return of the repressed’.8 Even in this essay written within a few weeks of his arrival in the United States, we see the struggle between desire and resistance being played out. Lawrence is deeply moved by the singing of an old man, an ‘old, mask-like, virile figure, with its metallic courage of persistence … So far, so great a memory’ (MM 119). This old man becomes the representative of an imagined ancestor: I have a dark-faced, bronze-voiced father far back in the resinous ages. My mother was no virgin. She lay in her hour with this dusky-lipped tribefather. And I have not forgotten him. But he, like many an old father with a changeling son, he would like to deny me. But I stand on the far edge of their fire light and am neither denied nor accepted. My way is my own, old red father; I can’t cluster at the drum any more. (MM 120) It may be a coincidence, but a pregnant one, that ‘dusky’ is a word Lawrence used to describe Walter Morel, the character based on his actual father, in the scene in Sons and Lovers that imagines the meeting of his parents (SL 18). This was a period in which Lawrence was re-evaluating the characters of his parents and the cultural values that they represented. A few months earlier, in one of his few favourable references to a native of Sri Lanka, his friend Achsah Brewster recalled him comparing a local workman to his father: ‘the same clean-cut, exuberant spirit, a true pagan. He added that he had not done justice to his father in Sons and Lovers and felt like rewriting it … Now he blamed his mother for her self-righteousness, her invulnerable Christian virtue.’9 Moreover, ‘my mother was no virgin’ suggests that Lawrence’s response to the old Apache facilitates, or reflects, an escape from the disturbingly Oedipal feeling in poems about his mother’s death such as ‘The Bride’ and ‘The Virgin Mother’ which

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erase her sexual relationship with his father (2Poems 65–7). This does not mean that his responses to cultural difference were merely a displacement of feelings about his parents. His changing judgement of them was an aspect of his revolt against English civilization, which both drove and was informed by his travels in Europe and beyond. When he wrote that the Native American ‘doesn’t believe in us and our civilisation’, beneath the discomfort is the unspoken fact that Lawrence himself at least half shares this disbelief. On 29 September, Lawrence wrote in a letter, ‘this week end is the Indian fiesta – fun. But I’d never make a stunt of these Indians. They’re quite nice, and all that —’ (4L 316). The casual tone is consistent with references to Indians in other letters, but contrasts markedly with ‘Indians and an Englishman’, which he was presumably writing at about this time. By not making a ‘stunt’ of the Indians, does he mean that he is unimpressed by them or, perhaps more likely, that he thinks other whites take a superficial and voyeuristic interest in them? The fiesta that he refers to is the Taos Pueblo feast of San Geronimo, still the most important Taos festival open to white visitors. It is the subject of the second essay to emerge from ‘Pueblos and an Englishman’, entitled ‘Taos’. The text of this essay is somewhat problematic. By comparison with his other writings about Native Americans, it is short, desultory and fragmentary. Virginia Hyde informs us that it was published in the Dial after it had extracted material for the two other essays, and that no other text survives (MM lxxvii). There is a fragment (describing one of the events of San Geronimo) published by Mabel Luhan in Lorenzo in Taos, and it may be that other material has been lost. However, given that Lawrence approved the published text, what the essay omits is as important as what it includes. The most obvious omission, to anyone who has visited Taos Pueblo, is any description of the village’s most striking feature. The two multi-storey, stepped adobe buildings, like irregular ziggurats, with roofs on five different levels, facing each other across the river that runs through the plaza, are the only surviving examples of a style of building that was once common in pueblo settlements. This does not mean that Lawrence is unimpressed by the pueblo. The essay opens with the statement that the Taos people say it is ‘the heart of the world’, and he endorses the sentiment, comparing it with the great cities and monasteries of Europe. These, however, have lost their ‘nodality’, which Taos has retained (MM 125). But there is no description of the village at all, only of the people. This is however not the most significant omission, perhaps explained by Lawrence’s assertion in this essay that ‘I have long since passed the stage when I want to crowd up and stare at anybody’s spectacle’ (MM 127). He describes helping to erect what he calls a maypole, and the essay concludes with a brief account of Indians singing and dancing. These events take place on the eve of San Geronimo. He also describes two instances of hostile behaviour by Indians towards the white visitors: the confiscation of a camera and refusal of entry into

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the church. About the fiesta, itself there is nothing. What follows is a description of the fiesta as it is practised in the twenty-first century. I have not been able to establish exactly what happened on 30 September 1922, though as we shall see some details are confirmed in contemporary reports. The pole that Lawrence helped to erect is hung at the top with various food items including a whole sheep, and this becomes the focus of the culmination of the day’s celebrations. The day begins with running ‘races’. I put the word in inverted commas because, as Lawrence recognized when he wrote about this or a similar event eighteen months later in ‘Indians and Entertainment’, this is a sacred, not a competitive activity: Naked, and daubed with clay to hide the nakedness, and to take the anointment of the earth; stuck over with bits of fluff of eagle’s down, to be anointed with the power of the air, the youths and men whirl down the racing track, in relays. They are not racing to win a race. They are not racing for a prize. They are not racing to show their prowess. (MM 68) The plaza is covered with stalls set up by traders from Taos and other pueblos, selling pottery, jewellery and food, and there is a large crowd, both Native American and white. At about midday, outlandish noises can be heard from the highest rooftop of one of the adobe buildings. Several figures appear, gesticulating. At first, one cannot discern any detail of their appearance, but as they leap down from one roof level to the next they become clearer. They are men, naked except for a loincloth and apron covering them in front and behind. Their bodies are painted with broad horizontal black and white stripes, their faces are grotesquely disguised with black, white and red paint, and they wear a headdress made of cornstalks. As they approach, the traders cover their tables, leaving visible one or two cheaper items. These invading figures are the sacred clowns, called koshare or chiffonete. There are about six of them and they roam around the plaza, singly or in groups, shouting and gabbling, stealing items from the stalls, shouldering people aside and generally violating every social convention. They take Indian infants from the arms of their parents and dunk them in the stream that flows through the plaza. The infants cry with terror, but their parents are complaisant. Adults, including whites, are also manhandled into the river. To resist would be to show oneself ignorant of the nature of the event. The parents of the purloined children allegedly regard the dunking as a blessing. These clowns have a role that has no equivalent in Western culture. By so grotesquely breaching the codes of the tribe, they reinforce them, and on other occasions they behave more decorously, stewarding ceremonial events by, for example, adjusting the dress of the dancers and confiscating the cameras of ill-informed white visitors. The clowns disappear after an hour or so, but the fiesta culminates with their return.

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Now they are armed with little toy bows and arrows and they gather round the pole buffoonishly shooting at the sheep suspended far beyond their reach, and making comically incompetent attempts to climb the pole. Eventually the one or two genuine athletes among them climb swiftly up the pole and hang daringly at the top while they lower the sheep and other items to the ground. As I have said, none of this is described in Lawrence’s essay. This raises some obvious questions: was Lawrence there on the day of the fiesta, did everything that I have described happen in 1922, and if so, why did he not write about such a striking example of Native American culture? There is very reliable evidence that Lawrence was present at least for the foot races. Mabel Luhan in Lorenzo in Taos quotes a fragment of ‘Pueblos and an Englishman’ describing the preparations for the races. This is however a rather grudging piece of writing with none of the insight or empathy of his later account in ‘Indians and Entertainment’. He complains of waiting three hours for the races which are over in half an hour, comments that the younger men ‘just shuffle’ rather than dancing like the elders and that the ‘daubed racers’ sing ‘dully’.10 Frustratingly, the text ends with four dots, indicating a potential continuation, but there is no way of knowing if these were in Lawrence’s manuscript, or if Mabel extracted the fragment from a longer piece. Mabel also describes Lawrence watching the races, in terms that contrast with the tone of his own writing: ‘Lawrence was really in it – he was able to go into it and participate with them and understand. It dissolved his painful isolation – breaking the barriers around him so that for a while he shared a communal effort and lost himself in the group.’11 This may have been influenced by ‘Indians and Entertainment’, in which as we have seen Lawrence writes much more appreciatively about the races, but we can take it as reliable evidence that Lawrence was present for them. We also have testimony that he was present for the later events. David Ellis has written that ‘if there were a prize for the memoir of Lawrence whose manner least inspires confidence in the accuracy of its details, [Joseph] Foster’s D. H. Lawrence in Taos – written fifty years after the events it describes – would be an easy winner’, and Mark Schorer wrote a review of it titled ‘A Book So Bad It Was Impossible to Put Down’.12 We should not therefore uncritically accept Foster’s account of Lawrence watching the pole climbing and a ‘Mexican’ being thrown in the river. (‘Mexican’ was a term commonly used by Anglos, including Lawrence himself, to describe the Hispanic population of New Mexico, many of whose ancestors had settled there centuries before Mexico existed as an independent state). Since Foster was writing fifty years after the event, and had possibly witnessed San Geronimo more recently, we cannot even rely on this as evidence that these incidents occurred in 1922. This was a period when Native American ceremonials were policed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which would have liked to suppress them altogether.

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Foster describes Lawrence ‘laughing with everyone’ at the pole climbing and the dunking of the ‘Mexican’. ‘Suddenly Lawrence turned around and frowned at [Foster and his wife]. He had sensed that someone was looking at him. And there was hatred in his eyes for both of us.’13 Foster says this is the first time he saw Lawrence, so one wonders how he could so confidently identify him, as well as why Lawrence should look with ‘hatred’ at a complete stranger. This may be reliable evidence that Lawrence was present, but not of his state of mind. Lawrence seems to have begun, albeit unenthusiastically, an account of the day, but then broken off. It is at least a strong possibility that this was because he was shocked, even outraged by the behaviour of the clowns. It is hard to imagine him laughing at the spectacle of a man being thrown in the river. The singing of the ‘old mask-like virile figure’ at the Apache ceremonial or the ‘wild music’ that ‘resounded strangely’ on the eve of San Geronimo (MM 127) would have corresponded to his expectations, but nothing could have prepared him for the acting out of a kind of pre-social barbarity that (in all probability) he witnessed on the day of the fiesta. It may have played a part in his emphasis on the ‘coarser and more revolting’ characteristics of Native Americans in his revision of Studies in Classic American Literature and his failure, on this first visit to New Mexico, to achieve a sustained imaginative engagement with their culture. Lawrence had hoped to write a novel with an American setting but in this ambition he was frustrated. Almost as soon as he arrived, he began working with Mabel on a novel about her experience in New Mexico. Only a small fragment of this was written (or survives), published with the title ‘The Wilful Woman’ in St Mawr and Other Stories (SM 199–203). The project was abandoned probably because of Frieda’s hostility14 but it is unlikely in any case that a collaboration between Lawrence and Mabel would have thrived. In Lorenzo in Taos she writes, ‘I wanted Lawrence to understand things for me. To take my experience, my material, my Taos, and to formulate it all into a magnificent creation.’15 This attitude was bound to antagonize Lawrence and partly accounts for his and Frieda’s decision to move out of Taos and spend the winter on a mountain ranch with the Danish painters Knud Merrild and Kai Gøtzsche. During this period, he wrote nothing more about Native Americans. In March, he travelled to Old Mexico with the American poet Witter Bynner and his partner Willard ‘Spud’ Johnson. After a period of considerable uncertainty and violent swings in his feeling about the country, he settled in Chapala, a lakeside town near Guadalajara.16 Lawrence might have been attracted to this region by the description of the natives in his guidebook: ‘The fishermen are a sturdy and self-reliant lot, different from the cringing peon of the Central Plateau. They are the direct descendants of the Indian whom the Spanish found … The Indian characteristics remain; the same stoicism, the same disdain for civilization and its enervating luxuries and the same shrinking from the contaminating touch of the white man.’17

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This could almost have been written by Lawrence himself. Within ten days of arriving in Chapala, Lawrence had begun the novel that was to become The Plumed Serpent. In seven weeks, he wrote the first draft, later published as Quetzalcoatl. As in the final version, the main story concerns the Irish heroine Kate Leslie’s involvement with a religio-political movement to overthrow the influences of European culture, especially Catholicism, and revive the ancient Mesoamerican gods. The radical but flawed nature of Lawrence’s attempt to imagine an indigenous religious revival is beyond the scope of this chapter; what I want to focus on is that fact that, so soon after his arrival in this particular place, he was able to embark on the ambitious American novel that had eluded him in New Mexico.18 One of the strengths of The Plumed Serpent is that its utopian vision is grounded in a much more intimate and sympathetic experience of indigenous people than Lawrence had been able to achieve in his first visit to New Mexico. In Chapala, the Indians were not an endangered species to be, as he felt, patronized and made a ‘stunt’ of by white enthusiasts. They were the ordinary local inhabitants, including the servant family who came with the house that he and Frieda rented. In his travel fiction, Lawrence habitually incorporated his day-to-day life into the larger narrative, resulting in what many readers feel to be the most attractive parts of these novels. In Quetzalcoatl, Lawrence names the mother of the servant family Felipa (Juana in The Plumed Serpent) and her sons Rafael (Ezequiel in The Plumed Serpent) and Jesus. The people were a great puzzle to Kate. Because she realised that Felipa and her children were all strongly attached to one another. It was a silent, careless, and yet enduring connection, impersonal and unthinking: very different from the effusive affection and personal feeling in white families. Felipa took from the boys a bit at a time the necessary money for food. And everything was spent, with the same casual indifference. When Rafael was pining for a new sarape with little flowers in it – florecitas – then Felipa did all she could to get it for him. When she needed a new reboso, the boys sarcastically helped her to it. But her reboso was only of black cotton, with black cotton fringe. The detachment and the callous indifference to the future, and to gain, were a curious relief to Kate, who had suffered from the strain of English families and the anxiety of people ‘getting on’. … They were what they were. They worked without effort, they lived without meaning. The life of the plaza was a life to the men, and when they worked, that was casual life to them also. Yet no one could call them dead. In the black eyes of Rafael at least there was a splendid free flame of life. He liked to work, he said, but he wanted to

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work in the fields, not in personal service or in a planta [electric plant]. And not for the sake of making money. Just to live. (Q 78–9) Here Lawrence shows an insight into the daily lives and family relationships of the Indians, of a kind that was not available to him in Taos. The close, sympathetic observation is admittedly coloured by predilection. The ways in which the Indians are explicitly or implicitly contrasted with Europeans are all favourable. Lawrence’s own family history, and his resistance to Frieda’s need for her children, made him sympathetic to the ‘impersonal and unthinking’ family relationships. The indifference to money and to ‘getting on’, carelessness about the future and enjoyment of work are all core Lawrentian values. Above all Kate, who is here Lawrence’s representative, is at ease with the Indians: there is little of the tension that characterizes his earlier essays about Native Americans. Even when the subject of ‘jeering’ is addressed, Kate recognizes that it is provoked by characteristic white behaviour which she learns to correct: ‘she must not hold her soul apart from them, in the white social manner, or they would jeer at her, and pull her down’ (Q 77). This first visit to Mexico was followed by one of the most turbulent periods in Lawrence’s life. He refused to accompany Frieda back to England and there followed the only period, from August to December 1923, when they were separated without any certainty that they would get back together. After parting with Frieda in New York, Lawrence returned to Mexico with his Danish friend Kai Gøtzsche and travelled in the Sierra Madre. Eventually he travelled to England, where he was miserable, and after visiting Germany he and Frieda returned to New Mexico, to stay on a ranch in the mountains that Mabel had given to Frieda in return for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. This second stay in New Mexico, from April to October 1924, produced Lawrence’s most important essays about Native American culture – ‘Indians and Entertainment’, ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ – and three of his best shorter fictions, ‘St Mawr’, ‘The Princess’ and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’. The new essays are much more secure in tone than the ones he wrote on his first visit. There is no nervous jocularity, and though there are still elements of resistance, these are explained calmly and without petulance. In ‘Indians and Entertainment’ he stresses the difficulty of avoiding sentimentality about Native Americans, and repeats the emphasis from earlier writing on the gulf between them and whites: ‘the Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian’s’ (MM 61). If this were the final word, it would seem to close off any serious attempt to engage with cultural difference, but it is not the final word. Lawrence goes on to write, ‘we can understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of

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the death of our own consciousness’ (MM 61), and if these words seem equally pessimistic, we might recall Birkin’s statement in Women in Love: ‘ “only there needs the pledge between us, that we will both cast off everything, cast off ourselves even, and cease to be, so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place in us” ’ (WL 147). In fact, the essay, with its two companions, forms a sustained attempt precisely to ‘understand the consciousness of the Indian … in terms of the death of our own consciousness’. This is not to say that Lawrence is entirely reliable as a commentator on Pueblo ceremonials. For example, he incorrectly states that the accompanying chants are without words. However, his evocation of the dance is extraordinarily sensitive, sympathetic and attentive: All the men sing in unison, as they move with the soft, yet heavy bird-tread which is the whole of the dance. There is no drama. With bodies bent a little forward, shoulders and breasts loose and heavy, feet powerful but soft, the men tread the rhythm into the centre of the earth. The drums keep up the pulsating heart-beat … The rhythm is the same, really, the drums keep up the heart-pulsation, the feet the peculiar bird-tread, the soft, heavy, bird-like step … But there is also the subtle leaping towards each other of the two shield-sheltered naked ones, feathered with the power of the eagle. The leaping together, the coming close, the circling, wary, stealthy avoidance and retreat, always on the same rhythm of drum-beats, the same regular, heavy-soft tread of moccasined feet. (MM 63–4) Lawrence is no longer self-conscious, apologetic or wary in his writing about Native Americans. He writes that ‘one man can belong to one great way of consciousness only’, but adds that ‘he may even change from one way to another’ (MM 61–2). It would be too much to claim that Lawrence himself ‘changed’ in this way, but his ‘belonging’ to white European consciousness accommodated a strong element of rejection and divergence. For him, the Native American dances epitomize a non-cerebral way of being that is collective without loss of individual identity, in which ‘everything is very soft, subtle, delicate. There is none of the hardness of representation’ (MM 65), recalling his much earlier abandonment of the style of Sons and Lovers: ‘that hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation’ (2L 132). During the spring and summer of 1924, Lawrence wrote two more essays about Native American ceremonials which are even more sympathetic to their subject. ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ is a short account of the Easter Corn Dance at Santo Domingo (now Kia) pueblo, south of Santa Fe. With minimal interpretation or speculation, this essay displays a remarkable absorption in its subject, and the characteristic ‘continual, slightly modified repetition’ of his

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style (as he described it in the Foreword to Women in Love) beautifully evokes the corresponding qualities of the dance (WL 486): The men are naked to the waist, and ruddy-golden, and in the rhythmic, hopping leap of the dance their breasts shake downwards, as the strong, heavy body comes down, down, down, down, in the downward-plunge of the dance. The black hair streams loose and living down their backs, the black brows are level, the black eyes look out unchanging from under the silky lashes. They are handsome, and absorbed with a deep rhythmic absorption, which leaves them awake and aware. Down, down, down they drop, on the heavy, ceaseless leap of the dance, and the great necklaces of shell-cores spring on the naked breasts, the neck-shell flaps up and down, the short white kilt of woven stuff, with the heavy woollen embroidery, green and red and black, opens and shuts slightly to the strong lifting of the knees. (MM 73–4) In August 1924, Lawrence was taken by Mabel and Tony to witness a ceremony that was more challenging to him than the corn dance. On their mesas in northern Arizona, in a much bleaker and more forbidding landscape than the Rio Grande valley with which he was familiar, the Hopis practise a ritual that involves dancing with live rattlesnakes in their mouths. Lawrence’s evolving response to this spectacle is instructive. On the way back to Taos, he wrote postcards in which he described the ceremony as ‘interesting rather than beautiful’ and ‘weird rather than beautiful’, suggesting that he was disappointed in expectations derived from the corn dance and other pueblo ceremonies, and that the Snake Dance had not made a profound impression on him (5L 100). His first attempt to write about it was a flippant, debunking piece called ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance’, which focuses more on the voyeuristic spectators than on the dance itself (MM 185–7). Mabel was understandably outraged by this, so Lawrence wrote the essay that he subsequently published in Mornings in Mexico, and which he said he valued ‘rather highly’ and that it ‘defines somewhat my position’ (5L 109–10). Although this essay is characterized by a typically Lawrentian sense of immediacy and empathy, the history suggests that it was the result of resistance overcome. ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ is much longer than ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ and, while performing the same empathetic recreation as the two earlier essays, it is much bolder in its offer to interpret the spectacle. Man, small, vulnerable man, the farthest adventurer from the dark heart of the first of suns, into the cosmos of creation. Man, the last god won into existence. And all the time, he is sustained and threatened, menaced and sustained from the Source, the innermost sun-dragon. And all the time, he must submit and he must conquer. Submit to the strange beneficence

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from the Source, whose ways are past finding out. And conquer the strange malevolence of the Source, which is past comprehension also. (MM 92) Although he had read a number of anthropological texts about Pueblo Indian culture, notably Adolf Bandelier’s The Delight-Makers,19 Lawrence was not an anthropologist, and this is a recognizable Lawrentian discourse. It does not have any claim to be a reliable interpretation of the snake ceremony. For Lawrence, the ceremony is a striking reinforcement of his belief both in submission to the mystery of the cosmos and bold assertion of one’s manhood (sic). However, in assessing Lawrence’s text in light of this, it is salutary to bear in mind the witness of a Hopi man quoted in Frank Waters’s Book of the Hopi. Waters’s book is itself controversial but he is unlikely to have invented this quotation. The speaker was not a member of the Snake clan (which owns the ceremony) but was required to participate in the ceremony in return for a benefit conferred on him: ‘I could not understand what only those born into the Snake Clan understand: why do our people perform a ceremony with snakes that other men fear, and call them their brothers?’20 If a Hopi who has taken part in it does not understand the ceremony, there is little chance of a European doing so. During this visit to New Mexico, Mabel Luhan took Lawrence to see what she called ‘an ancient ceremonial cave’, not used as such by the modern Taos Indians who ‘[would] not camp near it, for, they say, there are bad spirits there’. The vast, pelvic-shaped aperture faces the west and yawns upward to the sky; and over it descends the mountain water, falling thirty feet across the face of the entrance to form an icy pool below. We skirted the waterfall and entered the cavern; chill and damp and dark it was, too! Here there are holes hollowed out in the rock walls where Tony says the bears sleep in the winter; and at the right-hand side of the back wall of the place there are a number of rude climbing steps that lead up to a shelving ledge. Above this altar-like ledge there is a faint sun painted high up to the east of it. One by one we climbed to the high altar, and, looking before us, we saw the clear fall of water across the opening, green and transparent.21 She adds that at the winter solstice, when the waterfall has turned to an icy column, the sun shines through the ice and ‘falls precisely upon the altar’. Although Luhan does not explicitly say so, the comparison of the rock ledge to an altar and the malevolent atmosphere are suggestive of human sacrifice. Lawrence was to use this scene in his story ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, transposed to the Sierra Madre which he had recently visited, since it would be implausible and libellous to set a story of human sacrifice in the vicinity of Taos pueblo. An American woman, unhappily married to a mine owner in the Sierra Madre, responds with ‘foolish romanticism’ to a visitor’s tales of the remote

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Chilchui Indians, and ‘felt it was her destiny to wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians of the mountains’ (WWRA 42). Without telling anyone of her plan, she rides off for a day and a night until, disorientated by altitude and weariness, she meets a group of Chilchui Indians and, acting the part of a romantic adventurer, tells them, ‘ “I want to visit the Chilchui Indians – to see their houses and to know their Gods” ’ (WWRA 47). She is taken, effectively a prisoner, to the village of the Chilchui and interrogated by their cacique, to whom she says that ‘ “She would like to serve the gods of the Chilchui” ’ (speaking of herself in the third person like a parody of a stereotypical Indian) and when asked ‘ “do you bring your heart to the god of the Chilchui?” ’ answers yes (WWRA 52, 54). She is drugged and, at the winter solstice, is taken to the cave and laid on the altar. The story ends with the cacique waiting for the sun to shine through the ice, when he will plunge a knife into her, and a final non-sentence, ‘the mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race’ (WWRA 71). One way of reading this story is as a misogynistic fable – Kate Millett and Sheila Contreras are examples of critics who read it in this way.22 The story is certainly highly gendered in a number of respects: the Indians who participate in the sacrifice are all male, the world view of the Chilchuis centres on a male sun and female moon and the word ‘man’ in the final non-sentence supports this reading. However, we should remember that female characters frequently represent aspects of Lawrence’s personality and experience: Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow, Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl, Lou Witt in St Mawr, Dollie Urquhart in ‘The Princess’ and most notably, Kate Leslie in The Plumed Serpent. The woman’s ‘foolish romanticism’ about the ‘timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians’ is a not very exaggerated version of the attitude with which Lawrence came to America. The attitude of the woman’s hardbitten husband is not unlike that of Fenimore Cooper’s wife, which Lawrence initially satirized, then sympathized with and finally transcended: ‘ “savages are savages, and all savages behave more or less alike: rather low down and dirty, unsanitary, with a few cunning tricks” ’ (WWRA 42). The Indians sacrifice the woman not because they hate women but because they believe, rightly, that the white man (and woman) has stolen their world: ‘ “the Indian got weak, and lost his power with the sun, so the white men stole the sun” ’ (WWRA 61–2). The Chilchuis are not ‘timeless’, any more than contemporary Amazonian tribes are timeless: they are the victims of a historical genocide. ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ is Lawrence’s creative response to the realization, eighteen months earlier, that disabused him of the myth of Hawkeye and Chingachgook: ‘the Red Man … is dispossessed in life, and unforgiving. He doesn’t believe in us and our civilisation, and so is our mystic enemy, for we push him off the face of the earth’ (SCAL 42). But the story is a tragedy for the Chilchui as much as for the woman – for, of course, they will not reclaim their world by sacrificing

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her. A much likelier consequence is their extermination by a vengeful white world. This perhaps is why the final non-sentence floats unanchored: it does not state that the Chilchui have achieved this mastery. Lawrence has achieved what, in the roughly contemporary ‘Indians and Entertainment’, he claimed was impossible: a sympathetic response to Native Americans that is completely unsentimental. In October 1924, Lawrence returned to Mexico, this time to Oaxaca, for his third and final visit, during which he revised the novel that he still called Quetzalcoatl. In the final text, there are two significant changes that testify to Lawrence’s developing response to Native Americans. The first is that he draws on his mature appreciation of Pueblo ceremonies to enhance those of the Quetzalcoatl movement, making them much richer, more intimate and convincing, as for example when Kate joins in a dance in the plaza of Sayula (his fictionalized Chapala): The song seemed to take new wild flights, after it had sunk and rustled to a last ebb. It was like waves that rise out of the invisible, and rear up into foam and a flying, disappearing whiteness and a rustle of extinction. And the dancers, after dancing in a circle in a slow, deep absorption, each man changeless in his own place, treading the same dust with the soft churning of bare feet, slowly, slowly began to revolve, till the circle was slowly revolving round the fire, with always the same soft, down-sinking, churning tread. (PS 128) Lawrence’s incorporation into his imagined Mexican revolution of the benign, autochthonous culture of the Pueblo Indians is an important counterweight to those aspects of the novel that have led some critics to accuse Lawrence of Fascism, such as the ritual killing by Cipriano of the men who attempted to murder Ramon (PS 372–86). I might add that in the context of revolutionary politics in early-twentieth-century Mexico, the killing of would-be murderers of a revolutionary leader is hardly shocking. The second important change concerns the conclusion of the novel. In Quetzalcoatl, Kate leaves Mexico and refuses marriage to Cipriano and commitment to the movement. This is partly because Cipriano is an Indian, and Kate shares the revulsion towards miscegenation that so discomposed Lawrence when he met Mabel and Tony: ‘I can’t change my race. And I can’t betray my blood’ (Q 299). In The Plumed Serpent, she does marry Cipriano and, at the end, the question of whether she will stay or leave is left unanswered. In this version, the racist discourse of blood is emphatically rejected: She belonged to the ruling races, the clever ones. But back again they demanded her acquiescence to the primeval assertion: The blood is one blood. We are one blood. It was the assertion that swept away all individualism,

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and left her immersed, drowned in the grand sea of the living blood, in immediate contact with all these men and all these women. (PS 416–17) The character of Cipriano is so unappealing, and Kate’s relationship with him is so deformed by masculinist ideology (see the paragraph beginning ‘The mystery of the primeval world!’ (PS 310)) that its testimony to the development of Lawrence’s racial consciousness can easily go unnoticed. There are a number of possible reasons for this development. On his first visit to Mexico, he lived among indigenous people who were not on display as he felt they were in Taos. He was able to relate to them independently of what he felt to be the oppressive influence of Mabel Luhan. This, perhaps, enabled him to respond more freely to Pueblo and Hopi ceremonials when he returned to New Mexico. Mabel shrewdly observed that ‘though Lawrence believed he was through with what he called inessentials, they were not through with him, and “history” … never really lost its importance for him. That is why Mexico mattered more to him than New Mexico’.23 He believed that the native people of the United States had been defeated by history, and that their culture was doomed to extinction. In Mexico, he found a country where the pre-Columbian past was a living presence and he could imagine the native people as historical agents in a way that was not, like the Chilchuis, quixotic. It is a personal as well as an intellectual development. Lawrence’s work frequently dramatizes a conflict between individualism, in its most extreme form a refusal to be touched (‘Noli me tangere’, as he wrote in 1922 about South Sea Island women), and an opposing desire for community and touch. In one aspect his writing about the indigenous people of America and Mexico is a journey from one pole, an overwhelming and repelling sense of otherness and his own separate identity in his early New Mexican essays, to the other, a celebration of being ‘drowned in the grand sea of the living blood’.

NOTES 1 ‘E. T.’ [Jessie Chambers], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 96. 2 James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (London: Cassell, n.d.), p. 32 and passim; p. 208. 3 Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, p. 146. 4 Ibid., p. 212. 5 David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 60. 6 Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 42.

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7 Margaret D. Jacobs, ‘The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875–1935’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 23.3 (2002): 29–54: 32, 50. For fuller discussion of Lawrence and racial science, see Neil Roberts, ‘The Spirit of Place and the Spirit of Race: Lawrence and Nineteenth-Century Racial Theory’, D. H. Lawrence Studies, 12 (2015): 159–77. 8 Lee M. Jenkins, The American Lawrence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), p. 37. 9 D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. Volume Two, 1919–1925, ed. Edward Nehls (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), p. 126. 10 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (London: Secker, 1933), pp. 65–6. Reprinted in Neil Roberts, ‘A Lawrence Fragment not Included in Mornings in Mexico’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 6.1 (2021): 13–16, 15. 11 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 88. 12 Ellis, Dying Game, p. 194; Mark Schorer, ‘A Book So Bad It Was Impossible to Put Down’, New York Times, 16 January 1972, p. 36. 13 Joseph Foster, D. H. Lawrence in Taos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), pp. 33–4. 14 See Ellis, Dying Game, pp. 71–2. 15 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 77. 16 For Lawrence’s state of mind in this period, see Witter Bynner, Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (New York: John Day, 1951), pp. 19–80. 17 T. Philip Terry, Terry’s Guide to Mexico (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 156. 18 For a detailed analysis of The Plumed Serpent, see Neil Roberts, D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 117–69. 19 Adolf F. Bandelier, The Delight Makers, A Novel of Prehistoric Pueblo Indians (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, [1890] 1971). 20 Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), p. 268. 21 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, pp. 194–5. 22 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 410; Sheila Contreras, ‘ “They Were Just Natives to Her”: Chilchui Indians and “The Woman Who Rode Away” ’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 25.1–3 (1993–4): 91–103. 23 Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 231.

CHAPTER SIX

Australia and the Australians DAVID GAME

The title of this chapter reflects a binary in Lawrence’s Australian oeuvre which coalesced after his visit in 1922: his celebration of Australia the continent, and critique of Australia the sociopolitical construct emanating from the British invasion in 1788. Lawrence’s Australia embraces both his own and wider contemporary anxieties about the state of modern industrial civilization – including anxieties about race, health, gender roles, politics and the future of empire, and his hopes for its regeneration.1 The chapter is shaped by three themes which respond to these issues: migration, Aboriginal Australians and ‘the bush! The wonderful Australia’ (K 356).2

LAWRENCE’S AUSTRALIA PRE-1922: INFLUENCES AND IMPRESSIONS Lawrence’s visit to Australia occurred in the context of his peripatetic search for locales outside ‘overweening mechanical civilisation’ (3L 357). In his youth Australia was one of the large pink areas on British maps, highlighting its place in the British Empire. Several authors much favoured by the young Lawrence – Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Rolf Boldrewood – engage with Australia to varying degrees and resonate in Lawrence’s evocations of Australia. In Dickens, he found an Australia that incorporated both the punishment of the convict system and the promise of new colonies. In David Copperfield (1850), which Jessie Chambers recalls she and Lawrence felt was ‘pre-eminent’ among

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Dickens’s works, Lawrence encountered the ever optimistic Micawber moving to the fictional Port Middlebay and enriching himself in Australia.3 Coral Lansbury notes that in Dickens’s time, ‘popular opinion supported the myth that men returned from Australia rich’,4 and Dickens affirms this in Great Expectations (1861) through Magwitch’s success in New South Wales. However, as a former convict, his return to England is a troubling intrusion, and in a reflection of the duality in the British imagining of Australia, he ultimately dies in prison. In Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy also employs the trope of unexpected return from Australia. Arabella, like Magwitch, returns to England inconveniently, having abandoned her ‘Australian husband, formerly manager of the hotel in Sydney’.5 Lawrence also had a limited but significant exposure to depictions of Australia in Australian literature. ‘I’ll send you back the Bush Stories’ (1L 376) he informed Edward Garnett in March 1912, referring either to Henry Lawson’s Children of the Bush (1902) (1L 376, n. 1), or as Paul Eggert has suggested, Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902), since Garnett had an association with both authors.6 In a letter to S. S. Koteliansky of 28 March 1916, Lawrence included Rolf Boldrewood in a list of popular children’s books, recommending ‘R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island … Captain Marryatt (very good), R. M. Ballantyne, W. H. Kingston, Henty, Ralph (sic) Boldrewood, Melville’ (2L 588). Boldrewood was a prolific Australian author, and it is safe to assume that Lawrence’s reference to him includes Boldrewood’s best-known novel Robbery under Arms (1888). Robbery was immensely popular, and the Macmillan edition was reprinted eighteen times by 1901 (when Lawrence was in his teens); Macmillan subsequently took on numerous other Boldrewood titles.7 Lawrence may also have been referring to any of Boldrewood’s later Australian bush novels, such as The Squatter’s Dream (1890), Nevermore (1892) and Babes in the Bush (1900), which, in combination with Lawrence’s reference to ‘Bush Stories’, may have shaped the title of his own novel The Boy in the Bush (1924). Robbery under Arms is a classic romantic Australian novel whose influence on Lawrence has to date been unnoticed. The novel would have appealed to Lawrence in a similar way to the Fenimore Cooper Leatherstocking novels he critiques in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). Like Cooper’s American frontier of the eighteenth century, the Australian bush depicted in Robbery is a realm of violence, marginalization and myth inhabited by characters living outside settled civilization. The novel is set largely in the Australian bush in around 1860, soon after the gold rushes, and recounts the exploits of Dick Marston and his association with the elusive and charismatic bushranger Captain Starlight, an aristocratic Englishman. Rolf Boldrewood (a pseudonym adopted by T. A. Browne) arrived in Australia as a young child in 1831, and his fame rests on Robbery, first serialized in the Sydney Mail in 1882–3 and subsequently published in three volumes by Remington and Company in London in 1888, followed by an ‘abridged’ single

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volume edition by Macmillan and Company in 1889.8 On first publication by Remington, Robbery gained the subtitle A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of Australia.9 The subtitle was retained by Macmillan and its explicit reference to the Australian bush and the lure of gold draws attention to the contemporary fascination with these stereotypical themes among readers of the time. Lawrence rehearsed and reworked them most fully in The Boy in the Bush (1924), but also in Kangaroo (1923). Robbery’s protagonist, Dick Marston, is a ‘stock-rider’, ‘gold-miner’ and ‘bush-ranger’.10 In The Boy in the Bush, the Australian Tom affects the nickname ‘ “Ned Kelly” ’ (BB 243), the most infamous Australian bushranger who was hanged in the 1880s. The protagonist, Jack Grant, masters a bolting horse ‘Stampede’ (BB 67), and ‘with two pistols in his belt’, part ‘gold-miner’ and ‘gentleman settler’, he resembles ‘a bandit chief ’ (BB 312), exhibiting the trappings and charisma of a bushranger. But Lawrence writes against the moralistic grain of the bushranging in Robbery, which, as Paul Eggert observes, is part of a ‘folkloric tradition’ which ultimately affirms ‘family, religion and social group’.11 These are precisely the elements which Jack Grant challenges with his utopian vision in The Boy, and which Somers distances himself from in Kangaroo. Callcott jeers at Somers’s writing intentions in Australia: ‘ “Write about the bushrangers and the heroine lost in the bush and wandering into a camp of bullies?” ’ (K 30). Somers’s reply is a non-committal and ironic ‘ “Maybe” ’ (K 31). There are additional elements in Robbery which resonate with Lawrence’s Australian fiction, and which in combination point to Boldrewood’s novel serving as an ur-text for both Kangaroo and The Boy. In Robbery, Australia is described by a successful English migrant as ‘ “the best country … for a gentleman who is poor or a working man” ’, a place where the ‘ “poor man” ’ commands ‘ “high wages” ’ and the necessities of life are ‘ “cheap” ’.12 In Kangaroo, the opening paragraph set in Sydney describes ‘a bunch of workmen’ who have ‘the air of owning the city’ (K 7), and a ‘ “hansom-driver’ is ‘ “free to charge what he likes” ’ (K 10). In Robbery, Marston refers to his fellow Australians affectionately as unsophisticated ‘Cornstalks’.13 In Kangaroo, Lawrence reworks Boldrewood’s playful reference to cornstalks into a savage critique. Somers, in conversation with Ben Cooley (Kangaroo), dismisses the colonial Australians’ capacity to endure isolation and material hardship: ‘ “They may well call them corn-stalks” ’ (K 131). Somers continues bitterly: ‘ “The Colonies make for outwardness …– the inside soul just withers” ’ (K 131). Intriguingly, given Somers’s wanting ‘ “to go a bit further back into the bush” ’ (K 347), and the trajectory of his (and Lawrence’s) travels from Australia to America, Marston, midway through his bushranging career, looks to America, wanting to ‘clear out … to San Francisco, as Starlight was always talking about … and buy a farm. Nobody need know. Nobody would even inquire in the far West where we’d come from.’14 In Robbery, Lawrence would have been introduced to the

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part-Aboriginal character Warrigal, Captain Starlight’s servant and guide, who although a ‘good tracker’,15 was cruelly treated. Lawrence’s earliest references to Australia are comical and absurd. Australia is evoked as an exotic and vaguely realized disposal point for characters who have slipped out of the known world of England. In Lawrence’s first fictional engagement with Australia, ‘The Vicar’s Garden’, written in 1907, a couple admire a vicarage garden and learn that one of the vicar’s sons died abroad: “ ‘He went to Australia, a wild country, and got lost in the bushes, and wandered round and round, but there’s no water there, so he died of thirst, ay, very sad, very sad’ ” (VicG 8). In his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), Lawrence repeats the trope of a man disappearing in the Australian bush. The gamekeeper Annable recounts that, after the end of his marriage, ‘ “I was seen in France – then in Australia – though I never left England. I was supposed to have died in the bush. She married a young fellow. Then I was proved to have died, and I read a little obituary notice on myself in a Woman’s paper she subscribed to” ’ (WP 151). Although Annable did not actually go to Australia, the reporting of his purported disappearance restates the dangers of the Australian bush and conjures up a problematic Magwitch-like return. In the unfinished Mr Noon, which Lawrence ceased work on prior to visiting Australia, and had given up entirely by October 1922 (4L 319), the idea of Australia is conflated with its apparently wild bush. Terry’s prowess as a camper is impeccable: ‘He was a great camper-out. If they had been in the wilds of Australia it could not have been more thorough’ (MN 255).

AUSTRALIA IMAGINED: MIGRATION In a significant departure from the lighter hearted disappearances to Australia found in ‘The Vicar’s Garden’ and The White Peacock, Lawrence, in three subsequent works – and in his later Australian fiction – engages with the formal movement of people from Britain to Australia through migration. He may have seen the enormous ‘migrant seeking-poster, said to be the biggest in London’, displayed near where Australia House was soon to be built in 1913.16 Lawrence explicitly includes migration to Australia in three works written before 1922: The Daughter-in-Law, ‘The Primrose Path’ (both written in 1913) and The Lost Girl (1920). Lawrence appears to have written The Daughter-in-Law in early January 1913 (see Plays xxxv), in the cataclysmic first year of his relationship with Frieda, which had begun in March 1912 (see 1L 376 n. 5). While writing the play, Lawrence was aware that his close friend May Holbrook was considering migration to Australia. Six months earlier, on 13 July 1912, Lawrence had told her:

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What an exciting letter that was! The emigration idea is, I should say, a fine one. Australia is a new country, new morals: it is not a split from England, but a new nation. But which of the States? – you don’t say – N. S. Wales or Queensland? I shan’t come back to England for a long time, if I can help it. Now, I want to wander. (1L 425) May Holbrook ultimately went to Canada (see 1L 499 n. 2), but Lawrence’s sudden and effusive interest in Holbrook’s apparent plan to migrate to Australia is striking and probably stimulated his inclusion of the subject in The Daughter-in-Law. On 2 January 1913, with the play taking shape, Lawrence again expressed his admiration for Holbrook’s plan: ‘It seems so plucky of you to go to Australia in the teeth of everything’ (1L 499). The social and economic complications associated with his living with Frieda may have made emigration seem very attractive – some ten years before his visit to Australia, before his overwhelming disillusionment with England and before his utopian vision of Rananim in 1915, which became a rationale for Lawrence’s migrations (see 2L 252). In The Daughter-in-Law, two coal miners, brothers Luther and Joe Gascoyne, consider migrating to Australia to straighten out their respective marital, emotional and economic predicaments. The play begins with Mrs Gascoyne admonishing Joe for not seeking promotion at the mine: JOE

I’d as lief be a day man as a butty, i’ pits that rat-gnawed there’s hardly a stall worth havin’, an’ a company as ’ud like yer ter scrape yer tabs afore yer went home, for fear you took a grain o’ coal. MRS GASCOYNE Maybe – but tha’s got ter get thy livin’ by ’em. JOE I hanna – I s’ll go to Australia. MRS GASCOYNE Tha’lt do know such thing, while I’m o’ this earth. (Plays 305) John Worthen describes Mrs Gascoyne as ‘the most powerful and dangerous of all [Lawrence’s] mother-figures’ (EY 458),17 and her emphatic rebuttal invites us to speculate whether Lawrence’s own mother, mindful of her brother’s migration to Australia (discussed later in relation to ‘The Primrose Path’) and her own tireless efforts to advance Lawrence and his siblings, uttered similar words in the Lawrence household. Luther’s new wife Minnie, on learning that he had made a former girlfriend pregnant, asks: ‘Should you like me to leave you, and let you go to Australia?’ to which Luther replies, ‘’Apen I should’ (Plays 338). Mrs Gascoyne, in conversation with Minnie, now worries that both her sons plan to emigrate:

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Talks o’ goin’ t’r Australey. But not if I can help it. An’ hints as if our Luther – You not thinkin of it, are you? No, I’m not – not that I know of. Hm! It’s a rum go, when nobody seems ter know where they are, nor what they’re goin’ ter do. But there’s more blort than bustle, i’ this world. – What took thee to Manchester? (Plays 344)

Minnie admonishes Mrs Gascoyne for her possessiveness: ‘Your elder sons you let go … But your younger sons you’ve kept’ (Plays 350). And Joe agrees ‘it’s true’ (Plays 350), admitting he could never leave his mother: JOE

If I went t’r Australia, th’ best part on me wouldna go wi’ me. MRS GASCOYNE Tha wunna go t’r Australia. JOE If I went, I should be a husk of a man. I’m allers a husk of a man, mother. There’s nowt solid about me. The’ isna. (Plays 351) The prospect of migration drives a wedge into the family, but the play resolves without recourse to emigration. Through their own weaknesses, Luther and Joe lose the opportunity to free themselves from their mother and make a fresh start in Australia. However, there is a lingering sense that migration should also be seen as a last resort. In addition to economic imperatives, in ‘The Primrose Path’ Lawrence considers migration in the context of contemporary theories of degeneration.18 William Greenslade has pointed out that these theories arose after the publication of works such as Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880) by Edwin Ray Lankester, who identified a ‘backward evolutionary track’ applicable to ‘the human species’.19 J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman observe that degeneration ‘provided a way of organising impressions and projecting ideas’ about the ‘vitality of races and nations’.20 In a letter of 22 November 1915 to Philip Heseltine, Lawrence complained of the ‘great flux of disintegration’ which had grown up ‘since the Renaissance’ (2L 448). ‘The Primrose Path’ was probably written around July 1913 in Kent, but possibly begun earlier in the year in Italy (see EME xliii) and is congruent with The Daughter-in-Law. Lawrence draws on his uncle, Herbert Beardsall, in creating Daniel Sutton. Like Sutton, Beardsall left his wife to migrate to Australia, returning to run a taxi business in Nottingham (see EME 246 n. 123. The tale begins at Victoria Station, Nottingham, with Daniel Berry meeting his uncle, Sutton, who is irritable and disgruntled:

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‘How are you, lad?’ ‘All right. I thought you were in Australia.’ ‘Been back three months – bought a couple of these damned things—’ He kicked the tyre of his taxicab in affectionate disgust. There was a moment’s silence. ‘Oh, but I’m going back out there. I can’t stand this cankering, rottenhearted hell of a country any more. – You want to come out to Sydney with me, lad. That’s the place for you – beautiful place, oh, you could wish for nothing better. And money in it, too.’ (EME 123–4) Sutton contrasts the physical beauty and financial promise of Sydney with a degenerate provincial England, remarking: ‘ “You’ve only to look at the folk in the street to know there’s nothing keeps it going but gravitation. Look at ’em. Look at him!” – A mongrel-looking man was nosing past. “Wouldn’t he murder you for your watch-chain, but that he’s afraid of society” ’ (EME 124). The nephew is drawn into his uncle’s point of view: ‘Berry watched the townspeople go by … it seemed he was watching a sort of danse macabre of ugly criminals’ (EME 124). Against this background, it would seem that the tale might endorse migration to Australia, as Sutton himself urges, as an escape and an act of regeneration. We learn, however, that Sutton’s sojourn in Australia had a dark side, revealing he is as degenerate as the Nottingham townsfolk. His material success is undercut by the circumstances surrounding his migration: ‘in the end he fell absurdly and violently in love with a rather sentimental young woman who read Browning. He made his wife an allowance, and established a new ménage with the young lady, shortly after emigrating with her to Australia’ (EME 126). However, the woman he abandoned his wife for fell for someone else on the boat to Australia, and she tried to ‘ “poison” ’ Sutton (EME 127). Sutton and the woman lived for a time ‘ “in Wellington, New Zealand” ’, before Sutton in desperation ‘ “went to Sydney” ’ (EME 127). While Sutton’s report of Sydney as a ‘ “beautiful place” ’ (EME 123) suggests an appealing Australia, there being ‘ “money in it, too” ’ (EME 124) throws a crass, material light over Sydney. It is soiled by its association with Sutton. Tony Pinkney, writing of the much later Kangaroo, observes that for Lawrence, Australia represents ‘a much accelerated version of contemporary trends within the home culture’, and the novel’s chapter ‘The Nightmare’ depicting the collapse of London is, Pinkney points out, ‘in a sense the “Australianisation” of England’.21 Lawrence’s Australia in ‘The Primrose Path’ presents a similar danger. Daniel Sutton has, like Dickens’s Magwitch, been ‘Australianised’, and his return to England constitutes a further threat to an ailing England. In this tale, as in The Daughter-in-Law, migration to Australia proves not to offer a solution to problems in England.

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In The Lost Girl, Lawrence continues the thread of migration through the possibility that Alvina Houghton will marry the part-Aboriginal Australian Dr Alexander Graham and return with him to live in Australia. Again, migration to Australia does not eventuate, demonstrating Lawrence’s continuing ambivalence before 1922. However, it is the interracial element in Alvina’s decision not to marry Graham that warrants closer attention.

INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA I The Australian author Carmel Bird has noted that ‘the colonial discourse of otherness in one form or another permeates Australian life and literature’, and that depictions of indigenous Australians reveal ‘contempt’ by white authors are at best patronizing and at worst offensive.22 A remarkable aspect of Lawrence’s engagement with Australia prior to his visit, therefore, is his largely positive portrayal of an apparently part-Aboriginal character in The Lost Girl, and it is in this regard that Lawrence’s character differs spectacularly from those such as Boldrewood’s subservient Warrigal in Robbery under Arms. Lawrence wrote of The Lost Girl: ‘I am doing Mixed Marriage – it should be more popular’ than either ‘Women in Love’ or ‘The Rainbow’ (3L 485). Alvina meets Dr Graham at ‘the age of twenty-three, and it looked as if she were destined to join the ranks of the old maids’ like Miss Pinnegar, who manages the household, and Miss Frost, Alvina’s governess (LG 21). Alvina has a ‘certain pure breeding and inherent culture’, and it is against this background of confinement and careful grooming that Alvina meets Graham, ‘an Australian who had been in Edinburgh taking his medical degree’ and who is assisting the Houghton’s family doctor (LG 22). Mrs Houghton is an invalid, and it is after a visit by Graham that we are introduced to him, through the disapproving gaze of the Houghton household: Alexander Graham called to see Mrs Houghton. Mrs Houghton did not like him. She said he was creepy. He was a man of medium height, dark in colouring, with very dark eyes, and a body which seemed to move inside his clothing. He was amiable and polite, laughed often, showing his teeth. It was his teeth which Miss Frost could not stand. She seemed to see a strong mouthful of cruel, compact teeth. She declared he had dark blood in his veins, that he was not a man to be trusted, and that never, never would he make any woman’s life happy. (LG 22) Both Mrs Houghton and Miss Frost reject Graham as a foreigner, an outsider. Miss Frost’s observation of his dark colouring and eyes and description of his dark blood indicates that she perceives Graham as having Australian Aboriginal forebears. The racial suspicion felt by the Houghton household is shared by the

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townsfolk: ‘the darkie, as people called him’, because he disturbed the racial homogeneity of the town (LG 23). Alvina, with ‘sinister recklessness’, agrees to their engagement, and her feelings for Dr Graham are tied to her sense of his racial difference, which is at once attractive and repugnant: To tell the truth, Alvina herself was a little repelled by the man’s lovemaking. She found him fascinating, but a trifle repulsive. And she was not sure whether she hated the repulsive element, or whether she rather gloried in it. She kept her look of arch, half-derisive recklessness, which was so unbearably painful to Miss Frost, and so exciting to the dark little man. (LG 23) Soon after Graham’s return to Sydney, to ‘see his people first’ (LG 23), Alvina announces that she is ‘breaking off her engagement’ and sending back ‘his ring and his letters’ (LG 26). And yet, it is the memory of Graham and his having spoken of ‘Nurse This and Sister That’ which galvanizes her into a life change (LG 29). ‘Do you wish you had gone to Australia?’ put in Miss Pinnegar. ‘No, I don’t wish I had gone to Australia’, retorted Alvina with a rude laugh. ‘Australia isn’t the only other place besides Woodhouse’. Miss Pinnegar was naturally offended … ‘You see dear’, said Miss Frost, agitated: ‘if you knew what you wanted, it would be easier to see the way’. ‘I want to be a nurse’, rapped out Alvina. (LG 28) Her household ‘were all horrified’ at ‘such a repulsive and indelicate step’ (LG 29–30). It is Alvina’s memory of Graham, however, which also catalyses her later decision to commit to the Italian Ciccio. She decides ‘to go to London and find work in the war-hospitals’ (LG 285) and ‘in the night she dreamed that Alexander, her first fiancé, was with her on the quay of some harbour, and was reproaching her bitterly, even reviling her, for having come too late’ (LG 285). The dream is a warning that she is in danger of foregoing another relationship and she resolves to ‘wire to Ciccio and meet him’ (LG 285). Notwithstanding the failure of his relationship with Alvina, Alexander Graham remains an intriguing character, particularly in light of the accounts of Aborigines Lawrence had absorbed from anthropology and literature. In a letter of 8 December 1915, he told Bertrand Russell excitedly that James Frazer’s work on Australian Aborigines had convinced him that ‘there is a blood consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness’, and that ‘some [Aboriginal] tribes no doubt really were kangaroos: they contained the blood knowledge of the kangaroo’ (2L 470). On

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11 January 1916, he informed Catherine Carswell that he had read E. L. Grant Watson’s novel Where Bonds Are Loosed (1914), in part about the institutional ill-treatment of Australian Aborigines, observing it ‘has some real go in it’ (2L 502). However, in creating the urban, educated Dr Graham, Lawrence distances his character from contemporary anthropological and fictional accounts of Australian Aborigines, locating him in the modern era. Curiously, in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence later reaffirmed that ‘blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us’, and it is striking that although Graham has dark blood in his veins, Lawrence does not invest him with Aboriginal blood-consciousness (PFU 191). However, in Graham, the offspring of two racial lines, Lawrence anticipates an Australian racial type he later felt should be emblematic of the continent he was soon to visit. The disappointed Lawrentian protagonist observes later in Kangaroo: ‘It seemed to Somers as if the people of Australia ought to be dusky’ (K 102). In Aaron’s Rod, Lawrence introduces the Australian Francis Dekker, who is ambiguously ‘well-coloured, might be Italian’ (AR 186). Dekker has an ‘elegant figure’ (AR 188), is ‘the son of a highly-esteemed barrister and politician of Sydney’ possessing a ‘colonial newness and adaptability’ (AR 197). His colonial vitality contrasts with his war-damaged companion Angus, who is ‘very ill’ and whose cheeks are ‘withered’ (AR 187). Dekker, like Alexander Graham, is a positive Australian character, and both creations suggest that Lawrence felt a cautious optimism in the lead up to his visit to Australia. Australia encountered The European population of Australia has its origins in the British invasion. At the time the colonies federated in 1901, over ‘98 per cent were of English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh descent’23 and little was changed in 1922. Lawrence told Koteliansky soon after his arrival that he felt ‘awfully foreign with the people, although they are all English by origin. It is rather like the Midlands of England … rough’(4L 253). These are the ‘barbarians’, the ‘British Australians’ (K 21) Somers encounters in Kangaroo. In 1922, thousands of demobilized Australian soldiers, known as diggers, as depicted in Kangaroo, were still adjusting to peacetime. However, although in a letter to Mary Cannan of 5 December 1922, a few months after he had left Australia, Lawrence referred to Kangaroo as ‘political’, and the novel contains much that is autobiographical, he saw the novel as ‘a thought adventure’ (4L 353), and the political thread in its plot is entirely fictitious. The paramilitary diggers and the climactic riot in ‘A Row in Town’ derive from Lawrence’s recent experience of the rise of fascism in Italy (as reflected earlier in the street clashes depicted in Aaron’s Rod) rather than actual events in Australia (see AR 183–6). Somers remarks disappointedly to the Socialist leader Struthers that Italy had been ‘ “on the brink of revolution” ’

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but ‘ “the fascisti, seeing the socialists in a funk, got up and began to try to kick their behinds” ’ (K 194). However, the novel’s characterization of the broad thrust of Australian politics mirroring global conflict between labour and capital is accurate, and registers Lawrence’s disappointment that in Australia there was not a new political or social vision. Viewed in this light, the political machinations in Kangaroo are a continuation of his earlier condemnation of ‘all the isms’ (RDP 81) in his essay ‘Democracy’, which had been published in The Word in 1919 (see RDP xii–xiii). Lawrence condemned humanity’s ‘present state of mechanical degeneration’ (RDP 81) and debunked ‘Democracy and Socialism [as] dead ideals’ (RDP 66). On 1 January 1919, Lawrence informed Koteliansky: ‘I still have some sort of hope of our Rananim’ (3L 316), the next day telling his sister-in-law: ‘I must get out of England, of Europe’ (3L 316), and it is these sentiments, combined with his long-standing interest in Australia which impelled Lawrence to visit Australia some three years later. He was soon disappointed, informing Koteliansky on 20 May 1922 that Australians were ‘very friendly, but slow’ (4L 241). He complained to Robert Mountsier on 25 May 1922 that ‘Australia is liberty gone senile’ and that with ‘immigrants rolling in’ it had a ‘hateful newness’ and a ‘democratic conceit (4L 246–7). But ‘food is quite cheap’, he told Frieda’s mother (4L 249). In Kangaroo, the prospect of migration, already problematized in Lawrence’s earlier writing about Australia, is now equated with banishment. The poet Somers feels acute displacement in Australia: ‘He could sympathise now with Ovid on the Danube, hungering for Rome and blind to the land around him, blind to the savages’ (K 20). Sydney is ‘a substitute’ for ‘London’ (K 20). Somers meets William James (Jaz) Trewhella, a Cornish migrant, and hears of his hardships in Cornwall as ‘ “a half starved youngster” ’, which drove him to migrate (K 60). Somers, however, is unmoved, recalling his own ‘fascination’ with Cornwall’s Celtic ‘magic’ (K 61). Trewhella is proud of his success in Australia, and he and Somers debate the efficacy of migration. ‘ “You thinking of settling out here then, are you?” ’ Jaz asks. ‘ “No” said Somers. “But I don’t say I won’t. It depends” ’ (K 61). Unlike Somers, Trewhella likes Australia because it is democratic, a country ‘ “for all one dead level sort of people” ’ (K 72). His attitude interests Harriett. ‘ “You are Australian yourself now, aren’t you? Or don’t you feel it?” ’ (K 72). Jaz replies: ‘ “Oh yes, I suppose I feel it … It’s a fact” ’ (K 72). But Trewhella sees the Somerses as having ‘ “the gift of being superior” ’ (K 72) and tells Harriett that Somers is ‘ “making a mistake to come out here” ’ (K 73). Somers has already suffered the shock of finding that Australian society has ‘no superior classes’, is ‘à terre democratic. Demos was here his own master’ (K 21–2). Democracy infects the Australian character, producing a frustrating conundrum for Somers: it is the ‘democratic uppishness with a queer lousy quality, like a bushranger’ which makes Australians so

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‘ “foreign” ’, although ‘ “their manner of life” ’ was ‘ “almost exactly what [he] was used to as a boy” ’ (K 127). At his introductory meeting with Kangaroo, Somers learns that Kangaroo, hoping he has found an ally, alludes to his having read his essay ‘Democracy’ (K 110). But Somers, who mirrors the views in Lawrence’s eponymous essay, wants ‘a new social-form’ because democracy is ‘ “pot-bound” ’ (K 98). He is not interested in Cooley’s vision of ‘ “benevolent tyranny” ’ (K 112). Jack Callcott, who Somers meets soon after arriving in Sydney, is frustrated at Somers’s ambivalence towards Ben Cooley’s right-wing political objectives: ‘ “You blighters from the Old Country are so mighty careful of risking yourselves” ’ (K 142). We infer that he has called Somers a ‘pommy’, a playful insult for British migrants. ‘And Jack Callcott’s rebuke stuck his throat. Perhaps after all he was just a Pommy, prescribing things with overmuch emphasis’ (K 147). The narrator explains that in Australia ‘immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood “thins down”, by their round and ruddy cheeks’ (K 147). Somers fears a collapse of his English vitality, and reflects contemporary anxieties about ‘biological degeneration’, of being ‘tropicalised’, as noted by Nancy Stepan.24 Lawrence had earlier communicated to Koteliansky from Ceylon, a month before arriving in Australia: ‘It seems to me the life drains away from one here’ (4L 228). Somers ponders: ‘ “Do I want my blood to thin down like theirs? – that peculiar emptiness that is in them, because of the thinning that’s gone out of them? Do I want this curious transparent blood of the antipodes, with its momentaneous feelings and its sort of absentness?” ’(K 148). But so much would have to be ‘unlearnt’ which would be ‘dead against the sound old British tradition’ (K 148). Meanwhile Somers receives a letter from his sister seeking his views on her and her husband ‘coming to Australia’ to find a farm (K 152). Somers meets Willie Struthers at ‘Canberra House, in Sydney, where the Socialists and Labour People had their premises’ (K 193).25 Struthers, born Australian, is ‘a distinct Australian type, thin, hollow-cheeked’ who ‘spoke with a pronounced Australian accent – a bad cockney’ (K 193). He is a lesser form of Englishman, as opposed to Somers who is a ‘true Englishman’ (K 22). Struthers invites Somers to edit a ‘ “constructive Socialist paper” ’ (K 200), but Somers prevaricates, saying he does not have ‘ “the right touch” ’ (K 202). Although he would ‘ “prefer Willie Struthers” ’ because ‘ “Kangaroo” ’ is ‘ “false” ’ (K 303), ultimately ‘ “it’s a choice of evils” ’ (K 304), and Somers wants ‘a new show: a new recognition of the life-mystery’ (K 303). Somers leaves the claustrophobic political meeting with Struthers feeling he has ‘ “escaped out of a trap” ’ and discovers a new freedom in Australia. The ‘shibboleths of mankind are so trumpery’. Walking around the harbour and gardens of Sydney, he suddenly ‘ “loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air” ’. Jaz remarks: ‘ “You’ve got a bit of an Australian look this morning about you.” ’ Somers

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responds excitedly: ‘ “I feel Australian. I feel a new creature.” ’ Jaz is sceptical of Somers’s sudden enthusiasm, his ‘ “turn [to] bushrangers” ’ (K 203): But Somers continues, extolling the wonderful otherness of Australia: ‘ “You just walk out of the world and into Australia … where one can’t care” ’. Somers does wonder whether he would regret a decision to stay in Australia, and Jaz, who can see that Somers’s euphoria is hyperemotional, replies astutely: ‘ “You’ll change back before you regret it” ’ (K 204). However, after his bitter recollections of wartime England in ‘The Nightmare’ chapter, Somers takes more notice of the simple, country Australians he meets casually: ‘They are really awfully nice. There is a winsome charm about them’ (K 276). ‘He was so tempted to commit himself to this strange continent and its strange people.’ Lawrence continues the dialectic. ‘He was tempted, save for a sense of impending disaster at the bottom of his soul. And there a voice kept saying: ‘ “No no. No no.” ’ There is an ‘ “aristocratic principle’ ”, an ‘ “innate difference between people” ’ (K 277). Migration continues as a thread in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), where Connie wonders whether she and Mellors might move to ‘ “Africa or Australia” ’ (LCL 215). In St Mawr (1925) where Lawrence completed his fictional engagement with Australia,26 the Australian characters, Rico and the Manbys, have undertaken a problematic reverse migration from Australia to England. Like Dekker in Aaron’s Rod, Rico has minor aristocratic connections but unlike Dekker, following Lawrence’s disenchantment with Australia and the completion of his two Australian novels, he is a degenerate character, ‘living like an amiable machine’ (SM 94) and possessing a ‘eunuch cruelty’ (SM 96). He and the Manbys are ‘rich Australians returned to the old country and set up as Squires’ (SM 42), and like Magwitch, are an invasive and corrosive presence in England, exemplifying the modernizing Australianization Pinkney noted.

INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA II In a letter to Mollie Skinner of 3 December 1928, Lawrence affirmed that he ‘never saw a black boy except in the streets of Sydney’, which helps explain the absence of Aboriginal characters in Kangaroo (7L 36). And yet, there is a persistent engagement with Australian Aboriginality throughout the novel, paradoxically, through the frequent evoking of an eerie or mysterious absence, particularly in association with the natural world – the bush, and through the Aboriginal quasi-characters reproduced from The Bulletin. The first half dozen pages of the novel make clear that Aborigines have been dispossessed. In his first experience of the Australian bush, Somers sees ‘tree-trunks like naked pale aborigines’. He feels an ‘icy sensation of terror’ which ‘must be the spirit of the place’ (K 14), recalling the geo-racial concept Lawrence had coined in Studies in Classic American Literature (SCAL 17). The spirit in the bush has ‘a long black arm’ and is ‘biding its time … watching the myriad intruding white men’

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(K 14–15). Somers is one of an ‘alien people’ (K 14), and Lawrence may have recalled H. G. Wells’s nauseating observation in the opening pages of The War of the Worlds (1898): ‘The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.’27 In any case, Kangaroo may be read as a corrective to the British invasion of Aboriginal Australia. Lawrence’s title Kangaroo is quintessentially Aboriginal in origin and overtly references precolonial Aboriginal Australia.28 However, Lawrence simultaneously evokes a pre-human continent where humans were not yet present. The eyes of the Australian digger Callcott are of an ‘aboriginal darkness’ yet one ‘might imagine inhuman presences moving among the gum-trees’ (K 32). And at night, the ‘amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a kind of virgin sensuous aloofness’ (K 32). The kangaroo in Lawrence’s eponymous poem has ‘watched so many empty dawns in / silent Australia’ (1Poems 344). In Sydney, Somers and Harriett jeer at suburban houses with English names such as ‘Loves Harbour’ and ‘Arcady’ (K 28), which sit incongruously beside unspoilt ‘state reserve – a bit of aboriginal Australia’ (K 26). In order to reinforce an Aboriginal Australia, Lawrence renames Thirroul, the town in which he wrote his novel, ‘Mullumbimby’ (a town in northern New South Wales), unaware that Thirroul is itself derived from the name of the local indigenous people.29 Unlike the novel’s title, Kangaroo, the nickname for Ben Cooley, the would-be dictator, is deeply ironic. Kangaroo is a presumptuous absurdity. At their first meeting, Somers finds that Cooley ‘was a kangaroo. His face was long and lean’ (K 107) and he had a ‘round stomach’ (K 114). Cooley harangues Somers: ‘ “How do you like Australia and its national animal, the kangaroo?” ’ (K 115). Somers, who has been ‘bored’ (K 110) by their political discussion, replies sarcastically: ‘ “Australia is a weird country, and its national animal is beyond me” ’ (K 115). The Bulletin magazine, which ‘Lawrence religiously read’,30 and ‘the only periodical in the world that amused’ Somers (K 269) provided Lawrence with a window onto the lives of Australian Aborigines through its sensationalist and often racist reportage, which Lawrence reproduced in his novel. One example points to his continuing curiosity about interracial marriage and recounts ‘ “a white girl marrying an aboriginal about 20 years ago” ’. Her husband ‘ “Binghi’ was a landed proprietor, having acquired a very decent estate on the death of a former spinster employer” ’ (K 271). ‘Binghi’ is a derogatory term and was meant to be amusing. Lawrence ignores it and is more interested in the fact that from time to time the Aboriginal husband ‘would leave his wife and kids (they had three) and take himself to an old tumble-down hut in the bush’ (K 271), thereby fulfilling his own fantasy to ‘really go bush’ (4L 280), presumably not seeing himself as one of ‘the myriad intruding white men’ (K 15).

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In Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence wrote: ‘the Chinese in San Francisco will in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot’ (SCAL 17). In Kangaroo, Somers meditates on the future of the British population in Australia. He envisages an Australia still defined by its Aboriginal origins, but where the intruding civilization will ‘disappear’, and ‘a different sort of men might arise to a different sort of care. But as for now – like snow in aboriginal wine one could float and deliciously melt down, to nothingness, having no choice’ (K 334). Lawrence’s enduring fascination with racial ‘melt down’ is also evident in The Boy in the Bush. Newly arrived in Australia, the Englishman Jack’s ‘dark-blue eyes’ (BB 7) contrast with the Australian Mary’s ‘big, queer, very black eyes. You might have thought she had native blood’ (BB 30). And later, ‘Where had Mary got that queer aboriginal look, she the granddaughter of an English earl?’ (BB 261). ‘Dusky Mary’ has an alluring, but latent sexuality and Jack is attracted to her ‘wild tang’ (BB 250). However, her rejection of Jack’s essentially bigamous offer of ‘Scotch marriage’ (BB 318–19) and her hatred of her impliedly Aboriginal ‘animal nature’ (BB 331) stymie the possibility of a mixed-race union with Jack. Lawrence wrote The Boy in America after meeting Mabel Sterne and her soon-to-be-spouse Tony Luhan, a Native American, describing Luhan as ‘nice too, but silent’ (4L 295), and their later marriage as part of an ‘essential “onwards” ’ (4L 514). However, Lawrence’s curiosity about interracial unions originating in The Lost Girl collapses into anxiety in The Boy. His deeper view of miscegenation may have been closer to that of Frieda, who approved of Mabel’s marriage in her ‘head … but somewhere else it’s so impossible’ (4L 450). Jack attends a bush dance where the ‘next girl had been looming up like a big coal barge. She was a half-cast, of course named Lily, and she sat aggressively forwards, her bony elbows and wrists much in evidence, and her pleasant swarthy face alight and eager with anticipation. Oh these Missioner half-castes!’ (BB 130). The novel’s awkward sarcasm at the expense of a young ‘Missioner’ woman, one of the ‘Stolen Generations’,31 falls jarringly flat today, and is surprising, given the dignified part-Aboriginal Dr Alexander Graham Lawrence created in The Lost Girl. Jack discovers that the Australian rogue Easu has designs on Lily as well as Jack’s love interest, Monica. ‘Why Monica in the same class with the half-caste Lily?’ (BB 131), Jack bemoans. Interracial relations are a challenge to Jack’s British identity, and it would appear a bridge too far for Lawrence. Jack sees ‘an abandon in it all – an abandon of restrictions and confining control’ (BB 131). Ultimately ‘his pride of blood was too intense. He had no objection at all to Lily, until it came to actual physical contact. And then his blood recoiled with old haughtiness and pride of race’ (BB 132). Jack’s assertion of ‘sexual distance’ aligns with the ‘racial biology’ identified by Nancy Stepan, which by the ‘midnineteenth century had become a science of boundaries between racial groups

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and the “degeneration” that threatened when people lived outside “their proper place” ’.32 Lawrence wrote in a letter to Rolf Gardiner on 4 July 1924, ‘and the great racial differences are insuperable … The spirit of place ultimately always triumphs’. However, Lawrence is not crudely racist. His insistence on racial difference stems from his deeper celebration of what we might call Lawrentian sacred diversity: ‘I have known many things, that may never be unified: Ceylon, the Buddha temples, Australian bush … I hate “oneness” ’ (5L 67). And so, in The Boy, in place of intimacy with Australian Aborigines, sexual or otherwise, Lawrence posits, somewhat presumptuously, that Jack enjoys the ‘same deep, generous anger of the blood’ visible in the ‘eyes of the aborigines’ which produced ‘a kind of free-masonry between him and the blacks’ (BB 194). The bush From his railway carriage window, Somers sees the distant ‘Blue Mountains. And all this hoary space of bush between. The strange, as it were invisible beauty of Australia, which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range of our white vision’ (K 76–7). Somers’s perceptual difficulty derives from the unfamiliar aesthetics of the Australian landscape which is ‘ugly faced’ like ‘distorted aborigines’ (K 77). In Kangaroo, set on the lush east coast below Sydney, the Australian bush appears to be a fossil relic, existing in opposition to modernity – both in Europe and Australia – and it is the effect of this oppositional force on the human inhabitants of the continent which is one of the novel’s primary concerns. The ‘ancient flat-topped tree-ferns, these towsled palms’ reference the pre-human, carboniferous age, inducing an ‘old, saurian torpor’ (K 178) and a seductive ‘twilight indifference’, a regression to a ‘half-vegetable, devoid of pre-occupations’ (K 178). Somers and Harriett register that the Australians, Callcott and his wife Victoria, who have stayed overnight, are the products of a degenerative environment. Jack, appearing at the breakfast table, has not worn a tie: ‘Harriet really disapproved’ (K 183). Her ‘ancient judgement of the Old World’ separates the English couple from the Australians (K 183). Jack cooperates grudgingly, but he remains ‘so far, fernlost, from the Old World’ (K 183). Gradually, Somers sheds his inherited British aesthetics and learns to see the bush. By the end of the novel, Somers finds that the retrograde qualities of the bush, which produce the ‘profound Australian indifference’ and the ‘disintegration of the social mankind back to its elements’ (K 345) might be, paradoxically, rejuvenating and appealing after all. Having dreamt of an ‘old gothic cathedral, huge and massive and grey’, he wakes to find that he ‘loved the Australian landscape, with the remote gum trees’ (K 346). Surveying the township of Mullumbimby, he is ‘thankful for the amorphous scrappy scattering of foundationless shacks and bungalows’ carved out of the bush (K 346).

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Captivated by his new-found sensibility, Somers confides to Jazz: “ ‘Australia tempts me. Retro me … I fairly tremble with wanting it’ ” (K 347). “ ‘I wouldn’t want to live in Sydney. I’d want to go back in the bush near one of the little townships’ ” (K 348). He and Harriett hire ‘a sulky … to drive into the bush’ and find at last that they are able see its Edenic beauty (K 353). The bush in ‘bloom looked like a corner of paradise’ (K 355). Lawrence’s rewriting of Mollie Skinner’s ‘The House of Ellis’ after he had left Australia, giving it the title The Boy in the Bush, captures Lawrence’s continuing obsession with the Australian bush (see 5L 523–4). Earlier, en route from Perth to Sydney, he had written to Robert Mountsier in May 1922 If I were chucking up the literary sponge … I’d stop in Australia. One could live in the bush for next to nothing … But I suppose I must hang on at least till I have tried America … and it’s nice to know there is this country – the North West particularly – where one could lose oneself away from the world. (4L 245) With his new project, Lawrence was able to revisit Western Australia, envisaging a utopian north-west, and in contrast to the claustrophobic, regressive ‘saurian’ landscape of Kangaroo, the bush exists as an expansive frontier wilderness – dangerous, but also regenerative. Lawrence imagines himself as a young immigrant, Jack Grant, out from England making his way in ‘the newest of new colonies’ (BB 7).33 In continuing the themes of migration, Australian Aboriginality and the bush, The Boy illustrates the continuities in Lawrence’s work and his ‘process of revising, rethinking and rewriting’, noted by Paul Eggert.34 Jack, apparently born and raised in England, had an English father and a mother with ‘uncanny Australian blood’ (BB 10) and he fondly remembered her ‘jolly sensuousness’ (BB 11). Jack’s mixed lineage disturbs the neat polarity between English and Australian articulated in Kangaroo, suggesting the possibility of a regenerated Englishness in Australia, in contrast to the degenerative forces depicted in Kangaroo. His mother’s qualities arise from her upbringing in the western Australian bush where ‘you always had the wild and endless bush all round your little claim, and coming and going was always through the wild and innocent, but non-moral bush’. Jack’s mother ‘was like a wild, sweet animal … A real colonial, from the newest, wildest, remotest colony’. The settlements, by contrast, are home to ‘drunkenness and foolish pride’ (BB 12). With Jack’s eventual desire for community in the north-west, beyond the colonial settlements, Lawrence imagines his long-cherished vision of Rananim, reinforcing it with a romanticized allusion to the foundation of the British colony in western Australia.35 ‘Jack’s grandfather’ had been ‘busy clearing ground and erecting temporary houses’ among the first settlers ‘in midwinter, June 1827’, exactly fifty-five years before ‘June 1882’, the date of Jack’s arrival (BB 15).

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Jack has come to Australia to ‘escape the welter of vicious tameness’ (BB 306) in England and his slaying of the Australian born Easu, ‘a tame dog’ (BB 307), is the triumph of Jack’s Anglo-Australian lineage over the degeneracy of colonial western Australia. Easu’s death also marks the death of the old Jack as he moves from settled farm life to the north-west. Having slain Easu, Jack flees to the bush and collapses. In a dramatic reworking and conflation of Christ’s excursion into the wilderness, crucifixion and resurrection, Jack considers ‘ “I have dipped my hand in blood” ’ (BB 283); ‘ “I am a lord of death” ’ (BB 284). He then realizes ‘he was lost’ (BB 285) and ‘insignificant’ in the ‘malevolence of the bush’ (BB 286). However, he is rescued and ‘ “born again” ’ (BB 291). Jack, who had long been in love with Monica, marries her, and they move to the ‘North-West’ wandering in a transient ‘purgatory of discomfort’ (BB 302). Jack disappears gold prospecting to ‘ “conquer gold” ’ in order ‘to make a place for a few aristocrats-to-the-bone’ (BB 308). In contrast to the democratic Australian Lawrence condemned in Kangaroo, Jack heralds the ‘natural aristocracy’ (RDP 368) Lawrence later celebrated in ‘Aristocracy’ (1925). Unlike Harriett in Kangaroo, who forcefully contests Somers’s vision in ‘Harriett and Lovatt at Sea in Marriage’, the female voices in The Boy compete subtly, almost inadvertently. With his subsequent polyamorous proposal to Mary that she ‘ “come and live in the North-West” ’ (BB 331) with him and Monica, Jack postulates a morality higher than sexual ‘intrigue’ and ‘divorce’, evoking the polygamous relationships of the ‘old heroes … like Abraham in the bible’ (BB 330). However, his mockery of Mary’s refusal is outrageous and points to a self-serving arrogance at the heart of his hopes for utopian community: ‘ “What’s the good of keeping your virginity! It’s really mine” ’ (BB 331). Hilda Blessington’s sudden reappearance, an echo of Dorothy Brett’s undertaking to accompany the Lawrences back to New Mexico (see 4L 550), and her ambivalent assertion she ‘ “might like to be a man’s second or third wife” ’ (BB 346), offers scant comfort to Jack’s polygamous ambitions. He finds her position ‘a real joke’ (BB 347). The concluding sentence of the novel where Jack rides alone ‘down the silent grey bush, in which he had once been lost’ (BB 347), suggests that his utopian quest, and Lawrence’s, could not be achieved in modern Australia – or in the bush, and that the quest itself is part of the joke.

NOTES 1 These subjects are examined in David Game, D. H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 2 The bush is a broad term in Australia embracing forest, woodlands and other wild or sparsely inhabited areas. It exists in opposition to town. See The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 134.

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3 E. T. [Jessie Chambers], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), p. 95. 4 Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in NineteenthCentury English Literature (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970), p. 148. Lawrence cites Great Expectations in a letter to Catherine Carswell in June 1917 (3L 131). 5 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Macmillan, [1895] 1974), p. 211. In a letter of 17 December 1910, Lawrence asks Louie Burrows if she has read Jude the Obscure (1L 205). 6 See Paul Eggert, ‘D. H. Lawrence, Henry Lawson and Single Author Criticism’, D. H. Lawrence Review 36.2 (2011): 2–26, 10. 7 See ‘The Novels of Rolf Boldrewood’, in Robbery under Arms: A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of Australia, ed. Rolf Boldrewood (London: Macmillan, 1901), n.p., where sixteen additional works by Boldrewood are listed. 8 See Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby, introduction’ to Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery under Arms, ed. Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006), pp. xxv, xxiii, xli, lv. 9 Ibid., p. xlii. 10 Boldrewood, Robbery under Arms, p. 393. 11 Paul Eggert, ‘Textual Criticism and Folklore: The Ned Kelly Story and Robbery under Arms’, Script and Print 31.2 (2007): 69–80, 77. 12 Ibid., p. 51. 13 Ibid., p. 229. 14 Ibid., p. 211. 15 Ibid., p. 67. 16 Michael Roe, Australia, Britain and Migration, 1915–1940: A Study of Desperate Hopes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8. 17 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 458. 18 For a fuller discussion of Lawrence’s engagement with theories of degeneration and his personal quest for regeneration, see Game, D. H. Lawrence’s Australia, ­chapters 1, 2 and 6. 19 William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 33.

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20 J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, ‘Introduction’, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, ix–xiv (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. xii. 21 Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence and Modernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), pp. 113, 116.

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22 Carmel Bird, ‘An Overview of the Presence of Indigenous Characters in Australian Fiction’, December 2001. Available online: http://www.car​melb​ird.com/ind​igen​ous. htm n.p. (accessed 24 November 2021). 23 Gavin Souter, Lion and Kangaroo: The Initiation of Australia (Melbourne: Text Publishing, [1976] 2001), p. 12. 24 Nancy Stepan, ‘Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places’, in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. Chamberlin and Gilman, pp. 97–120, 99. 25 Canberra was designated the capital of Australia in 1913, but was still a fledgling city in 1922. Lawrence’s arguably idealistic reference to Canberra appears to be the first reference to the city in Anglophone fiction. For a fuller discussion, see Game, D. H. Lawrence’s Australia, p. 144. 26 For an account of Lawrence’s insertions in late 1928 to Mollie Skinner’s unpublished novel ‘Eve in the Land of Nod’, see Game, D. H. Lawrence’s Australia, pp. 260–8. 27 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (New York: Signet Classic, [1898] 1986), p. 5. In a letter of 18 May 1909 to Blanche Jennings, Lawrence referred to Wells’s novel as ‘arrant rot’ (1L 127). 28 Kangaroo is from ‘Guugu Yimidhirr ganuru, large black species of kangaroo’. See The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 584. 29 ‘Before European settlement, Aboriginal people belonging to the “Thurrural” tribe roamed this area. There were many different ways of spelling the name which translates to “the place or valley of the cabbage tree palms” ’. Available online: https://wol​long​ ong.nsw.gov.au/libr​ary/expl​ore-our-past/your-sub​urb/subu​rbs/thirr​oul (accessed 2 December 2021). Lawrence notes ‘these towsled palms’ in Kangaroo (K 178). 30 Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, but the Wind …’ (New York: The Viking Press, 1934), p. 120. 31 ‘Since colonisation, numerous government laws, policies and practices resulted in the forced removal of generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities across Australia … They are known as the Stolen Generations’. Available online: https://aiat​sis.gov.au/expl​ore/sto​len-gene​rati​ ons (accessed 14 December 2021). 32 Stepan, ‘Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places’, p. 99. 33 The novel’s protagonist, Jack Grant, is also drawn partly from Mollie Skinner’s brother Jack. Skinner, recalling her original manuscript wrote, after receiving Lawrence’s typescript, that he had ‘twisted its tail’ and altered Jack’s character. See M. L. Skinner, The Fifth Sparrow: An Autobiography (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1972), p. 128. 34 Paul Eggert, ‘Revising and Rewriting’, in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 219. 35 Lawrence received inspiration from the West Australia Year-Book for 1902–1904. See Paul Eggert, introduction, The Boy in the Bush (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. xiv.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Race and empire LAURA RYAN

In the rejected Epilogue to Movements in European History (1921), Lawrence employs the metaphorical ‘tree of mankind’ in his explanation of racial difference, seeming to suggest an abiding equality and uniformity uniting all humanity: In its root and trunk, mankind is one. But then the differences begin. The great tree of man branches out into different races: huge branches, reaching far out in different directions. … My manhood is the same as the manhood of a Chinaman. But in spirit and idea we two are different and shall be different forever, as apple-blossom will forever be different from irises. (MEH 256) Having initially averred the ‘oneness’ of mankind, he feels compelled to pull back, emphasizing racial difference as incontrovertible (especially in ‘spirit and idea’). Lawrence could not identify easily with men ‘of another race, of different culture and religion’ (IR 245) and he often could not help but feel that ultimately ‘the great racial differences are insuperable’ (5L 67). More odious – and frequently quoted – are comments elsewhere in which the narrator of The Plumed Serpent (1926) declares that ‘the dark races belong to a bygone cycle of humanity’ (PS 148), or, as Lawrence pronounces in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925), ‘Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me’ (RDP 357). Yet repeating such snippets in isolation fails to give a full and fair picture of his attitudes. In Reflections, having espoused a mainstream Darwinian hierarchy of ‘existence … in terms of species, race, or type’ and affirmed that ‘one race of man can subjugate and rule

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another race. … This is a law’ (RDP 357–8), Lawrence avows a few lines later that ‘any creature that attains to its own fulness of being, its own living self, becomes unique, a nonpareil … it is beyond comparison’ (RDP 357–8). This is merely one of many instances in which Lawrence appears initially to promote a racist and imperialist world view typical of his time, only to offer a far more nuanced, even progressive, insight. Nevertheless – for obvious reasons – Lawrence’s depictions of and responses to racial difference remain among the most problematic aspects of his work for readers and scholars alike. They are problematic not only because many of his positions would today undoubtedly be considered unacceptable, racist, colonialist, but also because they were never fixed. Indeed, they were constantly in flux, often contradictory and always complex. Lawrence was undeniably a product of his time, but he was also a writer who went against the grain and challenged prevailing Western attitudes to ethnicity and colonialism. He saw and experienced racial difference as alternately fascinating and intimidating; he regularly expressed the belief that encounters with racial ‘Others’ could be transformative and revitalizing, yet real-life experiences often provoked uneasiness, anxiety and disgust. This chapter will trace these contradictions and intricacies in Lawrence’s work and thought, both revisiting and evaluating current scholarship on Lawrence, race and empire and considering the hitherto neglected questions of how the English author influenced non-white writers in his own time and how he might today be read in light of contemporary events and movements. It will do so initially with reference to a range of Lawrence’s novels including The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920) and The Plumed Serpent, travel and non-fiction writings, letters, essays and creative criticism including ‘On Being a Man’ (1925) and Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). A brief note on the critical context precedes a discussion of Lawrence’s primitivism and attitudes to empire, with particular reference to The Rainbow and Women in Love, followed by a case study on Lawrence’s evolving ideas around racial mixing (or miscegenation).1 The latter part of the chapter explores Lawrence’s clear (yet perhaps unexpected) appeal to and influence upon several of the most important and influential Black writers of the twentieth century. Finally, I reflect upon what it means to read and respond to Lawrence today; as school and university curricula are rebalanced to give voice to a more diverse range of voices, I ask how Lawrence might sit among and be placed in dialogue with them. Though the primary focus of this chapter is Lawrence in relation to race and empire, it is difficult (and indeed inadvisable) to consider this topic in isolation from those treated in other chapters of this volume (on sexuality, gender, travel, cultural difference, even animal studies and sustainability). At base, as some recent criticism has acknowledged, Lawrence’s responses to and views

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on race and empire were rooted in a wider, contiguous sense of difference (whether racial, sexual, cultural or other) as potentially both transformative and threatening, vivifying and annihilating. As a white Englishman alive at the height of the British Empire, Lawrence should have been fairly secure in his subject position. Yet, in seeking new ways forward for himself – and for England, Europe, the Western world – he pushed his thinking to its limits, often to the point of fear and discomfort.

CRITICAL CONTEXT: A BRIEF HISTORY Because Lawrence’s responses to race and empire were prone to alter and are almost impossible to pin down or package neatly, writing about them has often proved challenging for scholars – and perhaps especially for those working in the past two or three decades. As Ronald Granofsky noted at the turn of this century, ‘the issue of Lawrence and race is entangled in his writing within a nexus of competing ideological and psychological formulations, and to untangle it is no easy task’.2 Those who have attempted such an untangling have often fallen into one of two camps: those who defend Lawrence too fervidly and those who condemn him too easily. The former are (generally) careful to acknowledge that racist and colonialist attitudes are present in Lawrence’s work, but eager to emphasize that such attitudes were so widespread during his lifetime as to be (almost) forgivable. The latter dismiss him – as Kate Millett famously did – as a wholly detestable figure, a racist and a fascist, often on the basis of only a few abhorrent passages. I call here for an honest reckoning with Lawrence’s racial politics: one that is neither defensive nor simply accusatory, but which offers a representative and equitable picture of what he wrote and how he thought on the subject. The issue of cultural context looms large in scholarship considering Lawrence and race. Judith Ruderman – though never overly defensive – avers that Lawrence was ‘one who would undoubtedly not have considered himself racist’.3 Mark Kinkead-Weekes warns that we must resist ‘condescending to the past’ in approaching Lawrence’s writings on race and empire; ‘we need to see’, he argues, ‘just how hard it could be (and is) to unscale one’s eyes from the prejudices of the time’.4 Likewise, A. S. Byatt advises employing ‘an historical imagination in approaching Lawrence’s world’.5 Certainly, it is prudent to read any author with a conscious awareness of their context, but this has sometimes meant glossing over the less palatable aspects of Lawrence’s life and work. John Worthen, for example, refutes claims of Lawrence’s antiSemitism in part by affirming that ‘one of his closest lifelong friends was a Jew’; ‘in reality’, Worthen contends, he was ‘generous to women and men alike, and to all races and colours’.6 Judged against some of his modernist counterparts – one thinks particularly of Ezra Pound, whose fascist and racist

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views were far more clear-cut and sustained than those of Lawrence, and of T. S. Eliot, whose bigotry permeates even his greatest work – Lawrence might be considered comparably ‘generous’. Such comparisons, however, are not particularly valuable. Little scholarly attention was paid to race in Lawrence until after 1945. Among the first to condemn him after the Second World War – unsurprisingly for his anti-Semitic comments and depictions – was Bertrand Russell. Russell’s oftquoted remark that his sometime friend ‘had developed the whole philosophy of fascism before the politicians had thought of it’, and that Lawrence’s theories on ‘blood consciousness’ had ‘led straight to Auschwitz’ is today widely dismissed as unfair and anachronistic.7 Yet, such comments continue to affect responses to Lawrence and particularly readings of his so-called leadership novels (a term long used to group Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, though now contested). In 1964, Jascha Kessler claimed that Lawrence’s later works (including The Plumed Serpent) enjoyed popularity in Nazi Germany because ‘his blood theory led him directly into totalitarian ideology. For to Lawrence blood was not merely a trope, or a spiritual symbol: it was the quintessence of the racial.’8 In more recent years, scholars have been able to move beyond either condemnation or defensiveness. Judith Ruderman’s Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (2014) is probably the most significant and wide-ranging study on Lawrence and race to date, while others, including Howard J. Booth and Granofsky, have published important work since the 1990s arguing for a balanced consideration of Lawrence’s racial politics. Yet, the ‘resistances in Lawrence Studies’ that – as Booth noted more than twenty years ago – ‘militated against the consideration, in the round, of the issue of Lawrence and race’, have often persisted in twenty-first-century scholarship.9 Long ‘occluded by the structuring of knowledge about his life and work’, the true complexity of Lawrence’s responses to race and empire were minimized or ignored.10 Even in the past decade, certain facets of Lawrence’s engagements have been somewhat obscured or understudied. Ruderman focuses chiefly upon Lawrence’s depictions of Jews and Jewishness, with relatively little treatment of his responses to people of African descent. Post-colonial readings were also slow to emerge, but perhaps the most significant work on the subject is Amit Chaudhuri’s 2003 book, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’. Chaudhuri positions Lawrence as a critic of Western ways of thinking, who challenges European consciousness and prefigures post-colonial theory in the unfinished, indeterminate and anti-foundationalist bricolage of his poetry.11 Much work remains to be done on Lawrence in relation to post-colonial theory and to non-white writers and thinkers; this chapter suggests some potential ways forward. The two sections to follow examine some of

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Lawrence’s key writings on race and empire in roughly chronological order. Characteristically, however, there is no particularly neat trajectory to be traced here: no miraculous, straightforward journey from ignorance to knowledge or from prejudiced youth to open-minded middle age. His thinking was itinerant and his views fluctuating; it is thus necessary, in places, to jump between different periods of Lawrence’s life to develop a fuller picture of his changing relationship to racial difference and to empire.

ENCOUNTERS WITH ‘OTHERS’: ANXIETY, PRIMITIVISM AND EMPIRE IN THE RAINBOW AND WOMEN IN LOVE A letter of 27 December 1910 provides us with one of Lawrence’s earliest reflections on racial difference. In it, he recounts to Louie Burrows a ‘strange’ encounter of the previous evening: At the petite danse last night there were three Asiatics from India. They are extraordinarily interesting to watch – like lithe beasts from the jungle: but one cannot help feeling how alien they are. You talk about ‘brother men’: but a terrier dog is much nearer kin to us than those men with their wild laughter and rolling eyes. Either I am disagreeable or a bit barbaric myself: but I felt the race instinct of aversion and slight antagonism to those blacks, rather strongly. (1L 215) This passage betrays its author’s inexperience; as Ruderman noted in 2018, Lawrence – like most who grew up in the English Midlands at the time – would have had very little exposure to anyone who was not white or Christian.12 Lawrence shows himself to be both fascinated and disgusted by these men, who are described, confusingly, as both ‘Asiatics from India’ and ‘blacks’. His description of their ‘wild laughter and rolling eyes’ clearly plays into stereotypes of the time that regarded non-white populations as uninhibited, uncivilized and animalistic. Yet, these commonplace opinions existed alongside the belief that these same peoples were in possession of a ‘primitive’ vitality that the West had lost. The popularization of psychoanalytic theories blaming modern man’s neuroses upon Western civilization, a new appreciation of African art among post-impressionist artists like Gaugin, Cézanne and Picasso, and a general post-war disenchantment with Western ways of living and being fuelled the modernist craze for all things ‘primitive’. Displays of African artefacts in London, Paris, Berlin and (slightly later) in New York fascinated and beguiled members of the public. Lawrence was among them, and like many modernists, he adopted a primitivist outlook. His primitivism was fundamentally rooted

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in the belief that modern ways of living were detrimental to innate ways of being, especially to man’s connection to nature and sexuality. For him, indeed, darker-skinned peoples were closer to the ‘blood-consciousness’ he prized, while whites were too much consumed by their minds and anaesthetized by the deadening mechanization of the industrial world.13 The primitivism espoused by the white modernists, of course, was bound up in the unequal power relations of imperialism and based upon false and harmful, racist stereotypes. Lawrence’s relationship to both ‘the primitive’ and to empire was ambivalent. He voiced both anti-colonial and pro-colonial opinions; he valued non-Western cultures, but could also express deeply blinkered, racist views. In The Rainbow, Ursula registers both Lawrence’s implicit critique of the colonialist and his fascination with the colonized. Recently returned from army service in Africa, Anton Skrebensky speaks to Ursula of ‘the strange darkness, the strange, blood fear’: She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the darkness. He talked to her all the while, in low tones, about Africa, conveying something strange and sensual to her: the negro, with his loose, soft passion that could envelop one like a bath. Gradually he transferred to her the hot, fecund darkness that possessed his own blood. (R 413) Skrebensky represents the modern military man; he is jingoistic (‘ “I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation” ’ [R 289]) and lacking in individuality. Ursula may ‘thrill’ to his sensual, exoticist descriptions of Africa, but in fact, as Michael Bell observes, ‘the darkness described here has little to do with Africa and everything to do with Skrebensky’.14 Ursula’s later rejection of Skrebensky is, in some senses, anti-colonial. The idea of moving to India as the wife of a colonial officer finally holds no appeal to her, although she initially writes that ‘ “India sounds lovely” ’ and imagines herself ‘ “on an elephant swaying between lanes of obsequious natives” ’ (R 425). When a row ensues between them, Ursula’s attack on Skrebensky is also an attack upon the very premise of empire: ‘You think the Indians are simpler than us, and so you’ll enjoy being near them and being a lord over them … and you’ll feel so righteous, governing them for their own good. … Your governing stinks. What do you govern for, but to make things there as dead and mean as they are here?’ (R 427–8). To Ursula, Skrebensky and his colonialism are associated with ‘old, dead things’ (R 428); British rule in India is merely a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing venture rendering that country as ‘dead and mean’ as Britain has become. Her lover’s commitment to nation and empire are symptoms of his own ‘nothingness’ (R 428): the lack of selfhood that so disturbs Ursula.

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As with Skrebensky in The Rainbow, Women in Love again sees the white man’s fears projected onto Africa. Confronted by Julian Halliday’s collection of African fetishes, Gerald Crich recognizes Halliday’s girlfriend, Pussum, in a statue of a Black woman giving birth. Rupert Birkin proclaims it ‘ “art” ’ because ‘ “It conveys a complete truth” ’ (WL 78–9), but Gerald hates ‘the sheer African thing’ with its ‘terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness’ (WL 79). The African woman here represents degeneration: a particular form of corrupted white sensuality.15 In a later passage, Birkin recalls Halliday’s statues; one figure in particular, of a West African woman with her hair in ‘a melon-shaped dome’ (WL 253), comes back to him in vivid relief. With her ‘astounding long elegant body’ and her ‘protuberant buttocks’, to Birkin she represents ‘thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge’, ‘knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution’. The fetish possesses an ‘astonishing cultured elegance’, but her face is ‘crushed tiny like a beetle’s’ (WL 253). Birkin’s admiration of the female statue swiftly descends into a kind of horror; it becomes not merely an art object but a projection of his own fears of decline and decay. The African fetishes of Women in Love are simultaneously representatives of an idealized ‘primitive’ and an alarming, threatening degeneration. Birkin’s eventual revulsion is reflected elsewhere in Lawrence; as Granofsky notes, he often responds with ‘a defensive aggression in the form of misogyny or racism when the boundaries of the self are threatened’.16 This is exactly what occurs in Ceylon in 1922; here we find him complaining of ‘silly dark people’, ‘their swarming billions’ and the ‘sense of nausea’ the East provokes in him (4L 221). His primitivist illusions shattered, he fears for the fate of England and Empire: ‘I break my heart over England when I am out here. Those natives are back of us – in the living sense lower than we are. But they’re going to swarm over us and suffocate us. We are, have been for five centuries, the growing tip. Now we’re going to fall’ (4L 234). Having earlier denounced colonialism in India in The Rainbow, he casts himself in 1922 as a besieged English colonial; he feels sure that, should power be handed to India, ‘corruption and semi anarchy will follow’ (4L 246). Lawrence’s views on race and empire shifted often over the course of his life, but one facet of his thinking did not move significantly; he valued difference only if it did not compromise his own position. Imaginary encounters with racial ‘Others’ were thus more palatable. Fourteen years after he had been simultaneously captivated and repulsed by the presence of ‘three Asiatics from India’, in the 1924 essay ‘On Being a Man’, Lawrence registers a similarly ambivalent (if more complex and considered) reaction to an imaginary encounter with racial otherness:

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It is not enough for me to glance at a black face and say: He is a negro. As he sits next to me, there is a faint uneasy movement in my blood. A strange vibration comes from him, which causes a slight disturbance in my own vibration. There is a slight odour in my nostrils. And above all, even if I shut my eyes, there is a strange presence in contact with me. (RDP 215) Lawrence’s visceral reaction disturbs, but it is also hypocritical. As Booth notes, having criticised ‘fixing the African American with a single word’, Lawrence ‘then falls into a series of stereotypes’.17 He goes on to explain that he is unable to comprehend this ‘strange presence’: ‘I am not a nigger and so I can’t quite know a nigger, and I can never fully “understand” him’ (RDP 215).18 Lawrence sees otherness as an opportunity for internal transformation – a ‘slight change in [his] blood’ resulting in ‘a new bit of realisation, a new term of consciousness’ (RDP 215). He values difference for the transformation it offers and racial ‘Others’ for any ‘new bit’ of knowledge or awareness they might impart to him. The discovery of sameness where otherness was to be expected was thus often disappointing and disconcerting. In a 1926 review of four novels including Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and Walter White’s Flight – both of which he describes as ‘nigger book[s]‌’ – he is disappointed to discover that ‘the nigger is a white man through and through’ (IR 307–8). Lawrence seems almost to foreshadow Frantz Fanon’s landmark Black Skin, White Masks (1952) in his comment that ‘he even sees himself as white men see him, blacker than he ought to be’ (IR 308). ‘One likes to cherish illusions about the race soul, the eternal negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and with mystery’, but, Lawrence laments ‘one is not allowed’ (IR 308). Crucially, he is objecting here not to racial difference, but to a perceived absence of it. In his writings of the mid-1920s, inspired in large part by his world travels, one witnesses Lawrence time and again seeking out difference often only to pull back in revulsion that the difference is too great or too shocking, or (less often) in disappointment that the difference is too slight. ‘Travel’ was to him ‘a splendid lesson in disillusion’ (4L 286).

ROUNDING A GREAT CURVE: MISCEGENATION AND ‘A NEW BEING’ IN STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE, QUETZALCOATL AND THE PLUMED SERPENT One hand in space is not enough. It needs the other hand from the opposite end of space, to clasp and form the Bridge. The dark hand and the white. (4L 520)

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In the 1923 letter quoted earlier, Lawrence is responding to John Middleton Murry’s suggestion that England might resume leadership of the world. Lawrence concedes that this may happen, but he affirms that before England can lead, ‘She’s got to pick up a lost trail. And the end of the lost trail is here in Mexico’ (4L 520). Lawrence’s travels beyond Europe from 1922 offered him significant first-hand encounters with and knowledge of non-European peoples and cultures for the first time; experiences in Ceylon, Australia, the United States and Mexico greatly influenced his writings on race and empire for the rest of his life. In particular, as I explore here, his writings from this period register a significant – though by no means straightforward – shift in his thinking on miscegenation. Lawrence’s travels were inspired at least partly by his sense – acute by the early 1920s – that Europe was dying. Racial mixing had long been a source of anxiety for him and many of his contemporaries, but Lawrence came to view it as a possible way forward: a way to revivify the West through contact with the ‘Other’. This seemed to him most possible in America. It was at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan that Lawrence first travelled to the American south-west, and he was initially disturbed by the relationship between his host and her Native American partner, Tony Luhan. These anxieties are evident in Studies in Classic American Literature.19 In his essay on Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo (begun around 1919 and published in its final form in 1923) Lawrence writes of the ‘gulf ’ between the white man and the South Sea Islanders; Lawrence cannot ‘commingle [his] being with theirs’, because to do so, he feels, would be to ‘go back … towards the past, savage life’ (SCAL 126). The South Sea Islander woman ‘is nice’, but Lawrence ‘would never want to touch her’; to do so would be to go back to her ‘uncreate condition’ (SCAL 127). Yet, there is an unresolved tension here between ‘going back’ to ‘savage life’ – which Lawrence deems akin to choosing death – and ‘living onwards, forwards’ (SCAL 127). Western civilization, Lawrence avers, has been ‘living and struggling forwards’ in ‘life development’; it must continue onwards, but in a new direction, avoiding the ‘cul de sac’ of modern culture and making ‘a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries’ (SCAL 127–8). If Lawrence feels that commingling one’s being with that of a ‘savage’ is deathly to all but the ‘renegade’ (SCAL 126), then elsewhere in Studies he does, as Ruderman notes, leave ‘a path open to conjunction’.20 In his essay on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, Lawrence does not quite revise his earlier position on the impossibility of ‘reconciliation of the flesh’ (SCAL 44) between white and red. ‘The Red Man and the White Man are not bloodbrothers’ and thus ‘there can be no fusion in the flesh’, he reiterates, ‘But the spirit can change. The white man’s spirit can never become as the red man’s spirit. … But it can cease to be the opposite and the negative of the red man’s

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spirit. It can open out a new great area of consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit too’ (SCAL 56). Bringing the ‘white man’s spirit’ into harmony with that of ‘the red man’ can produce a ‘new wide area of consciousness’ that is the opposite of the constraining, deadening ‘old consciousness’ (SCAL 56). As in ‘On Being a Man’, Lawrence sees the ‘immortal friendship’ between the white Natty Bumppo and the Indian Chingachgook as transformative, emblematic of ‘a new human relationship’ and ‘the new nucleus of a new society’ (SCAL 58). What is striking here – as in the 1924 essay – is that the dynamic Lawrence describes is not a Hegelian or Fanonian dialectic: it is not a master/slave binary. Rather, it is a relationship of exchange and interchange between the races. Such a relation ‘asks for a great and cruel sloughing first of all. Then it finds a great release into a new world, a new moral, a new landscape’ (SCAL 58). Lawrence’s vision in Studies does not quite extend to miscegenation (‘reconciliation in the flesh’). Yet, shortly after its American publication (in August 1923), he refers to his essay on Typee and Omoo in a letter to Luhan: ‘when I say in my book: “one cannot go back”, it is true, one cannot. But your marriage with Tony may even yet be the rounding of a great curve; since certainly he doesn’t merely draw you back, but himself advances perhaps more than you advance, in the essential “onwards” ’ (4L 514). Lawrence here recognizes – as he could not in Studies – the regenerative potential of interracial relations; if Mabel’s marriage to Tony could be ‘the rounding of a great curve’, then communion between different races might be the way forward, the way to avoid the cul de sac faced by Western civilization. Lawrence scholars generally agree that his views on miscegenation softened in the mid-1920s; most frequently cited in this regard is the transition from Quetzalcoatl to The Plumed Serpent.21 In the earlier Quetzalcoatl, the protagonist Kate Leslie feels ‘that never, never could she give her blood in contact with [the Indian Cipriano]. As if, were she to do so, a stream of dark, corrosive effluence would enter her from him, and hurt her so much that she would be destroyed’ (Q 205). Marriage to Cipriano, she feels, would be ‘a false marriage’: ‘There was a gulf between him and her, the gulf of race, of colour, of different aeons of time. He wanted to force a way across the gulf. But that would only mean a mutual destruction’ (Q 292). As an Irish woman, Kate occupies something of a liminal position between colonized and colonizer; she is described as ‘near enough’ to ‘the dark races’ (PS 148).22 But her aversions here mirror Lawrence’s anxieties in Studies regarding the results of miscegenation. The beliefs described in Quetzalcoatl were commonplace at the time. There was, Neil Roberts explains, an enduring ‘tendency to regard people of mixed race as “degenerate” ’; South America was often highlighted as a prime example of degeneration stemming from racial mixing.23 American eugenicists

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like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard cautioned against the dangers of miscegenation in their respective books, The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History (1916) and The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White World-Supremacy (1920).24 Both promoted the idea of a genetically superior ‘Nordic race’ and warned that this great race, ‘the Homo europæus, the white man par excellence’, was under threat due to racial mixing.25 For Grant, miscegenation inevitably ‘gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type’.26 Mexico demonstrates ‘what the Melting Pot actually does in practice’; Grant particularly highlights ‘its incapacity for self-government’.27 Lawrence’s negative opinions on racial mixing were clearly reflective of the beliefs and theories of many early-twentieth-century thinkers, though, as David Game argues, he was not a supporter of the eugenics movement.28 By the time he rewrote Quetzalcoatl as The Plumed Serpent, he appears to have overcome – or at least tempered significantly – his opposition to interracial marriage. The 1926 novel is reflective of a very different dialogue taking place in the early 1920s. The merits of miscegenation were a live issue during Lawrence’s time in Mexico (he visited several times between 1923 and 1925). Following a decade-long revolution, in the early 1920s Mexico was still reckoning with its new identity and the role native culture might play within it; Lawrence took a keen interest in these developments. He corresponded with the archaeologist Manuel Gamio in 1924; Gamio sent him a copy of his 1916 book Forjando Patria (Forging a Nation), in which he posits the fusion of Mexico’s different races and cultural traditions as essential to the success of a Mexican nation. In the previous year, as Witter Bynner notes, Lawrence had attempted to meet with José Vasconcelos, the Mexican education minister, with whom he hoped to discuss the ‘Indian revival’.29 Vasconcelos would later, in The Cosmic Race (1925), envision in Latin America ‘the creation of a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the previous ones: the final race, the cosmic race’.30 There is no evidence to suggest that Lawrence read The Cosmic Race while rewriting his Mexican novel, but The Plumed Serpent registers the debates around racial mixing in this period as well as the author’s shifting attitudes towards interracial marriage. In the 1926 novel, Kate does marry Cipriano. However, Lawrence’s views on racial mixing remain ambivalent and at times contradictory. Julio Toussaint, a character whose sole purpose appears to be the following diatribe on racial mixing, argues that ‘when you mix European and American Indian, you mix different blood races, and you produce the half-breed. Now the half-breed is a calamity. … His blood of one race tells him one thing, his blood of another race tells him another’ (PS 64). Kate’s challenge to this contention – her observation that ‘ “Some of your serious-minded men … say the half-breed is better than the Indian” ’

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(PS 66) – seems already to signal a shift in her ideas about miscegenation. Yet later, Kate is disturbed by the ‘blood-familiarity’ of her servants, who demand ‘her acquiescence to the primeval assertion: The blood is one blood. We are one blood’ (PS 416–17). She is happy to share her spirit, but her blood is ‘absolutely her own, her individual own’ (PS 417). Her marriage to Cipriano, then, is perhaps not such a great shift from Lawrence’s earlier barring of the possibility of ‘reconciliation in the flesh’. Kate’s union with Cipriano – much like Luhan’s with Tony – is perhaps acceptable to Lawrence because it will produce no children. In this sense, it can be figured as a fusion in the spirit more than one in the flesh: something like the ‘perfect relation’ of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. Yet, if Lawrence struggles throughout The Plumed Serpent with the issue of miscegenation, by the novel’s end it represents the only way out of the cul de sac of civilization. Here he envisages ‘a new germ, a new conception of human life, that will arise from the fusion of the old blood-and-vertebrate consciousness with the white man’s present mental-spiritual consciousness’ (PS 415). Seeming to echo and extend the ideas he had earlier explored in his American essays, Lawrence foresees the death of both the native culture and the white European culture, but he predicts that their fusion will produce ‘a new being’ (PS 415). He sees the future – especially that of the so-called New World – as dependent upon a fusion of old and new and a ‘great swerve’ in humanity’s trajectory to bring the different races into harmony. Scholarship has proposed that the texts examined earlier might usefully be read from a post-colonial point of view. Kinkead-Weekes sees Quetzalcoatl as ‘remarkably’ anticipating ‘anti-colonial writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, three decades and more ahead’.31 Elleke Boehmer sees Lawrence’s non-judgemental acknowledgement of multiple forms of ‘otherness’ – some of which are simply unknowable for Europeans – as anticipating the work of later post-colonial theorists.32 Certainly, strands of Lawrence’s thought chime with and seem to prefigure key aspects of postcolonial theory, however, as Booth observes, he ‘never found a stance that transcended the prevailing colonialist discourses. Assumptions remained in place about the right of the Western subject to develop fantasy constructions of the “other” ’.33 ‘Fantasy constructions’ did not always last long; his faith in interracial harmony as a viable way forward appears to have been short-lived. In Mornings in Mexico (1927), he explains, ‘The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. … There is no bridge, no canal of connection’ (MM 61). Lawrence seems here to directly contradict the quasi-utopian idea he had expressed only a few years earlier to Middleton Murry: the ‘dark hand and the white’ forming

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‘the Bridge’. In a sense, however, Lawrence’s oeuvre would itself prove to be a kind of ‘bridge’ across the races. For certain Black writers of the twentieth century, he was an important and influential figure.

‘FERMENT AND TORMENT AND TURMOIL’: LAWRENCE AND BLACK WRITERS In his aptly titled autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), the peripatetic Jamaican-born author Claude McKay recalls a conversation with friends in Paris in which, having read James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), he maintained that ‘D. H. Lawrence was the modern writer [he] preferred above any’.34 He concedes that Ulysses is ‘a bigger book than any of Lawrence’s’, but affirms that he ‘preferred Lawrence as a whole’.35 Explaining his preference, McKay cites the ‘confusion’, ‘the ferment and torment and turmoil’, ‘the sexual inquietude and incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out’ he identified in the Englishman’s oeuvre.36 Given the nature of certain expressed opinions and writings on racial difference and ‘otherness’ – and indeed his reactions to African American culture in particular37 – Lawrence’s appeal to some of the most important Black writers of the twentieth century may seem improbable.38 Yet, McKay was not the only one to cite Lawrence as an influence. His New Negro contemporary, Langston Hughes, was inspired by Lawrence’s short fiction to produce his own first (and arguably most powerful) short story collection, The Ways of White Folks (1934). Richard Wright also later professed his love of Lawrence’s work. Before his impassioned tribute to Lawrence in A Long Way from Home, McKay had – in Home to Harlem (1928) – written of Ray, the novel’s Haitian intellectual character, that he ‘had read, fascinated, all that D. H. Lawrence published. And wondered if there was not a great Lawrence reservoir of words too terrible and too terrifying for nice printing.’39 McKay looked to Lawrence – his ‘great reservoir of words’ and evocations of modern confusion – to confront and express his own feelings of alienation. He saw the Englishman as a kind of spiritual brother, and his reading of Lawrence served as a way into language, a way of routing his thoughts and mobilizing his own marginality. This impact is evident in McKay’s 1929 novel, Banjo, which clearly echoes the form and premise of Aaron’s Rod; in both works, the two male protagonists are a musician (Aaron Sisson and Banjo) and a writer (Rawdon Lilly and Ray) and both are plotless, picaresque novels. The year following Banjo’s publication, upon hearing of Lawrence’s passing in March 1930, McKay wrote to his agent: ‘it was very sad to hear of D. H. Lawrence’s death. Although I have never met him, it was like losing a close friend.’40 Lawrence’s influence upon Hughes is perhaps less personal, but no less significant. While in Moscow in early 1933 he had been gifted a copy of The

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Lovely Lady (1932), a posthumous collection of eight of Lawrence’s late short stories written mostly between 1924 and 1929. His reading of this volume quickly precipitated an unexpected flurry of writing and a series of short stories treating African American life as a Black writer had never before dared. Hughes recalls this unusual occurrence in his 1956 autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander: I had never read anything of Lawrence’s before, and was particularly taken with the title story, and with ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’. Both tales made my hair stand on end. … A night or two after I read the Lawrence stories, I sat down to write an Izvestia article on Tashkent when, instead, I began to write a short story. I had been saying to myself all day, ‘If D. H. Lawrence can write such psychologically powerful accounts of folks in England, that send shivers up and down my spine, maybe I could write stories like his about folks in America. I wonder.’41 Hughes was then (and remains) best known as a jazz poet and as a leading light of Alain Locke’s New Negro movement, but he discovered Lawrence at a moment when he had lost faith in the aims of the so-called Harlem Renaissance and in poetry as a vehicle for the messages he now wished to convey in his work. Lawrence’s impact spurred him to reconsider his own role as a writer and to reconceive of literature’s function as a mode capable of revealing the hypocrisies and horrors of life under Jim Crow. The result was The Ways of White Folks, a collection which mirrors the sardonic style and often bitter tone of Lawrence’s late short fiction in its ‘psychologically powerful’ tales of American race relations. In stories like ‘Cora Unashamed’ and ‘Father and Son’, Hughes translates The Lovely Lady’s themes of female possessiveness and unnatural family relations in a bid to explore new configurations of racial identity and new ways of thinking about family and legacy. A final example is instructive: Richard Wright. Lawrence, as several scholars and biographers note, was among his favourite writers and Sons and Lovers among his best-regarded books.42 Indeed, Wright was so taken with Lawrence’s novel about ‘coal miners in England’ that he ‘read nearly all of his books’.43 Wright provides a clue to Lawrence’s particular appeal in a letter of 1944: Lawrence cuts deeper into human feeling, and there does not exist in him the slightest hesitancy in revealing everything. Indeed, one could say that his passion was simply to do that to the best of his strength. … what I’m saying is leveled against our culture as a whole. We, both white and black, have so much to learn in our country. And I feel that an honest grappling with the Negro problem is one of the ways in which a therapeutic and loosening process could enter our culture, our feelings, and allow us to react freely.44

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Lawrence represents for Wright the freedom to react to one’s culture honestly and unreservedly: to reveal ‘everything’ without hesitation. Where Wright feels that Black and white Americans alike are stifled and stymied – unable to express their true feelings (especially regarding ‘the Negro problem’) – Lawrence speaks out forthrightly and unapologetically. Lawrence may be accused of myriad flaws, prejudices and misapprehensions in his writings on race and empire (and, indeed, many other subjects), but he always offers ‘an honest grappling’.

READING LAWRENCE TODAY In the uncertain days of May 2020, only a week before the murder of George Floyd, the Somali-British novelist Nadifa Mohamed tweeted: ‘which writer would you bring back to life to live with you during lockdown? I would pick DH Lawrence cos [sic] I need help with my shed and think he would do a good job’.45 Posted alongside was a photograph of Lawrence at the mast of a boat on Lake Chapala, taken during a 1923 trip to Mexico. Mohamed’s tongue-incheek mention of Lawrence speaks to the way in which he is now regarded, in some contexts at least, as a harmless figure, open to gentle ridicule. In 2009, Michael Bell noted that ‘it is actually very difficult, though deceptively easy, to write [Lawrence] down ideologically, which is why the ideological turn in literary studies during the late twentieth century led to a dramatic drop in his academic reputation’.46 Indeed, Lawrence for some time became a persona non grata in academic circles. Yet in recent years, he has enjoyed something of a renaissance; a flurry of new novels and biographies (mostly by female writers) and fresh adaptations speak to a new awakening of interest in his life and work. What, we might ask, has changed? Lawrence’s impact upon Black writers offers some insight into his enduring appeal to readers and writers in the age of social movements and justice campaigns (including Black Lives Matter and #MeToo). Whether ‘groping for a way out’ of modern crisis or seeking ‘an honest grappling’ with fundamental, human issues, Lawrence offers a model – imperfect though it is – of a writer unafraid to think truthfully, boldly and itinerantly. Sandra M. Gilbert indeed avers that ‘Lawrence cultivated a potentially appalling spiritual honesty’, but what appals is also what beguiles; ‘perhaps’, she conjectures, ‘it is precisely Lawrence’s intellectual as well as political incorrectness that haunts and intrigues so many of us; perhaps … we are bemused, even bewitched, by the ways he doesn’t fit into our current systems of thought’.47 Lawrence still has the power to frustrate, to subvert expectations, to disgust. He thinks in oppositions and is never afraid to change his position. In a climate in which changing one’s mind is often perceived as tantamount to admission of intellectual or moral frailty – in which political U-turns incite public ridicule – reading Lawrence (widely and attentively) reminds us of the unsung value of ambivalence and contradiction. In

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conversation with writers of the Harlem Renaissance, post-colonial writers and theorists or contemporary writers of colour, the dialogues reveal continuities of thought across racial, national and temporal boundaries. As universities seek to further diversify – and decolonize – their English departments and reading lists, Lawrence emerges as a fascinating (if challenging) interlocutor for writers of diverse identities and backgrounds.

NOTES 1 The word ‘miscegenation’ is now considered outmoded and pejorative; it is used here as a term common in Lawrence’s time for which there are few modern equivalents. 2 Ronald Granofsky, ‘ “Jews of the Wrong Sort”: D. H. Lawrence and Race’, Journal of Modern Literature, 23.2 (1999–2000): 209–23, 209. 3 Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 5–6. 4 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Decolonising Imagination: Lawrence in the 1920s’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 67. 5 A. S. Byatt, ‘The One Bright Book of Life’, New Statesman, 16 December 2002. 6 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (London: Penguin, 2005), p. xxv. 7 Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Boston: Little Brown, 1968), p. 14. 8 Jascha Kessler, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Primitivism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 5.4 (1964): 467–88, 484. 9 Howard J. Booth, ‘Give Me Differences: Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and Race’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 27 (1997): 171–96, 172. 10 Ibid. 11 Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 12 Judith Ruderman, ‘Race and Cultural Difference’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 242. 13 Lawrence explains his theory of ‘blood-consciousness’ in a 1913 letter: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect … All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral’ (1L 503). 14 Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 94. 15 Later, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Oliver Mellors’s comment that only ‘black women’ ‘really “come” naturally with a man’ (LCL 204) exemplifies Lawrence’s

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othering of the Black female as simultaneously representative of the ‘real sex’ he and Mellors prize and a degraded sexuality. 16 Granofsky, ‘ “Jews of the Wrong Sort” ’, p. 209. 17 Booth, ‘Give Me Differences’, p. 190. 18 When ‘On Being a Man’ was published in Vanity Fair, the editors changed Lawrence’s ‘nigger’ to ‘negro’. See ibid. 19 Lawrence is surely referring to the Luhans when he presents the ostensibly hypothetical situation of ‘an Indian [who] loves a white woman, and lives with her’ (SCAL 44). In this scenario, Lawrence feels, the Indian ‘will probably be very proud of it’, but ‘at the same time he will subtly jeer at his white mistress’; ‘at the bottom of his heart he is gibing, gibing, gibing at her’ (SCAL 44). 20 Ruderman, Race and Identity, p. 194. 21 See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 113. 22 The association of Irishness with non-whiteness occurs elsewhere in Lawrence; the Irish playwright Michaelis in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is described as ‘pure as an African ivory mask’ (LCL 51). 23 Neil Roberts, D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 151. 24 These works quickly infiltrated popular culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) features a thinly veiled reference to Stoddard; Tom Buchanan refers positively to ‘ “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by this man Goddard’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 14. 25 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1919), p. 67. 26 Ibid., p. 18. 27 Ibid., p. 17. 28 David Game, D. H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 39–45; A comment in a 1908 letter is often cited as evidence of Lawrence’s belief in eugenics: ‘If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed’ (1L 81). 29 Witter Bynner, Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (London: P. Nevill, 1953), p. 26; Vasconcelos failed to attend this meeting, a slight that enraged Lawrence. 30 José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 40. 31 Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Decolonising Imagination’, p. 71. 32 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 142–3.

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33 Howard J. Booth, ‘Lawrence in Doubt: A Theory of the “Other” and Its Collapse’, in Modernism and Empire, ed. Nigel Rigby and Howard J. Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 197. 34 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), p. 190. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 In his review of novels including Flight and Nigger Heaven, there is hostility in Lawrence’s wry acknowledgement of the 1920s vogue ‘for negro stuff ’ (IR 308). 38 Until recently, the only scholar to note Lawrence’s connection to Black writers was Leo Hamalian. Hamalian’s 1990 article, however, is marred by unsupported claims and errors. He claims, for example, that Jean Toomer and his wife met the Lawrences in Taos, ‘probably in 1924’; the author of Cane (1923) did not visit Taos until Christmas 1925, by which time the Lawrences were in Italy (and Toomer unmarried), ‘D. H. Lawrence and Black Writers’, Journal of Modern Literature, 16.4 (1990): 579–96, 585. 39 Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), p. 227. 40 Claude McKay, Letter to W. A. Bradley, 18 March 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, Box 43 Folder 8, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 41 Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 213. 42 Michel Fabre notes that ‘Wright’s contemporary British favorites were undoubtedly James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence’, ‘Richard Wright’s First Hundred Books’, CLA Journal, 16.4 (1973): 458–74, 469. 43 Richard Wright, Interview with Georges Charbonnier, October 1960, Conversations with Richard Wright, ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 214. 44 Richard Wright, quoted in Michel Fabre, Richard Wright: Books and Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), pp. 191–2. 45 Nadifa Mohamed, Twitter post, 17 May 2020, 10:31 am, https://twit​ter.com/the​sail​ orsg​irl. 46 Michael Bell, ‘D. H. Lawrence’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, ed. Adrian Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 322. 47 Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Apocalypse Now (and Then). Or, D. H. Lawrence and the Swan in the Electron’, in Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough, pp. 239, 237.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Regional drama: Lawrence and Joyce JAMES MORAN

There are a number of good reasons the playwriting of James Joyce can be discussed alongside that of D. H. Lawrence. For one thing, both writers made dismissive comments about the stage. Joyce, for instance, criticized the Irish theatre movement by declaring: ‘if an artist courts the favour of the multitude he cannot escape the contagion of its fetichism [sic] and deliberate self-deception’.1 Lawrence declared, in a 1912 letter to Edward Garnett, ‘I don’t know much about plays’ (1L 477). Towards the end of Lawrence’s life, he confessed to the German playwright and novelist Max Mohr that ‘the actual technique of the stage is foreign to me’ (6L 204). For most of the twentieth century, the plays written by both Joyce and Lawrence were straightforwardly unavailable to readers and scholars. Indeed, only one of Joyce’s three original plays survives today: he destroyed his play A Brilliant Career, and only a few lines of his verse drama Dream Stuff have survived. Joyce also made an Italian adaptation of Synge’s 1904 play Riders to the Sea, which has never been published, and he also claimed to have translated Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1900 play Michael Kramer into an English version, which is now lost.2 Joyce’s 1901 English adaptation of Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889) remained unpublished until 1978, and although Joyce claimed to have helped translate a drama by Yeats, The Countess Cathleen (1892), into Italian, that Joyce translation is almost entirely lost and it took until 1988 for a part of the text to appear in print.3

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Meanwhile, Lawrence abandoned the three plays that he wrote during 1911– 12, leaving them in the Heidelberg attic of his sister-in-law where they gathered dust throughout the rest of his life. Five of his eight complete plays remained unpublished until the mid-1960s, and that 1965 printing itself provided a highly corrupt version that left many of Lawrence’s lines garbled until the publication of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s plays in 1999.4 A low estimation of Lawrence’s playwriting certainly guided later critics. Richard Aldington, for example, knew Lawrence well, and in 1950 wrote that, in general, ‘I don’t think he had any real “theatre” in him. The play was not his form.’5 In 2001, Ian Clarke noted that ‘no other generic body of Lawrence’s work has suffered such extensive obscurity’, and Fiona Becket observed in 2004 that ‘critical interest in Lawrence’s plays has been relatively slight’.6 Similarly, Joyce’s sole surviving play Exiles was itself the subject of a withering assessment by Ezra Pound, who told Joyce in 1917, ‘damn it all, I dont [sic] think it up to the rest of your stuff ’.7 Subsequent critics endorsed Pound’s thinking about Exiles. As Mark Taylor-Batty observed in 2008, ‘the play is still generally disregarded in Joyce scholarship’, and although Exiles occasionally appears onstage, Christoph Henke asserted in 2015 that ‘critics have more or less dismissed it’.8 Both Joyce and Lawrence had a notably disappointing relationship with the Stage Society, a group dedicated to bringing uncommercial and experimental work to performance in London. Joyce’s Exiles was rejected in 1916 by the Stage Society, one of whose members declared that it was an example of ‘Filth and Disease’.9 Lawrence sent his play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd to the Stage Society in 1914, but the group declined the piece ‘after long consideration’.10 Towards the start of the First World War, if the Stage Society judged Joyce’s drama about adultery ‘putrid’, the organization apparently felt that, with Lawrence’s work, ‘you could not satisfactorily conclude an evening’s entertainment with the laying out of a dead body and twenty minutes of weeping, wailing and washing’.11 A decade later, when the interwar Stage Society was struggling for members and faced competition from rival theatrical groups, the management looked afresh at Joyce and Lawrence and opted to stage the two plays that had once been rejected.12 In the summer of 1925, Joyce learned that Exiles had been accepted for production by the Stage Society, and this British premiere occurred (under the direction of William Fay) on 14 and 15 February 1926 at the Regent Theatre in London.13 Later in 1926, having unveiled Joyce’s play for the first time in Britain, the Stage Society gave the professional British premiere of Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. When the Stage Society did put on the work of Joyce and Lawrence, both men wished to assist with the preparations: Joyce wanted to be ‘attending rehearsals in London’, while Lawrence declared ‘I must go and help’ (5L 613).14 In the event, however, both of them proved unable to travel and instead remained in continental Europe. Joyce, living in Paris, had recently endured an

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agonizing eye operation which left him ‘unable to see lights, suffering continual pain from the operation, weeping oceans of tears, highly nervous, and unable to think straight’.15 Lawrence, meanwhile, had been hampered by breathing difficulties; the production of his work at the Stage Society was repeatedly postponed and only finally reached the footlights in 1926 after Lawrence had left England for the final time and was in Florence. He did plan to return to his home country to watch the Stage Society produce his more recent play David the following year, but during the month of that eventual production in May 1927, he suffered from a tubercular attack and apologized, ‘I am more sorry than I can say about my not coming’ (8L 102).16 Ill health may have prevented Joyce and Lawrence from watching the eventual London productions of their dramatic work, but both men felt deeply invested in the Stage Society’s activity. According to Richard Ellmann, ‘Joyce sent bouquets to the principal actresses and instructed his friends in London to attend the performances … he received full reports from Miss Weaver, Claud Sykes, and Ettore Schmitz.’17 Lawrence gave advice about costumes and about how to deliver the lines, as well as about how to edit his drama for performance, advising that the actors get rid of ‘anything that makes the movement drag … cut the longish mouthfuls and spit it out quick and sharp. Anything rather than let it be long-drawn-out and a nuisance’ (8L 102). For both Joyce and Lawrence, the productions of 1926–7 proved anticlimactic. In each case, critics felt that the authors had abandoned the form to which they truly belonged. The Observer declared of Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd given by the Stage Society that ‘the mind of Mr. Lawrence was not present in his play … he can, if he chooses, make himself as important a dramatist as he is already a novelist. But he must say something, and not rest content with a mere exhibition.’18 Similarly, the Times reviewed the Stage Society performance of Joyce’s Exiles by commenting, ‘it is difficult to see what, precisely, the author of Exiles would be at … Perhaps he would have been clearer in a novel.’ The Manchester Guardian noted that ‘there is no sense of the stage about it’.19 Thereafter, for much of the twentieth century, influential critics proved dismissive of the playwriting by Joyce and Lawrence.20 However, Lawrence’s theatrical work was resuscitated between 1965 and 1968, when the Royal Court director Peter Gill mounted three of Lawrence’s plays, A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. These productions received critical acclaim and a 1969 Penguin paperback edition soon followed, establishing the three plays as a kind of trilogy.21 Critics such as Sylvia Sklar and myself have subsequently worked to emphasize the skill of Lawrence’s playwriting, and there ensued, in 1970, a corresponding revival in Joyce’s theatrical reputation when Harold Pinter directed a revelatory version of Exiles at London’s Mermaid Theatre.22 The Guardian theatre critic, Michael Billington, suggested the parallels between the

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two theatrical recoveries when he noted of Joyce’s Exiles that ‘it still looks like the best piece of theatrical salvage-work since the Royal Court rediscovered D. H. Lawrence’.23 Nonetheless, ever since the 1970s the plays of both Joyce and Lawrence have failed to establish a secure place in the theatrical repertoire. As recently as 2011, Anne Fogarty observed that Exiles ‘is often discounted as juvenilia or treated as a negligible detour’, while in 2006 Dominic Cavendish put it more bluntly, describing Exiles as a ‘neglected curio’.24 It is not simply in the onstage life of their plays and the critical evaluation of those works that Lawrence and Joyce mirrored one another, but also in the themes and settings of some of their theatrical work. Indeed, in part it may have been the way that Lawrence and Joyce used drama to focus on the realistic details of life in provincial locations that made their theatrical work ripe for rediscovery in the 1960s and 1970s, following the ‘kitchen sink’ breakthrough of figures such as John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney. In the summer of 1901, Joyce travelled with his father to County Westmeath in the Irish midlands. Here he created his translation of Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang, giving it the English title Before Sunrise; he noted the date ‘July 23, 1901’ at the end. The play is set within a farmer’s cottage, yet, as with Lawrence’s most famous works, the setting is not entirely a rural one, but a location where the rhythms of country life are placed against those of the mining industry.25 As one of the characters of Joyce’s version of Before Sunrise complains, HELEN

Going to the pits, coming from the pits … I never see anything but miners … Uh! it’s positively sickening!26

Into this district arrives the character of Alfred Loth, a young socialist who wishes to study the conditions in which the miners live and work. As he explains, LOTH

And only think of it! I have actually come here to study these people you find so disgusting … I am quite serious. These people interest me very much – more than any others, in fact. … HELEN Certainly … They are most instructive, as miners, if you look at them in that light … but meeting them so constantly they become tiresome. LOTH I should imagine, Miss Krause, that if you met them every day you would find something new … HELEN But even after you get at it … what good is it? … what interest can it have, I mean? LOTH It has, because it shows the people are, as you say, morose and sullen. HELEN And how is that interesting?

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LOTH

Well, it’s abnormal. It is interesting for a while to study the manners of people like these, though we mightn’t care to live our lives with them. HELEN But why are they always so morose and sullen? There must be some reason for it. LOTH There is. I wish I could find out what it is.27 The socialist, Loth, having arrived to study the miners, finds that an old acquaintance, Hoffmann, is now in charge of the mines and has grown both ruthless and wealthy. Hoffmann worries that Loth will generate trouble among the underpaid miners and warns him to leave, but in the meantime Loth has fallen in love with Hoffmann’s sister-in-law, Helen. When Loth does decide to leave, Helen commits suicide. In 1918, Lawrence wrote his play Touch and Go, partly by recycling elements of Women in Love, the novel that he had been struggling to publish. In Touch and Go we find a set of similar theatrical dynamics in terms of plot, narrative and setting as in the Joyce translation Before Sunrise. In Touch and Go, Gerald Barlow has taken over the management of a local colliery from his father who, in the face of violent strikes, has vainly attempted to run the mining operation according to a benevolent kind of Christian egalitarianism. That approach having failed, Gerald has subsequently made the mines profitable by introducing new methods of industrial production, and has done so with scant regard for the job losses and dehumanizing effect of such reforms. Gerald is consequently hated by the workers. A similarity of themes emerges as the characters in both plays grapple with the question of how the workers in the mines can be treated humanely. In Lawrence’s Touch and Go we find a socialist orator, Willie Houghton, preaching in the marketplace and attempting to alert a listening group of colliers to potentially liberating political and economic ideas. He grows frustrated that the miners can only see the immediate challenges that they face and are ignorant of the broader, structural issues that define their condition: Couldn’t you set up a proper government tomorrow, if you liked? Couldn’t you contrive that the pits belonged to you, instead of you belonging to the pits, like so many old pit-ponies that stop down till they are blind, and take to eating coal-slack for meadow-grass, not knowing the difference. – If only you’d learn to think, I’d respect you. As you are, I can’t, not if I try my hardest. – All you think of is to ask for another shilling a day. That’s as far as your imagination carries you. (Plays 373) Similarly, in Joyce’s version of Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise, Loth attempts to understand the underlying reasons for the conditions of the miners:

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HOFFMAN … Tell me, Loth, what was it really brought you into our part of the country? I quite forgot to ask you. LOTH (buttering a slice of bread) … To study the economic situation here. HOFFMAN (glances up) … I beg your pardon? … What do you mean by that? LOTH Plainly then: I want to study the lives and manners of the miners here. HOFFMAN That’s a good idea … on the whole. … Are you going to write about what you have seen down there? LOTH Yes, my work will mainly be descriptive. HOFFMAN Really, I’m sorry to hear that – of course it’s nothing to me. But do you propose writing about the miners – and nothing else? LOTH It is evident from your question that you know nothing of political economy … If I want to make a study of the present state of this district I must find out and examine the underlying causes.28 Both plays raise the idea that the miners may be stirred to violence. In Lawrence’s Touch and Go, the socialist Willie Houghton faces the increasingly belligerent attitude of another socialist orator Job Arthur, who rouses the colliers to viciousness: JOB ARTHUR How it’s got to be done is for us all to decide. I’m not one for violence, except it’s a force-put. But it’s like this. We’ve been travelling for years to where we stand now – and here the road stops. … There’s a precipice below and a rock-face above. And in front of us stands the masters. Now there’s three things we can do. We can either throw ourselves over the precipice: or we can lie down and let the masters walk over us: or we can get on. WILLIE Yes. That’s all right. But how are you going to get on? JOB ARTHUR Well – we’ve either got to throw the obstacle down the cliff – or walk over it. VOICES Ay – ay – ay – yes – that’s a fact – WILLIE I quite follow you, Job Arthur. You’ve either got to do for the masters – or else just remove them, and put them somewhere else. VOICES Get rid on ’em – drop ’em down the shaft – sink ’em – ha’ done wi’ ’em – drop ’em down the shaft – bust the beggars – what do you do wi’ vermin – (Plays 423)

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Similarly, in Joyce and Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise the mine manager Hoffmann worries that socialist sentiment is encouraging a seditious attitude among the colliers: HOFFMAN … This is really too much … A fellow who couldn’t feel that must have the hide of a rhinoceros. You come here, treat me to a lot of your threadbare phrases, enjoy my hospitality, turn my sister-in-law’s head, prate about our old friendship and how good it was – and then … you tell me naïvely: I am going to write a descriptive work on the local conditions. What do you take me for, I ask you? … Do you intend your work – I don’t know anything about it … will it be nothing but a shameful lampoon of a pamphlet or … and about our mining district too. Don’t you see whom you will injure most of all? Me! Me! … I tell you; you will have to be stopped at once, as you were stopped once before – demagogue! … Do as you please! Make the miners discontented, pretentious – stir them up, embitter their minds, make them refractory, disobedient, unhappy … dangle wealth before their eyes, and take their paltry few coppers of wages out of their pockets … I know!29 In his mining plays, Lawrence interweaves the political with the personal. The frustrated and interrupted sexual relationship of Anabel and Gerald is set alongside the increasingly militant miners in Touch and Go, and in Lawrence’s earlier play The Daughter-in-Law (written in 1913) the troubled marriage of Minnie and Luther parallels the industrial strife in the colliery where Luther works (Minnie tells him, ‘you’d be delighted if there was a strike, so you could loaf about. You don’t even get drunk. You only loaf. You’re lazy, lazy, and without the stomach of a louse. You want a strike’ (Plays 341)). Nora Foster Stoval highlights the originality of Lawrence in his deciding ‘to parallel the political conflict with the personal relationship, and The Daughter-in-Law is the only one of Lawrence’s plays in which the labor conflict invades the domestic space’.30 As part of this intertwining of labour militancy and domestic life, Lawrence’s mining plays include some frank descriptions of sex and childbirth. In The Daughter-in-Law, Luther has made another woman pregnant while waiting for Minnie to agree to marry him. Luther’s mother gets a kind of joy from this news, relishing the thought of her daughter-in-law’s pain, and saying, ‘Let her have it then, it’ll do her good. Who is she, to trample eggs that another hen would sit warm. No – Mrs Purdy, give it her. It’ll take her down a peg or two’ (Plays 316). Some similarly unprettified portrayals of sex and childbirth set against the backdrop of colliery militancy can be found in Joyce and Hauptmann’s Before

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Sunrise. When the character of Martha delivers a stillborn child, her cousin mocks the screams of childbirth: KAHL (calls to her). Wha’s th’ ro..aw no..aw? (She neither stops nor deigns to answer either by word or look) KAHL (guffawing). ’s the sow littered?31 The familial gloating about the misfortunes of childbirth is similar in both plays here. But as we shall see, what gives Before Sunrise a distinctly Joycean element is not so much any change in the plot of the play (which closely follows Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang) but the choice of language that is used in Joyce’s translation. Here, in Kahl’s cruelly misogynistic line about his cousin giving birth, Hauptmann’s original German reads ‘Ihr ha’t wull Schweinschlachta?’ (‘Are you slaughtering a pig?’).32 Joyce’s decision to change this in his translation of 1901 to ‘’s the sow littered’ carries an echo of the famous line in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) where Stephen Dedalus declares ‘with cold violence’ that ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow’.33 Such linguistic choices by Joyce give his version of the play a distinctly Irish regional flavour, rendering the speech of Hauptmann’s lowerclass German characters into Dublinese, much as Lawrence gave his mining community the regional English voices of his hometown of Eastwood. The political agitation of the collieries affects the domestic action of both Joyce and Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise and of Lawrence’s mining plays Touch and Go and The Daughter-in-Law. Lawrence repeatedly dramatized the strikes of the area where he had grown up. As Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen have pointed out, during the second half of 1918, shortly before Lawrence wrote Touch and Go, Lawrence grew increasingly aware of unrest in the mining industry catalysed by wartime increases in food prices. The collieries in Lawrence’s hometown of Eastwood that were owned by Barber Walker and Company had been modernized during 1905–8, as mechanical coal-cutting and conveying became commercially and technically viable, leading to the introduction of electric power and coal-cutters at Eastwood and the replacement of many of the older underground managers and office staff.34 By 1918, the real-life figure of Joseph Birkin, a checkweighman at Moorgreen colliery, had become the Eastwood miners’ leader in their negotiations with Barber Walker. Birkin was a socialist and violinist, and is fictionalized by Lawrence in Touch and Go in the character of Job Arthur Freer, who is also a miners’ leader who plays the violin and demands a ‘proper share’ for the mineworkers (Plays 374). Lurking behind this is the local memory of the real-life events of 1893, which Lawrence did not know personally but had doubtless heard from retellings in Eastwood. In the summer of 1893, the Coal-Owners’ Federation had attempted to cut wages, which precipitated a sixteen-week lockout.35 As Hans-Wilhelm

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Schwarze and Worthen have put it, during this time there occurred a serious riot at Watnall colliery: ‘on 6 September, wagons standing in the railway sidings and various buildings were set on fire; seven ringleaders were arrested. Large detachments of police and soldiers were brought into the area; 115 officers and men of the Staffordshire regiment were quartered at the Sun Inn.’36 Such local, real-life events helped to inspire the setting and action of Lawrence’s Touch and Go and The Daughter-in-Law. By contrast with Lawrence, Joyce grew up in a country where coal mining remained a relatively small-scale industry. As Malcolm T. Smith and Donald M. MacRaild point out, ‘during the 1870s and 1880s, Ireland’s mining output was tiny in comparison with Britain’s; moreover, it was diminishing … In 1879 Ireland produced almost 130,000 tons of coal, mostly in the eastern province of Leinster. By 1890 production levels had fallen over 20 per cent to 102,267 tons.’37 This was obviously a paltry amount when compared with the output of the British coal industry, which by the start of the twentieth century, was churning out 229,000,000 tons each year.38 The discussion of mining in Joyce’s translation, then, owes more to Hauptmann’s knowledge of conditions in the Upper Silesian coal basin. German coal production had grown rapidly by the time that Hauptmann wrote his play in the late 1880s, with output increasing from 6 million tons per year in 1850 to 43 million tons in 1871. In Silesia, where Hauptmann was born, the growth in mining had led to parts of the region coming to resemble ‘an unmanageable urban chaos’, according to René Leboutte.39 As William Scott Igo puts it, the young Hauptmann walked around his home of Obersalzbrunn, Silesia, and ‘saw first-hand the squalor of the miners and weavers, comparing it to the middle-class wealth of his father and his father’s acquaintances’.40 But there may nonetheless have been a class dynamic that made Joyce’s depiction of a mining community with Irish accents have a particular pertinence. After all, many Irish migrants travelled to work in the coalmining industries of Scotland, England and Wales during the nineteenth century. Here they often did more menial, low-skilled jobs than their English counterparts, with the Irish generally not working as colliers or as foremen but doing work on the surface such as shifting, shovelling, washing and grading. As Smith and MacRaild have emphasized, however, the view of the Irish as unskilled could shift during times of industrial strife: Employers were happy to argue that agricultural labourers could easily be trained as miners when labour supplies were halted or curtailed. In 1844, during the nation-wide wave of miners’ strikes, pit owners, such as the Earl of Lonsdale in west Cumberland, and Lord Londonderry of County Durham, introduced some blackleg Irish labour, which intensified [English] miners’ mistrust of the Irish. In the same year, when many Irish entered

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the Lanarkshire coalfield because of the gaps created by strikes, a local overman, Robert Lumsden, said the situation was common … In Scotland this process was clearly having some sort of effect on levels of Irish labour in the coalfields. By the mid-1840s, the Commissioner of Mines calculated up to one-quarter of the colliers and miners of Lanarkshire were Irish.41 Joyce may not have shared Lawrence’s intimate knowledge of the mining industry, but – given the real-life history of Irish work in the mines of the British Isles – there may nonetheless be a certain pertinence in Joyce vocalizing the industrial strife of the colliers through the regional Irish accents of his version of Before Sunrise. In his mining plays, Lawrence carefully delineates the social class statuses of his characters by drawing out distinctions in their uses of dialect. For example, in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd we find the character of Blackmore, who works as an electrician and asserts ‘we electricians, you know, we’re the gentlemen on a mine: ours is gentlemen’s work’ (Plays 64). Blackmore’s dialect is far closer to standard English than that of the collier Jack Holroyd. When Blackmore speaks to Mrs Holroyd, for example, he declares: It is rotten, when you’re tied to a life you don’t like. But I should miss it if you weren’t here. When I’m coming down the line to the pit in the morning – it’s nearly dark at seven now – I watch the fire-light in here – Sometimes I put my hand on the wall outside where the chimney runs up to feel it warm – There isn’t much in Bestwood, is there? (Plays 68) Jack Holroyd, by contrast, is a miner who works at the coal face, and he speaks to the titular character of the play in a far more distinctively regional style: Dost hear? (He pulls off his boots, noisily, and begins to hunt under the sofa.) I canna find the things. (No answer.) Humph! – then I’ll do be ’out ’em. (He stumps about in his stocking feet; going into the scullery, he brings out the loaf of bread; he returns into the scullery.) Wheer’s th’ cheese? (No answer – suddenly.) God blast it! (He hobbles into the kitchen.) I’ve trod on that brokken basin, an’ cut my foot open. (MRS. HOLROYD refuses to take any notice. He sits down and looks at his sole – pulls off his stocking and looks again.) It’s lamed me for life. (MRS. HOLROYD glances at the wound.) Arena ter goin’ ter get me öwt for it? (Plays 78) Joyce also shows a heightened awareness of the importance of dialect in Before Sunrise: indeed, the first words of his translation are a note that emphasizes that parts of Hauptmann’s original play are ‘written in the Silesian dialect’.42 As with Lawrence, Joyce used dialect in order to delineate between the social

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standing and class status of the onstage characters. In Joyce’s translation, the mine manager Hoffmann speaks in standard English and makes statements such as ‘Let us drop the subject. I pity him in his grave, as much as you do.’43 Only occasionally do such higher-status characters speak in distinctly Irish dialect (with a rare example occurring when Hoffmann uses the definite article when referring to ‘the mother-in-law’ rather than to ‘my mother-in-law’).44 However, a character such as Miele, the ‘robust country girl’ whose words open the play, consistently makes statements such as ‘Beg par’n! A’ll call Mr Injineer in a jiffy’.45 As Jill Perkins points out, when Joyce writes the speech of the characters of lower-social-status in Before Sunrise, there is the characteristic contraction and elision of peasant speech (‘’At’s the way ’tes, y’knoaw!’), vowel substitution (‘divil’, ‘ingineer’, ‘deeloighted’), elongation (‘noaw,’, ‘joab’), suppression of consonants ‘r’ and ‘t’ in medial and final position (‘fust’ for ‘first’, ‘bo’l’ for ‘bottle’, ‘juz’ for ‘just’), addition of medial ‘h’ (‘thrue’ for ‘true’, ‘docthor’, ‘dhrinks’, ‘conshiquence’), suppression of initial and medial ‘th’ (‘’at’ for ‘that’, ‘fa’r’ for ‘father’).46 If some of these techniques sound theatrically familiar, it may be because a number of the same effects that Joyce deploys here would be used by Sean O’Casey in the 1920s when O’Casey scripted his celebrated trio of Dublin plays, set in the poverty-stricken tenements of the Irish capital. For example, when Joyce translated Hauptmann, he rendered the German ‘Inse Bargleute saufen woarhaftig zu viel’ (which might be put in standard English as ‘those miners of ours really do drink a great deal’) as ‘such a hell iv a lot of them miners booses’.47 This language chimes with some of the best-known writing of O’Casey, who has the character of Fluther Good, when drinking in the pub during The Plough and the Stars declaring ‘how th’ hell do I know what it is?’ and the character of Reiligan in The Bishop’s Bonfire declare, ‘Come outa your booze of prayin’ for a minute’.48 Elsewhere, Joyce translates Hauptmann’s ‘Räum ab!’ (‘Clear away’) as ‘Clear the room! … Every man-jack a yez, clear!’49 This use of the plural ‘yez’ also occurs in O’Casey’s writing, where we find Johnny Boyle in Juno and the Paycock asking ‘Are yous goin’ to put on th’ gramophone to night, or are yous not?’. In the same play, the coal vendor asks ‘D’yes want any blocks?’50 Perhaps most notably, Joyce translated Hauptmann’s ‘der Alte gewesen’ (‘it was the old man’) as ‘me old cockey … ’a bet ’at wus’, and this choice of language would appear in the title of one of O’Casey’s best-known works.51 O’Casey would use this Joycean ‘cock’ in the title of Juno and the Paycock, with the strutting ‘paycock’ of the title pointing to the hapless ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle. Although O’Casey could not have noticed this parallel with Joyce’s Before Sunrise, which remained unpublished until after O’Casey’s death, he did sense

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that perhaps there was an affinity between his own use of regional dialect and what Lawrence was trying to achieve onstage. Indeed, although Lawrence’s playwriting never gained much fame in the first half of the twentieth century, when A Collier’s Friday Night was first published in 1934, it won praise from O’Casey. O’Casey applauded the work for being ‘saturated with an intense and accurate feeling in the vision of the life of the family he seeks to set upon the stage’, admired it for having ‘the touch and go of life in it’ and felt that it gave ‘a fine and lively idea of an English miner’s home’. He even argued that ‘it is maddening to think of the stillness that lay around the evident possibilities in Lawrence to create drama. A little more experience, a little more encouragement, and, in Lawrence, England might have had a great dramatist.’52 O’Casey was not alone in that assessment of Lawrence’s theatrical capabilities: Raymond Williams subsequently declared that Lawrence ‘brought to the drama a capacity for the rhythms of speech – as most notably in The Daughter-in-Law – which in the end he developed to change not only the dialogue but the narrative and analytic tones of the English novel’.53 George Bernard Shaw, meanwhile, reportedly declared that Lawrence’s ‘dialogue was the most magnificent he had ever heard and his own stuff was “the Barber of Fleet Street” by comparison’.54 W. B. Yeats also commented on Joyce’s prowess as a playwright. In 1904, Joyce sent some of his Hauptmann translation work to Yeats, hoping for production in Dublin by Yeats’s actors at the Abbey Theatre. Yeats, however, replied to tell Joyce bluntly, ‘you are not a very good German scholar’ and that it was ‘very unlikely that we can make any use of them for the theatre … We must get the ear of our public with Irish work’.55 Nonetheless, despite that dismissal, Yeats did remember Joyce’s translations for a quarter of a century, as evinced by a note that Joyce received from Ezra Pound in 1928: The Yeats alledges that in time past (80 or 90 years ago) thou madest some traductions of the plays of G. Hauptmann. 2ndly that these cd. not be used at the Abbey because it was then constitooted or red taped to do nowt but 100% green or Erse plays. If these juvenile indiscretions still exist the time may now have come to cash in on ’em … Seems quite as likely that it was Grillparzer or Ibsen that you’d traduced, but you might lemme have the reel dope on the sichoo-atshun.56 By this time, the manuscript of Joyce’s Before Sunrise had ended up in New York’s Brick Row Book Shop, so Joyce could not have sent it to Pound even if he wished to do so.57 Yet despite losing track of the manuscript, and despite Yeats’s rejection of the German translations, Joyce had continued to read and admire Hauptmann. Hauptmann may ultimately have exerted a key influence on both Joyce and Lawrence as each of the English-language writers attempted to construct

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regionally inflected dramatic scripts. Both the young Joyce and the young Lawrence had felt inspired by the example of the German dramatist from early in their writing careers, and the similarity of regional interest in the mining plays that they wrote in the early twentieth century owes a great deal to Hauptmann. After all, the young Lawrence had thrown himself into an intense period of reading via the Mechanics’ Institute Library in Eastwood, while Joyce visited the National Library on Kildare Street; both Lawrence and Joyce thus encountered the mainstream of European drama while surrounded by local circumstances that were less than salubrious. Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, observed: ‘it seems to me little short of a miracle that anyone should have striven to cultivate poetry or cared to get in touch with the current of European thought while living in a household such as ours, typical as it was of the squalor of a drunken generation’.58 Nottinghamshire resident Enid Hopkin Hilton recalled how, for Lawrence and his Eastwood circle, ‘self-education, music and drama’ emerged out of ‘shabby, often grimy houses’.59 As part of his youthful literary education, Joyce acquired a copy of William Archer’s translation of Hauptmann’s Hannele (1893) and was so impressed that he began studying German in order to read Hauptmann in the original.60 Hannele involves the kind of dream sequence that would fascinate Joyce in his later writing of the ‘Circe’ portion of Ulysses and in constructing his novel of dreams, Finnegans Wake. But Hauptmann’s more characteristic naturalistic style, which points to the lives of figures such as the downtrodden Silesian weavers and miners, also appealed to the young Joyce, who envisaged Hauptmann as a successor to Ibsen (another writer Joyce deeply admired). Hauptmann’s play Vor Sonnenaufgang, which includes a depiction of hereditary alcoholism, may also have spoken particularly to Joyce’s own family predicament. In 1906, Joyce acquired a copy of Hauptmann’s play Rose Bernd (1903), wondered whether the piece ‘acts well’ and praised its author in what were – for Joyce – fulsome terms by declaring, ‘I have found nothing of the charlatan in him yet’.61 Meanwhile, the young D. H. Lawrence also studied the work of Hauptmann with care. In 1910, Lawrence’s new acquaintance Grace Crawford lent him a copy of Hauptmann’s Elga (1905) and Lawrence read and appraised it (‘I liked the poetry of Elga but not the humanity’ (1L 154)).62 In the same year, Lawrence read another of Hauptmann’s plays, Die Versunkene Glocke (‘The Sunken Bell’, 1897) which, like Elga (1905), tackles the theme of marital infidelity. In 1910, Lawrence also read Hauptmann’s early 1891 play Einsame Menschen (‘Solitary People’), a story of extra-marital desire and apparent suicide that influenced the writing of Lawrence’s own 1912 novel The Trespasser. Indeed, the Hauptmann play Einsame Menschen is cited by name towards the end of Lawrence’s novel (T 224). Hauptmann’s influence can therefore be discerned in the themes of Lawrence and Joyce’s playwriting. The focus on problematic sexual relationships, the

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arrival of mining militancy in a domestic setting and the serious attention that is paid to the ordinary lives of working men and women are all ideas which Hauptmann explored and that are subsequently shared across Joyce’s translation of Before Sunrise, and Lawrence’s Touch and Go and The Daughterin-Law. But as time went by, and as Joyce and Lawrence failed to make their reputations on the stage, Hauptmann would exert his presence in the prose fiction of these younger men instead. The German dramatist is mentioned by name in Dubliners (1914), where the character of James Duffy in ‘A Painful Case’ keeps in his desk a ‘manuscript translation of Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink’.63 Elsewhere, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) when Stephen takes a morning walk, ‘the rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy’.64 As Jill Perkins has pointed out, Stephen Dedalus’s non serviam, ‘I will not serve that in which I no longer believe’, may owe a debt to Before Sunrise, in which the character of Alfred Loth distances himself from ‘sham religion’ and ‘sham morality’.65 Joyce’s Before Sunrise may also find an echo in one of his own later texts: Joyce’s translation of Vor Sonnenaufgang included a comic moment when a sexagenarian workman addresses his scythe as though addressing a person: LOTH Then why are you sharpening your scythe? BEIBST (to his scythe) …’A’s askin’ ’bout you.66 When Joyce came to write the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses, he went one step further, and allowed such objects to talk back, with the episode including dramatic dialogue spoken by items including a fan, a button and a pair of boots. In 1928, Joyce learned from Ezra Pound that Hauptmann was himself struggling through a translation of Ulysses, and that the German had commented that reading the novel felt ‘like looking at a coin through a microscope’. As late as 1937, Joyce hoped to make personal contact with the writer who had so inspired him, asking the arch-networker Pound: ‘Could you give me a word of introduction to Gerhart Hauptmann? When I was a boy in Dublin I made a translation (!) of his Michael Kramer a play which I still admire greatly. Perhaps he would do me the honour and pleasure of signing it – his text, I mean, in book form not my well meant atrocity.’67 Similarly, the influence of Gerhart Hauptmann can be found not only in Lawrence’s mining plays, but also in his prose fiction. After all, in 1921 when Lawrence wrote his novella ‘The Captain’s Doll’ he created a potentially wife-murdering army captain who resembles the stepfather of Hauptmann’s Hannele; Lawrence even used the name ‘Hannele’ for one of the characters,

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and he drew attention to this parallel by including the question, ‘there’s a play called Hannele, isn’t there?’ (Fox 96). When Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), he again looked to the German playwright for whom marital infidelity was also a significant theme. The first version of Lawrence’s novel opens by describing how Clifford Chatterley, before his wartime injury, read aloud to his wife Connie from the work of Hauptmann (FLC 7–8). In conclusion, then, although Lawrence and Joyce have often been considered as antagonistic literary figures, and although they certainly expressed personal antipathy towards one another, it is possible to discern a coincidence of interest in some of their relatively little-known attempts at writing plays. Lawrence’s Touch and Go and Joyce’s translation Before Sunrise have never enjoyed popularity in performance, and are unlikely to hold the stage at any point in the near future. Yet, the plays do show how these writers sought to use drama to express a kind of regionally inflected dialogue that was strongly motivated by the kinds of social tension that had arisen in the rapidly industrialized areas of the nineteenth century and which Gerhart Hauptmann had expressed on the German stage. Ultimately, that blend of influences, both cosmopolitan yet continually alive to the literary possibilities of the home areas in which these writers had been born and grown to maturity, could not be productively set to work in the playhouse by these writers, but remain a notable feature of Joyce and Lawrence’s mature work in the novel and in short fiction.

NOTES 1 James Joyce, ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, in James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 50–2, 51. 2 Jill Perkins has expressed some doubt about whether Joyce’s Michael Kramer should be regarded as a ‘fact’, or whether it might be an invention of Joyce’s. Perkins, ‘Joyce and European Drama: 1900–1906’, in Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, ed. Jill Perkins (San Marino: Henry E. Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, 1978), pp. 17–27, 20. Joyce’s translation of Riders to the Sea, which he worked on with Nicolò Vidacovich, is now found at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (see HRC Joyce collection, box 1 folder 7, J. M. Synge Riders to the Sea (1905) translated into Italian by James Joyce and Nicolo Vidacovich, n.d., p. 26). 3 See Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, and Carla Marengo Vaglio, ‘Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen: Vidacovich and Joyce’s Translation’, Joyce Studies in Italy, 2, ed. Carla de Petris (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988), pp. 197–212. 4 Lawrence, The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1965), p. 222. 5 Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence: An Appreciation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 30.

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6 Ian Clarke, ‘Dialogue and Dialect in Lawrence’s Colliery Plays’, Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (2001): 39–61; 39. Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 37. 7 Ezra Pound, letter of 17 July 1917, in Ezra Pound and James Joyce, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (London: Faber, 1968), p. 122. 8 Mark Taylor-Batty, ‘Joyce’s Bridge to Late Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Harold Pinter’s Dialogue with Exiles’, in A Companion to James Joyce, ed. Richard Brown (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 300–17, 302. Christoph Henke, ‘The Jealousy of Displacement: James Joyce’s Exiles and Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile” ’, in Censorship and Exile, ed. Johannan Hartmann and Hubert Zapf (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015), pp. 37–47, p. 37. 9 Len Platt, James Joyce: Texts and Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 40. 10 Printed in ‘The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd’, Sunday Times, 19 December 1926, p. 4. The newspaper reviewer said of this verdict, ‘I do not even begin to agree’. 11 ‘ “The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd”: A Play. By D. H. Lawrence’, Sunday Times, 19 December 1926, p. 4. 12 See James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 55–73. ‘The Stage Society: Thirty Years of Pioneer Work’, Observer, 22 September 1929, p. 13. ‘Our London Correspondence’, Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1926, p. 6. ‘Our London Correspondence’, Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1926, p. 6. ‘The Stage Society in Abeyance’, Manchester Guardian, 14 September 1939, p. 6. 13 John MacNicholas, ‘The Stage History of “Exiles” ’, James Joyce Quarterly, 19.1 (1981): 9–26, 12. 14 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols (London: Faber, 1957–66), Volume II, p. 411. 15 Gordon Bowker, James Joyce: A Biography (London: Phoenix, 2012), pp. 348–9. 16 David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 364–5. 17 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 575. 18 ‘The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd’, Observer, 19 December 1926, p. 13. 19 ‘Stage Society’, Times, 16 February 1926, p. 12. ‘Our London Correspondence’, Manchester Guardian, 16 February 1926, p. 10. 20 See Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence: An Appreciation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 30. Brooks Atkinson, ‘The Theatre: James Joyce’s “Exiles”’, New York Times, 13 March 1957, p. 27. 21 D. H. Lawrence, Three Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 22 Sylvia Sklar, The Plays of D. H. Lawrence (London: Vision, 1975); James Moran, The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

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23 Michael Billington, ‘Exiles at the Aldwych’, Guardian, 8 October 1971, p. 10. In fact, an earlier figure had also attempted to do this ‘salvage-work’ for both writers: the actor Esmé Percy produced Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd for the Stage Society in 1926, and then staged Joyce’s Exiles at London’s Q Theatre in 1950. See MacNicholas, ‘The Stage History of “Exiles” ’, p. 13. 24 Anne Fogarty, ‘Ghostly Intertexts: James Joyce and the Legacy of Synge’, in Synge and Edwardian Ireland, ed. Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 225–43, 235. Dominic Cavendish, ‘Unjustly Neglected – but no Masterpiece’, Telegraph, http://www.telegr​aph.co.uk/cult​ure/ thea​tre/drama/3654​247/Unjus​tly-neglec​ted-but-no-mast​erpi​ece.html (accessed 24 July 2023). 25 Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, p. 48. 26 Ibid., p. 59. 27 Ibid., pp. 59–60. 28 Ibid., p. 90. 29 Ibid., p. 97. 30 Nora Foster Stoval, ‘Minerva Vitrix: The Daughter-in-Law, A Power Play’, The D. H. Lawrence Review, 40.1 (2015): 59–72, 65. 31 Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, p. 112. 32 Gerhart Hauptmann, Vor Sonnenaufgang: Soziales Drama (Berlin: Hofenberg, 2017), p. 82. 33 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 220. 34 See Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen, ‘Explanatory Notes’ (Plays 638–9). 35 Schwarze and Worthen, ‘Explanatory Notes’ (Plays 649). 36 Schwarze and Worthen, ‘Explanatory Notes’ (Plays 642). 37 Malcolm T. Smith and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘The Irish in the Mining Industry in England and Wales’, Irish Economic and Social History, 36 (2009): 37–62, 43. 38 Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), p. 4. 39 René Leboutte, ‘Coal Basins’, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, Volume 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 455–9, 456. 40 William Scott Igo, ‘Gerhart Hauptmann: Germany through the Eyes of the Artist’, PhD dissertation, University of North Texas, 1996 https://digi​tal.libr​ary.unt.edu/ ark:/67531/metad​c277​987/m2/1/hig​h_re​s_d/100​2726​765-igo.pdf, p. 3 (accessed 24 July 2023). 41 Smith and MacRaild, ‘The Irish in the Mining Industry’, pp. 40–1. 42 Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, p. 4. 43 Ibid., p. 125. 44 Ibid., p. 62.

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45 Ibid., p. 48. 46 Jill Perkins, ‘Critical Commentary’, in Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, pp. 29–46, pp. 33–4. 47 Hauptmann, Vor Sonnenaufgang, p. 28. Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, p. 67. 48 O’Casey, The Complete Plays of Sean O’Casey, 5 vols (London: Macmillan, 1984), Volume I, p. 209, Volume V, p. 38. 49 Hauptmann, Vor Sonnenaufgang, p. 31. Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, p. 69. 50 O’Casey, Plays, Volume I, p. 58, 27. 51 Hauptmann, Vor Sonnenaufgang, p. 30. Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, p. 69. 52 O’Casey, ‘A Miner’s Dream of Home’, New Statesman, 28 July 1934, p. 124. 53 Raymond Williams, Introduction, in (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 14.

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54 Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), Volume III, p. 121. 55 W. B. Yeats in Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, Volume II, p. 58. 56 Pound, Pound/Joyce, pp. 234–5. 57 See Jill Perkins, ‘Provenance of the Manuscript’, in Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, pp. 9–15, pp. 10–11. 58 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1957), p. 98. 59 Enid Hopkin Hilton, More Than One Life: A Nottinghamshire Childhood with D. H. Lawrence (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1993), p. 23. 60 Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 76. Bowker, Biography, p. 75. 61 Quoted by Ellmann, James Joyce, pp. 235–6. 62 Grace Lovat Fraser, In the Days of My Youth (London: Cassell, 1970), p. 142. 63 James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 88. See also Bowker, Biography, p. 80. 64 Joyce, Portrait, p. 190. 65 Perkins, ‘Critical Commentary’, in Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, pp. 29–46, 37. 66 Joyce and Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, pp. 47–132, 73. 67 Pound, Pound/Joyce, p. 235. Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, Volume I, p. 398.

CHAPTER NINE

Money and revolution JEFF WALLACE

... the mysterious nothingness of money; a word on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic … Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) A kind of account book runs through D. H. Lawrence’s fiction – from, let us say, the sixpence Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers (1913) steals from his wife’s purse to go out drinking, to the £80,000 accumulated by the young Paul in his betting career in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ (1926). On her first pay day, Ursula Brangwen sits on a tramcar proudly ‘fingering the gold and fearing she might lose it’: ‘four pounds two shillings and one penny’ (R 369). After the first night of entertainment at ‘Houghton’s Pleasure Palace’, a venture designed to save him from financial ruin, James Houghton, father of lost girl Alvina Houghton, repairs upstairs to his ‘bare chamber’ in order to count the cash (LG 111). Here money is not numbers at all but pure affect: a whimsical extended metaphor of an ‘army’ of coins, carefully distinguished in rank, follows (112). Houghton is empowered by his army and loves them: He loved to feel that his table was pressed down, that it groaned under their weight. He loved to see the pence, like innumerable pillars of cloud, standing waiting to lead on into wildernesses of unopened resource, while the silver, as pillars of light, should guide the way down the long night of fortune. Their weight sank sensually into his muscle, and gave him gratification. The dark redness of bronze, like full-blooded fleas, seemed alive and pulsing, the silver was magic as if winged.

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In such instances, we feel the acute sense of money that pervades Lawrence’s writing – money as necessity, the necessary critique of money, and the necessity of prevailing over money. Late in 1928, Lawrence was invited by the poet, educator and union activist Charles Wilson to send a New Year’s message of support to the Willington miners of the Durham coalfield. The context of this was the severe economic hardship suffered nationally by miners following the General Strike of 1926 and the subsequent lockouts imposed by mine-owners across the country. Wilson is a distinctive and perhaps neglected figure in the labour history of North-East England, combining pre-war experience as a miner, checkweighman and trades union official with later careers in local education and politics.1 In 1916, Volume One of the Poetical Works of Charles Wilson, Pitman Poet was published in London by Arthur H. Stockwell; at the time of the invitation to Lawrence, Wilson had become established as an English Literature tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association. Wilson has attracted condescension for his practice of writing, with the accompaniment of gifts, to literary and political figures for support in this educational work, including from Lawrence, who over a year of sporadic correspondence had kept Wilson at a polite but cool distance and complained of him to Giuseppe Orioli as ‘a nuisance of a fellow’ (6L 476). Lawrence had perhaps neglected to empathize with the strategies that might be used by a cultural agent of the working class determined to break down barriers. At any rate, Lawrence found it in him to respond to Wilson’s invitation. Lawrence had already consistently fictionalized the industrial relations and labour disputes of the mining industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably in the historical narratives of the Crich family in the ‘Industrial Magnate’ chapter of Women in Love (1920), and through Clifford Chatterley’s interest in the modernizing of his mining concern in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Aaron Sisson of Aaron’s Rod (1922) is a miners’ union secretary, attracting his wife’s scorn for caring less for his family than for ‘ “a lot of ignorant colliers, who don’t know what they want except it’s more money just for themselves” ’ (AR 8). Taking stereotypical male refuge in a less-than-stereotypical pub, the talk is of the relationship between money and social progress, prompting Aaron’s gloomily philosophical insistence that ‘ “It’s money we live for, and money is what our lives is worth – nothing else” ’ (AR 20–1); later, socializing with the bohemian Bricknell set, the conversation turns to the possibility of miner-led revolution in the name of nationalization. Lawrence had, then, frequently written of miners in the context of money and of labour politics, but never directly to them; Wilson, curiously, presented just this opportunity. ‘If you could only tell them that living and spending aren’t the same thing!’ – not Lawrence in this instance, but the Oliver Mellors of his last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been completed early in 1928 (LCL 299). Would Lawrence elaborate more publicly upon private comments

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to Wilson earlier in the year, to the effect that miners had the power to change the industrial system by ‘just pulling the feathers out of the money bird’ (6L 267)? Bypassing both capitalism and bolshevism, the ‘great job’, Lawrence had insisted, was the development of the poetic intelligence and ‘the deepening and widening consciousness’ (6L 280, 267). The task was finally undertaken in a letter of 28 December 1928 from the Hotel Beau Rivage in Bandol, as Lawrence declared himself to Wilson ‘more revolutionary every minute, but for life’s sake’: ‘we want a revolution not in the name of money or work or any of that, but of life – and let money and work be as casual in human life as they are in a bird’s life, damn it all’ (7L 99). Six poems from the recent collection Pansies were accompanied by a ‘message’, or manifesto statement, of greeting. First, men should be individual and ‘grounded in your own manhood’ rather than identifying with abstractions such as the ‘working’, ‘average’ or ‘good’ man (7L 103). This would involve getting clear of ‘the money hysteria’, wringing ‘the neck of the money bird’ (103–4). Money was the ‘devil’ that ‘twists’ both poor and rich, ‘nothing more than the bogey of fear and greed, inside us’ (103). Work should be undertaken to secure the necessities of food, warmth and shelter only, a relatively uncomplicated arrangement that would free us up for ‘the great game of living’. The present game was wage-slavery, to whose terms and rules revolutionary bolshevism subscribed. Seventy per cent of contemporary work was, Lawrence estimated, ‘waste work’, ‘done just because people do not know what to do with themselves: and to get money. It is a form of idiocy’ (103). But: ‘money need not exist’. On the basis of this, Lawrence indeed concluded by advising the miners on the importance of ‘developing consciousness’ (104). It would be something to know if and how this manifesto was disseminated by Wilson to the miners, and what their reactions were. Lawrence’s address to the Willington men is part of the florescence of a revolutionary critique of money in his late life and work. At the conclusion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mellors, also in epistolary mode, seeks to ‘live beyond money’, which ‘poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t’ (LCL 300). From his new lodgings in Old Heanor, where he works on a farm (‘thirty shillings a week as laborer’ (298)), Mellors, like Aaron Sisson, drinks and talks nationalization in pubs, and observes the consumption habits of the industrial working classes. He essays structural economic analysis: the nationalization of coal would be ineffective without the comprehensive nationalization of industry, because it is part of a global market and must be sold, ‘even under a Soviet’ (LCL 299). Equally, ‘we’ve got these great industrial populations, and they’ve got to be fed’; the system must function and, to generate both necessities and the necessary excess of capital, that population must be captured, even though it is also in the nature of that system to crash on them. ‘Their whole life depends on spending money’, writes Mellors on the young of the district, ‘and now

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they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilisation and our education: brings up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out’ (LCL 299). Earlier, Mrs Bolton’s introduction into the novel, and into Sir Clifford Chatterley’s life, corroborates this condition of capture from the immersed perspective of Tevershall village itself. Responding to Sir Clifford’s anxious enquiries about whether there is ‘much socialism, bolshevism, among the people?’, she is able to reassure her employer that ‘all the lads want is just money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with fine clothes: and they don’t care about another thing. They haven’t the brains to be socialists’ (LCL 104). Overhearing these conversations, Connie Chatterley concludes that ‘there was only one class nowadays’, ‘the moneyboy and the moneygirl’ (LCL 105). For Mellors, the economics are precise: with the pits working two and a half days a week at best, a miner would be supporting a family on only twenty-five to thirty shillings – potentially less than he currently earns to support only himself. But to achieve more pay would only be to perpetuate the system of spending money. Yet, in ‘if only’ mode, twenty-five shillings would be perfectly adequate if the men knew how to wear scarlet trousers, dance nakedly, carve wooden stools and do embroidery. Mellors is tongue-in-cheek about this version of ‘living’, yet deadly serious at the same time. Wearing scarlet trousers does not happen spontaneously: between hard monetary calculation and whimsical paganism, Mellors’s theory of living beyond money is not about the evasion of capture per se, but rather the passionate pursuit of a different social system devoted to the art, or science, of living: ‘If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend’, he muses (LCL 299). These examples show Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be the culmination of Lawrence’s fictions of discussion. Money problems frame these discussions around post-war ruination in the novel. The Chatterleys are ‘on a rather inadequate income’ with a burning Tevershall pitbank that would ‘cost thousands’ to put out; they must nevertheless host the playwright Michaelis, reportedly on ‘an income of fifty thousand dollars from America alone’, who boasts that ‘money is a sort of instinct’ (LCL 5, 13, 23, 22). But as well as a forum for debate about what a revolution beyond money might look like, there is the novel’s symbolic pairing of Connie and Mellors, a liaison that enacts the tenderness and deterritorialization, as well as the struggle, of human relationship beyond the boundaries of money. The fact that living beyond money is a question of aesthetics is also implicit in the late, amassed poems of Pansies. Clusters of poems encapsulate the critique of money expounded in Lawrence’s Willington message and in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ‘Riches’, for example, declares in its first four lines, ‘When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.’ In ‘Wages’, ‘The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle / that ever turned men into fiends’ (1Poems 432, 452). In ‘O start a revolution – ’:

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O! start a revolution, somebody! not to get the money but to lose it all for ever. O! start a revolution, somebody! not to instal the working classes but to abolish the working classes for ever and have a world of men. (1Poems 392–3) These are poems that do what they say on the tin. But as such, the quotation of them, in fragments or as wholes, raises issues of literary-critical protocol and philosophy. In his Foreword of April 1929, Lawrence gave directions for reading: he ‘should wish’ the poems to be taken as flower-like pieces of transience, ‘merely the breath of the moment’ (1Poems 671–2). Each breath is a thought, of course, but not the kind of ‘prose thought’ that was ‘didactic’ and ‘slightly bullying’ (671). A letter of 28 October 1913 to Edward Marsh indicates the sense in which Lawrence might have envisaged Pansies, when they blossomed much later, as a form that inherently subverted money. Surveying the poems from Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies, Lawrence singles out the vocabulary of Ralph Hodgson’s ‘The Song of Honour’ as ‘the currency of poetry, not poetry itself ’ (2L 93). There may be some emotion in the rhythm – ‘the ruby’s and the rainbow’s song / the nightingale’s – all three’ – but Hodgson’s words are established poeticism, exemplifying a frequent association Lawrence makes between the counterfeit emotion of sentimentality and the making of money. Feeling his way around an analogy with a man giving a sovereign to a beggar, he affirms that there might be genuine emotion in donor and recipient, but that the intervention of money is the problem: ‘the sovereign is a bit of dead metal’. This at least casts ‘free’ verse in a different light, as in Lawrence’s passionate 1919 reconfiguration of the concept as ‘the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment’ (1Poems 648). Welcome though the invitation might be, however, to read Pansies as the mere passing breath of poetic thought, Lawrence cannot, on the very grounds of his own literary-critical philosophy, dictate these terms to the reader. The poems can be read in the exactly opposite manner, as dogmatic or didactic statements: I quote the money poems, trusting the tale rather than the teller, as simple summations of a critique of money that itself has an acknowledged currency in Lawrence’s late writing. Alternatively, the Pansies can be accommodated to buying and selling in a different way, perhaps in their straightforward instrumentality, or with the throwaway quality of a cheap commodity. Money has a complex conceptual life, as Lawrence knew and revealed in the instability of his own configurations of it – mysterious nothingness, sensual weight, pillars of cloud, dead sovereigns. In what remains in this chapter, I want to trace an awareness of this complexity from the earliest stages of Lawrence’s life and work, suggesting

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a long continuity with the late critique. Where money is concerned, there are certainly two Lawrences: the Lawrence who is thrifty and careful, and for whom every penny counts; and the Lawrence of pure expenditure and excess. This is to pose a certain relation between visibility and invisibility: on the one hand, money is solid and tangible, to be watched over as giving access to the necessities of life; on the other hand, money is pure invention or idea, of no account for life, and hence to be wasted ‘in a moment of great extremity’ (RDP 229). The latter phrase, from the 1924 essay ‘Climbing Down Pisgah’, refers to the curious speculation that the laws of physics or of ‘our scientific universe’ are ‘habits’ that might be broken. But I import it here to characterize, equally, the critique of evolutionary biology that Lawrence sketched out in the early long essay ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (1914). Lawrence found in Darwinian evolutionary logic an emphasis upon self-preservation: the economy of a poppy plant is to ensure its survival and to throw out the flower as a form of ‘excess which always accompanies reproduction’ (STH 9). On an alternative logic of creative evolution deriving from the philosophy of Henri Bergson, however, the poppy flower cannot be consigned to mere excess: it is, on the contrary, ‘the thing itself at its maximum of being’ (STH 11). A difference in logic or meaning of excess is at issue: where biology treats the flower as subordinate surplus, Lawrence sees it as the flower-ing of life at its extremity. We can save, or we can spend. This duality around money can in turn be mapped, exploratively, onto a fundamental division in the forms of Lawrence’s fiction at two levels. We can stay, or we can go. Many of the fictions are internally concerned with the decision, or not, of a protagonist or protagonists to take flight; I have written of sudden and uncalculated, but nevertheless problemsolving leaps made by certain Lawrence characters, in terms of ‘technologies of the self ’.2 At the level of aesthetic form, staying put in Lawrence’s fictions means a mode of social realism that often involves, as we have seen in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the detailed calculation of money concerns; when the fictions take flight, into modes of fantasy or mythology for example, money tends to be left behind. Struggle or oscillation between these modes may occur within or across the fictions. Once the four middle-class protagonists of Women in Love have given up their occupations, the plot of the novel is freed up to enter the symbolic Alpine realm of existential crisis where money is of no account. In Italy, having left behind the fiscal responsibilities of his family and the early realist chapters that dramatize them, Aaron Sisson is assured he can live on ‘your flute and your charm’, as the novel drifts into loosely connected episodic mode (AR 109). Once ascertaining that Ciccio does not require her to come with money, the fortune-less Alvina Houghton is free to commit to a new life of artistes and Italy, in association with a troupe that has already enabled her to become gladly ‘déclassé’: ‘it was so different from Woodhouse, where everything was priced and ticketed. These people were nomads. They

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didn’t care a straw who you were or who you weren’t’ (LG 118). The Lost Girl figures exoticized flight while never quite escaping from romantic social realism. But in later versions of this flight in linked narratives like The Plumed Serpent and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, where the transaction undertaken by the woman risks the more radical sacrifice of life itself, a logic of mythology takes over as money concerns become of little or no account. This dialectic, of saving and spending, having and letting go, can be traced in the psychodrama around money in Lawrence’s early formation. Again, it helps to set the teller in tension with the tale. In the brief retrospect of ‘Myself Revealed’ (1929), Lawrence, ‘undoubtedly a poor boy of the working classes’, chose to play down the available narrative of the hard knocks that led eventually to success (LEA 177). Since giving up teaching seventeen years previously, he may have become ‘a writer with a very modest income and a very questionable reputation’, but he had never ‘starved in a garret’ and ‘never even felt poor’ (LEA 177, 179). Over the first ten years, he reflects, he earned no more and often less than he would have done as a teacher. Nevertheless, the story is punctuated by its moments of pecuniary progress: £12 a year scholarship at the age of twelve; £100 a year for his first teacher’s salary in Croydon; £50 for the publication of The White Peacock. These have mattered because ‘when one has been born poor a very little money can be enough’; the impression of a principled disdain of money is reinforced in the latter stages of the sketch in the bold and profound admission that he could never make the transfer in ‘vibration’ from the working class to the middle class, or more precisely to ‘the middle-class thing’, ensuring that he ‘cannot rise in the world and become even a little popular and rich’ (LEA 179, 180–1). Enlightening though this urbane retrospect is, Lawrence’s letters tell a different story. Letters were of course the primary means by which a writer of Lawrence’s time was obliged to conduct the business of making a living. This should be borne in mind when we apprehend the anxious preoccupation with money that seems to run through the correspondence. Two symbolic moments framing the nightmare of the First World War, 1914 and 1919, may briefly exemplify. At the outset of the war, the Lawrences were seriously reduced, with Frieda no longer able to draw funds from Germany and a costly divorce settlement looming. Lawrence is not shy to express in highly emotional terms his despair at the prospect of being ‘penniless’. The letter to his publisher J. B. Pinker on 5 September 1914 is well known in the Lawrence field as the point at which, ‘out of sheer rage’ at the outbreak of war and its barbarism, he embarked upon his study of Hardy. The prior paragraph in the short letter indicates a more concrete and immediate source of this anger. Apologizing for worrying Pinker about money, he asks if Methuen will pay up the £150 that is owed to him. ‘I can last out here only another month – then I don’t know where to raise a penny, for nobody will pay me. It makes me quite savage’ (2L 212). Savagery melts a

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week later upon receipt of a donation of £10 from Edward Marsh: Lawrence is ‘moved almost to tears … I couldn’t bear to be really penniless’ (2L 213). At this time Marsh had earnestly taken up Lawrence’s cause, supplying him also with the complete Hardy needed for his essay. A month later, Marsh’s intervention also contributed to Lawrence gaining a life-saving award of £50 from the Royal Literary Fund. Writing to Catherine Jackson (later Carswell) on 21 October, Lawrence estimates ‘I have got about £70 in the world now’; £145 is however owed to divorce lawyers, which he determines not to pay, and the hopes of another source of funding have not transpired. Writer to writer, Lawrence allows himself a kickback, something that dares even to venture a sense of entitlement: ‘Have not I earned my whack – at least enough to live on – from this nation’ (2L 226). Mark Kinkead-Weekes remarks on ‘the poverty of 1919’ faced by the Lawrences, with the war having decimated publishing budgets and activities.3 ‘Who was going to bother to publish me and to pay for my writings, in 1918 and 1919?’, Lawrence reflected (IR 11). Anger this time is directed more at having to be a receiver, again, of charity. The poet Amy Lowell had donated a cheque for 1,300 lire, the equivalent of $100; writing on 20 February 1920, gratitude is filtered through a sardonic writerly camaraderie: ‘I am a sort of charity-boy of literature, apparently’, though he does not mind so much that Lowell is his benefactor, because ‘you are an artist, and that is always a sort of partnership’ (3L 415). Lawrence by now well knew that payment within the literary economy was obtuse and weightless in comparison with the more predictable patterns of industrial labour – perhaps ever since the publisher’s fee of £50 for The White Peacock had been met with astonishment by his pitman father. Writers were in it together, sometimes for better, often for worse. Nine days later, he was able to put his money where his mouth was, sending £5 to Catherine Carswell in case she did not have the ready cash to travel to Altrincham in Cheshire to review a production of his play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd for the Times. Not too long after, as KinkeadWeekes notes, things were beginning to look up, the Lawrence finances ‘markedly improved’.4 The intensity of Lawrence’s reactions to money underlines deep associations of shame and pride that we might expect from a ‘poor boy of the working classes’. In his case, the relationship to the working classes was from the start nuanced by the fractional difference between his collier father and a ‘superior’ mother belonging really to ‘the lower bourgeoisie’ (LEA 177). Sons and Lovers presents a kind of primal scenario, an occasion of formative trauma drawn from his own life. Paul Morel suffers ‘the tortures of the damned’ through the weekly ritual of going to collect the wages which his father, as butty, would thereafter distribute to his workmates (SL 96). From leaving the house at half past three on a Friday afternoon, the event is spectacle and public knowledge; all the

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collectors are ‘seen trooping’ to the colliery offices and are henceforth subject to the ‘patriarchal admonitions’ of the two colliery officials who distribute the money, with children especially prone to their satire (SL 93–4). When finally called, Paul is unable to speak, suffering a pounding heart and ‘convulsions of self consciousness’ (SL 95). The money is solidly and emphatically on display, yet dispensed with the same hint of sensuous affect we saw in James Houghton: Braithwaite the ‘great cashier’ ‘banged onto the invoice a five pound bag of silver, then, in a delicate and pretty movement, picked up a little ten-pound column of gold, and plumped it beside the silver. The gold slid in a bright stream over the paper’ (SL 95). Paul, ‘too much upset’ to count out the stoppages (16s 6d) required, simply pushes some coins back to him. Once freed, Paul has the second public stage of his discomfort to endure, delivering the money to his father in the pub. Returning home, Paul’s ‘dark and furious’ reaction to his mother is subtly class-oriented: both employers and colliers are ‘hateful, and common’, lacking in elocution. He refuses to go to the office again, even though it will cost him his sixpence reward (SL 97). This, Lawrence writes, is the boy’s ‘only income’, which he ‘treasured’; yet the curious identification of a child’s pocket money with ‘income’ is soon to be underlined when, at fourteen, Paul begins to look for work as ‘ “the man in the house” ’ following Morel’s accident in the pit (SL 97, 113). An artistic career as a painter is inconceivable; instead, knowing that he was not ‘of high monetary value in the world’, Paul’s truthful ambition is largely one of income, ‘quietly to earn his thirty or thirty-five shillings a week’ and live in a cottage with his mother ‘happy ever after’ (SL 113–14). The wages scene is one of several ways in which Lawrence in his writing drew attention to the forms of humiliation built structurally into the dispensation of money to the working classes. The scenarios are public and the money is necessarily visible and physical as cash, contrasting with the dematerialized, numerical and thereby less visible forms of capital accumulation enjoyed by those who benefited from the excess or profit generated by the wage earners. Braithwaite, though acting as cashier, is also an ‘important shareholder’ in the company; no more justification was needed for the patriarchal and undignified treatment of miners who had earned their pay and yet were forced to suffer in the payment of it. In the 1913 story ‘Strike-Pay’, the union distribution of strike-money mirrors that of the employers in Sons and Lovers, despite the men’s boisterous resistance: the union agent ‘has a bad way of paying’, calling out the colliers by name and loudly addressing them so that all can hear (LAH 134). Payment is a base rate of ten shillings plus ‘ “a bob a kid” ’; Sam Coutts has just had twins and so the appeal for his extra two shillings is publicly taken up – ‘ “get thy money, Sam, tha’s earned it” ’ (LAH 135). In the much earlier sketch ‘Lessford’s Rabbits’ (1909), the subject is the distribution of free school breakfasts for the boys of parents who are out of work. Few of the children

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can be persuaded to claim their rations despite being ‘pinched and pared thin with poverty’: using the piously superior voice of a teacher, ‘not many parents’, Lawrence writes, ‘would submit to the indignity of the officer’s inquiries, and the boys, the most foolishly sensitive animals in the world, would, many of them, prefer to go short rather than to partake of charity meals of which all their school-mates were aware’ (LAH 23). Even in the late form of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mrs Bolton acts as a summary reminder of these intensities of shame and the defences of pride surrounding the distribution of money, whether earned or charitable, for the working person. Her husband having been killed in a Tevershall pit explosion at the age of twenty-eight, the company manufactures an excuse to restrict her widow’s compensation to £300, ‘made out as if it was more of a gift than a legal compensation’, which is then further subject to moral adjudication on the woman’s character (LCL 80). As Mrs Bolton’s account continues in free indirect mode: And they wouldn’t let her have the money down: she wanted to start a little shop. But they said she’d no doubt squander it, perhaps in drink!! So she had to draw it thirty shillings a week. Yes, she had to go every Monday morning down to the offices and stand there a couple of hours waiting for her turn. Yes, for almost four years she went every Monday. (LCL 80–1) Mrs Bolton’s frustrated desire for a little shop is a distant echo; for a brief period when Lawrence was a baby, his mother Lydia had been the owner of a small haberdashery shop trading from the front room of their home at 8a Victoria Street, Eastwood. The business failed, as Mrs Lawrence’s family grew, but the venture attests to the fact that, as John Worthen puts it, the Lawrences were not only ‘part of an economically advancing working class’ but also ‘aiming, against the odds, at particular and special improvement’.5 The Lawrence children were able to draw on their mother’s ‘genius for economising’, but her superiority also expressed itself in a relation between visible and invisible wealth. Lydia Lawrence saved ruthlessly to provide her children with educational and cultural advantage, necessitating a repression not only of any unnecessary expenditure but also of the apparent evidence of money: as Lawrence’s youngest sister Ada recalled, in their various family homes, her mother ‘would have nothing cheap or tawdry, preferring bareness’.6 This is a familiar version of working-class respectability: outward conspicuous show is vulgar; bareness paradoxically denotes cultural capital and hints at the monetary capital that might lie behind it. Money was muted in public but was the subject of intense scrutiny within the family sphere: the effect on the young Lawrence, as Worthen observes, was not exactly a hatred of the lack of money itself, so much as a feeling of ‘the “dreadful indignity” of the endless carefulness to which they were subjected’.7

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As Worthen’s finely detailed analysis of the Lawrence domestic economy helps to show, this scrutiny was nowhere more in evidence than in the endlessly reworked scenario, in Lawrence’s dramas of mining family life, of the amount of money the collier retains from his weekly wages for his own pleasurable pursuits. Morel in Sons and Lovers never tells his wife how much this is, but she is able to deduce it from the report she obtains from Paul’s despised Friday afternoon excursions, while the narrative earlier provides an exact sliding scale: from ‘forty shillings, he kept ten; from thirty five, he kept five’, and so on (SL 27). In ‘Strike-Pay’, Ephraim Wharmby loses his money on the miners’ spontaneous pub-and-football jamboree and must be bailed out by his mates to the tune of six shillings. Returning to the home of his mother-in-law, where he lives with his pregnant wife, Ephraim must hand over the remaining 5s 6d in board, from which the older woman is able to deduce that his ‘good jaunt’ has cost 4s 6d (LAH 141). Nevertheless, Ephraim reacts with vituperative fury to the mother-in-law, demanding his dinner, and when she leaves, his wife Maud provides a curiously reconciliatory ending as the dinner is duly warmed up: ‘she attended to him. Not that she was really meek. But – he was her man – not her mother’s (LAH 142). This then is a strictly gendered expression of the fundamental tension and division in Lawrence between having and letting go, self-preservation and expenditure. In Aaron Sisson’s words, ‘women waste nothing – they couldn’t if they tried’ (AR 22); frustratingly and maddeningly, there is a sense from the fictions of Lawrence’s early milieu that men, by contrast, both could and should. Lawrence’s writing is permeated, then, by the lived experience of money as precariously poised between something and nothing. Behind this dualism is an intellectual understanding, encoded at length in the reflections on nature as political economy that make up the early chapters of the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, and crystallized in his first major philosophical statement of the postwar, the essay ‘Democracy’. ‘Money’, Lawrence writes, ‘is merely a contrivance for comparing a leg of mutton with a volume of Keats’ poems. The money in itself is nothing. It is simply the arbitrary static measure for human desires. We mistake the measure for the thing it measures, and proceed to base our desires on money’ (RDP 64). This is a clear summary of Karl Marx’s theory of exchange value, with which Lawrence would have been familiar from the left-progressive Eastwood circle of his youth and as a reader of The New Age. Money is an abstraction, pure invention and idea, a qualityless medium that enables the comparison of dissimilar qualitative things. What Lawrence calls ‘nonsensical materialism’ (RDP 64) resembles what Marx called the tendency to worship or fetishize the commodity form, and hence money, as if these had value in themselves. As Mellors’s ‘word on a bit of paper’ – a promissory note or cheque – money performs its own contradiction: lacking actual substance, it nevertheless replaces

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the unique use-value of a thing for a person with an impersonal value which is ‘material’ insofar as it is based on purely abstract calculation. But money’s abstraction is equally inherent in coinage as substance, with gold, as substance and as the sign of a substance, the ultimate exemplar. Even precious metals lack inherent value but instead are differentiated within a system of relations that we call money. Ursula Brangwen, James Houghton and Mr Braithwaite handle their coins lovingly, as the sensuous stuff of real value; but to mistake these metals for real value, their semiotics for substance, is in a sense the ultimate trick that money performs. The real point of money is that it is invisible. Abstraction has already happened in coinage; the conjuring or disappearing act – coins stand for nothing, nothing is turned into coin – is comparable with the extreme version of Marx’s theory proposed as ‘real abstraction’ by Alfred Sohn-Rethel in his work Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (1978). In this theory, the abstraction of capitalism is not something that we submit to and begin to think when we buy and sell; it has already happened in the commodity forms that populate the world, beyond thought.8 This of course implies, in turn, that money is so deeply embedded in the modern consciousness that we are unaware we are already thinking through and with it, for example in the accepted forms of scientific analysis. Lawrence knew, therefore, that the distinction framing the revolution he proposed to Charles Wilson and the Willington miners, ‘not in the name of money or work or any of that, but of life’, was never a simple one. Money colonizes life before we even know it. In Marx’s metaphor of the vampiric propensities of capital, it eats away at life itself. When the young working-class Paul of Sons and Lovers is reincarnated as the young middle-class Paul of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, another boy who wishes above all else to please his mother, Gothic is the necessary mode. The story reinvents the early Lawrence family scenario at an ostensibly bourgeois level: Paul’s mother ‘started with all the advantages’ but married for a love that ‘turned to dust’, yet the family has servants and Paul is intended for Eton (WWRA 239). A familiar repression is at work in the home: they keep up the appearance of style, beneath which there is ‘always an anxiety’ due to ‘the grinding sense of the shortage of money’ (230). ‘There must be more money!’ is the phrase that whispers in the house and whose evidence is never on display; the children, as sensitive instruments, ‘could hear it all the time’ (230). As a related psychological effect, the mother is unable to love her children, and hence compensates with the stronger appearance or, as it were, the currency of love rather than love itself. Paul’s response to his despair, which is to his own and his family’s unluckiness, is to channel the gambling history of the family into uncanny interaction with his rocking horse. Deriving from his mother the reductive materialist definition of luck as ‘what causes you to have money’, Paul associates luck with his uncle’s phrase ‘filthy lucre’ – etymologically wrong but psychologically right (231).

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Money is the dirt that the middle-class family must hide behind a façade of purity and cleanliness. In the 1929 essay Pornography and Obscenity, identifying pornography as the ‘vast lie’ of a social world that commercialized sexuality, Lawrence’s typical invective was: ‘the monstrous lie of money lurks under the cloak of purity. Kill the purity-lie, and the money-lie will be defenseless’ (LEA 251). Paul’s chilling death from nervous exhaustion takes place because the story must not resolve, in realist form, two aspects of money’s effect in his young life: the prematurely adult, serious and secretive pursuit of betting, aided by the unfortunate young gardener Bassett, who is henceforth scapegoated; and the enforced infantilism of Paul’s furious and equally secretive riding of his horse (‘aren’t you growing too big for a rocking-horse?’, his mother remonstrates (233)). In responding to Cynthia Asquith’s request for a ghost story, Lawrence clearly felt that the hidden and unconscious forces of money in human life, insatiably demanding accumulation, destroying Paul in proportion as his winnings deliver luxuries to the house, were entirely appropriate to this form. A similar aesthetics can be traced in the distinction between two extended and mirroring stories, ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ (1914) and ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’ (1926). The opening sentence of the latter – ‘When the vicar’s wife went off with a young and penniless man the scandal knew no bounds’ – wraps up in a symbolic way the entirety of the earlier tale (VG 5). ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ starts off with familiar lineaments: to build the necessary church in the newly industrialized mining community of Aldecross, ‘there was not too much money’ (PO 40). Into this parish come the young Lindleys, already pinched and disappointed; they live on a stipend of ‘about a hundred and twenty pounds’ and no more, because Mrs Lindley ‘had nothing of her own’, her father having spent the whole of his thousand a year as a Cambridgeshire rector (PO 40). While striving to maintain cultural superiority, then, the Lindleys find themselves distinctly poor, and even poorer in real terms than some of their mining parishioners. Cultural capital is beginning to add up to less than it used to in this new economic environment: Mrs Lindley must learn to confine her rages ‘within the walls of the rectory’, where she comes to feel defeated, while daughter Louisa is obliged to give piano lessons at sixpence a time (PO 41). The story then revolves around the marriage transaction that each of the daughters makes. When Mr Lindley falls ill, the daughters confront their ‘perpetual cold penury’ (PO 48). Within six months, and to Louisa’s horror, the eldest sister Mary has married the young stand-in clergyman Mr Massey, ‘inhuman’ in his physical repulsiveness and cold calculation. Mary has ‘sold herself ’, dispensing with her body in order to attain something higher, a ‘freedom from material things’ (PO 56). Louisa, determined not to reproduce this pattern, actively pursues her love of the miner Alfred Durant, though again in the mode of instinctive and unpredictable decision. ‘ “Where am I going?” ’,

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she says to herself, when she first seeks Alfred out (PO 63), in one of Lawrence’s most moving depictions of women’s agency and cross-class relationship. Money, however, must inevitably obtrude again, when the marriage’s threat to the Lindleys’ ‘prestige’ and ‘position’ is confronted (PO 85–6). What means does Alfred have to support Louisa? Proudly, he asserts that he can earn seven shillings and sixpence a day, and possibly more. In a sharp structural irony, the daily wage-earner is more prosperous than the middle-class future in-laws with their woefully inadequate annual ‘income’ or salary. Nevertheless, the false impression of a superior bourgeois wealth, its invisible presence behind cultural capital, must be maintained, to the extent of consigning the young couple to a new life in Canada. Alfred had already considered this as a possibility, but its cruelty as a tactic on the part of the Lindleys is not lost in the story’s conclusion. One key passage in ‘The Daughters of the Vicar’ speaks volumes about the aesthetic intervention Lawrence sought to make within the forms of fiction that upheld what Mark Fisher calls the principle of ‘capitalist realism’.9 Mary Lindley is considering the prospect of marriage with Mr Massey: Still, at the back of her mind, she remembered that he was an unattached gentleman, who would shortly have an income altogether of six or seven hundred a year. What did the man matter, if there were pecuniary ease! The man was a trifle thrown in. After twenty two years her sentimentality was ground away, and only the millstone of poverty mattered to her. So she supported the little man as a representative of a decent income. (PO 49) Lawrence thus channels, condenses and dispenses with his inner Jane Austen. The passage is an impudent shorthand version of the repressed feelings and hidden, conflicted motives around which Austen’s marriage plots richly and politely revolve. Dare it be said in such a vulgar yet also tragic way that the money matters to this extent? Austen in this sense belongs to the same tradition that Lawrence selected for literary-critical attention in his essays on Thomas Hardy and John Galsworthy – fictions in which the human tragedy is the inability to escape from money as a defining condition or horizon. Louisa Lindley figures an escape within the same terms of the social realist novel, and we are reminded of how far the Ursula Brangwen of Women in Love takes this in the realist mode of a refusing a tempting offer – ‘A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man’ (WL 8) – before the novel takes its mythic turn in the latter stages. But in ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, as indicated, the opening shorthand gesture satirizing and dismissing a whole tradition is more imperious and decisive; the inexplicable éclat of the decision of Cynthia, a vicar’s wife, to run off with a penniless man means that the scandal has already happened to the family in question, the Saywells. ‘Saywell’ figures the repression of the

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rectory-as-home; the story itself does not speak of money, but if, as Lawrence puts it in ‘John Galsworthy’, money and property are ‘the same thing’, then money is its emphatic undertow (STH 212). The house is seedily repulsive and, despite the advantages of ‘indoor sanitation’, reeks of its own sewerage: ‘there was never fresh air’ (VG 29–30). This repository of the neuroses and rituals of lower-middle-class life is waiting to be demolished, its insides exposed to public view, by the story’s own full acknowledgement of Gothic mode: the roaring wave, ‘like a wall of lions’, that also delivers Joe the gipsy to Yvette (VG 69). We may reflect again, then, on the ambivalence of these fictions. As an imaginative response to money, the Gothic helps Lawrence figure an alternative to or escape from the social realist world in which money is the material imperative. But the Gothic’s figuring of the irrational and the unconscious also channels the depth of money’s colonization of the psyche, connecting with the ghostly and vampiric propensities of capital signalled in Marx’s metaphors. Understanding exchange value and even the embedding of a ‘real abstraction’ in modernity, Lawrence’s writing grapples with money’s ability to shape human desire in a way that does not admit of any easy antithesis or antidote. ‘Money, of course,’ he asserts in ‘John Galsworthy’, ‘with every man living goes a long way. With the alive human being it may go as far as his penultimate feeling’ (STH 211). The hard-headed Lawrence, determined never to be penniless, would not advocate the self-defeating disregard of money – quite the contrary. The long exploratory essay à propos of his final fictional manifesto begins with a detailed accounting of the market in pirate editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Yet what cannot be discounted from the pride of earning a living, for example in the young Ursula’s trip home with her first wage packet, is a thrill felt in the body. Fingering the physical money as if it were real, Ursula also feels its potential for expenditure. James Houghton derives sensual gratification under the weight of his coins and the promise of ‘unopened resource’. Aaron Sisson glimpses the collective thrill of a Christmas evening on the main street, where there had been ‘a frenzy of money-spending’ (AR 15). The concern was for Christmas luxury goods rather than necessities, with ‘a wild grumbling, but a deep satisfaction in the fight, the struggle’, extending to the ‘stimulating’ and ‘surcharged’ hostility surrounding the boarding of trams home (AR 15). Money may be inherently counterfeit, or abstract, but what of this affect? Lawrence was even prepared to concede that the seduction could be registered aesthetically, in the bastion of poetry itself. ‘Business is discovering the individual, dynamic meaning of words, and poetry is losing it’, he wrote in Pornography and Obscenity, praising American advertisers for giving the word soap-suds ‘a bubbly, shiny individual meaning which is very skilfully poetic’ (LEA 238). There may be a bitter irony buried here, but as we saw in the much earlier critique of Georgian verse, the conviction that ‘poetic’ poetry had become mere currency, blurring the distinction between the commercial and the non-commercial, ran just as deep.

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Perhaps it was in the curiously hybrid form of the Memoir of Maurice Magnus (written in 1922), part memoir and part creative excursus, that the tension between the two Lawrences appeared in its acutest form. The piece is saturated in money, because Lawrence’s encounter with Magnus in Italy was from the start shaped by pressing financial imperatives, and because each man had his own, distinctly different way of not having enough money. As Geoff Dyer has noted, the memoir was itself written with strong monetary motives, to discharge Magnus’s debts and to recoup funds Lawrence had lost, yet through its extended length ‘wipes out – or writes off ’ these motives.10 From their first meeting in Florence in November 1919, Magnus is the living antithesis of Lawrence’s inherited principle of strict economy. Having, as Lawrence later discovers, ‘Hohenzollern blood in his veins’, Magnus lays claim to a life of privilege despite chronic debt and impoverishment (IR 72). Lawrence’s own accounting at the outset has a familiar ring: ‘I landed in Italy with nine pounds in my pocket and about twelve pounds lying in the bank in London. Nothing more’ (IR 11). Magnus seems to despise Lawrence for not spending money. Yet this does not prevent Lawrence from soon becoming Magnus’s benefactor, sending him £5 of a £20 gift from America, just as he had done for Catherine Carswell, and later from having to bear the weight of ‘the serpent[’s]’ persistent and invasive importunities. Lawrence’s reactions to Magnus modulate intensely. He dislikes the fact that Magnus is the modern type of sponger or parasite ‘who just assume their right to live and live well, leaving the payment to anybody who can, will, or must pay’ (IR 51). But the ambivalence of a different affect finds its way into other characterizations of Magnus – a ‘would-be-loving’ soul with a bullying, ‘charity-demanding insolence’; ‘a little loving vampire!’ (IR 45, 63). Lawrence had not been immune to this strange love. Magnus incarnates the supreme contempt for money, the principle of sheer expenditure, that our other Lawrence had projected in his work, a principle perhaps first limned in the apparent entitlement of working-class masculinity to their own forms of non-familial flight and excess. After Magnus’s suicide in the face of ruin, another act of sheer expenditure disdaining self-preservation, Lawrence comes to a startling assessment: Magnus has shown courage and unconquerable spirit in seeing the human fate of suffering in self-knowledge to its logical conclusion. Money has been the means by which Magnus has taken the human faculties of egotistical concern and calculation to their limit. Lawrence is not only admiring, but grateful, because Magnus has done something, in the domain of life’s struggle with money, which he himself could not achieve: ‘he beat out for me boundaries of human experience which I could not have beaten out for myself ’ (IR 70). To Charles Wilson in 1928 Lawrence was insistent, as he had long been, that the necessary revolution could not occur within the paradigm of money or

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have its terms set by money. This had been the persistent tenor of his critique of revolutionary socialism, in a way that, as I have suggested elsewhere, invites comparison with the early ‘mirror of production’ theory of Jean Baudrillard.11 Skirting close to the biblical formulation, one ‘pansy’, ‘The root of our evil –’, declares that ‘The root of our present evil is that we buy and sell’; ‘some sort of communism’ was ‘what we want’, one based on a religion of life (1Poems 418–19). But could Lawrence be sure that this imperative to live beyond money was not itself still dictated or mirrored by the invisible yet highly visible magic of money? The Magnus memoir subtly asks or discloses such questions, and in doing so in the latter stages places concepts of the human and of humanity under the most intense scrutiny. It is a tendency of Lawrence’s to surprise the reader with such sceptical reflections on the human – including, for example, in ‘Myself Revealed’, where I have earlier shown Lawrence presenting a somewhat monetary account of his progress, or not, in life. He has failed to be rich, because he ‘cannot make the transfer from my own class into the middle-class’ (LEA 181). But something else haunts this sense of failure: ‘I feel, somehow, not much of a human success’; there is a breach, and ‘my contact’, Lawrence confesses, or speculates, ‘is with something that is non-human, non-vocal’ (LEA 179–80). At the same time Lawrence can complain, in emphatically humanist terms, that class cuts off ‘all the best human flow’ (LEA 180). But if money has insinuated itself into this ‘human’, what then? The question is presented in ‘pansy’ form as a different version of ‘To let go or to hold on –?’: ‘Must we hold on, hold on / and go ahead with what is human nature / and make a new job of the human world?’ Or, must the human ‘disappear, / leaving it to the vast revolutions of creative chaos’ to produce creatures that are ‘an improvement’ on us? Or (it is a poem of questions), ‘is it even possible we must do both?’ (1Poems 372–3). What would doing both even look like? The revolutionary imperative for Lawrence was not to forsake the human world and its money, but to reimagine it.

NOTES 1 For a full account, from which my details here are taken, see L. H. Mates, ‘Charles Wilson, the Pitman’s Poet’, in Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume III, ed. K. Gildart and D. Howell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), accessed online at https:// www.acade​mia.edu/28184​840/Mates_L_H_2010_Charles_Wilson_the_Pitman_s_ Poet_in_Gildart_K_and_Howell_D_eds_Dictionary_of_Labour_Biography_V​ol_X​ III_​Palg​rave​_pp_​372_​381 (accessed 24 July 2023). 2 Jeff Wallace, ‘  “The Art of Living”: D. H. Lawrence’s Technologies of the Self ’, in D. H. Lawrence, Technology and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 115–26.

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3 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 564. 4 Ibid., p. 586. 5 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 41. 6 Quoted in Worthen, ibid., p. 36. 7 Ibid., p. 38. 8 See, for example, Alberto Toscano, ‘The Culture of Abstraction’, Theory, Culture and Society, 25.4 (2008): 57–75. 9 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 10 Geoff Dyer, Introduction, in D. H. Lawrence, Life with a Capital L: Essays Chosen and Introduced by Geoff Dyer (London: Penguin, 2019), p. xvi. 11 Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 96.

CHAPTER TEN

Performing gender HELEN WUSSOW

Gender is a performative act in D. H. Lawrence’s writings. Throughout his work, he attempts to find a resolution between interpersonal relationships and the tensions experienced among human beings as they endeavour to discover their place in a society that holds rigid gender expectations. Sylvia Sklar labels Lawrence’s plays ‘kaleidoscopic’.1 The term is useful when describing how gender roles and identities shift and permutate as part of the dramatic action in A Collier’s Friday Night (written 1909), The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (written 1910, published 1914), The Merry-Go-Round (written 1910–11), The Married Man (written 1912), The Fight for Barbara (written 1912), The Daughter-inLaw (written 1913) and Touch and Go (written 1918). Writing about sex and gender in Lawrence’s work is laden with difficulty since much has been said and much is rebarbative. As Marianna Torgovnick stated in 2001, ‘reading Lawrence criticism [feels] like being caught in a time warp’.2 She notes that there is a tendency for critics ‘to get caught up inside the author’s theories’, even his prejudices.3 Lawrence stands accused of many sins, such as bullying and coercion. For example, Anne E. Fernald condemns ‘his jarring shifts of diction and context, as if mixed metaphors, slang, and assault might pierce the veil of language itself ’.4 His various phobias rise to the critical surface. It seems his alleged ‘ferocity’ is ‘most meaningful’ when it engages with heterosexual eroticism instead of being, as Daniel Fuchs puts it, ‘the bizarre shrillness of a latent homosexual’.5 Discussions of heteronormative roles often erode the difference between sex and gender in cadences that are reminiscent of Lawrence’s sentences: ‘there is a radical, as it were chemical, transformation of the self for both parties as their internal fluidity and mixture acquire a

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momentary purification’.6 By ‘purification’, Michael Bell means, in this passage, the reification of binary gender norms. Sanatan Bhowal leads the reader past the ‘heterosexual matrix’7 in which many critics entrap themselves. Pointing to the writings of several thinkers, such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, Bhowal argues that ‘Lawrence’s view of gender is that gender is constructed by culture’8 and that ‘Lawrence’s concept of gender is something contingent, provisional and performative’.9 Bhowal cites a passage from Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) in which Lawrence states that ‘there are all kinds of ways of being’.10 The fact that Lawrence ‘points to the leakiness of the watertight compartments of the male and female’11 gives the lie to estimations of Lawrence as a ‘shrill’, ‘latent homosexual’ whose most forceful writing occurs when he engages with ‘heterosexual eroticism’. In Lawrence’s plays, traditional gender roles are undone.12 They bend and are reconfigured into what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a ‘spectrum of sexualities’.13 Characters affect/effect one another, usually within tightly confined domestic settings. Costumes could act as gender signifiers but wearing the trousers does not always a master make. Most of Lawrence’s dramatis personae have phenomenologically fluid labels that have no meaning. Married women become widows, unmarried women become wives, mothers lose their children. A working man becomes unemployed or, worse, a corpse. A married woman becomes a legal nonentity after leaving her husband. If either a woman or a man requires a relationship with a member of the opposite biological sex in order to define her or himself, her/his ontological outlook is bleak. Every character in the early plays is done for by the gender roles assigned by their cultural context and frequently by themselves. Their inability to step out of the provisional role assigned leads to confusion, misery and sometimes death. Given that characters in Lawrence’s plays share the undoings of the characters in his fictions, it is remarkable that his dramatic works have received limited critical attention. Martin Puchner argues that British modernists in general were perplexed by drama because it did not fit ‘the modernist ideal of difficulty’.14 Modernist writers celebrated ‘aggressively the virtues of solitary reading as the models for watching a play’ by experiencing drama within the safety of their study and reading chair.15 The fear of low-brow audiences in the ‘public sphere’ is another reason for what Puchner terms ‘anti-theatricalism’.16 Although the lure of ticket sales and performance rights attracted Lawrence, his dislike of the masses would have made any sustained relationship with the theatre-going public problematic. The early plays situate the viewer in claustrophobic domestic environments, thus illustrating modernism’s preoccupation with ‘the structure of private life’.17 Domestic architecture is a framework for the readjustment of gender. Lawrence’s characters engage in quotidian battles in which gender identities disintegrate and refocus. The ostensible action of the theatrical works may be

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summed up in a synopsis. More complex, however, are the plays within the plays. There is a performance, even dance, of gender that is effected among and between the characters through engagement, action and gesticulation. Gender is indeterminate and malleable. Womanly men and manly women are indicated by their gestures and speech no matter what their binarial sex may be as signalled by proper names, pronouns or the costumes described in the stage directions. In A Collier’s Friday Night, the domestic space appears to be a woman’s domain. The Lamberts’ ‘kitchen or living room’ is a busy arena (Plays 5). The setting is a site where Baudelaire, bread-baking, pit dirt and laundry commingle. The audience only sees this one room, but it is a framed part of a wider world where characters interact. The stage directions require figures to pass by the window; piano music is heard offstage; Mr Lambert goes upstairs to his bedroom. A number of people come and go, struggling for recognition and dominance. The characters ridicule and attack one another to confirm (or abdicate) their prescribed class and gender roles. Nellie Lambert calls young Gertie Coomber a flirt. Gertie refutes the accusation by proclaiming that none of the local boys meets her expectations from a man. Mrs Lambert claims that her ‘great-great-grandfather married a Lady Vernon’ (Plays 16). This tenuous aristocratic association helps relieve her status as a coal miner’s wife. Ernest Lambert is called a ‘jumped up monkey’, not a man at all (Plays 12). Father and son nearly come to fisticuffs. Mrs Lambert acts as referee until she urges them to back down. Mr Lambert then limps ‘pitiably’ offstage after having been defeated in his roles as husband, father and male householder (Plays 53). Beatrice Wyld plays a part similar to Mr Lambert. Her surname indicates that she escapes the limits of language and gender. Instead of celebrating Ernest’s book learning, she attacks his pretensions and makes fun of his efforts to be a lady’s man. By doing so, she casts doubt on his sexual attractiveness. Ernest describes women as ‘delicate pieces of goods’: ‘Women. Men have to handle them gently like a man selling millinery’ (Plays 35). ‘Beat’ casts doubt on Ernest’s assessment as she ‘flings her arms and her feet in an ungraceful, exultant glee’ (Plays 41). Beatrice adopts Mr Lambert’s role. She speaks in dialect in direct confrontation to those in the cottage who affect standard English speech. Her ‘chaffing’ of Ernest discomforts him. She challenges his desire to leave his class and points to the pretence of his position as the heir of a working-class family who dismisses the ‘great men’ of the university (Plays 28). Ernest is unwilling to remain in the class to which he was born (despite his mother’s pretensions); he is caught within an economic matrix that defines working men as powerless and sexually inconsequential. The audience sits (un)comfortably in its seats within the Lamberts’ sitting room. The playgoers are part of the performance and are, in fact, the only characters that do not move from their places. Stuck in its role, perhaps even complicit with it, the audience observe the characters performing

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for it but also for one another. James Moran is one of the few scholars to have focused on Lawrence’s plays in the context of British modernist drama. For his work, The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence: Dramatic Modernist and Theatrical Innovator (2015), he interviewed Peter Gill, who, in 1965, produced A Collier’s Friday Night at the Royal Court Theatre. Gill stated that ‘it was a Sunday night production, without décor’, thereby further decreasing the distance between those on the stage and those in the audience.18 Lawrence’s plays invite the audience into a domestic setting which subverts traditional domesticity and dismantles the gender and economic assumptions behind everyday concepts of home. Judith Butler writes that ‘gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any juncture in time’.19 As evidenced in his letters, Lawrence played with the fluidity of gender even before he wrote A Collier’s Friday Night. On 5 April 1908, he wrote to Blanche Jennings regarding their gender identities: Pray continue to call me David – since it suits me so well – and since it puts you in the position of safe, wise elder who will smile with an experienced woman’s lenity at my absurdities; it is a position you have taken; and to be sure, I am very young – though twenty two; I have never left my mother, you see. (1L 45) Jennings is ‘experienced’; she is a ‘woman’, a role she has ‘taken’. Lawrence plays the ‘very young’ child who ‘has ever left [his] mother’. He urges Jennings to ‘see’ his character as he plays it on the stage of his self. Two weeks later, Lawrence writes again to Jennings to negotiate gender titles: ‘Let’s make a bargain – I’ll call you a girl if you will style me a man’ (1L 48). Sexual maturity is now reversed. Lawrence assumes a man’s role, while Jennings’s sexual power is diminished. But Lawrence could play the girl, too: ‘Did you think I, one of the meaner sex, aspired to the glorious title of “girl” ’ (1L 48). As far as we know, the question goes unanswered, although the rhetoric suggests that as a ‘meaner’ man, Lawrence might do better as a ‘girl’; note that being a sexually mature ‘woman’ is not on offer at this time for either Jennings or Lawrence. Gender identity and biological age are common topics in Lawrence’s correspondence with Jennings. The indeterminacy of gender invites verbal cavorting: ‘I was a born boy, cut out for eternal boyishness’ (1L 50). His Peter Pan plays disingenuously with cap and bells: ‘I am always opening my heart to some girl or woman, and they wax sympathetic, but they are fools with no alloy of wisdom’ (1L 51). Lawrence questions the wisdom of men, too. He tells Jennings that he has lost his ‘reverence for men’ (1L 49). Wisdom resides with the boy-child who seeks a woman ‘to whom I could abandon myself, I should find infinite comfort if she would nurse me, console me, soothe me, and tell me

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I should soon be better’ (1L 62). What remedy does Lawrence seek? He runs his hands over his body and expresses love for his corporeal self (1L 65). In a letter to Jennings, he compares himself to Christ and for the first time cries, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama Sabachthani’ (1L 86). The sacrificial child demands a woman to comfort him but from a safe distance: ‘I have kissed dozens of girls – on the cheek – never on the mouth – I could not. Such a touch is the connection between the vigorous flow of two lives’ (1L 99). Only one woman owns his breath: ‘nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had it, and nobody else can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere’ (1L 190–1). The home atmosphere in the plays is detrimental to well-being. As in A Collier’s Friday Night, the audience of The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd is placed within the kitchen and sitting room of a coal miner’s cottage. Lizzie Holroyd loathes her husband. She does not trust her admirer, Blackmore, for he states that he has never loved anyone and refuses to say he loves her. Mr Holroyd’s mother is married to ‘a man that has no feeling’ (Plays 109). Emotional bonds are bankrupt, and gendered roles askew. Lizzie is a disorderly housekeeper. The newly washed sheets have ‘smuts’ on them (Plays 67), and she is behind on her ironing. Large rats live in the scullery, and she has failed to keep a set of good clothes aside for her husband, which means he has to be buried in his father’s shirt. She rants at the women her husband brings home from the pub and refers to them as ‘trollops’ (Plays 79). Lizzie is a slut, a slatternly wife (to invoke both senses of the word in colloquial English) who has stepped away from her expected role and who encourages an admirer. Holroyd fulminates, ‘We’ll see who is master in this house. I tell you … do you think I’m a dog in the house, an’ not a man’ (Plays 79). All the characters are imprisoned in gendered roles set by their class. Clara, one of the women Mr Holroyd brings home from the pub, is bereft of her primary role as wife and has lost her economic stability. She claims she is socially a step up from Lizzie: ‘An’ I’ve been educated at boarding school, as good as anybody. I can behave myself either in the drawing-room or in the kitchen as is fitting and proper’ (Plays 77). Her claim is questionable. She has lost her abusive husband and now feels ‘off ’ (Plays 77). The suffocating atmosphere of the Holroyds’ cottage parallels the airless pit in which Holroyd dies. He tries to claw his way out of the collapsed shaft, just as he tries to claw his way back into his home when drunk. Death is his release. The audience is caught in the darkness of the theatre in the company of a stiffening corpse, a man who can no longer perform his gendered roles as father and breadwinner. His wife refuses her expected role of undressing and washing the body. Holroyd’s mother begs Lizzie not to go feeling ‘off ’ (Plays 110). Like Clara, Lizzie has lost an abusive, drunken husband whom she believes she is ‘above’. In The Fight for Barbara, the audience again finds itself in a kitchen/sitting room, another domestic space into and from which people from the world

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beyond the stage’s frame come and go amid arguments over gender roles, class distinctions and sexual performance. Barbara Tressider, an aristocrat, has left her husband and moved to Italy with the penniless writer, Jimmie Wesson. She remarks frequently on Wesson’s ‘commoness’, both in his speech and opinions (Plays 242). He acts as domestic servant, lighting fires, grinding coffee, passing around biscuits and cigarettes. He flirts with the Italian maidservant and refuses, to Barbara’s annoyance, to play the ‘gentleman’, a role which she nevertheless argues he is unfit to assume (Plays 241). Wesson breaks several economic and gender ‘rules’. He is unemployed and cannot support a baron’s daughter. Worse, he has ‘touched’ a married woman. In so doing, he has, according to Barbara’s father, Sir William Charlcote, destroyed ‘the whole family system’ and struck ‘at the whole of society’. Touching a married woman is ‘a criminal act against the state, against the rights of man altogether’ (Plays 272). What Sir William and Dr Tressider fail to understand is that Wesson did not abduct or steal Barbara; she decided for herself to leave her husband and live in Italy in a tiny cottage with Wesson, a man who refuses to fight duels or force his lover to stay. Barbara is exasperated: ‘I have to fight for you, as if you weren’t a man’. Wesson assures her, ‘I don’t think you have any need’ (Plays 272). Her expectations of his performance as a man require him to fight for her against her father and husband. The ‘fight’ for Barbara is a one-sided battle in which Wesson refuses to engage. Barbara is her own person, something she fails to comprehend. She clings to presupposed roles. Dr Frederick Tressider is well educated; he makes enough money to buy his wife fancy frocks. There is, however, a hint that he lacks a certain something. ‘I gave you everything you asked for. What did you want?’ he demands of Barbara. She responds, ‘I suppose I wanted something you could not give’ (Plays 289). The innuendo hits Frederick, and he threatens to murder her. The fight is not ‘for’ Barbara at all. Jimmie Wesson’s struggle is against social expectations around employment, marriage, gender roles and class distinctions. He asks Barbara to request a divorce but his plea goes unanswered. Instead, she demands ‘a fearful lot’ of love (Plays 299). Wesson promises he will give it to her, possibly because love is beyond gender definitions and costs nothing. Barbara has won the ‘fight’ because she affirms her self-agency against the roles prescribed for her. Love has very little to do with marriage, as Mrs Gascoyne in The Daughterin-Law makes clear: ‘marriage is like a mouse trap for either man or woman’ (Plays 306). In this play the audience is invited into two kitchen/sitting rooms, that of Mrs Gascoyne and her daughter-in-law, Minnie. Both are relatively prosperous homes that are well decorated. Money – who has it and who does not – is central to the play, as it is in The Fight for Barbara. Mrs Gascoyne is a widow whose youngest son, Joe, is injured. His most recent accident is the result of fooling around with machinery while in the mine. Luther, the

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eldest, has married into money. Minnie has inherited approximately £11,000 in today’s money, a sum large enough to decorate a cottage and buy a husband. For bought Luther is, despite the fact that he insists he proposed to Minnie twice before she contacted him with the marriage invitation. Luther has hardly spent time pining over his spurned advances. Mrs Purdy’s young daughter, Bertha, is pregnant by Luther, and her mother has a price: £40 for the inconvenience and to set Bertha up so that some other man will marry her. Mrs Gascoyne refuses to pay. Joe has no money, and Luther refuses to ask Minnie for the cash. Tellingly, there is no Mr Gascoyne. The mother is the head of the household and garnishes Joe’s wages. Joe appears half a man in his mother’s house with his limp and useless arm. Minnie accuses Luther of impotence: ‘I don’t believe you can have children’ (Plays 340). By going on strike, the colliers negate their selfdefinition as working men. Sklar argues that in the play, ‘masculinity becomes equated with a capacity to work and do the job well’.20 Joe cannot work, and Luther lacks ambition. It is left to the women to manage the home on strike pay. Minnie, in an effort to put her marriage on an equal footing, spends her inheritance on jewellery and prints. Luther hurls the art into the fire. What remains for Minnie is an unemployed husband who is injured while fighting strikebreakers. In this condition, she takes full possession of him: ‘Let me have you for my own’ (Plays 360). The male characters in the play appear ‘hen-pecked’ and the women ‘cocksure’. Mrs Gascoyne raises two sons on her own. Minnie goes into service to support herself. Very little is on offer for the women in the play. Rather than condemn Mrs Gascoyne for hanging on to her sons, one should consider what other options she has. In ‘Morality and the Novel’ (1925), Lawrence wrote that ‘Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail’ (STH 172). The same could be said for the plays. The performance of gender in these works is exactly that – a performance. There is no rule that says Lizzie Holroyd, because she is female, must be a good housekeeper or love her abusive husband, or that Barbara Tressider should return to her husband or treat Jimmie Wesson as a class equal. The audience resides within the moral universe of these works. If its members prejudge how the characters perform their roles as man, husband, woman or wife, they might as well take their tickets and their nails and return to their own sitting rooms where the performance is more to their liking. Lawrence had a lifelong love of charades (see Plays lix–lx), and by all accounts he was a talented mimic. Players in charades may act any part they wish. Identity and gender are performances enacted throughout life. As Bhowal argues, ‘for Lawrence the formation of the subject is never complete and sexual difference

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does not influence subject formation in any significant way’.21 Gender roles in Lawrence’s plays, indeed in his entire writings, are upset or undone. The MerryGo-Round is a play loosely constructed around the comedic marriage plotline of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a play Lawrence taught at his school in Croydon in 1911 shortly before writing his own marriage comedy (1L 242, 245, 247). As in Shakespeare, mistaken identities abound in Lawrence’s play. Baron Rudolf von Ruge, whose title is questionable, believes he has seen courting lovers hiding in the bushes. The clandestine evening tryst offends his extreme, and prurient, moral code. He mistakes Susy Smalley for the man. Later, he believes that Susy, and her accomplice Rachel Wilcox, are the ‘male’ ruffians who have broken his lantern and hit him. Mistaken partners and mistaken appearances abound in The Merry-Go-Round where nothing is pinned down in an amoral world where everyone has their price and marriage is a bargain. ‘A woman is what a man makes her’ and vice versa (Plays 155). Interpretations of gender roles abound. Where Mrs Henderson, the dying matriarch, seems to believe that if there is a will there is a way, money cannot buy a marriage contract and it certainly does not certify love. She fails in her posthumous attempt to force a marriage between her son, Harry, and Nurse Broadbanks. In The Married Man, Dr Grainger has seen his wife Ethel only once since their marriage. He has left her in Wolverhampton while he poses as a bachelor in Nottingham. ‘You don’t know what it is to be a man’ exclaims Grainger (Plays 234). If the audience went strictly by society’s expectations, then neither does he. He is unemployed; he has walked out on his wife and child; he flirts with Annie Calladine in a manner that could compromise her in the marriage market. A drunken dance in a country cottage ends with Grainger and his friend Billy Brentnall sharing a bed. While the dance suggests changing partners is easy, Grainger and Brentnall return to wife and fiancée, respectively. Grainger is reunited with Ethel and the supposedly free-thinking Brentnall, who urges Annie to practice sex without marriage, follows Elsa Smith, his betrothed, back to London. Lawrence told Rachel Annand Taylor that his close relationship with his mother made him ‘in some respects, abnormal’ (1L 190). Lawrence used a similar term when he wrote to his fiancée Louie Burrows: ‘my way is a form of abnormality’ (1L 251). Lawrence’s use of ‘abnormality’ is predicated on the heteronormative expectations of his time. In repeated references to his sexuality, Lawrence may be producing the effects he names. The stress he experienced during his mother’s illness and death, along with his sexual indeterminacy, may well have been partial causes for the near-fatal bout of pneumonia he suffered in 1911. His ‘rebirth’ into life was accompanied by a conviction that a ‘readjustment’ in the relationships between men and women was necessary (1L 544, 546). This ‘readjustment’ is evident in the destabilized gender roles in the early plays and the fictions that followed, where emotional alliances are decentred and endings inconclusive.

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Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) is not definitively gendered. She has ‘no self ’. She is ashamed that she is not like other people who seem ‘fixed, empathetic’. She regards herself as ‘a wavering undefined sensibility only, without form or being’ (R 311). Winifred Inger is her teacher and her superior, but one of the reasons Ursula is attracted to her physically is that in their relationship, Ursula discovers ‘a queer awareness’ (R 311). The lesbian relationship empowers Ursula to challenge heterosexual hegemony and earn ‘the freedom to choose for herself ’ (R 333). She repudiates subordinate positions, whether in emotional or sexual scenarios, as in her relationships with Anton Skrebensky or Rupert Birkin. Birkin also questions traditional heterosexual relationships. He seeks ‘a man friend’, an ‘eternal union with a man … another kind of love’ (WL 481). Despite her own experiences, Ursula is astounded and calls his desire ‘a perversity’ (WL 481). Multinominal gender performances in Lawrence’s work go beyond binarial combinations. Fluctuating gender performances are common in the short stories and novels written after the completion of the plays. In ‘Tickets Please’ (1922), John Thomas Raynor (both his given names and nickname ‘Coddy’ refer to male genitals in British slang) has relations with a number of women. Sexual roles are reversed, however, when he is attacked and ‘violated’ by a group of working-class women who tear off his clothes. In ‘Monkey Nuts’ (1922), Miss Stokes gains ‘nuts’ by wearing land-girls’ khaki. Aloft on her wagon, she powers over Albert and Joe, and she feels comfortable taking the physical initiative by putting her arm around Joe’s waist (EME 71). She slips easily from khaki into a velvet dress and back again. Albert, Joe’s corporal, classes her ‘Major’, thus ranking her as an officer superior. But Joe calls her ‘Monkey nuts’, suggesting her gonads are peanut-sized (EME 76). Cross-dressing as a metaphor for gender ambivalence also occurs in Sons and Lovers (1913). Prior to having sex with Clara Dawes, Paul Morel ‘stealthily’ puts on her stockings and waits for her, ‘erect’ on her bed. The text never states whether Paul removes the stockings prior to joining Clara, who is ‘kneeling naked’ by the fire in the kitchen (SL 381–2). It is fascinating to speculate whether Paul, a young man torn between his love for his mother and the need for heterosexual relations, dons an article of women’s clothing in order to mitigate his betrayal by signalling he is not completely ‘male’. Lawrence frequently employs zoomorphic comparisons to amplify gender descriptions. Count Psanek, in ‘The Ladybird’ (1923), says his name means ‘outlaw’ in Czech (Fox 172). Daphne calls him ‘a little outsider’ not only because he is an injured prisoner-of-war but also because he is a dark-haired foreigner (Fox 182). The small, dark count exists beyond conventional gender definitions. Daphne’s tall, blonde husband Major Basil Apsley is attracted to Psanek and invites him to his father-in-law’s country estate – an awkward invitation given Count Psanek’s enemy status. Major Apsley and Count Psanek

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duel in words over the meaning of love. Basil argues that ‘love must be multiform’ (Fox 201). Daphne hears Dionys calling to her at night. His voice is ‘a bat’s uncanny peeping’ (Fox 213). She knows him as a lover only by sound and touch for they have sex in total darkness. Basil questions the value of heterosexual physical relations: ‘He didn’t want it – he hadn’t wanted it’ (Fox 218). Both Basil and Dionys regard death as a resolution to the gendered complexities of the post-war present. ‘The Fox’ (1922) presents relationships outside of the heteronormative matrix. The two female housemates, Banford and March, only have surnames at the story’s beginning. March dresses and looks like ‘a graceful, loose-balanced young man’ (Fox 8). The women sleep together and have ‘odd’ and ‘unsatisfied tendencies’ (Fox 9). The ex-soldier Grenfel, who comes to the farm searching for his uncle, possesses extra-gender aspects described through non-human features. He is fox-like; he has reddish hair and an ‘odour’ (Fox 18). Although their farm is failing, the women are economically superior to Grenfel, who is an unemployed returning soldier. For a short time, Grenfel plays the ‘help’. By killing the fox and Banford, he gains mastery over the land and March, who no longer cross-dresses. ‘The Captain’s Doll’ (1923) further investigates assumed gender roles. Countess Johanna zu Rassentlow, who goes by Hannele, is the ‘doll’ of Captain Hepburn. However, by making a literal doll of the captain, she indicates where true power resides. The captain’s wife appears small and winsome, but he is her plaything. Hannele and Mrs Hepburn dominate the army man. Whether he pushes his wealthy wife out of the hotel window is a matter for conjecture, but the result is that Hannele and her business partner Mitchka are driven out of the garrison town over the ensuing scandal. Lawrence’s subversion of gender definitions reveals their hollowness. There is also a price to be paid by those who do not play it ‘straight’. For example, Ursula Brangwen suffers a miscarriage and subsequent illness following her rejection of Anton Skrebensky. Winifred Inger is described as unhealthy. Gerald Crich dies after experiencing physical intimacy with Rupert Birkin. The crossdressing Miss Stokes is ridiculed by Joe and Albert. The war leaves Count Psanek and Major Apsley weakened physically, emotionally and sexually. The lesbian relationship between March and Banford ends with the latter’s death. Society’s conventions around male/female performances are extremely limited and shown as bankrupt. Many discussions of the gender troubles in Lawrence’s writings focus on dueling binaries dramatized in works such as ‘The Crown’ (1915), where the ‘holy’ ‘fight of opposites’ (RDP 262) is emblematized by the exhausted conflicts between male/female, life/death or light/death. The issues pertaining to the performance of roles and the fashionings of the self are more complex and multivariable. The topic of gender performance in the works is aligned to power, which is fluid and rarely sited where one might expect.

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The title of Touch and Go references the instability of gender, class and shifting power dynamics. The play is set in a northern mining town. A wealthy mineowning family suffers the tragedy of loss and the animosity of the local workers. The action is, in many ways, similar to the ‘Breadalby’ chapters in Women in Love, and the play dramatizes a miners’ strike for increased wages following a payrise for office staff. Oliver Turton, who resembles Rupert Birkin, and Willie Houghton, a preaching socialist, refuse the lure of power. Oliver says, ‘Can’t you see it’s no good, either side’. Willie responds, ‘I’m damned if I’ll take sides with anybody against anything, after this’. Job Arthur Freer, the miners’ leader, reminds them about the colliers: ‘Have the men nothing to be said for their side?’ (Plays 429). The quarrel continues, back and forth, about money, power – who has them and who does not – and what to do about a ‘system’ that denies individuals a sense of self and stability. Anabel Wrath is the lover of the mine owner’s son, Gerald. Her surname symbolizes the animosity rife throughout the play. The only solution, as Oliver states, is death: ‘We might as well all die tomorrow, or today, or here this minute, as go on bullying one another, one side bullying the other side, and the other side bullying back. We’d better all die’ (Plays 429). In many of Lawrence’s works, death proves the ‘best’ solution to gender (and often class) troubles. Gerald Crich is attracted to Rupert Birkin and vice versa. Following Gerald’s death by hypothermia in the mountains, Rupert is left longing for a strong bond with another man. In ‘The Prussian Officer’ (1914), the sadistic homoeroticism Captain Hauptmann directs towards his orderly Schöner (whose name means ‘most beautiful’ in German) ends in death after Schöner breaks his superior’s neck. The battle of opposites or ‘absolutes’ referenced in ‘The Crown’ finds resolution in ‘the infinite darkness’ beyond time and space (RDP 264): ‘I know I am compound of two waves, I, who am temporal and mortal. When I am timeless and absolute, all duality has vanished. But whilst I am temporal and mortal, I am framed in the struggle and embrace of the two opposite waves of darkness and light’ (RDP 265). ‘The Ship of Death’ is Lawrence’s valedictory poem. It exists in multiple versions within which Lawrence plays with gender. The soul slides between male and female. Often Lawrence avoids mention of biological sex by using the first-person plural (‘we’) and the third-person plural (‘they’). The different versions of the poem and the shifting pronouns indicate that, for Lawrence, there is ultimately no essentialist gender distinction. Frightened and alone, the soul slips out of the house or is pushed out to find himself on the crowded, arid margins of existence. (‘Ship of Death’ from the ‘Nettles’ Notebook, 1Poems 594)

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Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises. We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying (‘The Ship of Death’, 1Poems 631) The strife faced by Lawrence’s characters as they attempt to improvise ‘within a scene of constraint’ frequently leads to their undoing.22 The effort to attain ‘self-agency’ is, as Butler has argued, ‘riven with paradox’, an existential dilemma that provides possibilities but also imperils.23 Butler continues, ‘Our very sense of personhood is linked to the desire for recognition, and that desire places us outside ourselves in a realm of social norms that we do not fully choose, but that provides the horizon and resource for any sense of choice that we have’.24 In his early plays, Lawrence’s characters struggle against horizons. There are no solutions or resolutions to problems posed by social expectations. Only the ‘possibility of persistence’ remains.25 This essay is dedicated to Annalise Grice.

NOTES 1 Sylvia Sklar, The Plays of D. H. Lawrence: A Biographical and Critical Study (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), p. 137. 2 Marianna Torgovnick, ‘Narrating Sexuality in The Rainbow’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 33–48, 33. 3 Torgovnick, ‘Narrating Sexuality’, p. 33. 4 Anne E. Fernald, ‘ “Out of It”: Alienation and Coercion in D. H. Lawrence’, Modern Fiction Studies, 49.2 (Summer 2003): 183–203, 194. 5 Daniel Fuchs, The Limits of Ferocity: Sexual Aggression and Modern Literary Rebellion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 194. 6 Michael Bell, ‘Vive la difference: A Note on Sexuality, Gender, and Difference in Lawrence’, Études Lawrenciennes, 49 (2019): 21. 7 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 151. 8 Sanatan Bhowal, ‘Lawrence and the Question of Gender in Our Times’, Études Lawrenciennes, 45 (2014): 35. 9 Ibid., p. 4. 10 Quoted in Bhowal, ‘Lawrence and the Question of Gender’, p. 5. 11 Ibid.

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12 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 19. 13 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 1. 14 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 11. 15 Ibid., p. 10. 16 Ibid., p. 9. 17 Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 2. 18 James Moran, The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence: Modern Dramatist and Theatrical Innovator (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), p. 146. 19 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 58. 20 Sklar, Plays, p. 91. 21 Bhowal, ‘Lawrence and the Question of Gender’, p. 8. 22 Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 1. 23 Ibid., p. 3. 24 Ibid., p. 38. 25 Ibid., p. 33.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Bachelors, husbands, fathers, sons STEWART SMITH

MASCULINE STRUCTURES OF FEELING ‘It is up to men to be men’ to have the courage to ‘to give expression to new desires and new feelings’, contends D. H. Lawrence in his 1929 essay ‘The State of Funk’ (LEA 220). Radically aligning masculinity with the life of feeling, Lawrence issues this injunction to counter ‘the great danger … to go brittle, hard, and in some way dead’ (224). Like his modernist contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and W. B. Yeats, Lawrence railed against what the critic Fredric Jameson refers to as modernity’s ‘waning of affect’.1 Identifying a crisis of masculinity, Lawrence simultaneously suggests that men lack an awareness of their affective lives and that they do not possess feelings to recognize. As he put it in ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ (1925), ‘we have no language for the feelings, because our feelings do not even exist for us’ (STH 203). This tension, between an absence of consciousness of feelings and the paucity of affective being itself, appears repeatedly in Lawrence’s non-fictional writings focusing on masculine subjectivities.2 Lawrence’s target in ‘Enslaved by Civilisation’ (1928) is the repressive social structure that reconstitutes and negates masculine affectivity. More specifically, he indicts the moral righteousness which, in the female-dominated school system, sanctions the pathological elimination of boys’ individual feelings: ‘You must be good, and feel exactly what is expected of you, which is just what other people feel. Which means that in the end you feel nothing at all, all your feeling has been killed out of you’ (LEA 158).

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In ‘Nobody Loves Me’ (written in late 1929), on the other hand, Lawrence decries the masculine subject who actively represses his own feelings. Arguing here that ‘the result of forcing any feeling is the death of that feeling, and the substitution of some sort of opposite’ (LEA 315), he accounts for the men who not only partake in the general ‘recoil from sympathy’ (316) but who also ‘have a savage satisfaction in the annihilation of all feeling and all connection’ (319). Nevertheless, the essay implies that feelings are ineliminable and inescapable: Lawrence claims that these male egoists, the ‘real nihilists’ (319) who attempt to kill their ‘sensitive responses’ (314), experience the essentially relational emotions of pride and triumph in their state of affective detachment. The contention that such a man is ‘always trying to get away from’ realization of his own inner life implies that there are feelings ‘to get away from’; the depiction of the male nihilist who desires to ‘feel nothing and be touched by nothing’, seeking an imperviousness ‘inside his glass tower’ of his ego, suggests a fragile masculine subjectivity dominated by fear (319). Like his contemporary, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Lawrence discerns fear as the fundamental affective orientation pervading modernity.3 It is a structure of feeling which, for Lawrence, tyrannizes the self and precludes other feelings. In ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, for instance, Lawrence argues that we ‘deny and blank out our feelings’ (STH 204) ‘in sheer terror of ourselves’ (203): our ‘dangerous’ feelings disturb our sense of rational autarkic selfhood (202). Yet, Lawrence rejects the traditional masculine antagonistic model of mind and body together with the (masculine) desire for control and mastery as he posits a reciprocal relation between feeling and intellect and exhorts his reader to embrace a (feminine) passivity and vulnerability. The need to remain sensitive to the body’s disturbing promptings cannot be overstated: our feelings constitute ‘our own inner meaning’ (205). Having denied our unsettling feelings, man is inevitably nihilistic: he ‘has lost his power for command, the power to give himself direction’ (203). Lawrence concludes ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ by encouraging his affectively impoverished reader to turn to ‘the real novels’ and attend to the ‘calling cries of the characters’ (205). In this chapter I focus on three of Lawrence’s great novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), to explore his penetrating presentations of men’s emotional lives. To provide sufficient analytical depth, I have restricted myself to discussing novels which are variously preoccupied with examining the masculine life of feeling often in startling and radical ways, and which contain some of Lawrence’s most celebrated, infamous and provocative male characters. Themes broached in this introduction (such as men’s propensity to repress their feelings and the predominance of fearful male subjects) will be further explored and inevitably complicated as the focus shifts from Lawrence’s broad cultural reflections in his essays to his complex and nuanced presentation of individual

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male characters. Examining a plurality of masculine subjectivities, bachelors, husbands, fathers and sons, it will demonstrably refute a general complaint voiced against Lawrence: that his work is, as Peter Middleton observes, a clear ‘symptom of pathological masculinities’ which is unable to ‘reflect self-critically on men’s excesses’.4

BACHELORS Early in Women in Love, the novel’s two central bachelor figures, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, discuss the import of love and marriage. Birkin’s proposal of an alternative form of marriage is bound to his Nietzschean diagnosis of modern nihilism: ‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman –sort of ultimate marriage’, ‘ “seeing there’s no God” ’ (WL 58). Yet Birkin’s proposition and his subsequent proposal of an ‘ “additional perfect relationship between man and man” ’ (352) are rejected by his friend. In both cases, Gerald claims that he ‘ “can’t feel” ’ the other’s truth (353). Issues of feeling, non-feeling and what Jerome Neu calls an ‘ethics of emotion’ – emotions ‘that one ought or ought not to feel’, are central to the novel’s presentation of masculine subjectivities.5 As Eileen Kennedy-Moore and Jeanne C. Watson argue, ‘with the possible exception of sexual activity, no other behaviour is more subject to proscriptive beliefs and evaluative judgments than emotional expression’.6 Neu expands on this claiming that these norms not only relate to the outward display of emotion, but also to what Kennedy-Moore and Watson call emotional experience, or its inner, felt aspect: ‘people are quite commonly enjoined to feel certain things or to not feel certain things’.7 Women in Love repeatedly challenges conventionally sanctioned feelings and their expression, largely through the provocative, masculine notion of the impersonal. As Michael Levenson observes, Lawrence’s conception of the impersonal dimension of feeling ‘derives from his well-known formulation of “the non-human, in humanity” ’.8 It is conveyed as a ‘primal feeling’, a ‘crucial substratum beneath what we ordinarily take to be our emotional and cognitive life’, Kenneth Asher clarifies.9 As espoused by Birkin, the impersonal is the foundation for new forms of affective relationality, signifying an alternative to conventional marriage’s ‘hot narrow intimacy between man and wife’ (WL 199). While standard marriage compromises individual integrity, Birkin claims, the impersonal relation permits self-overcoming and new being: it is ‘something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence’ (369). The novel, however, performs a self-critique of its own ideology. Ursula Brangwen, Birkin’s lover, most obviously embodies the opposition to Birkin’s regular dogmatic assertions. For instance, while Birkin valourizes the impersonal

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on the grounds that it entails the liberation of desire from moral strictures and the overcoming of shame, she fears that it means mere instrumentalization, that Birkin will ‘use her for his own private satisfactions, not admitting her’ (295). Nevertheless, Kirsty Martin convincingly argues that Lawrence is a writer who explores the ways in which ‘passionate sympathy, by reducing people to things, might redefine love’.10 Lawrence’s novel strains to imagine new forms of communion that exceed conventional moral thinking. This indeed is Birkin’s contention with regard to the impersonal: ‘ “there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there” ’; it is a rejection of the ethical, ‘ “because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies” ’ (WL 146). It is therefore Birkin’s repudiation of Ursula’s ‘ “womanly feelings” ’ that seems most objectionable about the value of the impersonal (147).11 For it amounts to the denial of Ursula’s affective being, from Ursula’s perspective: ‘ “He doesn’t want real warm intimacy – he won’t have it – he rejects it. He won’t let me think, really, and he won’t let me feel – he hates feelings” ’ (294). Thus, if Birkin rejects conventional romantic love on the grounds that it ‘excludes all other directions’, his alternative affective realm similarly operates by exclusion and denial (152). Birkin’s behaviour and pronouncements are beset by contradictions that undermine his espoused alternative dimension of feeling. Claiming, for instance, that his notion of an impersonal marriage is an antidote to the ‘ultimate nihilism’ (152) of romantic love, his celebration of his consummation in a ‘paradisal unit’ (369) with Ursula implies a similar form of merging.12 Furthermore, despite privileging indifference and dismissing Ursula’s disclosure of her emotional wounds, claiming that ‘ “suffering bores’ ” him (153), Birkin is shown to remain dependent on the emotional interchange with the sympathetic other: he is propelled into nihilistic doubt when Ursula is ‘closed and unresponding’ following his marriage proposal (302). Birkin’s reaction is registered in affective terms: denied her warmth, ‘his heart sank, his heart contracted’ and there is the corresponding cognitive-affective realization that ‘his life now seemed so reduced, that he hardly cared any more’ (302). Moreover, Birkin’s restrictive emotionality seems to be bound to a masculine fearfulness of compromising autarkic selfhood through deep identification with the other. For it is through sympathetic sentiment that man is rendered vulnerable and the woman establishes her ‘female tyranny’, Birkin contemplates: ‘by her very suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her everlasting prisoner’ (200). Birkin’s display of grief at Gerald’s death, contradicting his previous denunciations of public expressions of mourning, similarly suggests that the impersonal is deployed to restrict his susceptibility to being overwhelmed by powerful feelings. For when Birkin confronts the horror of Gerald’s corpse, he initially has recourse to the consoling abstraction of a creative, non-human life

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principle transcending individuality. He then resolves, because of the shattering power of his feelings, to ‘cease to care’ before succumbing to emotional expression: ‘because of his heart’s hunger, suddenly his heart contracted’ and ‘the tears broke out’ (479). Charting Birkin’s grief, which culminates in the nullification of his consoling abstraction and the deadening of his affective being, Lawrence vividly renders a vulnerability and depth of feeling that stands in contrast to the portrayal of the static, cold unresponsiveness of Gudrun Brangwen and Loerke to Gerald’s death. While Gerald is commonly read as emotionally vacant, the affective dimension of his being directs his relationships and his trajectory in the novel. Indeed, rather than existing in an affectless condition, Gerald’s state of affective dissonance is highlighted by the narrator who starkly undercuts his claim of feeling indifferent towards his own death: ‘As a matter of fact, he did care terribly, with a great fear’ (204). Peter Middleton’s argument is germane to Lawrence’s characterization of Gerald, and indeed to the whole gamut of personalities populating the novel: ‘the issue is not whether people actually have emotions, but whether they are aware of them, and to what degree’.13 Fear comes to dominate Gerald: when he recognizes that ‘his centres of feeling were drying up’, which is ascribed to his externally orientated, masculine activity as the ‘industrial magnate’, this itself stimulates a deep affective response of nihilistic terror (WL 232). Gerald’s promiscuous relations with women provide ‘his most satisfactory relief ’ from his horror of being rendered meaningless and when these fail he is instilled with ‘faith’ from contact with Birkin’s ‘odd mobility and changeableness’ (232). The paucity of the relation based on Birkin’s protean nature is, however, anticipated earlier in the novel when Birkin proposes ‘love and eternal conjunction between two men’ (206). Gerald is cognizant of his feelings of separation, rather than deep connection: ‘He knew Birkin could do without him – could forget, and not suffer. This was always present in Gerald’s consciousness, filling him with bitter unbelief: this consciousness of the young, animal-like spontaneity of detachment. It seemed almost like hypocrisy and lying, sometimes, oh, often, on Birkin’s part, to talk so deeply and importantly’ (206). Instead of accepting the idealized union Birkin proposes, Gerald reveals the limitations of the novel’s proposed paradigm of intra-masculine feeling. Birkin here resembles Gerald’s sister, Winifred, who similarly rejects culturally sanctioned ways of feeling and expressing emotions. She is, as Gerald suspects of Birkin, able to ‘lose the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day’ (220). Thus, while critics attribute the failure in the relationship to Gerald’s limitations, or suggest Gerald’s rational rejection of Birkin’s proposal of blood brotherhood, they overlook the affective lack in the relationship itself, or the fact that Birkin ‘ “isn’t sympathetic” ’, as Gerald later protests to Gudrun (326).14

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Gerald’s rejection of Birkin’s proposal for impersonal male friendship is attended by his intention to marry Gudrun. Defined throughout by his promiscuous bachelorhood, Gerald’s consideration of marriage, a convention in which he ‘did not livingly believe’, signals that ‘he was ready to be doomed’ (353). Gerald’s enduring fear of ‘  “universal collapse”  ’ is central to this ‘doom’, rendering him excessively dependent and simultaneously incapable of emotionally responding to Gudrun’s needs (325). Unable to reciprocate the sympathetic feeling they both covet, Gerald ‘made the burden for her greater’. For Gudrun, too, suffers from the ‘endless unrelief ’ of her own nihilistic thoughts and feelings (465). As they both seek self-oblivion through the other, Gudrun realizes that Gerald’s passion for her is merely ‘to put him to sleep, to give him repose’, to negate his own feelings (465).15 Her growing awareness of her own contempt for Gerald involves a brutal negation of the conventional ideals of active masculinity and its affective failings, which Gerald embodies: ‘the Geralds of this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of infants in the night’ (466). Lawrence’s depiction of husband figures in Lady Chatterley’s Lover also conveys forms of masculine affective dependence and emotional oblivion.

HUSBANDS Sir Clifford Chatterley, the central husband character in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is, like Gerald Crich, a colliery owner, representing active masculine prowess in the outer world. However, in harsher, more direct terms, Lawrence states Clifford’s affective failings: ‘this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left to his own emotional life’ (LCL 111). Thus, while Connie clearly suffers from her husband’s inability to meaningfully orientate their shared existence, the relationship’s affective paucity is entwined with this lacuna and key to understanding Connie’s depression and subsequent adulterous affairs. For the novel thematizes forms and failures of masculine feeling: Clifford was ‘never warm as a man can be warm to a woman’; he is unable to ‘comfort a woman with a bit of his masculine glow’ (72). Clifford’s emotional lack can be understood as both dispositional and resulting from his war trauma. As Michael Bell observes, ‘Lawrence never accepted that human beings, individually or collectively, are simply victims of their fate. They create, or connive at, their fate’.16 On the one hand, as a result of his war injuries, Clifford ‘had been so much hurt, something inside of him perished, some of his feelings were gone. There was a blank of insentience’ (LCL 6). Notably, ‘some’, not all, of his feelings have been destroyed. Fear dominates his whole being when he seems to be convalescing: ‘Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror coming up and … was gradually spreading in his affective self ’ (49). On the other hand, the baronet aspires towards a ‘refined insentience’ (FLC 133). In the first version of the novel, and echoing Lawrence’s portrayal

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of masculine subjects in Women in Love, the narrator comments on Clifford switching off his feelings: ‘he could blow out his feelings as one blows out a candle, and re-kindle them at his own convenience’ (FLC 139). His approach to feeling is typical of his aristocratic milieu: ‘They were all inwardly hard and separate, and warmth to them was just bad taste’ (LCL 72). Like the ‘real nihilists’ Lawrence describes in ‘Nobody Loves Me’, they seek (as Lawrence puts it in ‘Version 2’ of the novel) an ‘ultimate imperviousness’ (FLC 284). Underlining Clifford’s wilful drive to extirpate intimate feelings, Connie muses in ‘Version 1’ of the novel, ‘he would have done just the same if he had never been wounded in the war’ (FLC 27). The disastrous effects of privileging the cerebral life at the expense of the affective is summed up by Lawrence’s spokesperson, Tommy Dukes: ‘ “there’s something wrong with the mental life, radically. It’s rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit” ’ (LCL 36). ‘Version 2’ vividly describes Clifford accordingly: He felt that, in the universe, he was a thing apart, and that all the other things in the universe were probably taking away a portion of life he himself might have had. The expansive yellow face of the dandelion irritated him, with its crude yellowness and its exposed foolishness. He preferred the nipped bud, in the rain. Mrs Bolton’s slightly effusive goodwill annoyed him, and he wanted to hurt her. Parkin’s fresh, out-of-door healthiness and solitary perkiness, like a cock chaffinch, exasperated him. The fellow ought to be put down. And Constance’s vague unawareness, added to the freshening of her beauty and her look of ‘maidenliness’, filled him with rancour. He himself was at a disadvantage, while all these others, all inferior to himself, flourished sickeningly. (FLC 452–3) Clifford’s cerebral, abstract mode of living is characterized by a feeling of alienation and hence vulnerability. It evokes the Nietzschean notion of ressentiment, implying a victimhood that compensates for its suffering with an ‘imaginary revenge’ against the perceived culprit.17 Dennis Jackson’s reading of Clifford’s literary allusions corroborates this connection. According to Jackson, Clifford, on disclosure of his wife’s affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, has sought relief and compensation in the only resource available to him, his imagination: he ‘identifies Mellors with Celine, Rabelais, Sade, Rodrigo – sexual sinners all – and simultaneously imagines his adversary punished for offending “common decency” ’.18 While Mellors (Parkin in Versions 1 and 2) is often read as Clifford’s binary opposite, closer inspection of all three versions of the novel reveals an embittered vindictiveness akin to Clifford’s condition. He does not wholly exemplify the masculine warmth Connie finds lacking in her husband. Indeed, in his state of

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‘vengeful isolation’ prior to his encounter with Connie, the gamekeeper’s desire to repress his feelings echoes Clifford’s volitional affective denial (FLC 31): ‘He had kept himself without feeling for a long time now. Feeling was finished in him, with the war, and with his wife. Why should anybody care about other people? Let everybody keep their feelings to themselves, as he would keep his. Especially about women! The war had been bad. But women were worse’ (‘Version 2’, FLC 251). His chief grievance is with his wife, Bertha Coutts. Estranged from her, Mellors later complains, ‘ “If only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery!” ’ (LCL 280). The persistence of his embitterment, explaining his earlier desire to nullify his sentient self, is acknowledged when he admits to Connie that he has a ‘ “bellyful of remembering” ’ (LCL 204): he cannot ‘ “quite digest [his] bile” ’ (LCL 168). Moreover, Mellors’s recurrent exterminatory desires starkly undercut his newly realized belief in ‘tenderness’ while also resonating with the impotent imaginary revenge that characterizes Nietzschean ressentiment. The philosopher Micheal Ure’s distinction between the pathological ‘ontological ressentiment’ that Nietzsche highlights and the legitimate feelings of grievance of ‘moral resentment’ may be invoked to illuminate a central difference between Lawrence’s characterization of these husband figures with respect to their reactionary sentiments. Observing that resentment may transform into enduring and global ressentiment, Ure contends that ‘agents can overcome their resentment through communicative measures’.19 That is, expressing one’s emotional injuries to a listening witness enables painful feelings to be articulated and acknowledged as part of the therapeutic process. An expressivist or hydraulic theory of the emotions is key here, valourizing the discharging or venting of feelings to prevent their repression and consequent pathological disturbance. In Lawrence’s novel, there is a marked contrast between Connie’s cathartic relation to the two men as she affords the gamekeeper the opportunity to communicate his sense of injustice, while she herself is deprived of fulfilling what N. H. Reeve calls her ‘nursing instinct, an instinct both aroused and frustrated by Clifford’s condition’.20 Notably, at the start of ‘Version 1’, Connie is able to emotionally guide Clifford, encouraging him to recognize his passions and to discharge his anger. Resonating with Lawrence’s views in a letter to Henry Savage in 1913, on the need to vent his fury, Connie valourizes Clifford’s bouts of rage.21 She withdraws from this role as listening witness, justifying, in the first two versions, the restriction of her sympathy by referring to Clifford’s volitional repression of his feeling. In the final novel, Clifford’s depression transmits to her, rendering her incapable of effective support. By way of contrast, Connie provokes Mellors to disclose past hurts. She has seemingly worked through her own powerful reactionary feelings and, by enabling him to vent, she is able to lead him to tentatively articulate ‘ “the courage of [his] own tenderness” ’ (LCL 277). Nevertheless, Connie’s

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exhortation to ‘ “Forget then!” ’ (205), together with Mellors’s persistent exterminatory wishes, suggest his incapacity to fully overcome his grievances and that emotional venting may actually intensify his negative feelings.22 The failure of Clifford’s masculinity in affective terms is confirmed at the novel’s denouement as Mrs Bolton assumes the role of Clifford’s cathartic medium. Both Clifford’s denial of his emotions and the resultant extreme expression are critiqued, for his display of grief at his wife’s affair, following the emotional repression of its reality, signifies collapse. His standard mode of emotional denial is unsustainable, for his absolute refusal of ‘any outward admission of ’ Connie leaving him, which ‘inwardly, he had known for a long time’ (LCL 288), provokes a ‘crisis of falsity and dislocation’ (289). As he confronts the reality, Mrs Bolton induces him to ‘release his self-pity’ (290). Evoking Lawrence’s disapproval of Gerald’s emasculating self-abandonment to Gudrun in Women in Love, Clifford’s emotional expression is similarly condemned: ‘it was sheer relaxation on his part, letting go all his manhood, and sinking back to a childish position that was really perverse’ (291). Turning to examine Lawrence’s characterization of fathers, I will begin by highlighting his critique of masculinity and false feeling.

FATHERS Thomas Crich in Women in Love considers himself as ‘the father, the Patriarch’ giving ‘life to his sons’, his ‘manly and noble’ miners (WL 224). However, his proclivity to sentimentalize is characteristic of an ascetic or idealized interpretation of existence that denies authentic feelings and which averts deep identification or intimacy with the significant other. In terms which anticipate his later characterization of Clifford Chatterley, Lawrence portrays Thomas Crich repudiating his wife’s affective-erotic being: she is ‘pure, chaste’, his ‘white snow-flower’ (218). He is another male character dominated by fear: he shields behind the ‘armour of his pity’ to deny the deeper ‘covert fear and horror of his wife’ (219). So threatening is this fear that Thomas Crich would die ‘without knowing what his feelings were, towards her’ (214). He similarly keeps Gerald, his son, at a physical and affective distance. Gerald is the ‘young enemy’ whom he disliked (219), yet characteristically the father ‘had refused to acknowledge’ this animosity (218). Echoing Lawrence’s earlier novel, Sons and Lovers, the father’s affective failings embitter the mother, provoking the son’s hostility and ‘impotent anger’ (208). The parental ‘relation of utter interdestruction’ in Women in Love reverberates in the depiction of the father and mother relationship in Sons and Lovers (217). Prima facie, the source of conflict between Gertrude and Walter Morel lies in a clash of values, or more precisely in Morel’s absence of purposeful being. For Morel’s very lack of ambition nullifies his wife’s

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bourgeois and puritanical aspirations, afflicting her with an enduring ‘bitterness of disillusion’ (SL 22). Again, the affective dynamic of one’s relation to one’s values is evinced: in this case, the frustration of the goals that enable one to orientate oneself and conceive of oneself as a meaningful agent are registered in the life of feeling. Mrs Morel’s strong need, particularly associated with masculinity in Lawrence, to experience herself as an effectual agent, for ‘doing counted with her’, seems even to surpass her feelings of maternal love (261). The reader is told that she ‘loved [William] so much! More than that, she hoped in him so much. Almost she lived by him’ (79, emphasis added). Given that Morel thwarts his wife’s dominant drive, by implication none of his other qualities can meaningfully compensate for his lack of masculine purposeful being. Quite simply, as Scott Sanders notes, Morel ‘does not live up to Mrs Morel’s ideal of manhood’.23 Furthermore, a fundamental affective dissonance between the couple, presented early in the novel, underpins the failing parental relationship. Morel is held responsible for this. For when she ‘tried to open her heart seriously’, to develop a ‘finer intimacy’ with Morel at the onset of the relationship, he is ‘without understanding’, unable to respond and reciprocate (SL 19). Much of the narrative commentary, particularly in the first part of the novel, shares Mrs Morel’s perspective. She transmits her feelings to her children and their view of their parents is extreme and polarized, idealizing the mother while demonizing the father. The children are permeated with her suffering and bitterness. For instance, when Mrs Morel is contemptuous of what is presented as Morel’s disingenuous soliciting of sympathy, the eldest son, William, ‘with a boy’s hatred for false sentiment’, conveys and reinforces his mother’s condemnation of Morel’s duplicitousness (48). Paul, the novel’s chief focalizer, similarly imbibes his mother’s animus towards his father and even as a baby rejects Morel’s affection, refusing to be nursed by him. As Neil Roberts points out, ‘the son’s alienation from his father, and the father’s marginalization in the world of the novel’ is most powerfully conveyed when Paul announces the death of William.24 For as Morel ‘leaned up against a truck side, his hand over his eyes’, Paul’s own cold, affectless state towards his father renders his father invisible: ‘Paul saw everything, except his father leaning against the truck as if he were tired’ (SL 167). Nevertheless, while the Paul-narrator emphasizes Morel’s drunkenness, violence and cruelty, Morel’s warmth of feeling infiltrates the narrative. As H. M. Daleski observes, ‘the weight of hostile comment which Lawrence directs against Morel is balanced by the unconscious sympathy with which he is presented dramatically, while the overt celebration of Mrs Morel is challenged by the harshness of the character in action’.25 Mrs Morel is repeatedly described in masculine terms which, when scrutinized, corroborate Daleski’s interpretation and enable a more sympathetic or at least more ambiguous appraisal of Morel

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than that presented by the narrator. In addition to possessing a restrictive masculine emotionality, for ‘she was one of those women who cannot cry; whom it hurts as it hurts a man’ (SL 24), Mrs Morel has also inherited and idealized the ‘harsh’ disposition of her puritan father: he ‘was to her the type of all men’ and ‘who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the Apostle Paul’ (18). Mrs Morel resembles her father in her relation to Morel, becoming the cruel punitive patriarch who ‘tortured him’ with her inherited puritan ideals, ideals which the sensuous, alienated miner could never hope to realize (25). By way of contrast to Mrs Morel’s harshness, evident also when she restricts sympathy to her children on the grounds that ‘she expected her children to take the same odds’ that ‘she herself had had to put up with’ (135), Morel ‘was always very gentle if anyone were ill’ (91). And despite being told that the children’s hostility towards their father had become unalterable, and that Morel ‘was an outsider’, he is shown to animate and unite the household with vital affection through his craftsmanship and storytelling (88). Revolving around his life ‘down-pit’, the stories both engage the children and affirm the collective masculine world negated by his wife. That Morel is susceptible to Mrs Morel’s ‘torture’ also implies an affective receptiveness and a depth of attachment to his wife. Indeed, it is Morel’s dependence on the emotional exchange with his wife, and her thwarting of this, that heighten his sense of powerlessness and intensify his reactive violence. This dependence is evinced after both parents ‘made an effort to come back somewhat to the old relationship of the first months of their marriage’ following Morel’s illness (63). It is when Mrs Morel withdraws again to the children and Morel’s ‘soul would reach out in its blind way to her and find her gone’ that he is left isolated and impotent (63). In this condition, ‘he himself acquiesced, as so many men do, yielding their place to their children’ (62). Frequenting the pub, as Sanders notes, is Morel’s escape from a negative emotional atmosphere at home and a means of finding the acceptance and affirmation denied him by his wife.26 His self-destructive drinking can also be equated to the point that ‘he had endless accidents’ at work (108). For his carelessness resonates with the later narratorial observation that ‘recklessness is almost a man’s revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued, so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether’ (228). Read in conjunction with this insight, Mrs Morel’s seemingly embittered claim that her husband would willingly suffer from accidents to ‘put all the burden on’ her suggests that Morel’s vindictiveness is rooted in emotional dependency (108). Morel’s deep attachment to his wife is highlighted during her illness and after her death, despite the Paul-narrator’s pejorative comments. From Paul’s critical perspective, Morel’s tendency to shield himself from his wife’s decline can be interpreted as another instance of his moral failing, representing cowardliness to face actuality and realize his own emotional response. There are echoes here

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of Thomas Crich. As Lawrence later wrote in a letter to Dorothy Brett in March 1926, ‘the greatest virtue in life is real courage, that knows how to face facts and live beyond them. … I do loath cowardice and sloppy emotion’ (5L 408). Recalling William’s rejection of Morel’s false feeling, Paul condemns his father’s grieving process for denying the facts of his wife’s decline and the consequent realization of his feelings: ‘everything deep in him he denied. Paul hated his father for sitting sentimentalising over her’ (SL 445). Yet, not only does Paul’s judgement overlook the powerful grief that renders his father benumbed and infantilized, it occludes his own recourse to sentiment or illusion, or his own necessary denial of realization with regard to his mother’s death. The tension between realization of the emotional life and its denial animates Lawrence’s fictional characterization of sons.

SONS In contrast to Walter Morel’s denial of his wife’s decline, Gerald Crich in Women in Love is impelled to confront and realize his father’s death. Implicitly critiquing Thomas Crich’s will to ignorance, Gerald claims to be obliged to witness his father’s dying: he informs his mother, ‘ “somebody’s got to see it through” ’ (WL 327). The will to know that propels Gerald to the precipice of nihilistic breakdown is not only a reaction against his father, but also his own volitional ‘trial by ordeal’. It is an emotional challenge which he undertakes; an examination of whether he ‘would experience the whole process of slow death without wincing or flinching’ (322). Exemplifying hegemonic masculinity’s value of struggling, enduring and competing against an adversary, he tests his ability to remain unaffected, to stand ‘firm and immune’ against death (322).27 That he succumbs to a consequent and pervasive fear of ‘universal collapse’ is again suggestive of the impossibility of attaining a state of affectless indifference. Gerald’s reaction against his father is also evident in his utilitarian modernization of the mines. Rejecting the benevolent Christian sentiment that defines his father’s management of his workers, Gerald eschews concerns for the ‘sufferings and feelings of individuals’ for the cold criterion of practical usefulness (223). Notably, Lawrence describes the modernized mechanical process Gerald implements in affective terms: ‘participation in a great and perfect system’ engenders an ‘exalted’ feeling of ‘belonging’ for Gerald and his workers. While Lawrence suggests that this is a state ‘beyond feeling or reason’, the very expression ‘exalted by belonging’ acknowledges the collective affective basis of the experience (231). Thus, despite his nihilistic reaction against his father’s values and sentiments, Gerald is unable to wholly detach himself from sensibility. He remains ‘bound up with his father’ (322). The narrator’s observation at the novel’s denouement, that ‘in Gerald’s soul there still lingered some attachment to the rest, to the whole’, suggests an incapacity to surmount

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his father’s need ‘for goodness, for righteousness, for oneness with the ultimate purpose’ (452). I therefore partly agree with David Parker’s contention that ‘Gerald dies because he can’t be, as Loerke is and Gudrun becomes, merely “indifferent” ’; yet this assessment should be qualified by observing how the novel complicates this value standard and to acknowledge that Gerald’s doom is bound to his failure to realize his own feelings and values.28 Sons and Lovers similarly presents Paul Morel struggling to extricate himself from parental values and feeling. In contradistinction to Gerald Crich, Paul valourizes the life of feeling, avowing ‘that one should feel inside oneself for right and wrong’. His individualistic notion of authentic feeling is however aligned with his supposed ability to connect with ‘ “the common people” ’ and feel ‘ “life itself, warmth” ’ (SL 298). Moreover, Paul’s realization and articulation of his values signal an attempt to detach himself from his mother: her affective and moral dominance have hampered his sexual and emotional growth in his development ‘from childhood to manhood’ (177). Paul is repeatedly described as possessing a sensitive sensibility, of embodying the value of warmth which he comes to recognize. This quality is evident in his extreme identification with his mother’s grievances: ‘this feeling about her that she had never had her life’s fulfilment’ determines his ‘childish aim’ to fulfil his mother’s goals (91). Nevertheless, like the other male characters considered in this chapter, Paul possesses the seemingly distinctive masculine quality of switching off his feelings.29 Not only is he feared by the women at Jordan’s for this proclivity despite his occasional delicacy towards their emotional needs, but Paul’s insistent interrogation of Clara Dawes over her relationship to her estranged husband, Baxter, is as insensitive to her emotional injuries as is it revealing of his own fear of attachment. With little regard for her suffering, he charges her with emasculating her husband by ‘making him feel as if he were nothing’ (320). Importantly, while Paul ‘feels but does not understand’ Clara, it is clear that he is not seeking to come into realization, to comprehend his feelings (318). For his own fear of being rendered nothing by the indomitable woman precludes realization. Instead, as Clara retorts, he has a need to ‘ “invent things” ’, to project his fears onto the morally culpable woman (320). His recoil is again indicative of a masculine fear of a loss of autarkic selfhood: he restricts the ‘strength and warmth of one’s feelings for a woman’ which ‘have run away with one’ (336). Paul’s masculine defensiveness is similarly evoked when he repudiates his relationship with Miriam Leivers on the grounds that as a couple they substitute physical ‘warmth’ for an excessive and exhaustive intellectuality. However, what they actually share is a mutual ‘passion for understanding’, an intellectual ‘passion’ or rapport that is affectively grounded and which enables both to flourish (210): ‘She alone helped him towards realization’, to understand and articulate his feelings and values (267); his abstract discourses ‘gave her a feeling

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of life again, and vivified things which had meant nothing to her’ (183). The cognitive is inseparable from the affective, and he, too, is emotionally enriched, experiencing in one exchange, ‘a strange, roused sensation, as if his feelings were new’ (183). The rejection of Miriam therefore signifies Paul’s fear of physical and emotional intimacy, which is to the detriment of his own feelings and capacity to realize these. Charting Paul’s oscillating relationship with his mother indexes the restriction of his emotional exchanges. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum notes, ‘in love, pieces of the self go out into objects that the lover does not control. But this means that the object also goes inside the self, creating upheaval in the inner world.’30 Thus, when Paul fears being affectively overwhelmed by his sexual partners, Mrs Morel is invoked to limit his feelings, vindicating his recoil from threatening exposure. For instance, when Paul is ‘irritated … into a frenzy’ by a ‘fearful, naked contact’ of Miriam when she solicits her younger brother’s love, he rebukes Miriam for ‘her extreme emotion’. He appeals to his mother’s ‘reserve’ for stability, and ‘was thankful in his heart and soul that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome’ (SL 184). On the other hand, when Paul performs a startling reinterpretation and affirmation of his mother’s life and marriage, telling her that she has ‘ “done well”, this amounts to an attempted withdrawal of sympathy towards his mother and annulment of his commitment to assuage her consuming bitterness (300). This emotional distancing simultaneously suggests his growing affection towards Miriam at this point as well as a strategy to limit his painful identification with his mother’s ageing and suffering. While Paul condemns his father’s avoidance of his mother’s dying, his own grieving entails a similar denial of realization: he ‘beat against’ knowledge of his mother’s decline with ‘all the strength of his soul’ (281). When she dies he similarly evades full awareness, sentimentalizing her appearance by attributing to her a virgin maidenhood. When the grief follows, ‘his mind did not try to analyse or understand’ his bodily feelings, and he is rendered emotionally ‘paralysed’ (430). Writing on the profound and global affect grief engenders upon the self, Matthew Ratcliffe notes that grief ‘involves a change in how one experiences and relates to the world as a whole’ as ‘we experience and engage with the world in the context of the long- and short-term projects’ that implicate ‘another person in a range of ways’.31 Paul’s life is made intelligible with reference to his mother. Paul conveys, and Mrs Morel vicariously shares, many of his experiences and achievements; his repeatedly stated goal is to live with and support his mother. Coming to greater realization of his feelings, Paul therefore experiences a profound affective nihilism, a loss of the feelings of personal agency and significance. This is described as the gravest disruption to his sense of self: ‘the real agony was that he had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to say, and was nothing himself ’ (SL 456). Phenomenologically, Paul

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experiences a deep sense of estrangement, a loss of the familiar world, which resonates with Ratcliffe’s discussion of depression: at the public house ‘he could not get into touch’; ‘something separated him’ from the tangible world (457).32 The surmounting of his anguish through emotionally and cognitively readjusting to the world is suggested by his overcoming of this feeling of apartness. In the novel’s final scene, Paul works through his nihilistic grief for his mother. He relinquishes the compensatory romantic illusion that he ‘was with her still’, ‘wherever she was’: he acknowledges that ‘she was gone, intermingled herself ’ in the ‘vastness and terror’ of an indifferent universe. He recognizes his own fragility: his mother ‘was the only thing that held him up, himself ’, securing him against forces that would dissolve him ‘into extinction’ (464). In contrast to John Goode’s contention that ‘there is no discovery at the end’ of the novel, and that Paul ‘has to recognise more radically his own apartness’, I read this scene as evoking an admittance of masculine vulnerability and dependence.33 From this (feminine) realization, there arises the prospect of a new masculine individuality emerging, suggesting the transcendence of its old dependence through a willingness to embrace new relationality. Paul’s final resolve to direct himself to the town symbolizes this potential. * Lawrence’s discursive writings sometimes suggest a Socratic conception of the self, of a self that can cognitively ‘penetrate the depths of being, and that … is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being’.34 In ‘On Being a Man’, for instance, Lawrence urges men to ‘make the great experience of realising’ their passions and feelings (RDP 217). In his ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’, he similarly claims that ‘we’ve got to know the greatest and most shattering human passions’ in order to ‘go forward step by step through realisation, full, bitter, conscious realisation’ (IR 69). The valourization of knowing is attended by a concomitant belief in the correction of being. In the Magnus memoir, Lawrence holds Magnus’s bravery to confront and overcome ‘the thing he loathed, despised, and feared’ as exemplary: extolling ‘the lonely terrified courage of the isolated spirit which grits its teeth and stares the horrors in the face’, Lawrence urges his reader to similarly face the feelings of shame, self-hatred and embitterment engendered by the war (70). On the other hand, in ‘On Being a Man’, Lawrence critiques the war veterans who ‘never faced the strange war-passions that came up in themselves’: inward confrontation of ‘the strange revulsion … should have resulted [in] a fierce revision of existing values, and a final repudiation of the non-valid’, he contends. In the post-war, nihilistic culture Lawrence inhabited when he wrote this essay, he argues that nothing less than a revaluation of redundant values and the production of new meaning and emotional life may emerge from fulfilling the normative task of

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attending to one’s affective self: ‘there should have risen the germ of a new idea, and the nucleus of a new way of feeling’ (RDP 221). My discussion of Lawrence’s novels and his presentation of multiple masculinities complicates the implications of his discursive work. While Lawrence’s essays often suggest a discrete male subject individually realizing his inner life, Lawrence’s novels emphasize relationality: his male protagonists struggle to know and articulate their feelings and values in connection, mostly with an emotionally supportive, and arguably stronger, woman. Furthermore, I have endeavoured, at least implicitly, to show that Lawrence’s male characters cannot be qualitatively separated according to a binary that assesses whether they have achieved, or have not achieved, the valourized realization of their feelings: Lawrence’s men, to varying degrees, are emotionally wounded, vulnerable and variously restrict their affective lives. The novels show his male characters being overwhelmed by the ‘most shattering human passions’ such as love, grief and bitterness, revealing their affective limitations and reactionary responses. The novels, then, are more revealing of a tragic, rather than Socratic, conception of the self, acknowledging the ‘essential heteronomy’ of the passions and ‘fragility of the human psychological economy’.35 Depicting masculine subjectivities unable to cohere and integrate their emotions, or to realize their feelings and correct or surpass their existent selves, Lawrence emphasizes the masculine proclivity to fearful enclosure from the affects. At the same time, the depiction of masculine emotional vulnerability counters the traditional male expectation of autarkic mastery to gesture towards a relationality which may ‘restore … the natural warm flow of common sympathy between man and man, man and woman’ (LEA 223).

NOTES 1 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984): 59–62, 61. On the modern loss of feeling, see Rilke’s ‘The Second Elegy’ from The Duino Elegies, inThe Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (London: Pan, 1987). On the role of poetry in making emotion accessible, see Yeats’s ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, in Yeats: Selected Criticism and Prose, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan Books, 1980), pp. 46–7. For discussions of Lawrence’s relation to modernism and emotion, see Michael Bell, ‘Lawrence and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 179–96, and Kirsty Martin, ‘Modernism and Emotion’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, ed. Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 81–98. 2 In ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, Lawrence privileges individual, authentic ‘feelings’ in contrast to superficial and socially approved, ‘domesticated’ emotions (STH 202).

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His usage is inconsistent, however. For instance, he speaks of ‘deep emotion’ in ‘Nobody Loves Me’ (LEA 316). I will therefore use terms such as emotions, feelings and affects interchangeably. 3 Lawrence similarly stresses the role of fear in ‘The State of Funk’ (LEA) and ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (STH 17). For Heidegger, ‘Dasein as Being-in-the-World is “fearful”. This fearfulness is not to be understood in an ontical sense as some factical “individualized” disposition, but as an existential possibility of the essential state-of-mind of Dasein in general.’ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, [1927] 1962), p. 182. 4 Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 68. 5 Jerome Neu, ‘An Ethics of Emotion?’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 501–17, 508. 6 Eileen Kennedy-Moore and Jeanne C. Watson, Expressing Emotion: Myths, Realities and Therapeutic Strategies (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), p. 91. 7 Neu, ‘An Ethics of Emotion?’, p. 508. 8 Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 150. See also Lawrence’s letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914 (2L 182). 9 Kenneth Asher, ‘Emotions and the Ethical Life in D. H. Lawrence’, Cambridge Quarterly, 40.2 (2011): 101–20, 102. 10 Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy, Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 153. 11 Birkin’s point resonates with Lawrence’s in the aforementioned letter to Edward Garnett: ‘I don’t care so much about what the woman feels – in the ordinary usage of the word’ (2L 183). 12 See also Susan Reid, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Angelic Men’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 38.1 (2013): 57–72, 62–3. 13 Middleton, The Inward Gaze, p. 190. 14 Jesse Wolfe focuses on Gerald’s rational rejection of Birkin’s proposal in Bloomsbury, Modernism and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) p. 117. Ben Knights stresses Gerald’s limitations in the relationship in Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 103. 15 In ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Angelic Men’ (p. 62), Reid notes that Birkin similarly ‘resists [Ursula’s] passion, preferring ‘a perfect mood of softness and sleep-loveliness’ (WL 187). 16 Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 215.

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17 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1887] 1994), p. 21. 18 Dennis Jackson, ‘Literary Allusions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady’: A New Look at Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 170–96, 186. 19 Michael Ure, ‘Resentment/Ressentiment’, Constellations, 22.4 (2015): 599– 613, 600. 20 N. H. Reeve, Reading Late Lawrence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 86. 21 Lawrence wrote to Henry Savage on 15 September 1913: ‘I have a good old English habit of shutting my rages of trouble well inside my belly, so that they play havoc with my innards. … One sits so tight on the crater of one’s passions and emotions. I am just learning – thanks to Frieda – to let go a bit. It is this sitting tight, and this inability to let go, which is killing the modern England, I think’ (2L 73). 22 On this theme, and contra Lawrence’s view in his letter to Henry Savage, see Kennedy-Moore and Watson’s second chapter, ‘The Myth of Emotional Venting’, in Kennedy-Moore and Watson, Expressing Emotion, pp. 25–62. 23 Scott Sanders, ‘Society and Ideology in Sons and Lovers’, in Sons and Lovers: New Casebooks, ed. Rick Rylance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 155–70, 156. 24 Neil Roberts, ‘Is Lawrence a Moving Writer, and Does It Matter?’, Etudes Lawrenciennes, 42 (2011): 9–19, 11. 25 H. M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 43. 26 Sanders, ‘Society and Ideology in Sons and Lovers’, p. 158. 27 See Christopher E. Forth’s discussion of the methods ‘of recuperating or preserving the robustness of the male under civilised conditions’ in Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 115. 28 David Parker, ‘Into the Ideological Unknown: Women in Love’, in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: A Casebook, ed. David Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 79–110, 89. 29 On men’s pathological denial of feeling, see Middleton, The Inward Gaze, pp. 191–9. 30 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 458. 31 Matthew Ratcliffe, ‘Grief and the Unity of Emotion’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 41.1 (2017): 154–74, 163. 32 Ratcliffe argues that ‘the depressed person finds herself in a different ‘world’, in an isolated, alien realm that is cut off from the consensus reality where people have more mundane experiences of feeling ‘more x’ or ‘less y’ than usual. … Depression involves a disturbance of something that is fundamental to our lives, something that goes unnoticed when intact. What is eroded or lost is a ‘sense’ or ‘feeling’ of being

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comfortably immersed in the world’. Matthew Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 15. 33 John Goode, ‘Individuality and Society in Sons and Lovers’, in Sons and Lovers: New Casebooks, ed. Rick Rylance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 125–32, 132. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, [1872] 1993), p. 73. 35 Aaron Ridley, ‘Emotion and Feeling’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 71.1 (1997): 163–76, 172.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Gay, lesbian and queer theory RICHARD A. KAYE

Of all the major British twentieth-century writers, D. H. Lawrence is the most attentive to the thematics of female and male same-sex desire, and among twentieth-century European writers he is rivalled perhaps only by Thomas Mann as a writer on that subject. Explorations of same-sex eros are evident in Lawrence’s fiction, poetry, theatrical work and at times his critical writing, where he emerges as an admirer (with varying levels of ambivalence) of a number of writers who wrote on such themes, running the gamut from the English Catholic convert and writer Frederick Rolfe to the American poet Walt Whitman. Lawrence’s intense absorption in homoerotically charged themes is complicated, however, by his sometimes hostile comments about friends and acquaintances of same-sex preferences, particularly members or friends of the Bloomsbury group as well as the American traveller and author Maurice Magnus, to whose Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (1924) Lawrence contributed an introduction that casts aspersions on Magnus’s unconventional personal life.1 Lawrence could be pitilessly unsentimental in his treatment of both male–male and female–female erotic relations, often linking such arrangements to decayed, disturbed, strained, unresolved, degenerate, narcissistic or violent sexual and psychological scenarios. He often views male and female homosexuality as in tensile or hostile relation to heterosexuality, a threat that is not always resolved successfully. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that his emphatic remarks about homosexual relations are complicated and even undermined by

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the complex poetic logic of his fiction, which cannot be reduced to a clear-cut ‘position’ or even a coherently sustained argument. Those explicit statements ranged from curiosity, admiration and awe to querulousness, anxiety and disgust. ‘I believe, he would have loved a man, more than a woman: even physically: like the ancients did’, Lawrence wrote in a letter to Henry Savage dated 2 December 1913 about Richard Middleton, a man Lawrence admired but viewed as ‘corrupt’ and ‘impure’ for his same-sex erotic desires. Of homosexuality itself, Lawrence wrote in this same letter: I believe it is because most women don’t leave scope to the man’s imagination – but I don’t know. I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not: so that he loves the body of a man better than the body of a woman – as I believe the Greeks did, sculptors and all, by far. I believe a man projects his own image on another man, like on a mirror. But from a woman he wants himself re-born, re-constructed. So he can always get satisfaction from a man, but it is the hardest thing in life to get ones [sic] soul and body satisfied from a woman, so that one is free from oneself. And one is kept by all tradition and instinct from loving men, or a man – for it means just extinction of all the purposive influences. (2L 115) Although the naïvely generalizing essentialism of this passage might discomfit a contemporary reader, it is notable that Lawrence is without his usual doctrinal self-assurance as he searchingly tries to work out his thoughts on male same-sex eros. Linking homosexuality to a ‘greatness’ that originates with the Ancient Greeks and their elevation of the male body, Lawrence then references a ‘tradition’ that militates against homosexual impulses, one wedded to ‘instinct’. As Keith Sagar observes, although ‘Lawrence is here tacitly admitting his own tendency to homosexuality, he does not fear it because he feels the taboos against it and his own positive commitment to marriage are strong enough to protect him’.2 In the 1915 version of his 1925 philosophical essay ‘The Crown’, Lawrence offers a more condemnatory analysis, seeing homosexuality as a corrupt state of narcissistic self-infatuation: ‘it is only coarse, insensitive men who can obtain the prime gratification of reduction in physical connection with a woman’, Lawrence opines, ‘a sensitive man is too subtle, he cannot come like a perverse animal, straight to the reduction of the self in the sex’ (RDP 472, note 285:1). Homosexual relations signify a kind of evolutionary regression to a beast-like state of being: It may be [the homosexual] wishes to reduce himself only to the level of a lower type of man. In which case he will love boy or man … His ideal,

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his basic desire, will be to get back to a state which he has long surpassed. And the getting back, the reduction, is a sort of progress … He is given up to the flux of reduction, his mouth is upon the mouth of corruption. This is the reason of homosexuality, and of connection with animals. (RDP 472, note 285:1) With this repeated reference to a regressive animal and human atavism, one senses, as Howard Booth suggests, the influence of Max Nordau’s bestselling Degeneration (1892–3) with its emphasis on cultural decline linked to new, dissident sexualities.3 One glimpses, too, what might have been the argument of Lawrence’s ‘Goats and Compasses’ (c. 1916), the essay on homosexuality that Lawrence probably destroyed, its title suggesting a distinction between animallike impulses and a set of social or moral guideposts.

GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES/QUEER THEORETICAL CONTEXTS Lawrence’s ambivalent and often harsh conception of homoerotic desire has made him a difficult figure for Gay and Lesbian Studies as that academic field emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, a critical perspective that generally has sought out socially positive models in works of literature – finding, for instance, E. M. Forster’s posthumously published novel Maurice (1971) with its decidedly happy ending for its eponymous protagonist and his working-class lover to be a more attractive model in the twentieth-century fictional depiction of homosexual amours. Yet Lawrence’s conflicted, unresolved attitude lends his writing a rigour, intensity and force absent in the more resolved outlook offered by Forster. Lawrence’s emphasis on erotic fluidity, on the anti-social and disruptive dimension in the erotic domain, on unstable sexual identities, coupled with his visionary and utopian belief in the experimental possibilities in all human relationships and with his exploration of a destructive psychic reality made him a cultural hero for modern-day progressives and radicals in Britain, Europe and America, for whom his writing represents a welcome devil’s advocacy troubling socially positivist conceptions of a ‘healthy’ self. Those qualities also make Lawrence an ideal subject for those critics working in Queer theory. Queer theory is hardly a univocal critical optic given that there are numerous divisions in the thinking of Queer theorists, none more so than on the status of psychoanalysis.4 As we shall see, Lawrence taps into a strong current in a Queer theoretical methodology indebted to a psychoanalytic approach in which the erotically anarchic and socially adverse hold a prominent place (an ironic critical fate given Lawrence’s explicitly skeptical view of Freudian psychoanalysis as articulated in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious). Such an approach as directly related to Lawrence’s writing was first expressed in Leo Bersani’s chapter on

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Women in Love in A Future for Astayanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976), which accentuates the powerfully destabilizing nature of sexuality and the resistance of desire to social norms even as it criticized Lawrence for not fully envisioning erotic relations between men. Jonathan Dollimore, meanwhile, has pointed out that in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and in Lawrence’s other fiction the ‘male yearning towards the male is occasionally expressed explicitly … but more often it is expressed through the eyes and desires of women’ (not unlike, one might add, Forster’s delegation of male homoerotic desires to female characters in novels such as his 1905 Where Angels Fear to Tread, with its alluring Italian men, and the 1923 A Passage to India, with its similarly beguiling Indian males).5 More recently, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean’s Hatred of Sex (2022), with its clear debts to Queer theory and critical view of recent attempts at the policing of sexuality by the right and the left, argues that there is a fundamental uneasiness at the heart of human sexuality because sex itself is often feared and loathed. The reason? Sexual intensity impedes cohesive, coherent selfhood as it undermines a stable identity. Further, Davis and Dean draw on the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière to argue that there is a corollary for the pervasive animus against sex that lies in the political sphere. Western democracy, they argue, harbours a paradox: namely, that a politics based on democratic populism inevitably must confront the ugly anti-democratic impulses among a given populace. The neoliberal error, they suggest, lies in failing to recognize that popular democracy inevitably gives rise to an unruly, illiberal mob.6 Although Lawrence’s so-called leadership novels suggest an attraction to an anti-populist authoritarian politics, certainly the notion of sex as undermining a secure individual and social self is fundamental to Lawrence’s belief system. In terms of homosexual desire, ‘The Prussian Officer’ (1914) and ‘The Blind Man’ (1922) demonstrate Lawrence’s sense that an excessive repression of homoerotic impulses leads to a convulsive shattering of ego, and far worse. At once a study in sado-masochistic desires, repressed homosexual yearning and deadly rage, ‘The Prussian Officer’ details an officer’s tormented obsession with his orderly, an obsession that (in typical Lawrentian fashion) is registered not by the officer himself, who is only half-cognizant of his feelings, but by the narrator. ‘The officer tried hard not to admit the passion that had got hold of him. He would not know that his feeling for his orderly was anything but that of a man incensed by his stupid, perverse servant’ (PO 5–6). When the captain takes a fall, the orderly instantly takes his revenge, finding himself on top of the body of his tormentor. And it was pleasant too to have that chin, that hard jaw already slightly rough with beard, in his hands. He did not relax one hair’s-breath but, all

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the force of all his blood exulting in his thrust, he shoved back the head of the other man, till there was a little ‘cluck’ and a crunching sensation. Then he felt as if his heart went to vapour. Heavy convulsions shook the body of the officer, frightening and horrifying the young soldier. Yet it pleased him too to repress them. It pleased him to keep his hands pressing back the chin, to feel the chest of the other man yield in expiration to the weight of his strong young knee, to feel the hard twitchings of the prostrate body jerking his own whole frame, which was pressed down on it. (PO 15) A perverse consummation of repudiated homoerotic passion and a grisly Liebestod, this climax discloses frissons of necrophiliac lust on the newly empowered orderly’s part as the now-vanquished officer dies beneath him. Part of the diabolical cleverness of the tale lies in its initial narration from the perspective of the obsessed sergeant, whose attraction to the other man leads him to torment the orderly, whose own perspective is delayed until we are allowed to perceive his savage resentment. Then the point of view shifts yet again as we become privy to the thoughts of the soldiers who discover the orderly’s body (still alive) and who ‘dropped him in horror’, followed by a fourth shift in perspective as doctors ‘saw the bruises on the orderly’s legs, behind, and were silent’ (PO 20). What has transpired between the two men defies ordinary military or medical modes of comprehension. The final image is a grisly double tableau of unconsummated desire: ‘the bodies of the two men lay together, side by side, in the mortuary, the one white and slender, but laid rigidly at rest, the other looking as if every moment it must rouse itself into life again, so young and unused, from a slumber’ (PO 20–1). A male couple is born, as it were, but only, paradoxically, in death. Set in the country, ‘The Blind Man’ is equally engrossed in sexually charged friction between men, although this time, as in ‘The Fox’, Lawrence depicts those tensions in an uneasy triangle. The tale opens with Isabel Pervin waiting for the sound of her husband and that of her friend, a ‘second or third cousin’, Bertie Reid, who is soon to arrive at her home, a bifurcation that will structure the psychological conflict of the story. Almost immediately, Lawrence subtly undermines Bertie. He is a barrister and, notably, not a writer but a ‘man of letters’, a ‘Scotchman of the intellectual type, quick, ironical, sentimental, and on his knees before the woman he adored but did not want to marry’ (EME 48). The implication is that Bertie is a social and professional success but is repressed. Lawrence establishes a characterological impasse: ‘Maurice Pervin was different … passionate, sensitive, perhaps over-sensitive, wincing – a big fellow with heavy limbs and a forehead that flushed painfully’ (EME 48). When Maurice invites Bertie to his work-shed and asks him if he may touch his face, Bertie obliges, and then Bertie, in turn, is asked to touch his scars:

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Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the power of the blind man, as if hypnotised. He lifted his hand, and laid the fingers on the scar, on the scarred eyes. Maurice suddenly covered them with his own hand, pressed the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets, trembling in every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side. He remained thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie stood as if in a swoon, unconscious, imprisoned. (EME 62) This has the quality of a sexual assault, with the last line of the story revealing the shattering effect of the forced encounter on Bertie: ‘he could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken’, the phrase ‘insane reserve’ making it transparent that it is Bertie who is fundamentally, damagingly repressed (EME 63). This gothic climax, with its slight ambiguity as to whether Maurice has acted with conscious or unconscious malice and in which an emotionally brittle young man is effectively forced into an unwanted male bond, recalls Judith Wilt’s argument that Lawrence often draws on gothic tropes as a way of representing unsayable, unallowable forms of desire.7

DREAMING OF BEETLES: MALE SAME-SEX DESIRE AND BIOGRAPHICAL SPECULATION Although for decades biographers generally skirted the question of Lawrence’s own possible homosexual feelings and experiences, over time that question has become a salient issue in considerations of the writer’s life. Early speculation included Lawrence’s erstwhile close friend (and model for the character of Gerald Crich in Women in Love) John Middleton Murry, whose memoir Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (1931) reasoned that Lawrence could not physically satisfy his wife Frieda because of a blocked homosexuality, but which also praised Lawrence’s novel Aaron’s Rod (in which Murry probably was depicted as the character of Jim) for its candour regarding male–male affection: what Lawrence was asking for was not even a disciple, but simply a lover. He disguised it from himself, as he needed to do. But those who are responsive to the unconscious emotion no less than to the explicit thought of a book, cannot mistake the meaning of the beautiful chapter describing Aaron’s illness in Lilly’s little flat. The women are far away, the underlying tension of hostility that is always felt when Lawrence is describing a woman and a man together dissolves peacefully away. Lilly is blissfully happy looking after Aaron, with a more than wifely tenderness. Lawrence never drew a more life-like picture of himself than this whole description of Lilly.8

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Murry’s review of Aaron’s Rod in The Nation and The Athenaeum had gone so far as to deem that the novel was ‘much more important’ than James Joyce’s Ulysses.9 Although often severe in its treatment of its subject – and, as the above passage suggests, reductively biographical in its reading of Lawrence’s fiction – Murry’s biographical study represents what one might characterize as the very first extended ‘queer’ interpretative lens on Lawrence, one that is alive to the fraught-yet-tender homoerotic currents animating Lawrence’s life and writing. Murry’s resistance to Lawrence’s appeals seemed to have stemmed from his reluctance to respond to Lawrence’s pleas for a closer rapport. As Richard Aldington, a friend of both men, writes of the years just before and during the First World War in D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius, But … (1950): There can be little doubt that in these years Lawrence liked Murry more than any other of his not very numerous men friends. The very violence of his later reaction against Murry indicates the depth of his former affection. But there was a twist to his affection which Murry did not accept. Lawrence had at this time got into his obstinate head the notion of Blutbrüderschaft (blood brotherhood), reinforced perhaps by reading Melville’s description of the relationship Between Ishmael and Queequeg. Be that as it may, he began as was his wont – ‘hammer, hammer, hammer’ – at the idea of blood brotherhood, expounded at length in the scenes between Gerald and Birkin of Women in Love.10 Here the rift between Lawrence and Murry signifies less a matter of differing sexual orientations than a difference in personal temperaments. With F. R. Leavis’s valourizing conception of Lawrence in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1930) and Harry T. Moore’s discreetly uncurious biographical approach to the erotically aberrant in The Priest of Love (1974), the frank discussion afforded by Murry and Aldington’s memoirs would recede. Seeking to view the issue almost strictly in intellectual terms, Emile Delavenay published what was the earliest extended exploration of ideas related to male homoerotic desire in Lawrence’s writing in D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Transition (1971). Delaney argued, based on limited evidence (for example, Lawrence having given a copy of a book by Carpenter to his friend Helen Corke) that Lawrence had been influenced by Carpenter’s ideas concerning what Carpenter termed ‘homogenic love’. Yet, despite certain affinities between the writing of Carpenter and Lawrence (a streak of mysticism, a valourization of working-class male–male intimacy, a love of undestroyed rural life), Carpenter’s serenely resolved and proselytizing works on behalf of the sentimental stasis of homoerotic feeling could not be more different from Lawrence’s restlessly unsatisfied stress on homoerotic impasse, conflict and revulsion.

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Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970) was willing to address the homoerotics of Lawrence’s fiction but in wholly unreceptive terms. Millett skewered Lawrence as damagingly phallus-worshipping and misogynistic along with Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, each of whom, she explained, depicted heroes who define their manhood through the subjugation of women. To the extent that Millett saw Lawrence as addressing homosexuality, she understood it as in opposition to female interests. In an added rebuke to what she saw as the hetero-masculinist practices of these writers, Millett devoted a chapter to the openly gay French writer Jean Genet, whose writing lacked, she argued, the disfiguring patriarchal elements so pervasive in the work of Lawrence, Miller and Mailer. Mailer’s response, The Prisoner of Sex (1971), strenuously defended Lawrence’s ‘heroism’ as an artist and as a man who escaped a homosexual fate, writing that ‘homosexuality would have been an abdication of Lawrence as a philosopher king. Conceive how he must have struggled against it!’11 Other critics also perceived psychic disturbance and unresolved self-conflict. Reading the issue, like Mailer, in biographical terms, Scott Sanders assesses Lawrence in the years of the First World War and during the composition of Women in Love as struggling with his own sexuality. ‘Compounding [the] social and economic strain was the uncertainty of his sexual identity’, writes Sanders in his Marxian D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Five Major Novels (1973). ‘During those wartime years he was torn, more savagely than at any other point in his career, by competing homosexual and heterosexual impulses.’12 All of this may be true, but then Sanders simply ignores how homosexual eros – or, more accurately, bisexual eros – is a fundamental issue (indeed, a posited visionary solution) in Lawrence’s novel, as Birkin wishes for ‘two kinds of love’ in the novel’s final sentences. Several biographers have sought to make the case for Lawrence having had an affair with the Cornish farmer and the Lawrences’ neighbour William Hocking during their time in Cornwall between March 1916 and November 1917. In an 11 October 1916 letter, Lawrence described Hocking as having ‘something manly and independent about him – and something truly Celtic and unknown – something non-christian, non-European, but strangely beautiful and fair in spirit, unselfish’ (2L 664). Frieda, her family, and the Hocking family appear to have been troubled by the relationship between the two neighbors. ‘ “Was there really a thing between them?”, Mabel Dodge Luhan asked Frieda, to which Frieda reportedly replied, “I think so. I was dreadfully unhappy.” ’13 ‘ “I think the homosexuality in him was a short phase out of misery – I fought him and won” ’ Frieda told John Middleton Murry.14 Frieda’s daughter Barbara Weekley Barr, meanwhile, pronounced the Lawrence–Hocking relationship ‘irregular’.15 That Lawrence might have given in to an ‘irregular’ urge for another man has inspired some imaginative leaps in some of his biographers. With the

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exuberance of a gay-romance novelist, C. J. Stevens in his 1988 Lawrence at Tregerthen (D. H. Lawrence in Cornwall) conjures up a scene of unchecked homoerotic passion between the two men: ‘one can imagine the scene of seduction – perhaps somewhere in the darkness on the shaggy moors where the Druidical boulders suggest a blood ceremony’, only to clamp down on his own daydream with a sober caveat: ‘but it would be only speculation; no evidence has been unearthed to confirm such a culmination’.16 Drawing on Stevens’s account, Jeffrey Meyers’s biography of Lawrence returned to what in a 1973 essay, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Homosexuality’, Meyers had coyly characterized as Lawrence’s ‘mysterious and obscure passion for the handsome Cornish farmer’.17 The tie between Lawrence and Hocking is now clarified as signalling the writer’s ‘unusually warm interest in the innocent native son’ who was ‘square-jawed’ and with a ‘handsome animal-like body’.18 Meyers further speculates that Lawrence drew on the relationship for the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo and the suppressed Prologue to Women in Love. In an equally steamy, fanciful effort at same-sex fantasy, Brenda Maddox muses that it is ‘possible … that in the fine summer of 1917, lying in the bracken and talking about sex, Lawrence and Hocking consummated their love’.19 In D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (1996), Mark KinkeadWeekes provides an open-minded, if less steamy, discussion of the subject of Lawrence’s sexuality, arguing that by 1914 Lawrence had accepted his own bisexuality. Kinkead-Weekes maintains that despite a visit to Cambridge in 1915 in which Lawrence felt distraught by the relatively open atmosphere of homosexual badinage, by 1917–18 Lawrence had accepted the viability of homosexual anal sex. However, in his 2002 essay, Howard Booth questioned this argument, arguing that from 1917 to 1918 Lawrence remained uncomfortable with homosexual desire. Whereas Kinkead-Weekes suggested that after 1917 Lawrence’s interest in homosexuality waned, Booth insists that he remained absorbed in issues related to homosexuality, if only as a besetting problem, well into the 1920s. Beyond its critique of Kinkead-Weekes, Booth’s essay was the most extended and insightful discussion of Lawrence’s relation to homosexuality since Meyers’s 1973 essay. With his excoriation of Cambridge and Bloomsbury men of same-sex preferences, it is possible that Lawrence may have been seeking to protect his masculinist conception of a homoerotic Bruderschaft from the elitist, effete and upper-class domain of Cambridge and Bloomsbury, not unlike Walt Whitman’s testy non-response to an 1872 letter from the British writer John Addington Symonds asking for clarification of the term ‘athletic friendship’, no doubt desiring to shield his all-male working-class idylls from a British middle-class sexual pioneer. It is possible, too, that Lawrence reserved most of his bile for homosexual Englishmen. He does not seem to have been troubled, for example, by his American friends Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson, who Lawrence

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must have known were a couple. Lawrence’s animus was reciprocated by homosexual Bloomsbury: ‘I wrote an ironical letter to the New Statesman in favour of the suppression of The Rainbow; but the joke was too heavy, and has also been suppressed’, wrote Lytton Strachey to Clive Bell on 17 November 1915, a remark that doubtless had less to do with questions of sexuality than Stracheyean skepticism about Lawrentian earnestness.20

LAWRENCE’S QUEER MALE–MALE IMAGINARY Beginning with his first published novel, The White Peacock (1911), the subject of homoerotic eros is frequently present and even central to Lawrence’s fictional work. Partly indebted to Wuthering Heights, especially that novel’s contrast between socially suitable marriage and an unsuitable romantic tie, Lawrence’s novel traces the fortunes in love of three couples and is narrated by Cyril Beardsall, a young man of fussy overelaborations whose name evokes the celebrated British artist Aubrey Beardsley, a figure synonymous with finde-siècle decadence. In the chapter entitled ‘A Poem of Friendship’, there is a bathing scene of untroubled gentleness between Cyril and George, reminiscent of the (comic) nude bathing scene in Forster’s A Room with a View (1908): He saw I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman. (WP 222–3) The passage is striking not only for its concentrated sensuality but for the way in which physical contact between two men is immediately spiritualized, as the ‘sweetness of touch’ satisfies the ‘yearning’ of Cyril’s ‘soul’ while eliciting feelings that are ‘indecipherable’. It is as if Lawrence, through a rhetoric of the soul, were sequestering his two uninhibited men from having to submit to the kind of analysis to which psychology – specifically, the new method of psychoanalytic inquiry – would require this carnally charged idyll to submit. Lawrence would never again write of same-sex erotic male relations with such untroubled, lyrical exuberance. In the autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913), male intimacy is primarily expressed through a psychically unstable mixture of unstated affection, hostility

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and combat between the central protagonist Paul Morel and his mistress Clara’s husband, Baxter Dawes. ‘Paul and he were confirmed enemies, and yet there was between them that peculiar feeling of intimacy, as if they were secretly near to each other, which sometimes exists between two people although they never speak to one another’, we are instructed, any peculiarity dissolved in a generalizing formula regarding what ‘sometimes’ occurs between people (SL 386). There is a psychic, non-verbal recognition on Paul’s part about the other man’s feelings: ‘Paul often thought of Baxter Dawes, often wanted to get at him, and be friends with him. He knew that Dawes often thought about him, and that the man was drawn to him by some bond or other’, lines that once again focus on but then deflect attention from a too-specific sense of the nature of men’s relationship (SL 386). The intimate tensile impasse reaches a climax when the two men engage in physical combat, a struggle through which samesex intimacy is further achieved. ‘They had met in a naked extremity of hate’, notes the narrator, ‘and it was a bond’ (SL 423–4). A hyper-masculine fight, it would seem, allows for an intense male attachment that otherwise would be suspect or unallowable in frictionless encounters between men.21 Literal naked combat between men comprises a central scene in Lawrence’s most sustained treatment of male homoerotics – indeed, it is one of the novel’s dominant themes – Women in Love (1920). The two protagonists, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, establish an intense friendship even as they pursue romantic ties to two women, sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. The Birkin–Crich relationship reaches an emotional and physical climax when Birkin nurses a sick Gerald and then during a nude wrestling scene. Strangely, but in keeping with the novel’s anti-mimetic stance of excluding historical actualities, there is no mention of any opprobrium regarding male same-sex relations. Just as Lawrence claimed in his Foreword to the novel to have deliberately omitted any reference to the First World War (during which Women in Love had been written) so, too, did the novelist neglect to acknowledge the legal, social and moral hindrances to the display of male homoerotics depicted in Women in Love, a choice allowable, perhaps, in a novel of vatic modernist ambitions. Indeed, the visionary outlook of the novel is crucial to understanding its homosexual politics. As Erwin Rosinberg notes, ‘to love a man “purely and fully” is “necessary”, but even this realisation does not help Birkin truly understand what place relations between men can have in his world, as well as the world at large. The problem of same-sex relations in the novel is the problem, in short, of the future itself.’22 In Women in Love, Lawrence tends to conceive of male homosexuality primarily as a corollary to – or as in tension with – heterosexual eros (with the woman’s feelings about the matter mostly in abeyance). In a curious reversal, the free-thinking Ursula that the reader encounters at the beginning of the novel, and who along with her sister Gudrun questions whether marriage is a viable

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choice and institution, emerges in the novel’s final pages as denying that her husband Birkin should have the love of a woman and man, an idea she derides as an ‘obstinacy, a theory, a perversity’ (WL 481). Further, the novel contrasts the elevated emotional and erotic rapport of Rupert and Gerald with the repellent, bisexual, possibly Jewish artist Loerke, who taunts the virile Gerald with his open dalliance with Gerald’s lover Gudrun. Such contrasts – between a virile homoerotics and an exotic decadent effeminacy – confirms Gregory Woods’s observation that Lawrence’s ‘most insistent, but necessarily contradictory, erotic grail is the passionate, physical union of two heterosexual men’.23 Birkin’s homosexual impulses are far more pronounced in the Prologue to Women in Love, published in 1963 (a year after it was discovered), where we learn that Birkin, far less the self-confident seeker of the published novel, has been tormented about his attraction to other men. All the time, he recognised that, although he was always drawn to women, feeling more at home with a woman than with a man, yet it was for men that he felt the hot, flushing, roused attraction which a man is supposed to feel for the other sex. Although nearly all his living interchange went on with one woman or another, although he was always terribly intimate with at least one woman, and practically never intimate with a man, yet the male physique had a fascination for him, and for the female physique he felt only a fondness, a sort of sacred love, as for a sister. (WL 501–2) It is the impersonality of male–male enticement that stands out here, contrasted with the loving but sexless intimacy of Birkin’s attraction to women. Elsewhere we learn that the men to whom Birkin is drawn are working-class strangers, notably in uniform (unlike the upper-class Gerald of the published Women in Love): It might be any man, a policeman who suddenly looked up at him, as he enquired the way, or a soldier who sat next to him in a railway carriage. How vividly, months afterwards, he would recall the soldier who had sat pressed up close to him on a journey from Charing Cross to Westerham; the shapely, motionless body, the large, dumb, coarsely beautiful hands that rested helpless upon the strong knees, the dark brown eyes, vulnerable in the erect body. (WL 503) Unbidden, with the random anonymity afforded by urban life, Birkin’s desires are kindled by two kinds of men: In his mind was a small gallery of such men, men whom he had never spoken to, but who had flashed themselves upon his senses unforgettably, men

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whom he apprehended intoxicatingly in his blood. They divided themselves, roughly, into two classes: these white-skinned, keen-limbed men with eyes like blue-flashing ice and hair like crystals of winter sunshine, the northmen, inhuman as sharp-crying gulls, distinct like splinters of ice, like crystals, isolated, individual; and then the men with dark eyes that one can enter and plunge into, bathe in, as in a liquid darkness, dark-skinned, supple, nightsmelling men, who are the living substance of the viscous, universal, heavy darkness. (WL 503–4) Their tantalizing male bodies vividly evoked but not physically felt, these men all have discernable physical attributes (‘keen-limbed’, ‘dark skin’) that are swiftly abstracted into metaphors that, in evoking non-human qualities, obscure rather than describe (‘eyes like blue-flashing ice’, ‘hair like crystals of winter sunshine’, ‘viscous, heavy darkness’). These men are further analogized to exalted nonhuman creatures, as the coarse animality signified by homosexuality in ‘The Crown’ and the predatory ‘carrion’ and ‘vultures’ of Lawrence’s letter to Garnett accede to awesome (if disturbing) ‘sharp-crying gulls’. Critics writing from a Queer theoretical perspective have not been uniformly welcoming of Lawrentian homoerotics as they play out in Women in Love, seeing Lawrence as ultimately restrained in his depiction of homoerotic relations as he links their expression to a fundamental morbidity. ‘In the published version of the novel, Birkin’s love for Gerald certainly includes a keen physical awareness’, Leo Bersani notes, but it has almost none of the specificity suggested in the Prologue … A profound love between man and man is part of Birkin’s ideal, but there is no clear indication that this would include sex, and there is certainly no suggestion that only a form of homosexual physical contact could solve the problem of frictionless sex for men, and allow them to enjoy the ‘soft, heavy, hot flow’ available to women.24 With analogous scepticism regarding Women in Love’s liberating effects, Christopher Craft complains that ‘this unhappy story … both explicates and repeats the chilling cathexis between homosexual desire and death that has compelled so much attention’.25 Still, on occasion Lawrence did depict male homoeroticism in less apocalyptically charged terms. In the comical 1924 short story ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’, the protagonist is described in coded terms – specifically, in a reference to the long-burnished homosexual icon St Sebastian: In his own opinion, he was a sort of Martyred Saint Sebastian, at whom the wicked world shot arrow after arrow … In the opinion of his men friends,

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he was, or should be, a consistently-grinning faun, satyr, or Pan-person. In his own opinion, he was a Martyred Saint Sebastian with the mind of a Plato. In the opinion of his woman friends, he was a fascinating little man with a profound understanding of life and the capacity really to understand a woman and to make a woman feel a queen. Which of course was to make a woman feel her real self. (WWRA 100) The codes for same-sex eroticism (Pan, Sebastian, satyr, Plato) drop away, however, and after divorcing his wife he pursues another woman, the married Emily Pinnegar, only to find that he ‘was fascinated’ by Emily’s husband, a collier who first appears in the story shirtless before Jimmy. ‘And again he hated the spell of this fascination … this thin, peculiar man could dominate him’ (119). The story ends in suspended triangular irresolution: a perverse but intense desire for her came over him, making him almost helpless. He could feel, so strongly, the presence of that other man about her, and this went to his head like neat spirits. That other man! In some subtle, inexplicable way, he was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him. And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whisky. Which of the two would fall before him with a greater fall? – the woman, or the man, her husband? (120–1) From Jimmy’s point of view, the impossibility of achieving a physical bond with another man is resolved through a female proxy, in an arrangement that seems to satisfy Jimmy’s narcissistic need to be an object of worship. In Aaron’s Rod, relations between the sexes become even more strained as the bonds between men are solidified and domesticated. The central protagonist Aaron Sisson’s wife not only lacks the spirited vigour of the Brangwen sisters but is also a whimpering domestic killjoy whom Aaron abandons along with their children. The comely, working-class Aaron is taken up by London’s leftist, artistic set, in which both men and women are drawn to him: ‘Jim was leading Aaron, holding him by the arm and slightly pinching his muscles’, the novel reads. ‘It gave him great satisfaction to have between his fingers the armmuscles of a working-man, one of the common people, the fons et origo of modern life’ (AR 56). Rejecting this decadent cohort, Aaron falls under the sway of Rawdon Lilly, with whom he has an extended conversation about the limitations of wives and women generally. The novel depicts the pair as living in a brief but harmonious domestic arrangement, with at one point Lilly rubbing ointment into Sisson’s body as Sisson recovers from an illness brought on by soul-sickness: ‘he went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man’s lower body – the abdomen,

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the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it’ (AR 96). Lawrence’s other so-called leadership fiction explored male–male relations as they traced the hold – at once emotional, physical and political – charismatic leaders exact over their disciples. These novels all have homoerotically charged set-pieces, chief among them Somers’s final tender moments with the dying leader Kangaroo in Kangaroo (1923) and the initiation rite between Ramón and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent (1926). Undergirding each of these three works is the felt proposition that authoritarian leaders necessarily draw on the bonds of a homoerotic Blutbrüderschaft to assert their authority over disciples. Lawrence’s idealizations of male–male friendship are evident in other genres. His biblical drama David (1925) focuses on the irrevocable bond between David and Jonathan. JONATHAN We have sworn a covenant, is it not between us? – Wilt thou not swear with me, that our souls shall be as brothers, closer even than the blood? – Oh, David, my heart hath no peace save all be well between thy soul and mine, and thy blood and mine. DAVID As the Lord liveth, the soul of Jonathan is dearer to me than a brother’s – Oh brother, if I were but come out of this pass, and we might live before the Lord, together! JONATHAN What fearest thou then? DAVID In the Lord, I fear nothing. But before the faces of men, my heart misgives me. (Plays 475–6) David’s misgivings ‘before the faces of men’ represent one of the few moments in Lawrence’s writing in which there is a recognition of the social censure regarding male same-sex desire – this, ironically, in a work that is among the writer’s least realistic works. The play culminates in David’s death and, as in ‘The Prussian Officer’, a kind of romantic consummation: ‘DAVID comes forth, weeping. Falls on his face to the ground, and bows himself three times before JONATHAN. JONATHAN raises him. They kiss one another, and weep’ (Plays 523). Lawrence’s poetry is not without a sense of male and female homosexuality as a problem to be explored. Woods notes that in the poem ‘Ego-bound women –’ from Pansies (1929) Lawrence describes its subjects as ‘often lesbian, / perhaps always’, going on to reject female homosexuality as the ‘most appalling’ of ‘all passions’ and a ‘frenzy of tortured possession / and a million frenzies of tortured jealousy’ (1Poems 412). At the same time, Woods presents Lawrence as a lyrical polemicist on behalf of such figures as the Male Bride, the New Man and the Passionate Phallus.26 In poems such as ‘Virgin Youth’, ‘The Wild Common’ and ‘For the Heroes Are Dipped in Scarlet’, there lies a fantasy of physically

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desirable, beautiful working-class men whose rough pagan beauty is without bourgeois good looks. In the war poem ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ (first published in the Egoist in 1915) a soldier imagines his enemy as a ravished wife: Waiting. – And I knew he wanted it. Like a bride he took my bayonet, wanting it, Like a virgin the blade of my bayonet, wanting it, And it sank to rest from me to him, And I, the lover, am consummate, And he is the bride, I have sown him with the seed And planted and fertilised him. (3Poems 1518) This poem reprises familiar Lawrentian themes of male–male consummation in battle and death even as it partakes of the homoerotic chords common in First World War poetry.

SAPPHIC LAWRENCE Some of the same complexity and audaciousness in Lawrence’s exploration of male–male longing is evident in Lawrence’s representation of lesbian erotics. That lesbianism was not explicitly outlawed in Britain as male homosexuality had been ensured that Lawrence had unusual freedom to navigate the subject. The Rainbow (1915) primarily drew the rancour of censors not so much for Ursula’s romantic relationship with her teacher Winifred Inger as for the scene of a pregnant Anna Brangwen dancing before the moon, although one magistrate did write savagely and specifically of the section of the novel detailing the romance between Ursula and Winifred (in condemning the novel The Daily Telegraph was more oblique, citing a ‘certain chapter’ as especially offensive).27 In The Rainbow, the relation between Ursula and Winifred is physically exciting and richly emotional, culminating in a night-time swim race: ‘Now, ah now she was swimming in the same water with her dear mistress. The girl moved her limbs voluptuously, and swam by herself, deliciously, yet with a craving of unsatisfaction. She wanted to touch the other, to touch her, to feel her’ (R 313). This authorial panting along with his characters is characteristic of Lawrence at his most affirmative of carnal passion, however renegade. This scene is followed by Ursula’s visit to Winifred’s bungalow as the two women walk towards a pond. Lawrence narrates the increments in their dalliance as an expansion of Winifred’s role as teacher: They ventured out into the darkness, feeling the soft air of night upon their skins.

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‘I can’t see the path’, said Ursula. ‘It is here’, said the voice, and the wavering, pallid figure was beside her, a hand grasping her arm. And the elder held the younger close against her, close, as they went down, and by the side of the water, she put her arms round her, and kissed her. And she lifted her in her arms, close, saying softly: ‘I shall carry you into the water.’ Ursula lay still in her mistress’s arms, her forehead against the beloved, maddening breast. ‘I shall put you in’, said Winifred. But Ursula twined her body about her mistress. (R 315–16) When a ‘sort of nausea’ overcomes Ursula and she rejects Winifred, finding her ‘ugly, clayey’ and likening the experience with her to a ‘bottomless darkness’, the novel stresses the older woman’s enduring devotion: ‘Winifred still loved Ursula. She had a passion for the fine flame of the girl’ (R 316, 319). Ursula arranges for Winifred to marry Ursula’s prosperous, mine-owning uncle, Tom. As with the male homoerotics of Women in Love, there is no sense that there is social opprobrium against lesbian eros, although the chapter in which the relationship is explored is entitled (mysteriously, given that Ursula expresses no such feeling) ‘Shame’. Ursula’s rejection of Winifred forms part of a pattern that extends to her male lover, Skrebensky, whom Ursula rejects for his blind faith in the imperialist cause. It is significant, too, that unlike Birkin, who is denied a kiss from another man in Women in Love, Lawrence allows Ursula that particular consummation, suggesting that Sapphic passion can be expressed without the inhibitions or social risks of desire between males. In Lawrence’s novella ‘The Fox’ (1922), two women struggle to make a life together on a failing farm until one of them is drawn to a young male visitor, whose family used to live there. The bitter rivalry between the male and female lovers of Banford is gruesomely resolved in the tale’s climax, in which Paul chops down a tree and kills March in front of her horrified parents. What seems like a triumph of male prerogative in murder is belied in the story’s last sentences, as Paul and Banford travel by train to Canada. We are told that her ‘eyelids drooped with the slow motion, sleep weighing them unconscious’: ‘ “If only we could go soon”, he said, with pain in his voice” ’ (Fox 71). The accent lies on Banford’s possibly persistent, restless bisexuality, caught (as Freud once stated of women erotically drawn to both sexes) in a ‘bisexual limbo’. In his boldness in depicting forms of Sapphic desire, Lawrence is rivalled only by the American novelists Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. Stein’s posthumously published novel QED (written in 1903) depicts a lesbian love triangle, while Barnes’s semi-autobiographical Nightwood (1936) explores a triangular lesbian relationship along with a range of sexual and ethnic outcasts.

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HETERONORMATIVE CRITICISM AND BEYOND It would be easy enough to catalogue the long-standing critical discomfort with, and hostility towards – or, more commonly, erasure of – homosexual thematics in Lawrence’s work and life. Yet not all critical discussions have been marked by homophobic demurrals and resistances. Beginning in the 1940s, some critics were open to discussing the subject with enlightened interest. A number of these critical voices were female who, unlike most of their male colleagues, did not harbour an investment in sequestering Lawrence from associations of effeminacy, emasculation and homosexuality. The first book-length, critical-biographical study of Lawrence, Stephen Potter’s 1930 D. H. Lawrence: A First Study (based on interviews with the writer) raised the question of male same-sex passion in a curious first-person address apparently quoting – or else meaning to channel – Lawrence’s thinking after the publication of Women in Love: All my life I have wanted friendship with a man – real friendship, in my sense of what I mean by that word. What is that sense? Do I want friendliness? I should like to see anybody being ‘friendly’ with me. Intellectual equals? Or equals in being non-intellectual? … Not something homosexual, surely? Indeed you have misunderstood me – besides this term is imbedded in its own period. I do not belong to a world where that word has meaning. Comradeship perhaps? No, not that – too much love about it – no, not even in the Calamus sense, not comradeship – not Manly Love. Then what Nietzsche describes – ‘the friend in whom the world standeth complete, a capsule of the good – the creating friend, who hath always a complete world to bestow’? Well in a way. That means, in my words, choose as your friend the man who has centre. But this does not explain it.28 Potter’s quoting or impersonation of Lawrence as the novelist searches for the precise nomenclature to describe his yearning for a deeper male bond (formulated in hesitations, demurrals and elevated Latinate words) and seems to suggest that there is no existing term for so unique a desire, that such a desire is outside of existing social and personal experience and that the relatively recent term ‘homosexuality’ is a historical artefact too redolent of sexological meaning. Other critics confused the issue of homosexuality with notions of irreducibly masculine and feminine qualities. Writing in 1933, Horace Gregory comments that ‘the human failures in Women in Love are failures traceable to the imperfect distribution of male and female qualities in men and women. Birkin’s female qualities, never brought to a test, find perfect repose in the untested male qualities in Gerald, or vice versa’, although Gregory never explains exactly what those male and female qualities might be.29

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A more forward-thinking critical perspective appears in Diana Trilling’s 1947 introduction to The Portable D. H. Lawrence, which declares that ‘Lawrence was not a homosexual, nor was he seeking a license for homosexuality for his male characters’, a curious formulation since fictional characters can hardly be said to be granted permission, while the conclusion of Women in Love suggests that Gerald should have (as Birkin would have it) reciprocated Birkin’s fervour for an intense bond. But what Trilling goes on to state represents one of the first open-minded critical considerations: ‘if to interpret male relationships in Lawrence as sexually perverse is to distort them, then to rob them of their physical dimension is to falsify them no less’.30 A similar open-mindedness informed Sylvia Plath’s consideration of Lawrentian homoerotic currents in an unpublished paper dated 17 February 1957 that she wrote while at Newnham College, Cambridge, as a Fulbright fellow. In her essay, entitled ‘D. H. Lawrence: The Tree of Knowledge Versus the Tree of Life’ and written under the direction of her teacher Dorothea Brook, Plath expresses reservations about Women in Love – specifically, about what she sees as Lawrence’s imprecision on the nature of the physical bond he has in mind for Gerald and Birkin. Finding Lawrence too restrained in his conception of the bond between these two characters, Plath writes: The ‘Gladiatorial’ chapter describes the wrestling match between Birkin and Gerald in terms of this ‘physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness’. But Birkin’s attempt fails. It is difficult to define what is meant by a physical intimacy between men here: today, among our men, anything more intimate than a jocular poke in the ribs smacks of homosexuality. The warm cheek-kissing of the Latin men is looked upon with embarrassment. Bruderschaft – another mystery. And, if anything, Lawrence does not develop the ‘mutual physical understanding’ between his men beyond their wrestling match. Close, noble, physical combat, perhaps, will serve.31 Plath’s quarrelsomeness regarding Gerald and Birkin’s fitful rapport is somewhat literal-minded given Lawrence’s relative boldness in his depiction of the emotionally and erotically charged friendship between his two male protagonists. Yet her comments reveal an advanced and, with their reference to uninhibited Latin cultures, worldly understanding of same-sex erotic relations between men. Lawrence’s friend Aldous Huxley, self-exiled to Southern California since the 1930s, served as a kind of emissary of Lawrentian ideas in America with works such as The Doors of Perception (1954), with its personal story of finding a ‘purely aesthetic’ experience and a ‘sacramental vision’ under the psychedelic influence of mescaline.32 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, there was an effort among

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some critics and biographers to present Lawrence as a prophet of free love – but a free love delimited within the confines of a heterosexual erotics. However, in Stephen Spender’s 1973 volume of essays, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, Jeffrey Meyers published what is arguably the first extended discussion of the subject of same-sex eros in Lawrence’s fiction and life. In his essay, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Homosexuality’, Meyers criticizes Eugene Goodheart, Mark Spilka and H. M. Daleski for their willful efforts to contain or explain away Lawrence’s attitudes about the homoerotic. Meyers argued, for example, that the anal intercourse evident in the ‘Excurse’ chapter of Women in Love ‘sublimates Birkin’s homosexual desires by satisfying them in an alternative and perhaps more perverse way’.33 Welcome as this critique is, Meyers’s rather clinical focus on anal sexuality as somehow defining, determining or synonymous with masculine same-sex desire would seem to be rigidly misguided given the range of emotional, erotic and psychological aspects of Lawrence’s explorations of homosexual desire. Whatever Lawrence’s philosophical view of erotic relations between men or his own personal inclinations, avowedly homosexual men often filled him with anxiety, disgust and even rage. His 1915 letter to David Garnett, prompted by a visit to Cambridge at the home of Bertrand Russell in March 1915, is now infamous; it follows Lawrence’s glimpse of John Maynard Keynes emerging from a bedroom in his nightgown. It is foolish of you to say that it doesn’t matter either way – the men loving men. It doesn’t matter in the public way. But it matters so much, David, to the man himself … that it is like a blow of triumphant decay, when I meet Birrell or the others. I simply can’t bear it. It is so wrong, it is unbearable. It makes a form of inward corruption which truly makes me scarce able to live. Why is there this horrible sense of frowstiness, so repulsive, as if it came from deep inward dirt – a sort of sewer – deep in men like K[eynes] and B[irrell] and D[uncan] G[rant]. It is something almost unbearable to me … I myself never considered Plato very wrong, or Oscar Wilde. I never knew what it meant till I saw K., till I saw him at Cambridge. We went into his rooms at midday, and it was very sunny. He was not there, so Russell was writing a note. Then suddenly a door opened and K. was there, blinking from sleep, standing in his pyjamas. And as he stood there gradually a knowledge passed into me, which has been like a little madness to me ever since. And it was carried along with the most dreadful sense of repulsiveness – something like carrion – a vulture gives me the same feeling. I begin to feel mad as I think of it – insane. Never bring B. to see me any more. There is something nasty about him, like black-beetles. He is horrible and unclean. I feel as if I should go mad, if I think of your set, D. G. and K. and B. It makes me dream of beetles (2L 320–1).

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Evidently, Lawrence had determined that some sort of homosexual assignation had taken place, although the evidence he cites – Keynes emerging from a room in his pyjamas – is so scant as to suggest paranoid overreaching. Citing this letter, David Ellis has called Lawrence’s reaction both ‘hysterical’ and ‘homophobic’, and sees it as likely evidence of a Freudian ‘reaction formation’ arising from Lawrence’s own homosexual desires.34 As for beetles, in his 1978 study of Lawrence’s experience during the First World War, Paul Delany suggests that Lawrence’s reference to beetles may have had its source in the ancient Egyptian idea that scarab beetles were all male, mount from behind and laid their eggs in dung balls.35 Elsewhere, Lawrence made a distinction between insects and animals. ‘Yesterday, at Worthing, there were many soldiers’, he wrote in a 30 April 1915 letter to Ottoline Morrell lamenting the death of Rupert Brooke. ‘Can I ever tell you how ugly they were: “to insects – sensual lust”. I like sensual lust – but insectwise, no – it is obscene. I like men to be beasts – but insects – one insect mounted on another – oh God!’ (2L 331). Yet in the 1970s, an understanding of Lawrence as an audacious navigator of male and female homosexual consciousness found its most forceful incarnation outside of literary criticism and biography proper and in the realm of an expanding, youth-oriented popular culture.

LAWRENCE AND THE NEW COUNTERCULTURE Scholars of Lawrence’s work often see the 1970s as a low point in critical estimations of Lawrence’s fortunes given Millett’s mordant feminist treatment. However, the new sexual liberationist politics of the counterculture, girded by bestselling books such as Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959), with its celebration of the ‘Dionysian’ life and intense experience, Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969), which sought to explain the appeal of Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman and Charles Reich’s bestselling The Greening of America (1970), with its lyrical paean to cannabis, blue jeans and rock music, represented a pop culture version of Lawrentian values. Susan Sontag, writing on behalf of an ‘erotics of art’ in her 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, took aim at the ‘thick encrustations of interpretation’ that she claimed had built up around modernist writers such as Lawrence.36 In France, with radical psychoanalytic astringency, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari saluted Lawrence as psychically liberating in their bestselling Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (published in France in 1972 and translated into English in 1977), in which Lawrence joined Rimbaud, Proust, Artaud and Henry Miller as literary prophets who had forged a conceptual link between psychological repression and social oppression, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as the radical British psychiatrist R. D. Laing and the Frankfurt School social theorist Herbert Marcuse, two leading gurus of the counterculture.

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In what represents a high point in Lawrence’s popular culture fame, two major film adaptations highlighted the homoerotic element in his fiction: Mark Rydell’s 1967 Canadian film ‘The Fox’ and Ken Russell’s 1970 ‘Women in Love’, which brought Lawrence wide attention as a writer in tune with countercultural sexual transformations. Although the Rydell film generated controversy (the owner of a theatre showing the movie was convicted of promoting pornography in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1967), ‘The Fox’ was the fifth most popular movie in Britain in 1968 and Russell’s adaptation was one of the eight most popular films in Britain in 1970. Set in contemporary rural Canada, ‘The Fox’ manages to outdo Lawrence’s story in sexual explicitness. The two women Jill Banford (Anne Heywood) and Ellen March (Sandy Dennis) are unsuccessfully trying to run a chicken farm. They have a seemingly loving domestic life (there are scenes of them frolicking in the snow) but then a handsome young stranger Paul Grenfel (Keir Dullea) enters their lives and stirs up what until then had been a latent lesbian domestic relationship. In an extended scene, the women go to bed together and kiss. Paul also sleeps with Banford and then proposes marriage to her, an offer she declines. He leaves, and then returns, this time, it would seem, with murderous intent. There are several telling deviations from Lawrence’s story, among the most significant is that this male interlocutor obviously is not a ‘boy’ as he is described in Lawrence’s tale, but a fully fledged man, with all the determined authority of a man in erotic pursuit. With Dennis’s performance of March as a high-strung, tremulous neurotic, it is hard to see how this fragile woman can have a chance against her rival, a stalwart, dominating, chiselled Adonis. Forthright about male homoerotic themes, Russell’s adaptation of Women in Love, released in Britain in 1969 and in the United States in 1970, owed its frankness about this issue to a confluence of factors. The screenwriter and producer Larry Kramer (later founder of the AIDS activist organization Act-Up) found himself amid a romantic break-up with another man. He re-read Lawrence’s novel at the request of a film producer. In his notes to the published screenplay and in his commentary for a DVD version of the film, Kramer explains that the movie sought to be true to this material – in fact, the film-makers decided the ‘Gladiatorial’ scene should adhere very closely to the novel to evade the official British censor, who knew that the novel had been in publication in uncensored form since 1921. ‘There is no question that all the jockeying between Birkin and Gerald in the published novel, and thus in the screenplay, are attempts by Birkin to tell Gerald that he loves him and wants him’, notes Kramer.37 The ‘Gladiatorial’ sequence in Russell’s film is striking in its solemn, protracted fealty to the spirit of Lawrence’s pivotal chapter. Tellingly, the sequence comes immediately after the ‘Water-Party’ episode in which Gerald’s

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sister, Laura, and her groom have drowned, leading a grim-faced Gerald to tell Birkin, as the bodies of the couple are being brought away, ‘she killed him’. For Gerald, female treachery begets male–male erotics. In front of a fire in a sitting room at Gerald’s estate, the men talk of the need for intimate contact and agree to wrestle. One notable added detail in the film: there is a close-up of Gerald’s hand locking the door of the room, an indication that what is about to occur is socially proscribed. Bates and Reed are shot wrestling while completely naked, while the sombre score by Georges Delerue indicates that this is a characterdefining, violently enacted ritual. Yet, even with these popular adaptations that freely explored homoerotic issues, some prominent critics defensively sought to affirm a robustly heteronormative ethos in the writer’s fiction. In D. H. Lawrence: Flame into Being (1985), Anthony Burgess wrote of the ‘Gladiatorial’ chapter that ‘it is meshing of entities, not identities, of which the body is an essential part, but if sex comes into it it is not the sex of “gay” magazines’.38 The sweaty body-on-body contact dramatized in this chapter, we are instructed, is sheer metaphor, not actual sex or even eroticized gymnastics – and whatever the scene represents it must be isolated from the low, popular and repellant domain of ‘gay’ magazines. Where Stevens, Meyers and Maddox had fantasized about the possibility of homosexual romance during Lawrence’s sojourn in Cornwall, Burgess frets that this scene of man-on-man action might be confused with a product of the pornographic gay-male imagination. A similar note of anxiety is struck in Mark Spilka’s Renewing the Normative D. H. Lawrence (1992), the title of which conveys its strenuous effort at rehabilitating Lawrence into a sexual straight arrow.39

LAWRENCE’S QUEER LITERARY AFTERLIFE Probably the first self-conscious literary group to look to Lawrence as an inspiration was the British circle composed of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and Graham Greene, many of whom were semi- or sometimes openly homosexual. Yet the appeal of Lawrence for this cohort was not necessarily related to the writer’s treatment of homosexual themes. As Samuel Hynes has explained, Lawrence ‘remained throughout the thirties an heroic figure, tragic but wise in his understanding of the English sickness, a rebel and protester’.40 In a recently published interview conducted in 1979, Isherwood was asked if ‘stylistically he did hold a certain debt to Katherine Mansfield and E. M. Forster’ and if there were other writers who had influenced him. Isherwood responded that there was and he gestured to the canyon over which his Santa Monica house in Los Angeles looked (and in which the interview was conducted) in order to make his point:

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Yes, I would say there’s a great debt that is not apparent in the style so much, to D. H. Lawrence. What D. H. Lawrence said to me in effect was never mind what that canyon looks like, how does it look to you this morning when you’ve got a violent hangover and have just been left by your lover, when this has happened and that has happened? In other words, it’s his world, a totally subjective approach to what he wrote about, that makes his writing enormously exciting. Of course, I know that that’s only, in a sense, the negative side of the genius of Lawrence, who I think a very great genius. But it’s the excitement of the whole thing. It’s all through him. Nothing is outside him. So you really narrow your gaze down as though you were under water looking through some kind of goggles and you explore the world of Lawrence.41 Isherwood, who had been friends with Forster and who from the early 1970s would become increasingly frank in exploring themes of same-sex male erotics in his highly autobiographical fiction (and like Lawrence an exile from an England about which he had sharply conflicted feelings), acknowledges Lawrence not as a brave navigator of female and male homosexual consciousness – although, as we have seen, Lawrence often was – but as a truth-telling spirit whose radical subjectivity as a writer represented its own powerfully generating, galvanizing imaginative force.

NOTES 1 D. H. Lawrence, Memoir of Maurice Magnus, ed. Keith Cushman (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 93. 2 Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 153. 3 Howard Booth, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Male Homosexuality’, Review of English Studies, 53. 209 (February 2002): 86–107. 4 One of the foundational works of Queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), with its influential notion of homosocial triangulation in which two males form bonds through a female vector, was more appropriate for the mid-Victorian texts she examines than Lawrence’s writing, given the often unmediated desires central to his fiction. 5 Jonathan Dollimore, Sex, Literature, and Censorship (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001), p. 105. 6 Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, Hatred of Sex (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022). 7 Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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8 John Middleton Murry, Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931), p. 189. 9 John Middleton Murry, ‘Review of Aaron’s Rod, The Nation and The Athenaeum (12 August 1922)’, in D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. P. Draper (London: Routledge, Kegan, Paul), p. 177. 10 Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius but… . (New York: Macmillan, [1950] 1967), p. 175. 11 Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: New American Library, 1971), p. 114. 12 Scott Sanders, D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Five Major Novels (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 96. 13 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 51. 14 Frieda Lawrence and E. W. Tedlock, eds, Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1964), p. 360. 15 Letter from Barbara Weekley Barr to Edward Nehls, 29 August 1953 [?]‌, Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, Austin (cited in Booth, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Male Homosexuality’, p. 101). 16 C. J. Stevens, Lawrence at Tregerthen (D. H. Lawrence in Cornwall) (Albany, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1988), p. 36. 17 Meyers, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Homosexuality’, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 135–46, p. 131. 18 Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence: A Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), pp. 224, 213, 214. 19 Brenda Maddox, D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 239. 20 The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2005), p. 258. 21 For an extensive consideration of the relationship between Paul and Baxter as homoerotically freighted, see Howard Booth, ‘ “They Had Met in a Naked Extremity of Hate, and It Was a Bond”: The Later Chapters of Sons and Lovers, Psychoanalysis, and Male–Male Intimacy’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 39.2 (2014): 59–76. 22 Erwin Rosinberg, ‘ “After Us, Not Out of Us”: Wrestling with the Future in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love’, Modern Fiction Studies, 59.1 (Spring 2013): 1–25, 16. 23 Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 125. 24 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Little Brown, 1976), p. 171. 25 Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 190.

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26 Woods, Articulate Flesh, p. 126. 27 Cited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, introduction to (R l). 28 Stephen Potter, D. H. Lawrence: A First Study (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), pp. 71–2. 29 Horace Gregory, D. H. Lawrence: Pilgrim of the Apocalypse (New York: Grove Press, [1933] 1957), p. 47. 30 Diana Trilling, introduction to The Portable D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking Press, 1947), pp. 21–2. 31 For a fuller discussion of Plath’s relation to Lawrence, see Richard A. Kaye, ‘Sylvia Plath’s “D. H. Lawrence: The Tree of Knowledge Versus the Tree of Life” ’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 44.1 (2019): 155–74. 32 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto and Windus), p. 15. 33 Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Lawrence and Homosexuality’, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 146. 34 David Ellis, Love and Sex in D. H. Lawrence (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2015), pp. 56–8. 35 Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Viking, 1978), pp. 88–9. 36 Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Laurel Editions, 1964), p. 18. 37 Larry Kramer, Women in Love and Other Dramatic Works (New York: Grove, 2002), pp. 19–20. 38 Anthony Burgess, D. H. Lawrence: Flame into Being (New York: Arbor House, 1985), p. 125. 39 Mark Spilka, Renewing the Normative D. H. Lawrence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992). 40 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 95. 41 Conversation with Christopher Isherwood conducted by Dennis Bartel (26 August 1979) in Isherwood in Transit, ed. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), pp. 242–3.

PART III

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mental health and bibliotherapy PHILIP DAVIS

A HEALTH AND SAFETY WARNING Who ever thought D. H. Lawrence could be good for your mental health? The man himself was a danger. When he told Bertrand Russell that his life of intellectual pacifism was hardly worth living, Russell said he considered suicide – for at least 24 hours at any rate.1 When his friend John Middleton Murry disgusted him, Lawrence did not hesitate to write to Murry’s lover, Katherine Mansfield: ‘we must grow from our deepest underground roots, out of the unconsciousness, not from the conscious concepts we falsely call ourselves. Murry irritates me and falsifies me, and I must tell him so. He makes me false’ (2L 473). These were to Lawrence secondary human beings of clever consciousness. His message to them was: if the challenge of a really vital life has not been met, then be done with it, kill off what is already half-dead. Do not settle for the fail-safe substitutes we have now: just as we have butter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, and leather-substitute, so we have life-substitute. We have beastly benevolence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity, and poisonous ideals. (Fantasia of the Unconscious, PFU 162)

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Consciousness itself was often the worst and most lying substitute. Today it provides the well-meaning language of ‘mental health issues’ – of ‘resilience’, ‘mindfulness’ and ‘empathy’; of ‘bibliotherapy’ and ‘books on prescription’ – that Lawrence would have hated as ‘beastly, foul, stinking, and poisonous’, precisely for their hygienic well-meaningness. And so it is still a terrible risk to read and think and write of him. Take for example this imagined biographer, struggling to write what he fears is a secondhand and second-rate life of Lawrence. Suddenly one day in the midst of his work, he thinks he hears his own subject turning against him, in a coruscating voice re-forming itself out of the writings: You dare not live as a man ought … You fear primal impulses. Work which should be an extension of human consciousness you distort to the end-all of existence. You write mucksprout lives because you fear you have no life to live … I detest and loathe you.2 This itself is taken from a novel, Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives (1979), where the middle-aged biographer, a married man, has been having an affair with a much younger woman. He thinks that perhaps this relationship could not have come at a better time, a sexual reawakening to help him understand Lawrence better. But that opportunism has its own hubris. When the young woman leaves him, not only is he made impotent with his wife but his writing leaves him too. And then he does not know what his work has done to his life, or what his life has done to his work. He only knows that the voice of his own Lawrence would condemn him, his life and his writing, as a Lawrence-substitute. Whether in life or in fiction, what right has such a Lawrentian voice to launch these destructive attacks upon mental well-being? That is often the question readers ask of Lawrence’s hectoring intensity and aggression. There must be something wrong with him, they say, against which he is also fighting, in macho-compensation. But it is not as though Lawrence had not asked himself, or a version of himself, that question. ‘ “Even if everybody is wrong – where are you right?” ’ demands Ursula in Women in Love, ‘ “where are you any better?” ’ Birkin replies, ‘ “I? – I’m not right. … At least my only rightness lies in the fact that I know it.” ’ It infuriates me, he has just said, ‘ “that I can’t get right, at the really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I can’t get straight anyhow” ’ (WL 125–6). But the difference is that ‘at least … I know it’. And mainly, he thinks, people do not want to know it, precisely for the sake of a false secondary sense of protective well-being. But isn’t the ‘knowing it’ itself just another fake substitute? Birkin puts the challenge like this: ‘was it really only an idea, or was it the interpretation of

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a profound yearning?’ (WL 252). A profound yearning does not want to be a substitute, it wants a way back into being, and it holds on and on even from within the urgent negatives, ‘I am not right’, ‘I can’t get right’, in a refusal to be annulled. Not for Lawrence, Freud’s austere saying to his patients at the end of his Studies in Hysteria (1895): much will be gained if psychoanalysis succeeds in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. Here is what common unhappiness looks like to Lawrence. Here in Will Brangwen from the second generation of The Rainbow is what it feels like when the voices of condemnatory judgement or irrepressible yearning arise not from outside but from within: His life was shifting its centre, becoming more superficial. He had failed to become really articulate, failed to find real expression. He had to continue in the old form. But in spirit, he was uncreated. (R 191) This is compromise, wherein it seems sensible that he should ‘submit to his own inadequacy’, give up on the yearning and make do with what is left. And his wife Anna sees it, knows that the battle over and is ‘more gentle with him’. But at another more absolute level – a level so often signalled by a decisive new paragraph in Lawrence – it is also utterly terrible at the same time. It is almost no good continuing living like that, even if most of us do so in the name of a sort of realism. To such people Lawrence says, in condemnation, ‘You fear primal impulses.’ Why aren’t they screaming?3 Sane and hygienic thoughts are too often for Lawrence the surrender to having no real future, to living on after one’s life has effectively died, which he will not make and can barely accept. They are substitutes: secondary thoughts made by self-evacuation, by looking back on oneself as if from outside, and treating the I as a you or he. But consciousness – Lawrence insists through his favourite psychoanalyst, Trigant Burrow – ‘should be a flow from within outwards’. It should flow from the radical subjectivity of a human’s core, keeping that sense of inner centre alive, even though it is more raw and unfiltered and unreasonable than most of us dare admit. But the moment man became aware of himself he made a picture of himself, and began to live from the picture: that is, from without inwards. This is truly the reversal of life. And this is how we live. (IR 334) Determinedly putting others first, suffering from the very power of one’s own feelings, obeying the pious conventions: that is life toxic and in reverse. Instead, through his work Lawrence wants to keep us struggling for life inside the sheer unregulated mess of the thing, not at some externally pictured meta-distance. ‘An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them

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on to some mischief or merriment’; novels ‘are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches’ so safe and superior; and then this especially: whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it – if he wants a safe seat in the audience – let him read somebody else. (5L 201) And likewise, no polite obligation is laid upon the reader. ‘I first read Lawrence in a time of trouble’, said Sue, a reader in the experiment that follows, ‘and I took what I needed’. She had lost everything, was back in her parents’ home, divorced with two children, and reading The Rainbow on an access course. What she needed back then she took from the very beginning of the book, ‘the vision of the women looking towards the horizon and what was beyond it’. What follows are preliminary investigations in all that gets to a reader, the needful smash-and-grab in the thick of Lawrence’s scrimmage.

THE GROUP EXPERIMENT ‘I say feelings, not emotions’: Emotions are things we more or less recognize. We see love, like a woolly lamb … hate like a dog chained to a kennel … Our emotions are our domesticated animals … Convenience! Convenience! There are convenient emotions and inconvenient ones. The inconvenient ones we chain up, or put a ring through their nose. The convenient ones are our pets. Love is our pet favourite. (‘The Novel and the Feelings’ STH 202–3) But feelings are wilder animals, demanding of their right to live untamed. The measure of Lawrence is taken through his escalating degrees of movement out of convenient emotion. It makes readers complain of Lawrence’s searing over-intensity. ‘Intense’ or ‘over-intense’ were the words most chosen by participants in a reading group I brought together to read Lawrence via Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown period of 2020, when they were asked to describe Lawrence from any previous or initial reading of him. So what! he would reply: My field is to know the feelings inside a man, and to make new feelings conscious. What really torments civilised people is that they are full of feelings they know nothing about; they can’t realise them, they can’t fulfil

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them, they can’t live them. And so they are tortured. It is like having energy you can’t use – it destroys you. And feelings are a form of vital energy. (‘The State of Funk’, LEA 221) The civilized people in this case were twelve serious non-academic readers who had volunteered to be part of an experiment aimed towards the writing of this chapter, reading Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow together over twelve weeks, with each weekly session lasting ninety minutes.4 That is what I wanted, empirically: individuals engaged in live acts of specific reading, in place of general theories of ‘reader response’. The procedure was this. For those willing to do so, the novels could be read or re-read independently, outside the sessions, as we went along. But at each meeting the group read aloud together excerpts from that week’s section of chapters, the selection initially made by myself, but later by group members, as involvement and confidence increased. The passages, usually pre-distributed a few days in advance but read aloud in the session, were discussed in various unstructured ways – but always moving to-and-fro between the words on the page and the personal reactions triggered and evoked by them. I also sought to follow up on particularly interesting comments, on sudden specific moments that seemed to contain more than could be wholly captured at the time, by emailing participants to ask them to write to me with any further reflections on those moments. Granted, reading in a group is not the same as reading privately and individually; but it is a way of seeing something of what is otherwise invisible: what happens in individuals in the thick of the scrimmage, and then in their later reflections upon that raw experience. The first experience was how painful is the closeness involved in reading Lawrence’s work, and how much that produced a reader’s resistance. No surprise there: a really new novel or painting or piece of music ‘will always hurt’, Lawrence writes in ‘Morality and the Novel’. ‘You may judge of their reality by the fact that they do arouse a certain resistance, and compel, at length, a certain acquiescence’ (STH 175). ‘But he gets me into such terrible areas, in the family, or between the sexes’, said one participant, representatively, ‘I don’t like the uncomfortable feelings and memories that spring up from there’. But we have to ‘go through it’, said another, and that is what the group committed themselves to do in the weeks that followed. It never got easier; if anything, the discomfort increased. But the difficult feeling became something used, rather than something blocking. Halfway through the three months, Janet summarized it: Lawrence and his characters are so often ‘saying all the horriblest stuff – to get it out’. She coined ‘horriblest’ in the thick of the scrimmage, instead of the more conventional ‘worst’, to express the ugliness of what was being risked. But getting out all that repulsion, she insisted, even at the risking of alienating the readership, was as much exorcism as expression: ‘to see if anything better could survive it or come out of it’.

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My work with these readers involved taking as much note of their language, in their responses, as the language of the text they were intensely affected by. In the early stages of reading Sons and Lovers, that intensity was felt in the deeply inconvenient feeling of almost simultaneously (as they put it) feeling for Walter Morel, and hating what it would actually be like to have to live with him. In the thick of things, these prepositions seemed to hold the clue to the relationship more than the names of the emotions themselves. It was easier for people to take sides, either for or against the father, or later, via Paul, between the mother and Miriam. But the first breakthrough-development was for one person to have to try to hold both positions at the same time. Then they felt in trouble. Participant Helen, commenting on Paul’s cruelty to Miriam through the years of their increasingly tortuous relationship, said, ‘it only seems cruel when we can stand outside it’. But inside Paul, ‘because the writing makes it so hard to detach yourself ’, she went on, the lashing-out at Miriam’s vulnerability itself felt also vulnerable and desperate. ‘Both Paul and Miriam are powerless, though they have power over each other.’ It was not just a liberal seeing of both points of view. The simultaneity of the different perspectives made her feel ‘sometimes dizzy’. That was the thickness in the thick of the scrimmage. The alternative was to make the situation less horrible, easing the tension, ambivalence or conflict by making the passages more convenient to read. Early on, as group leader I would half-teasingly offer little alternatives, to see if the group felt happier with those instead. Actually, they were not at all happier with the more clichéd writing of sentiment that most of us can manage. So even in the shortest of sentences, at that micro level which gets under the skin, they would read: ‘Paul hated his father so’ (SL 87, my italics) – and then I would ask what difference it made if instead it was just ‘Paul hated his father’ or ‘Paul hated his father so much’. ‘It gets on your nerves – on your imagination of Paul’s nerves – more,’ said Helen again. ‘You can’t stay outside. You have to provide something that isn’t said, from what is.’ That was a second early breakthrough: the inner appreciation of the sudden opening of a sub-text, with its subvocal echoes and resonances for the involved reader. We went on to the childhood-sickness scene, also in Chapter Four: there Paul ill in bed, though gently attended by his often rough father, still wants his mother instead. I now offered Lawrence’s own alternatives, not mine: Lawrence at work and in action, revising and taking away material from the draft version entitled Paul Morel, for the final text of Sons and Lovers. ‘I wish she’d come’, the child sighs in Paul Morel, and the father first says: ‘Shall I stay with you, darling?’ Paul did not answer, not having the hardness to say the ‘No’ he intended. Morel walked around to the fire …

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Morel waited ‘ignominiously’ amidst the lack of human warmth, like an ‘intruder’ upon his own child. ‘I wish she’d come’, Paul sighed, at the end of half an hour, oppressed by his father’s presence. Then Morel went to the top of the stairs, calling softly: ‘Are you coming, Bertha! This child is fretting for you.’ (PM 32) But now in Sons and Lovers they saw Lawrence start again by cutting the secondary explicitness of Paul not having the ‘hardness to say No’, yet feeling ‘oppressed by his father’s presence’. How long will she be? the boy asks in the final version. Not long, is the reply, and then: The father waited undecidedly on the hearthrug for a moment or two. He felt his son did not want him. Then he went to the top of the stairs and said to his wife: ‘That childt’s axin’ for thee – how long art goin’ to be?’ ‘Until I’ve finished, good gracious! Tell him to go to sleep.’ ‘She says you’re to go to sleep,’ the father repeated gently to Paul. ‘Well, I want her to come,’ insisted the boy. (SL 91) ‘I say feelings, not emotions.’ They could feel this at both ends, not only all that is implicit in the boy in crying for her but at the same time the father wincing at the hearing of it. Then they were no longer reading from one sentence to another, but across and between two people. And so there Walter Morel is, caught at the stair-top between son and mother. That is the direct and subtle circuitry, beginning within the family, that Lawrence wants to establish, bare and without comment, even through its jars and discords: A family, if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the same, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver with the interchange, there is one long ceaseless flow of vitalistic communication between members of one family, a long, strange rapport … (Fantasia of the Unconscious, PFU 77) That is why my readers, likewise, started talking about ‘atmosphere’ and ‘litmus paper’ and ‘barometer’ in this scene, till they themselves began to form such a circuit between them, the novel having got thoroughly into the group. Suddenly for these readers in this charged and attuned setting, the very adverbs come alive, as one of them noted: ‘ “She says you’re to go to sleep”, the father repeated gently’; ‘The father waited undecidedly’; and finally, ‘He loitered about indefinitely’ (SL 91–2). It is not so explicit as the draft’s ‘ignominiously’.

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There is no longer the need for names and nouns and labels and explanations – they are ‘only ideas’. Instead there is feeling now, they noticed, even in the sheer sensitivity of pronouns: ‘I want her to come.’ ‘He felt his son did not want him’ (SL 91, my italics). ‘One never catches Lawrence – this is one of his most remarkable qualities – “arranging” ’, wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘Words, scenes flow as fast and direct as if he merely traced them with a free rapid hand on sheet after sheet. Not a sentence seems thought about twice: not a word added for its effect on the architecture of the phrase.’5 We saw that he did think twice; but even the third or fourth time round, he knows how to clear his way through as if for the first time again. ‘He naturally seems to feel when his words have got it right’, said group member Viv. Later I sent the group Lawrence’s voice, to add to the conversation in a way more congenial than Malamud’s poor Dubin suffered: Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? – or my mind? … My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. (‘Why the Novel Matters’, STH 193) That sheer physico-mental feel of ‘getting it right’ is a vital intuition in the making, steering and reading of these novels: it is indeed like a real form of health. For this group, the most important breakthrough came in week three of Sons and Lovers when Paul discusses with Miriam his mother’s life: ‘That’s what one must have, I think’, he continued; ‘the real, real flame of feeling through another person, once, only once, if it only lasts three months. See, my mother looks as if she’d had everything that was necessary for her living and developing … She knows – she has been there. You can feel it about her, and about him, and about hundreds of people you meet everyday.’ (SL 361–2) Did his mother have ‘it’? did his father have ‘it’? Yes. Did Miriam, did Clara Dawes? No. I even asked the group: Do you believe that you can tell whether people have had ‘it’ or not? Where ‘it’ is not only what in the mood of Lady Chatterley’s Lover might be called sex, ugly as Lawrence often found the little word, but all that is most passionately expressed by that vitality. And in reply the group variously said they thought that they often could, they could sense those people who had had that ‘it’ and those who have not. They could recognize the ruthless and decisive marks of life and death, of saved and lost.

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From then on, as group leader I proposed that we were going to read and to steer blind by some sense of ‘it’, the unnameable mark of where the living or dying was at any moment. ‘You should have seen him as a young man’, the mother had cried suddenly to Paul, washing her husband’s back again on his return from the pit, and drawing herself up to imitate the old man’s once youthful bearing: Morel watched her shyly. He saw again the passion she had had for him. It blazed upon her for a moment. He was shy, rather scared, and humble. Yet again he felt his old glow. And then, immediately, he felt the ruin he had made during these years. He wanted to bustle about, to run away from it. (SL 236) ‘It’ is the passion, the old glow, but also the ruin he had then made of ‘it’ which now he has to run away from thinking of. That is what a reader does with Lawrence, and it is what Lawrence himself did as a reader: find the ‘it’ and first of all just point to its vitality and location, ahead of giving it a name or appraising its status. Reading the French-American essayist Hector St John Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), he found himself rather bored by what the author thought he thought: the over-generalized theme of the American Dream, the apparently big idea of the New World and a false Rousseau-like love of innocent Nature, sweet and pure. Instead, Lawrence sees Crèvecœur most alive, in small and further down, in the predicament of tiny quails in winter: Often, in the angles of the fences, where the motion of the wind prevents the snow from settling, I carry them both chaff and grain; the one to feed them, the other to prevent their tender feet from freezing fast to the earth, as I have frequently observed them to do. (SCAL 36–7) That beautiful little detail about – that minute human care for – those tender bird feet: that’s it, says Lawrence: Crèvecœur knows the touch of birds’ feet, as if they had stood with their vibrating, sharp, cold-cleaving balance, naked-footed on his naked hand. (SCAL 37) There ‘it’ is in the life of the detail – the detail that in Lawrence is more than just description, by having (as Viv put it) a sense of the special without deliberately having to say that it is so. ‘We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. IT is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us’ (SCAL 30).6

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LAWRENCE’S TRACK AND TRACE What Lawrence is best at is getting things in the right order. It is what he insists upon when he says, rather esoterically, in the unused Foreword to Sons and Lovers, that it should not be as it is written in John’s Gospel, that the Word was made Flesh, but rather the other way round, that in the beginning the Flesh was made Word (SL 467). It is Flesh first, the physically felt and unspoken that demands expression and only then becomes the Word. In the same way, Lawrence’s greatest contribution to psychology is his insistence that the unconscious is not primarily Freudian, is not a backward secondary formation from consciousness, guiltily repressed and banished. It comes as most purely and primally itself before consciousness. Because for Lawrence the movement of genuine vitality is almost always forward, improvised in the moment to feel its way along in fractional advance of consciousness, with consciousness catching up rather than planning ahead. ‘This is the use of the mind – a great indicator and instrument. The mind as author and director of life is anathema’ (Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, PFU 43). Anathema: I too did not want to start from what I will call the ‘top bit’ of the readers in the reading group: the uncreative opinions, the habitual responses, the preset mental agendas that do not really do the people who hold them justice in respect of their deeper selves. I looked for what Lawrence called the ‘inchoate’: thoughts still contained within all that prompted them, and not yet finished or completely understood; times when IT is the priority regardless of surrounding emotions of unhappiness or discomfort. ‘What experience do I want?’ says the young Will Brangwen when Anna’s parents say they are too young to marry, without experience or money (R 118). You can’t have experience in order to get experience. For the sake of a real life there must remain at the core of human beings ‘a certain innocence or naïveté’ wrote Lawrence: ‘this does not mean that the human being is nothing but naïve or innocent … But in his essential core he is naïve’ (‘John Galsworthy’, STH 211). Though we think we are not meant to be innocent any longer, it is not parental experience or Freudian guilt but naïvety that is still somewhere at the core.7 ‘What did it matter?’ is one of Lawrence’s great insouciant phrases at times, making for a larger world irrespective of convenience. When you write biography, says Malamud’s Dubin, you want to write about people who will make you strain to understand them. ‘Dubin said it was like chasing a runner you would never catch up with.’8 In Lawrence, the deeper realities are to be reached by speed, by something going quicker, being more alive, sensitive and ready for action, than the safe default of a later normal consciousness. That meant I was looking for ways for the readers to follow Lawrence’s lead, in the quick penetrative spirit of Lawrence, rather than

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capture and paraphrase him. The language of conventional literary criticism was not going to help, when it is too far from the wilder, rawer immediacy of reading. In a music masterclass, a virtuoso violinist cannot just verbally explain to the students how to do it better: he or she shows them the difference through demonstrably comparing their version with their pupils’. Equivalently I sought the pre-articulate in the participants, the impetus in naïve inarticulacy, because for Lawrence that is where genuine articulation should start from, should struggle out of – whereas modern education too often provides a ready-made vocabulary that is acquired top down, more than hard-won from below. Most of a child’s questions are, and should be, unanswerable. They are not questions at all. They are exclamations of wonder. ‘Why is grass green?’ It means, ‘Is it really green?’ Don’t knowingly answer by mumbling something about ‘chlorophyll’. Respond in the same spirit: ‘Because it is.’ (Fantasia of the Unconscious, PFU, 123–4)9 What literature gives is what Lawrence called ‘art-speech’. And with art-speech readers must want not only to re-perform and recreate it within themselves, as if reading were their instrument, but also take something away from it in themselves. Art-speech exists, writes Lawrence, for two reasons: first to produce the primary emotional experience – nothing without or before that. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us. (SCAL 14) But if the applied and practical help of what we now call bibliotherapy is a genuine possibility, it means not letting yourself off the art to get to the message: it means staying for a long time within a language that has its effects within the nervous system, at a level below reductive or convenient utility, and prior to slow, over-deliberate consciousness. Lawrence’s was a two-handed fight – to find a ground for art-speech between two things he hated: on the one hand art for art’s sake, and a substitute language for self-help, on the other. So, I offered the group, individually, an instrument that I hoped would give further access to reading’s nervous system. Poetry Explorer10 was a software programme that my colleague in Computing Sciences at the University of Liverpool, Phil Jimmieson, and myself had recently designed for the reading of poetry to try to employ a creative pre-language in action. The work that my research team had previously done with eye-tracking, voice recognition and brain-imaging was relevant here. Eye-movements in the very act of reading were not straightforward, certain words prompting fixations or retrogressions.

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Voices likewise changed from their normal monotones during moments of sudden emphases of feeling; so too with pulses or galvanic skin responses. In EEG and fMRI experiments, the surges in electrical activity or oxygen-flow represented responses in the brain that, behind the scenes, were prior to thought and yet thought-laden. In particular, we characterized these varying responses in terms of the rawest material for language: a ‘wow’, a ‘what!?’ an ‘a-ha!’, an ‘ugh’. These guttural expressions of surprise and excitement stood for the primal experience of immediate responsive feeling, out of which thought bursts. ‘Feelings are a vital energy.’ Designed for tablets and laptops, Poetry Explorer enabled its users to take a poem, copy and paste it in, and instead of leaving it as a flat inert and finished thing, open it up again, highlighting any word or phrase that feels like a hotspot, that catches you as you go along, without or before your yet knowing why. The reader could then use arrows to make links between those words up, down and across the text, as if by some intuitive electrical or synaptic connection tracing the journey of the poem’s inner brain-workings. And finally, the reader could try out alternative words and different formulations as in the optician’s eye-test: does this word make it easier? is putting the line or sentence this way-round somehow better? You do not have to speak, you can just point, tap a button, drag a word. Or split the screen so that two of you can compare gut-instinct choices, possible variations in trial-and-error, simply by doing them. We had hardly trialled it with prose excerpts before. But it is somewhat like what Birkin tries to do by copying a Chinese drawing of geese instead of just looking at it. ‘ “But why do you copy it?” ’ Hermione asks him, ‘ “Why not do something original?” “I want to know it,” he replied. “One gets more of China, copying this picture, than reading all the books” ’ (WL 89). Initially, Poetry Explorer might look like an artificial, technological aid, but the wager was that in actual practice it could kick-start its user into recreating a Lawrence-like form of physical thinking. Two of us started doing this kind of thinking with just one sentence in The Rainbow – a compressed epitome of the sheer movement of the whole novel across its three related generations. It came at the end of Chapter Nine (R 241) when after the death of Tom, Lydia tells her granddaughter, young Ursula, the story of her own early life, as if to transmit something of it to her over the novel’s ages. Before Tom, there had been a first marriage to the Polish man, Paul Lensky, by whom she bore Ursula’s own mother Anna. When Lensky lay dying, ‘I don’t know what you will do’, he had said, ‘I am a failure from beginning to end. I cannot even provide for my wife and child.’ But now in retrospect you can see, she tells Ursula, ‘ “It was not for him to provide for us.” ’ Then, this crucial sentence: ‘ “My life went on, though his stopped, and I married your grandfather.” ’ One sentence of three clauses which could have made three

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separate sentences. We did not say anything; I just re-made the sentence for the moment, moving the second clause into first place. ‘Though his life stopped, mine went on …’ Better or worse? Worse, said the person with whom I was trying it – even though this version must have seemed more easily successive, straightforward and chronological. And then what? ‘Mine went on, and I married your grandfather.’ But Lydia did not do quite that of course; instead, I inserted, ‘and I married the man who was to become your grandfather’ – which again thins out and flattens and normalizes. But Lawrence’s sentence is not put into three pieces, spelt out in static story-tale facts; he wanted the flow, and life’s flow having to go on through the loss of the first man, despite and not simply after it. As if through the whole sentence ‘my hand is alive as it writes these words, it flickers with a life of its own’. This was not about learning some specific lesson, it was about being able to follow whatever was implicit through the sheer movement in life, in time, through the very psychology of its grammar. And that in a novel that from the very beginning was a great composition of horizontals and verticals. It bore out what Helen had said in one of the sessions, ‘We read along, horizontally, but jolts and changes occur within the process, and we feel them, we are caught by them even while we are still going on’.11 Accordingly, my Explorer partner used the highlighter to point up three words that caught her, and then add the dynamic of directional arrows:

My life went on, though his stopped, and I married your grandfather.

‘Stopped’ is one of those jolts, a vertical or retarding movement. But I wanted to follow the notation not just through the verbs. So, I silently replied by marking a linear movement through the pronouns instead:

My life went on, though his stopped, and I married your grandfather. And she then came back with something finer still:

My life went on, though his stopped, and I married your grandfather.

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Something is improvising itself here, as both Janet and Rebecca had said in previous sessions. On through though to and marks the circuit which makes these micro-details interstitial parts of the larger motion in process through them.12 That made me remember this, which I later looked up from Lawrence’s Apocalypse: the emotional consciousness of man has a life and movement quite different from the mental consciousness. The mind knows in part, in part and parcel, with full stop after every sentence. But the emotional soul knows in full, like a river or a flood. (A 142) All did not stop with Paul Lensky, feeling himself ‘a failure from beginning to end’. Sentences that are too separate and self-contained are for Lawrence the mental consciousness that chops things up, the culmination being the syllogism working like a machine printout on the page: All humans are mortal. I am a human. I am mortal. But emotional consciousness made for a charged space left between the sentences, and underlying the clauses, like the subtext between the voices in dialogue. That is why Lawrence so often begins a sentence or even a new paragraph with ‘And’, or ‘But’ or ‘So’, denying its separateness, saying it is not as separate as it might look if the page were the only reality. This is art-speech. It is what the feeling in a word or through a phrase could suddenly do, create an opening ahead for a possible future for a human being: ‘in his fullest living he does not know what he does, his mind, his consciousness, unacquaint, hovers behind … Altogether devoid of knowledge and conscious motive is he when he is heaving into uncreated space’ (‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, STH 41). And yet to take this long over a quick, single twelve-word sentence? But it was really quick when we actually did it. And besides, my Lawrence snaps back: You only really wanted a simple therapy with messages in capital letters! Instead, subliminally, all those little things, like ‘on’, ‘though’, ‘and’ accumulate more and more, until finally they communicate themselves to Ursula at the macro level of suddenly realized translation: the door opened on to the greater space, the past, which was so big, that all it contained seemed tiny, loves and births and deaths, tiny units and features within a vast horizon. (R 242) The tiny and the greater work together. Back in the sessions themselves, there was an increasing sense of this different calibration. It was like the great breaths of the dying mother towards the end of Sons and Lovers: the great intake, held awhile, till given out again, and then through a great suspended space that could have

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been the end, irregularly resumed. What could match that? Not the lamed attempt afterwards to offer marriage to Miriam. Only the great vision of space at the end of the novel: ‘so much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing’ (SL 464). Or in The Rainbow Tom gives away his stepdaughter Anna at the altar – she who after all the years of achieved closeness had suddenly said to him in his opposition to her marrying Will, ‘ “You are not my father” ’ (R 118). And that with the memory of our reading two months earlier, across the books and the generations, Paul Morel’s ‘ “I want her to come” ’. And Tom is here at Anna’s wedding, feeling ‘still as unsure and unfixed as when he had married himself ’ (R 125), with so many of the group knowing what it was to give away a daughter with the emotion of hidden sadness even amid the celebration. And this seemed the same thing as they knew – only enlarged and realized deeper down, more purely itself, without filter or mitigation. That intensified ‘more’ was something group-member Lydia had pointed to in what normally would be a minor incident. It was in Chapter Eight when Ursula as a young child finds her father Will berating her for having thoughtlessly trodden on his sown seed, when she was meant to be helping him. ‘Why were the footprints there?’ thinks Ursula, ‘She had not wanted to make them’: ‘It had shocked him in his intent world to see the zigzagging lines of deep little foot-prints across his work.’ But then if it had shocked the father: ‘The child was infinitely more shocked’ (R 207). It was that word ‘infinitely’ that struck Lydia, as something more than cliché in this context: it was like an electric shock, she said, a depth suddenly opening and opening. And it is on a quite different scale, she added, Lawrence’s scale. I remember as a mother my daughter’s wedding, I remember as a child a parent’s irritation: But I am a normal person. At most, I will peel one or two skins off the onion. But Lawrence keeps peeling more and more away. It is dangerously overwhelming, it is like losing one’s hold on the world – but I love it. This in itself is a wonderful bit of what I would still call art-speech, here carried on through the reader herself. Because after all the mute pointing and the noting, it is as if people then feel they must try, finally, to say straight what it is they have done, made by the overflowing mass of all they have picked up to say what it means to them: they can hardly contain the feeling without also trying to speak it. That is like Lawrence himself, the writing of psychology and philosophy coming only after the work of fiction, to get it to say more of what it has meant.13 And that again is in the right order. In this experiment, these blurted-out utterances at the beginning of a response have been more valuable to me than learned articles at the end. Highly finished academic pieces have not shown the thought suddenly coming into being, and could not include those

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dimensions of ‘pre-’ and ‘sub-’ that are so crucial to the feeling of a thought and what it actually means within a person. ‘We have had the feelings … But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them.’ If this was therapy it was not therapy as conventionally conceived, no more than psychology in Lawrence is like the norm. What was being dug up in this way was not names or labels but ways of being – senses of Movement, of Size, and of Dimension, in place of the depressing stuckness of habits, rules and norms. When Lydia pointed to ‘the child infinitely more shocked’, suddenly it made another group-member, Jilly, stop and recall something from the very beginning of the chapter and the beginning of a life – a link and echo backwards that felt more important than simply going on to the next thing. Jilly went back to read us this: From the first, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge, it was so strong and came out of the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him, because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent? (R 196) We tried it out within the group as it would be in Poetry Explorer. You might think most obviously to highlight the call between ‘baby’ and ‘father’, but Lawrence does better to insert ‘the young father’. That is where ‘it’ is in the double-take surprise – the subtler relativism of which, in its own vulnerability, makes you feel again how ‘he dared scarcely acknowledge’. Or you might put a full stop after that ‘acknowledge’ – but then have to think why it would be less like Lawrence to have ‘It was so strong and came out of the dark of him’ as a simply separate sentence. Tagged on to the first sentence, answered Jilly, ‘it was so strong …’ added emergent power to the ‘it’. And then again, in the next sentence, the child’s ‘cry’ most obviously goes with the father’s ‘echo’ in this early communication between them – but really for Jilly the vital word, the deeper notation in relation also to Lydia’s ‘infinite’, was ‘unfathomed’. Lawrence himself had known this. According to the typescript he had first written, ‘the answering echo from the far, dark distances in himself ’, and then altered it to ‘the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself ’ in its place (R 598). But these italics and the report of all that the readers say around them are words and words and more words. Only, it does not seem so minute or feel merely trivial when you can see it in action, and can make it happen again live on the Explorer’s mental screen, so like the screen of a reader’s mind bearing the writer’s text. The app is not of course essential, it is just one way of seeing what the readers’ brain, mind, gut and heart-work are in action, like showing them wired up. There is the therapeutic, in what is alive and recreative. There

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you begin to be part of the circuitry through those little words, ‘it’, ‘so’, ‘of ’, ‘from’, ‘in’ and ‘such’, that are less like words now than electrical impulses or firing neurons within the activation: From the first, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge, it was so strong and came out of the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him, because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent? ‘It is right it begins with “From the first” and ends on “Must he know … ?” ’ Jilly concluded, ‘It is that Lawrence keeps stretching you. You think you know where he is going – and then he goes further. And further – infinite, unfathomed – in modified repetition of the words, trying themselves out, going on and on into deeper dimensions. And there is Will Brangwen like us in normal, hating to confront the deep inner space.’ ‘Must he know … ?’ She wrote to me later: ‘the main thrust of the novels is the internal sense of the world. The novels are full of rîtes of passage but external events are few and far between. It is that the layers are stripped away. And then the intensity is in the experience rather than the deed.’ In that world, answering echoes travel alarmingly across space and time, she wrote, making strange new links both across the novel and with the reader: It is what goes on in the inner lives below the surface that touches or triggers deep memories in a reader, memories of a blind feeling rather than an event. And most interesting to me are those unexpected memories which can be uncomfortable or painful. And maybe this is why they are buried, and why some people find DHL so upsetting. That is the force of the psychological stripping away of layers that another group-member, Donna, said she ‘instantly’ felt on reading the words about Ursula as a young woman: ‘Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead’ (R 404). ‘Always’, she echoed, ‘my life has been like this, an opening and then it closes. Ursula can go on because she’s young and has stamina; I can’t.’ But it still seemed a powerful thing to be able to say, at the basic minimal it-ness of Paul in ‘a nothingness, and yet not nothing’. This is multidimensional reading, rather than something thinner and more straightforward. Amid the openings and closings, reading Lawrence means venturing through a world larger than we normally can allow, though it is still recognizably ours. Group-member Jackie wrote that it is like space and time travel, on earth:

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It is like moving in and out of different realms, constantly, often still in one when moving into another, as if living in blurred watercolour. I’m not a trekkie, a sci-fan fan, but it’s like when the screen goes all wiggly and characters suddenly find selves elsewhere, still coming to terms with what’s happened, whilst at the same time trying to work out what is happening now and next. ‘He felt himself tiny, a little upright figure on a plain, circled round with the immense, roaring sky … He would go on with his wife, he and she like two children camping in the plains’ (R 126). The feel of the horizon, said Sue, having again her first experience of the novel, ‘has never really left me, though it has dimmed at times’. Bibliotherapy in Lawrence is not a psychological solution, a cure or an end. In a way psychology is through him only a very powerful tool for taking readers beyond their norms. It is a means of steering towards a greater ontology, a larger vision of the nature, scale and movement of being in the world, of IT, whatever its cost in pain or its expression through sorrow. What did that matter? Look, we have come through, said one of the group, wryly, in the final session.

NOTES 1 The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1951–69), Vol. 2, p. 14. 2 Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979), pp. 318–19. 3 As in the poem ‘The Old Fools’ by that admirer of Lawrence, Philip Larkin: ‘do they fancy there’s really been no change /… If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange; / Why aren’t they screaming?’ 4 This experiment was conducted via The Reader (see www.therea​der.org.uk) and the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool (https://www.liverp​ool.ac.uk/hum​anit​ies-soc​ial-scien​ces-hea​lth-medic​ ine-tec​hnol​ogy/read​ing-lit​erat​ure-and-soci​ety/). The twelve participants were female aged thirty–seventy, though two males and one female who were not able to attend the sessions received the excerpts and contributed by email. Some had been members of my part-time Masters programme up to fifteen years previously. Under the circumstances, I acted as both reader-leader of the group and researcher; in this pilot there was no control group or use of contrasting material. Some participants preferred to be anonymous or have a pseudonym, but I am glad to be able to express explicit gratitude for contributions from Viv Churney, Jackie Cunningham, Sue Highfield, Janet Lewison, Lydia Moore, Jilly Reynolds, Rebecca Reynolds, Helen Thresher and Donna Tomlinson, all cited by their first names in the text. The relation to psychology in practice is adumbrated in footnotes 6, 7, 9 and 12.

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5 Virginia Woolf, ‘Notes on D. H. Lawrence’, in The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), p. 80. 6 Compare the psychoanalyst Bion and his use of ‘0’ to stand for ‘the really real’ as a regulative orientation without words, in my chapter ‘Wild Aesthetics: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Art for My Sake’, in The Question of Aesthetics, ed. George Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Bion along with William James offers within psychology a powerful account of what they both call ‘wild’ (untamed) thinking. 7 For a psychoanalyst’s account of an essentially innocent self, venturing ahead of a witnessing mind, see Christopher Bollas, ‘Mind against Self ’, in The Mystery of Things (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 86–7. 8 Malamud, Dubin’s Lives, pp. 303–4. 9 See also Daniel Stern, Diary of a Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1990) and Forms of Vitality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) in relation to pre-verbal rhythms and attunement to sources of life, from babyhood onwards. 10 See guide https://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~phil/PEApp/Poe​try Explorer guide.pdf and download https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/poe​try-explo​rer/id153​6973​486. 11 Malamud himself was much occupied with the dimensional powers of composition in ‘the poetry of vertical and horizontal’: see my Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 105, 170, 297, 342. 12 On the use of these particles in a forward grammar and its relation to Lawrence, see my book, My Reading: William James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022): The young Lawrence read James with interest. 13 ‘And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one’s experiences as a writer and as a man’ (PFU 65).

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Language and style VIOLETA SOTIROVA

As a writer, D. H. Lawrence is probably not best known for his stylistic achievement. Yet careful examination of the language of his works reveals meticulous and sensitive attention to linguistic detail, a keen ear for the effects that language can produce and a masterful ability to embody and enact meaning in language. But in the course of his reception as a writer, Lawrence was more often attacked for his use of language than lauded for it. As Michael Bell remarks, ‘much of his early reception during, and shortly after, his lifetime was as an artless writer and simplistic thinker whose naivety was evidenced in his repetitious and insistent didacticism. His heavy-handed style, only too fatally, revealed the man.’1 Although more recent criticism has remedied this perception of Lawrence’s heavy use of repetition, criticism of his style did not just target repetition. More generally, Lawrence is condemned to an inferior position as far as linguistic mastery is concerned, at least in relation to Joyce. This verdict is given by a fine stylistician, not one of his early critics. ‘It is hard to see’, says Katie Wales in her book on The Language of James Joyce, ‘how F. R. Leavis writing in The Great Tradition (1948) should see D. H. Lawrence as the more creative master of language, and Ulysses as a “dead end” ’, a surprise stemming from a recognition of Joyce as ‘the greatest manipulator of literary language since Shakespeare’.2 But Lawrence deserves a place in the literary canon for his ability to use language so evocatively that it ceases to purely refer and starts to evoke and enact meaning. The chapter will explore this argument by focusing on several aspects of Lawrence’s style that stand out as some of the best examples of his stylistic achievement.

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More serious engagement with the language of Lawrence’s texts, undertaken by stylisticians and linguistically minded critics, has substantiated Leavis’s broad pronouncement that Lawrence is ‘so much more significant in relation to the past and future, so much more truly creative as a technical inventor, an innovator, a master of language, than James Joyce’, not so much as an assertion of Lawrence’s value vis-à-vis Joyce, but as a claim to restore Lawrence’s importance as a master of language.3 In the first book-length study of Lawrence’s language, Allan Ingram paves the way for a closer scrutiny of both Lawrence’s linguistic choices on a local level, which contribute to the expressiveness of individual scenes in his novels, as well as for an exploration of the stylistic embodiment of wider philosophical and artistic questions, such as a new language for the feelings, a language that can express the relation between men and women, or a language that ‘crystallises the knowledge of a character who cannot yet aspire to the language for herself ’.4 The three main strands of Lawrence’s prose language that Ingram identifies are the syntactic and lexical enactment of meaning, the authentic representation of character idiom, including dialect, and the expression of the viewpoints of male and female characters, with a separate chapter devoted to Lawrence’s poetry. While the local analyses offer an insight into some intricate patterns of syntax and semantic word choices, the wider philosophical issues as embodied in language are not always easy to map onto specific linguistic structures. A more thorough use of the tools of stylistic narratology, and in particular the techniques available for the representation of character consciousness, would have enabled this kind of analysis. The same can be said about the use of non-standard varieties which can be explored making use of the full range of tools that sociolinguistics can offer. However, each of these strands of Lawrence’s stylistic achievement has been investigated in further depth in studies grounded more solidly in linguistics and stylistics. This chapter will explore these three aspects of Lawrence’s style – linguistic enactment, use of sociolinguistic varieties and the representation of consciousness – as they emerge as the most emblematic techniques of his texts.

ICONIC ENACTMENT The enactment of meaning in Lawrence’s writing, noted by critics such as Ingram and Bell, is an instance of what in linguistics is known as iconicity.5 As a semiotic term, iconicity describes the similarity between a sign and the object that it designates, or in the case of language the relationship of similarity between linguistic structure and meaning.6 Alongside its referential function (referring to the world it tries to depict), literary language is the most powerful example of the representational function of language, mirroring mimetically the meaning that it is trying to express.7 Although all literary language can be viewed as iconic in comparison with other uses of language, writers can

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practise iconic enactment to varying degrees.8 The particularly iconic quality of Lawrence’s prose style has been captured in critical evaluations, such as meaning being subliminally suggested and his prose being ‘incantatory’.9 Enactment: Syntax and grammar A well-known example of stylistic achievement, analysed by at least four critics, is the opening of Lawrence’s short story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. Walter Nash’s (1977) account of scene setting in the second paragraph of the opening offers much insight into how a descriptive opening can foreshadow some of the major themes of the story – the oppression of the individual by the industrial environment and the alienation experienced by the main character in her relationship. Regrettably, this analysis owes part of its fame to Peter Barry’s (1985) vehement attack on the stylistic approach per se and on Nash’s analysis as an example. While Barry may be right that a couple of linguistic features may have been subjected to overinterpretation in Nash’s analysis, the general drift of his argument that stylistics is arbitrary and that grammar is nothing more than a set of rules that do not have any connection to the meaning expressed is wrong.10 The detailed analysis of the opening offered by Leech and Short (2007) shows that unequivocally: there are hardly any lexical and syntactic choices that are not suggestive of the main themes of the story.11 Peter Stockwell (2019) substantiates further the impression of ‘suppressive power’ in the opening of the story by pointing out the cognitive and grammatical prominence attributed to inanimate objects or the natural environment, as opposed to the lack of agency associated with the human figures. Items of the natural and industrial environment ‘receive highly active, fast, bright or anomalous verbal processes: as well as the engine stumbling, threatening, thumping and trapping, the colt “outdistanced it”, the gorse “flickered”, the withered oak leaves “dropped”, the birds “pulling at the scarlet hips” “made off ”, the dusk “crept”, the smoke “cleaved”, the fields were “forsaken”, the fowls “abandoned their run” ’.12 While Lawrence’s figurative language and grammatical choices have been explored in depth in these two analyses, it is quite telling of the richness of Lawrence’s style that a revisiting of the story’s opening can yield further linguistic detail that previous critics have not noticed, but which plays a prominent role in setting the scene for the unfolding plot. This is the opening paragraph: The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway-line to Underwood, drew back

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into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak-leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up. (PO 181) The opening paragraph encapsulates Stockwell’s observations about the prominence of inanimate or nature entities, not just because (as he argues) they are coupled with cognitively more prominent verbs, but also because they constitute the grammatical subjects in all main clauses but two. The two exceptions out of fifteen are ‘a woman’ and ‘the miners’. The subject of a clause is important as it appears at the start of the clause and constitutes what M. A. K. Halliday calls ‘the theme’ of the sentence/clause – the new information – that attracts the reader’s attention.13 But a further pattern emerges, if we consider the semantics of grammatical subjects in main clauses, that adds more significance to Lawrence’s careful grafting of the opening scene of the story. Of the fifteen main clause subjects, five are noun phrases referring to the locomotive engine or parts associated with it, three refer to the headstocks that take miners down to the coal seams, two to the mines and three to nature: Engine-related subjects Main clause the small locomotive engine it the trucks they the smoke from the engine

Headstocks

Nature subjects

the clumsy black the colt headstocks the fields the two wheels the fowls the winding-engine

Mines-related subjects

Human subjects

the pit-bank

a woman

the tapering chimneys the miners [and the clumsy black headstocks] of Brinsley Colliery

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Engine-related subjects Subordinate clause it

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Nature subjects

Mines-related subjects

Human subjects

which (the colt)

flames

she

the withered oak leaves the birds that (the dusk)

This predominance of clause subjects referring to the locomotive engine, the headstocks (or the winding engine) and the bank and chimneys of the mine adds a further layer of complexity to the interpretation of the opening, as that part of the story that sets up expectations for what is to come. All the critical interpretations offered so far have some basis in the linguistic construction of the first and second paragraph of the story. So it is true, as Stockwell argues, that non-human subjects command more agency and attention. We can also find evidence for Nash’s observation about the ‘suppressive power’ of the industrial environment, albeit the focus of his analysis was the second paragraph of the opening.14 And for all his condemnation of stylistics, Barry also makes a point that can be evidenced through the language of the text’s opening: namely that ‘the pattern in the text seems to suggest that the world of machines will never totally triumph over the human world’, which ‘will always interpose itself … within the mechanised world’.15 His interpretation is witnessed in the slightly more even distribution of nature versus machine subjects if we include subordinate clauses in the counts. However, even if we take into account the increased number of nature subjects by including subordinate clauses, their subordinate grammatical status makes them thematically subordinate to the engine-related and minesrelated clause subjects, which lends more weight to Nash’s position. This purely syntactic arrangement, based on the simple feature of grammatical clause subject, signals already from the start of the story a great deal about the focus and later development of the plot as illustrated by the connections I have made with the existing critical evaluations. But rather than extrapolating from this simple quantitative syntactic analysis to the wider theme of industry versus human beings, I want to suggest that syntactic arrangement here plays a significant local role too, one that is solely intratextual, but nevertheless of great enactive and suggestive power. The seven/eight clause subjects referencing the train engine, the trucks, the smoke, the headstocks, the winding-engine and the wheels, and so on

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create a subliminal focus for the reader not only as a symbol of the industrial world – after all, Lawrence could have chosen to use clause subjects related to a different aspect of industrialization – but because of their importance for bringing the coal and the miners out of the pit and because they stand out as the embodiment of the mechanized world the miners are forced to inhabit and depend on. Combined with the further reference to the mine and its chimneys, the overall number of clause subjects relating to the mines is overwhelmingly bigger than any other participant or entity in the story world so far. Moreover, the only clause subject that consists of two coordinated noun phrases, which ensures its salience, is ‘the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery’, another reference to the mine. All these references signal the intratextual significance of the mines for the lives of the characters and the plot – this is where one of the main protagonists works and this is where the tragedy of the plot happens. That these sentence and clause subjects have not been chosen accidentally (though by this I do not mean to suggest that Lawrence necessarily consciously chose them), is further powerfully evidenced in the final two sentences of the passage: The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the windingengine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up. What we find in these sentences is a grammatical feature not present in any other sentence of the opening, including this paragraph and the following (which is the focus of Nash’s analysis): the past progressive aspect of the verb – ‘were spinning’ and ‘were being turned up’. The use of the non-finite progressive, that is, in the form of a present participle, has been noted by Helen Baron in 2013 as a hallmark of Lawrence’s lively and dynamic prose.16 Comparing the opening of an anonymous short story, which critics had tried to attribute to Lawrence, with his first published piece ‘A Prelude’, Baron argues that the use of present participles as non-finite verbs in ‘A Prelude’ is one of the distinguishing features of Lawrence’s style, because their position after a main verb creates a sense of a dynamic ongoing event or activity, something which the author of ‘The Back Road’ does not manage to convey through a scant use of non-finite progressives positioned always as subordinated to a noun phrase rather than a verb. The opening sentences of the two short stories illustrate Baron’s point: The gravel crunched, and a boy, moving slowly along, passed the janitor’s house, and stood for the first time in the Back Road. (‘The Back Road’, cited in Baron)

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In the kitchen of a small farm a little woman sat cutting bread and butter. (‘A Prelude’, cited in Baron) The dynamic quality of the progressive aspect is also present in the use of the full finite verb as is the case with the last two sentences from the opening of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. Linguistically, the semantic quality of the progressive has been defined by Geoffrey Leech in the following way: The most important function of the Progressive Aspect … is to refer to temporary situations, activities, or goings-on … the temporary situation includes the present moment in its time-span, stretching for a limited period into the past and into the future.17 It is significant that the internal structure of the event as conceptualized by this verbal aspect is one where the present moment is included in its time span. Thus, in spoken discourse, the present progressive always has to refer to something that is happening right now at the moment of speaking, as opposed to the present simple which can denote a habitual event, or be used in the timeless present sense. The semantic meaning of the progressive is best captured in the name of this aspectual category in English: its basic meaning is that it presents the situation as being ‘in progress’. This implies that it is conceived of as taking place, thus as having a more or less dynamic character, rather than being wholly static. The situation is viewed not in its temporal totality, but at some point or period within it.18 The important points in Rodney Huddleston’s definition are that the situation is viewed as ‘in progress’ and that it is viewed as if internally. Indeed, the significance of the past progressive for the representation of narrative point of view and consciousness has long been recognized in stylistic narratology.19 The past progressive creates the impression that the event is viewed from a narrative internal vantage point, that there is an observing consciousness on stage onto which we can anchor the experiential and subjective quality of the progressive aspect. In the case of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, a character who could act as this observing consciousness has not yet been introduced, but this does not preclude from the possibility of the narrative world being focalized as if from within by an internally positioned narrator (cf. the concept of ‘the empty centre’).20 The past progressive is always salient when used in narrative, because the default narrative tense and aspect is the past simple as it implies a temporal sequence in the case of dynamic events or a permanent state in

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the case of stative verbs. The past progressive, however, slows down the movement of narrative time and forces the reader to observe the event in the process of its unfolding. This kind of close focus on the event in progress is achieved in the two sentences that end the first paragraph of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. Put differently, if the setting were to be represented in the medium of film, at this point the action might appear as if in slow cadence, or as ongoing, as still unfolding. The very fact that there are only two past progressive verbs in the passage and in the whole opening foregrounds the events that they denote as opposed to the background of everything else described. The wheels of the winding-engine spinning and the miners being turned up are two significant focal points for the whole opening. Together with the predominance of clause subjects referring to the train, the opening sets up an expectation of the miners arriving home and of the coal being delivered from the pits at the end of the day. Although both sentences use the past progressive, there is another grammatical detail that sets their meaning apart: the use of the passive voice in ‘the miners were being turned up’. While the locomotive engine and the winding-engine in subject positions are always coupled with an active voice verb, the fact that the human subject ‘the miners’ is used with a passive construction is subtle evidence of the opposition between the human world and the world of the machine, as noted by critics. It is also a subtle detail pointing to the dependence and powerlessness of the miners vis-à-vis the mechanized world of industry. There is a curious parallel created through the prominent focus on the locomotive engine in subject position and its identity in name with ‘the winding-engine’ of the headstocks. Together with the passive voice coupled with ‘the miners’, these references create a subliminal parallel between the coal and the miners, between the most significant commodity of the mining industry and the human participants involved in its production, both being brought out from the mines by these two engines, both reliant on them. The unfolding tragedy is thus powerfully indexed in an opening that at first glance might appear to be purely descriptive in terms of setting the scene. But there is no detail in this description that is randomly chosen and does not foreshadow what is to come later in the story. That Lawrence worked out the syntax of his sentences to capture subtle nuances of the meaning can be nicely illustrated through comparing the different versions of one of his most famous poetic texts. Syntactic enactment is carefully inscribed in the two versions of his poem ‘Piano’.

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‘Piano’ (Published version)

Somewhere beneath that piano’s superb Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; sleek black Taking me back down the vista of years, Must hide my mother’s piano, little and till I see brown, with the back A child sitting under the piano, in the boom That stood close to the wall, and the of the tingling strings front’s faded silk, both torn, And pressing the small, poised feet of a And the keys with little hollows, that my mother who smiles as she sings. mother’s fingers had worn. Softly, in the shadows, a woman is singing to me

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

Quietly, through the years I have crept back to see

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the shaking strings

To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside

Pressing the little poised feet of the mother who smiles as she sings

And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

The full throated woman has chosen a winning, tiny song

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour

And surely the heart that is in me must belong

With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour

To the old Sunday evenings, when darkness wandered outside

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast

And hymns gleamed on our warm lips, as we watched mother’s fingers glide

Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Or this is my sister at home in the old front room

(1Poems 108)

Singing love’s first surprised gladness, alone in the gloom. She will start when she sees me, and blushing, spread out her hands To cover my mouth’s raillery, till I’m bound in her shame’s heart-spun bands. A woman is singing me a wild Hungarian air And her arms, and her bosom, and the whole of her soul is bare And the great black piano is clamouring as my mother’s never could clamour And my mother’s tunes are devoured of this music’s ravaging glamour. (3Poems 1399–1400)

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As Holly Laird explains in her article, which traces the revisions of this poem over four successive drafts, a variety of critical interpretations have been offered, some contradictory, some not very flattering (as for instance I. A. Richards’s readers’ comments about the sentimentality of the poem in his 1929 Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement), but most without acknowledgement that the reworking of the poem demonstrates Lawrence’s attempt ‘to gain mastery over [the situation recorded in “Piano”]’.21 Her contention that the final version demonstrates this mastery, not just emotionally, but also linguistically, is aligned with critical interpretations, going back to F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, that praise the text for its poetic achievement of succeeding to convey a strong emotion while retaining control over it. Critics, commenting on the first notebook version and the final published poem, read the differences mainly in terms of content and point out that while the earlier text has got both women – the singer and the speaker’s mother, or the past and the present – competing with each other, with the past finally being defeated, according to Keith Sagar the final text ‘does not recapture the past’, it signals that the narrator ‘has never left it’.22 But this to Sagar is also a signal of the past’s ‘disabling’ power for ‘the young man in his twenties who should be free to move out into the unknown, into a wider world of mature sexual relationships’.23 Whether or not one is inclined to attribute the Oedipal overtones critics so often associate with Lawrence’s writing due to a biographical connection they see with his life, there is a stark difference in terms of the linguistic rendering of the powerful experience of memories stirred alive by music. Although Laird’s praise of the later poem is mainly grounded in the semantic interpretation of the two texts, she does hint at the significance of grammar and syntax: In stanza 1 where before he had pictured himself actively creeping ‘back to see’ himself as a child, Lawrence reworked the phrasing several times to describe his helplessness: , , , until he settled more plainly with ‘Taking me back’.24 It is indeed one of the most important revisions that have been carried out: the positioning of the speaker in a grammatically passive role, being overtaken by the music and the memory, at one point explicitly ‘in spite of [him]self ’. The active voice of ‘Quietly, through the years I have crept back to see’ implies control on the part of the poetic speaker, he has chosen to revisit the past. ‘Taking me back down the vista of years’ positions the first-person speaker as the object, the affected entity of the action performed by the singer. But this is not the only construction that encodes the implication of passive submission. In successive stanzas, Lawrence underlines the power of the music to take hold of his emotions by repeatedly placing himself in object position, in the position

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of the affected (‘In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song betrays me back’; ‘The glamour of childish days is upon me’), until he finally grafts this powerlessness in the form of a passive: ‘my manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance’. All of these constructions signal the overwhelming power of the past to take hold of the speaker’s emotions and the overwhelming powerlessness of his present self to resist it. There are only two constructions in which the poetic speaker, or a part of him, is the grammatical subject: ‘till the heart of me weeps to belong’ and ‘I weep like a child for the past’, but none of them implies particularly strong agency. Both constructions use the verb ‘weep’, which is, linguistically speaking, a behavioural verb expressing a physiological reaction as a result of an emotional reaction.25 Both make an explicit acknowledgement of the power of the longing to belong to the past. Compared with its earlier version, the first statement conveys a much less secure ability to revisit, evoke or reside, in the past: ‘The Piano’ (Notebook version)

‘Piano’ (Published version)

And surely the heart that is in me must belong

the insidious mastery of song

To the old Sunday evenings

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home

Whereas the earlier statement portrays the reaction of the poet’s ‘heart’ as grammatically independent from the music and the singing, the revised version places it in subordinate position by linking it to the main verb ‘betrays’ through the subordinating conjunction – ‘till’, thus portraying it as a reaction inflicted upon the speaker by the music. The earlier sentence is also epistemically much stronger with the two markers of modality – the adverb ‘surely’ and the modal verb ‘must’ – both expressive of certainty and commitment to the truth of the statement. Although not modally coloured, the sentence in the published version signals grammatically the overwhelming power of the music and the desire it brings about to belong to the past. The strong emotion expressed with a verb like ‘weep’ does not seem to me to index that Lawrence is still living in the past and has not overcome it in order to reach maturity as a man. Through the grammar of these constructions and the semantics of the verb ‘weep’ a strong sense of nostalgia is conveyed, one that is more likely to stem from a realization of the irrevocable passage of time and the loss of the warmth of childhood, rather than from a psychologically inhibiting inability to leave the past behind. This is reinforced by the reworking of the syntax of the poem. A further subtle change introduced in the final text is the erasing of the explicit personal connection between the speaker and the mother. Whereas in

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the first version, the noun ‘mother’ is always accompanied by the possessive pronoun – ‘my mother’ – and once by the definite article – ‘the mother’ – the final version makes one mention of mother, and the noun is accompanied by the indefinite article – ‘a mother’ – thus gesturing towards a more impersonal and potentially universal rendition of the experience. As these two iconic examples of Lawrence’s oeuvre demonstrate, syntactic arrangement and grammatical choice contribute to the symbolic and evocative power of the language that critics have felt resonates with readers to convey the meaning of the text not through explicit lexical articulation, but subliminally, through its linguistic enactment. In the next section, I will discuss two further linguistic devices through which enactment is achieved – repetition, the technique most characteristically identified as Lawrence’s fingerprint, and its interplay with grammar. Enactment: Grammar and repetition Repetition, one of the most derided and most lauded features of Lawrence’s style, is in large part a device sought for its strongly enactive power. At the time of its publication, Lawrence’s prose was charged with the criticism that it displayed ‘the usual faults of redundancy and the like that come of overfacile writing’26 or that ‘the thud, thud, thud of the hectic phrases is intolerably wearisome. They pound away like engines, grinding out a dull, monotonous tune of spiritless sensuality’.27 Later critics, however, have rectified this perception and have argued that repetition has a certain evocative power that justifies its heavy presence in Lawrence’s texts. Baron shows that Lawrence’s frequent repetitions offer a way of encoding the subliminal relations ‘inside and outside the individual’, a way of conveying unconscious strands of character experience, whereas John Swift associates repetition with ‘the representing of characters’ thoughts’.28 As I have shown in my D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint (2011), repetition is also a powerful device for connecting characters’ thoughts in a dialogic relationship. One passage from The Rainbow illustrates the enactive power of repetition and grammatical aspect: Everything was so vague and lovely, and he wanted to wake her up to the hard, hostile reality. She drew back in resistance. Still he said nothing. But she felt his power persisting on her, till she became aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was forcing her, he was forcing her. And she wanted so much the joy and the vagueness and the innocence of her pregnancy. She did not want his bitter-corrosive love, she did not want it poured into her, to burn her. Why must she have it? Why, oh, why was he not content, contained? (R 168)

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The motif of Will’s power and will weighing over Anna like a dark force is repeatedly brought into focus in the representation of her consciousness. What is striking about this passage is that a complete clause – ‘He was forcing her’ – is repeated in immediately adjacent position. Thus, the strain and suffocating power of Will’s imposition, his demand for love, is foregrounded through the repetition, which seems to enact the strain Anna is experiencing. The passage is unique in signalling the function of the repetition – it enacts the psychological experience, also explicitly signalled through the nouns ‘strain’ and ‘exhaustion’ and it enacts the persistence of the imposition through the exact repetition of a whole clause. The use of the progressive aspect in this clause reinforces the persistent feeling of oppression through its semantic connotations of an ongoing event, one whose endpoint is not profiled in the form of the verb. Lawrence’s repetitions, together with his grammatical choices, then, have a strongly enactive power, one that makes his writing particularly iconic or evocative of the meanings he is trying to express. The examples studied here demonstrate the careful stylistic working out of the language so that its full representational power resounds with the reader in signalling its referential meaning.

THE REPRESENTATION OF DIALECT Lawrence’s use of dialect follows in an already established line of tradition in the English novel. However, though Charles Dickens and George Eliot had already depicted dialect speech in their novels, according to Richard Leith, ‘the most striking aspect of Lawrence’s handling of dialect is his perception of its symbolic role in society’, so that his use of dialect is ‘not merely a matter of providing … “local colour” or marking “social distance” ’, but ‘enters quite directly into the thematic and symbolic structures of the novels’.29 The linguist Hilary Hillier has shown abundantly that Lawrence’s representation of the local Eastwood dialect is both accurate and rich in detail and stylistic significance.30 From a stylistic standpoint, according to Sylvia Adamson the literary representation of dialect has two functions: naturalistic and metaphorical. While the most immediate function of dialect is to give authenticity to a character’s voice (i.e. represent accurately the speech of a character who is a dialect speaker, and thus contribute to the novel’s social realism), its metaphorical, or wider stylistic, function can add significant depth to both characterization and thematic content. Dialect can therefore function as the emblem of certain social and personal character traits: In Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), the regional dialect used by the gamekeeper, Mellors, is a natural option as far as the character is concerned, but within the overall design of the novel it also stands for his

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natural sensuality, as opposed to the impotence of Sir Clifford Chatterley and the inhibitions of his wife.31 Sociolinguists have shown that ‘this kind of metaphorisation is not peculiar to literature’ and that there are, for example, ‘strong correlations in folk mythology between … non-Standard urban varieties and physical toughness or Standard varieties and high intelligence’.32 It would seem, then, that what Leith claims is Lawrence’s achievement in representing dialect in the novel vis-à-vis his predecessors relates to the exploration of the metaphorical function of literary dialect for symbolic purposes, not just its naturalistic function which contributes to authenticity and ‘local colour’. While dialect as social realism is the predominant function of dialect representation in Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow (at least according to Leith), the use of dialect in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is more complex and challenging in its function. This complexity has puzzled critics trying to identify a reason behind Lawrence’s switches between dialect and Standard English in Mellors’s speech. In spite of acknowledging that ‘dialect becomes a paradoxically aggressive language of tenderness, the verbal weapon of Mellors (and Lawrence) against the sterile, hypocritical, and repressive formulae of “correct” society’, Margery Sabin also views Mellors’s use of dialect and his switches between the standard and the dialect as the result of ‘his somewhat wilfully alternating moods of personal ease or social constraint’.33 This might give the impression of a somewhat random alternation of linguistic varieties and in any case, it signals the difficulty in pinning down the reasons behind Mellors’s shifts between Standard and nonStandard. Leith, however, credits Lawrence with an ‘awareness of the social mechanisms underlying bi-dialectalism and “code-switching” ’, on the basis of which ‘he could be said to have anticipated, by half a century, the findings of modern sociolinguistic enquiry’.34 This is significant praise for a writer whose stylistic achievement often goes unacknowledged and has been only scantily explored. But in spite of his praise for Lawrence’s sensitivity in the portrayal of dialect as a sociolinguistic code and his linguistically acute definition of Mellors’s use of different varieties as code-switching, even Leith deems Mellors’s codeswitching as ‘occasionally bizarre’ and ‘mak[ing] him appear schizophrenic’. He continues, ‘it is characteristic of this novel that Lawrence shows the code-switching but barely gives reasons for it’.35 But there are aspects of the sociolinguistic dynamics between the two characters that can be explored in further depth, so that the perceived difficulty with explaining fully the reasons behind Mellors’s code-switching is resolved. What I want to suggest is that it is the intricate intertwining of Standard and non-Standard speech on a more local level, within episodes, that gives

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us a more nuanced understanding of Lawrence’s careful depiction of codeswitching, which is far from ‘perverse’ or ‘bizarre’ or ‘wilful’ and instead is carefully considered and crafted. Further still, the two varieties as sociolinguistic codes have to be situated in relation to, and alongside, the characters’ reactions and emotions. It is through the characters’ feelings towards each other, not just towards the dialect, that we gain more depth in our understanding of Lawrence’s practice of code-switching in the novel. As an example, I will analyse the use of the two varieties in Chapter 10, when Connie goes to the hut again, after she had already started her involvement with Mellors the previous day. Mellors does not appear in the afternoon and Connie knows: ‘She must go home to tea. But she had to force herself to leave’ (LCL 122). She cannot resist and goes again in the evening and just as she realizes that ‘Night was drawing near again: she would have to go. He was avoiding her’ (LCL 123), he appears. Their conversation at this point is mostly conducted with Mellors speaking the dialect: ‘Won’t folks be thinkin’ somethink, you comin’ here every night?’ he said. ‘Why?’ – She looked up at him, at a loss. ‘I said I’d come. Nobody knows.’ ‘They soon will, though’, he replied. ‘An’ what then?’ … ‘Well I can’t help it’, she faltered. ‘Nay!’ he said. ‘You can help it by not comin’.—If yer want to’, he added, in a lower tone. … ‘Is it—’ she stammered, ‘is it that you don’t want me?’ ‘Think!’ he said. ‘Think what if folks finds out – Sir Clifford an’ a’—an’ everybody talkin’—’ (LCL 123–4). It is obvious that Mellors is in two minds about getting further involved with Connie. Connie senses this, first because he does not go to the hut until late, then through the questions he is raising with her. She is even afraid he does not want her. His thoughts represented in free indirect style on the night before, after they first make love, reveal his hesitance, his fear that his involvement with Connie would be very problematic, and especially so for her: ‘To tell the truth, he was sorry for what had happened, perhaps most for her sake’ (LCL 120). It is made obvious to the reader that he is trying to resist this relationship from progressing further. His use of the dialect throughout the conversation, in which he is trying to dissuade Connie from getting further involved, is therefore a symbolic barrier to her, similar to the one he had put up when using the dialect in response to her initial request to have a key to the hut. But there is a point when code-switching occurs and Mellors produces one utterance almost entirely in Standard English:

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‘Ay, you think that! But you’ll care! You’ll have to care, everybody has. You’ve got to remember. Your Ladyship carrying on with a gamekeeper! It’s not as if I was a gentleman. Yes, you’d care. You’d care!’ (LCL 124) Some of what he says here is ventriloquizing the words that would be spoken by other people, the condemnation Connie will have to face and the contempt. This echoic ventriloquism is appropriately represented in Standard English, the language of the social class that will condemn Connie’s relationship with a gamekeeper. At the point of physical closeness, when Mellors succumbs to his desire for Connie, his use of the dialect shifts significance – it is now the language of intimacy and emotional warmth, his native and natural code: ‘ “Are ter cold?” he asked, in a soft, small voice, as if she were close, so close’ (LCL 126). Connie’s reaction at this point is not aligned with Mellors’s reinstated warmth for her. The doubt and hesitation that he had stirred in her make her ‘wil[l]‌herself into this separateness’ (LCL 126) even when they make love. As Mellors walks her home through the wood, he continues using the dialect, still under the spell of ‘a close, undoubting warmth’ (LCL 126), but Connie is resentful even of his dialect speech: ‘It puzzled her, his queer, persistent wanting her, when there was nothing between them, when he never really spoke to her. And in spite of herself, she resented the dialect. His “tha mun come” seemed not addressed to her, but some common woman’ (LCL 127). And at this point, Mellors code-switches to Standard English: ‘ “It’s quarter past seven”, he said. “You’ll do it.” He had changed his voice, seemed to feel her distance’ (LCL 127). Mellors’s code-switching is manipulated masterfully to reflect not only the fact that Connie is about to part with him, that is, her physical distance, but also to reflect his sensitivity towards her emotional distance which he intuitively feels too. In the same conversation, he comes back to the dialect as they are about to part and he has to blow out the light, but realizes that she would not be able to see in the dark and offers her the torch: ‘ “It’s a bit lighter i’ th’ park,” he said. “But take it, for fear you get off th’ path.” … “I could die for the touch of a woman like thee,” he said in his throat. “If tha could stop another minute—” ’ (LCL 127). His spontaneous concern and the rising desire he feels when they are about to separate are beautifully reflected in this shift to the dialect once again, the variety that is closer and more personal to him. Following a long section in the novel, during which Connie battles with herself unable to accept her feelings for Mellors, in Chapter 13 she is finally reconciled to her inner being. This is a pivotal moment in their relationship: it is now established and both Connie and Mellors have accepted their commitment to each other. The manipulation of varieties is again symbolic of the feelings

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of the characters with Connie going as far as attempting to imitate Mellors’s dialect speech. Her first and only attempt at speaking in the vernacular marks this crucial turning point in their relationship. We can see, then, that Lawrence uses the two varieties in Mellors’s speech symbolically to index the fluctuations in the characters’ feelings as they struggle to come to terms with a relationship that neither of them can straightforwardly accept. Broadly speaking, Leith’s assessment of the dialect as the language of tenderness or as a provocative tool of defiance is accurate. But in addition to this broadly defined stylistic function, we can see that the dialect, based on the section examined here, is closely intertwined with the Standard, so that they both acquire significance only if studied vis-à-vis each other. Mellors code-switches within individual scenes and this adds to the complexity of interpreting the values of the two codes. Previous critical studies have implicitly worked on the assumption that the dialect is the marked option and its uses have to be interpreted on their own terms. While this may be the case in relation to written literary text, in Mellors’s case it is difficult to determine which variety is the marked option. He is perfectly well versed in the Standard, yet he must have grown up speaking the dialect. His use of both the vernacular and the Standard has a stylistic significance therefore. The two varieties thus become a metaphor for the characters’ feelings and their alternating uses mark subtle fluctuations in the characters’ internal state and attitude towards the other or towards their unfolding relationship. Rather than deeming these linguistic alternations ‘bizarre’ on occasion, we have seen that they are tightly interlinked with the characters’ thoughts and feelings represented in free indirect style. Thus, it is through the representation of character consciousness that the reader gains subtle access to the reasons behind the linguistic manipulation of codes. The dialect and the Standard work as a metaphor for Mellors’s and Connie’s internal battle with themselves to succumb to something that is more powerful than their established social roles, their views about the world and themselves – the power of their love for each other.

THE REPRESENTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS The analyses of iconicity and dialect in the first two sections of this chapter have shown how intricately these linguistic techniques are intertwined with the representation of consciousness. It is almost impossible to discuss any stylistic aspect of Lawrence’s writing without considering its relationship to character point of view. As Bell contends, ‘what is at stake in Lawrence’s rhythmic prose is not a representation of the world so much as an enactment of the inner processes by which a particular “world” is sustained’.36 Lawrence’s place in the modernist canon has been disputed by some critics, though most agree that he belongs there and this is due in large part to the centrality that the consciousness of his characters is accorded in the prose.

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One of the most thematically significant features of Lawrence’s technique of consciousness representation is its dialogicity. David Lodge identifies Lawrence as a primary example of Bakhtinian dialogicity, which he locates both in direct speech exchanges and in the representation of character viewpoint; Lawrence’s ‘fluid, flexible handling of point of view’ allows for different subject positions to be explored in the novels.37 Bell also finds that Lawrence’s prose is characterized by ‘a narrative mode of shifting subjectivity’ and he correlates ‘this internal relativism’ with ‘the “dialogic” conception of [Bakhtin]’.38 As I have noted in my previous research, in linguistic terms, the dialogic grafting of free indirect style (the style used to represent character consciousness) can be mapped on specific indices, such as referring expressions, conjunctions, repetition, that work as discourse links which ultimately create a sense of different characters’ viewpoints being dialogically interrelated.39 The dialogic interrelatedness of characters as a powerful theme in Lawrence’s fiction is also noticed by Baron, who calls this ‘interactive human consciousness’ and traces its instantiations also primarily in the use of repetition.40 Eric Rundquist, although reintroducing the voice of the authorial narrator as a prominent presence in The Rainbow in particular, also claims that ‘Lawrence’s experimental forms of [free indirect style] evoke a dual subjectivity’, because the narratorial voice is far from objective, rather it is ‘a subjective narratorial voice within [free indirect style] to provide access to a psychological realm that is hidden from the character: the unconscious’.41 His assessment that Lawrence’s free indirect style gives access to unconscious strands of character experience chimes in with Baron’s claim that frequent repetitions are a mode of encoding the subliminal relations ‘inside and outside the individual’.42 That Lawrence is more focused on conveying unconscious or unreflective strands of character experience is witnessed in the particular variety of free indirect style that he practises. Unlike Woolf or Joyce, whose focus is on the immediate flow of consciousness anchored in the character’s present moment, Lawrence’s free indirect style consists mainly of consonant psychonarration, a mode of free indirect style reserved for the expression of states and feelings, or represented perception, as opposed to free indirect thought or free direct thought, modes reserved for the representation of articulated thought. In Bell’s view, ‘Lawrence’s narrative language seeks to render the movements of feeling, rather than ideas about feeling, and it will deliberately dissolve semantic units into emotional counters’.43 The representation of unconscious or semi-conscious states presents a stylistic problem in that no matter how unreflective the character’s experience, it should still be represented in language (see previously noted studies by Leech and Short, 2007, Fludernik, 1996 and Rundquist, 2017). It is this unique representation of the unconscious, or of non-reflective states of consciousness, together

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with the dialogic interrelatedness of different characters’ minds, that is most emblematic of Lawrence’s prose. The following passage from The Rainbow captures the initial moments of Will’s experience of eternity at the onset of his married life with Anna: Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and the distraction. Here at the centre the great wheel was motionless, centred upon itself. Here was a poised, unflawed stillness that was beyond time, because it remained the same, inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted. As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep inside them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise: the steady core of all movements, the unawakened sleep of all wakefulness. They found themselves there, and they lay still, in each other’s arms; for their moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off, forever far off, towards the rim. (R 135) This passage is part of the opening of the chapter ‘Anna Victrix’, written from the perspective of Will for whom the immersion into the consummation of married life is like discovering a new world while he feels ‘strange and unused’ to the utter rejection of social habits (R 134). The excerpt is permeated with Will’s perceptions and semi-conscious experience of eternity. There are indisputable signals that the character as a deictic centre is the originator of these experiences. The deictic expressions ‘far outside’, ‘here’, ‘far off ’ position us inside the narrative world with the character as focalizer; they also create a sense of immediacy, signalling that this is experience rooted in the character’s present moment. But alongside these concrete spatial indices anchored onto the character, the passage abounds in abstract vocabulary: ‘a great steadiness’, ‘a core of living eternity’, ‘distraction’, ‘stillness’, ‘time’, ‘change’, ‘agitation’, ‘life’, ‘utter radiance’, ‘eternal being’, ‘silence’, ‘praise’, ‘the steady core of all movements’, ‘the unawakened sleep’, ‘eternity’. It is these that prompt Rundquist, who analyses the second paragraph of this passage, to treat it as an example of the authorial narrator’s voice. He argues that These metaphors map religious states of perfection, impenetrability, divinity, immortality, and ecstasy onto the characters as they lie in their marriage bed. … While the bliss and ambivalence they feel are likely to be conscious sensations, the idealisation and religiosity underpinning it have the impression of being part of their unconscious, something that motivates

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their blissful feelings but is not part of their awareness. This is because they are expressed implicitly through complex metaphor.44 While the abstract vocabulary can be treated as ‘complex metaphors’ because the characters are not literally ‘at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal being’, it might not be automatically indicative of the presence of the authorial narrator. Indeed, recognizing that the specific choices of abstract nouns in this instance can be viewed as associated with the religious stage of experience governing the lives of this generation of the Brangwens opens up the possibility of attributing this vocabulary to the character’s consciousness, were he to articulate the experience. The use of the plural pronoun ‘they’ in the second paragraph, although remarkable in its power to convey the reciprocity of the experience, is not necessarily an index that the passage represents the joint consciousness of both Will and Anna. Rundquist reads the passage as expressing the dual consciousness of the two characters, which he treats as another piece of evidence for the presence of the authorial narrator. The earlier sections of the chapter’s opening make it clear that this experience originates in Will’s consciousness. Attributing this paragraph to Will’s consciousness has implications for how we interpret the religious, or spiritual, connotations of the abstract nouns. Will’s immersion in religion is more profound than Anna’s and his command of a metaphysical vocabulary of this nature would be plausible to the reader. Even the metaphysical or spiritual extrapolation from the concrete experience of bliss is consistent with the expression of Will’s psyche and his propensity to religious abstraction. Indeed, it is this that infuriates Anna at other moments in their relationship. Later in the chapter, when Will feels that ‘his real being lay in his dark emotional experience of the Infinite, of the Absolute’, we also get Anna’s reaction which dissociates her from the grand metaphors of the eternal: ‘It exasperated her beyond measure’ (R 147). Part of Lawrence’s stylistic mastery in this representation is that the concrete moment, embodied in the use of character-anchored deixis, the character’s immediate ‘here’, and by implication now, is interwoven with the abstractions of a higher metaphysical order. Thus, the instability and temporality of human experience is inextricably linked with the immutability of eternity. Speaking about a different passage, Bell notes a ‘stylistic correlative of that jostling of the absolute and the relative which lies at the heart of Lawrence’s vision of human reality’.45 Perhaps some of this dialectic is evident in this extract too, enhanced through the symbolic metaphor of the wheel, dialectically combining the stillness of the centre and the motion of the outer circle, and the syntactic juxtapositions of opposites, such as ‘unawakened sleep of all wakefulness’ and ‘time roar[ing] far off, forever’. The simultaneous linguistic signalling of the concrete moment and the eternal reality is also indicative of Lawrence’s

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attempt to portray human experience as both psychological and ontological, as not only rooted in the individual psyche, but also indexing the ontology of being human, as Bell observes. The abstractions and poetic metaphors that permeate the representation of characters’ consciousness are on one level ‘unmistakeably Lawrentian’.46 This claim is also repeatedly put forward by Rundquist, when he says that ‘Lawrence deploys within [the category of psychonarration] a poeticised rhetorical style across characters’, or when he argues that ‘the use of these recurring rhetorical patterns throughout The Rainbow contributes to a characteristic linguistic style, a style which occurs across representations of different characters’ consciousness and in various emotional contexts’.47 But when examining Lawrence’s representation of consciousness more closely, we find that his abstractions are not included in equal measure across every character’s inner state. Further, in the same chapter of The Rainbow, Anna’s consciousness takes over and the vocabulary changes to a degree that marks her outlook on the world and her experience as distinct from Will’s: Nevertheless it was a marvellous world, she was for the most part lost in the marvellousness of it. Even her great woes were marvellous to her. She could be very happy. And she wanted to be happy. She resented it when he made her unhappy. Then she could kill him, cast him out. Many days, she waited for the hour when he would be gone to work. Then the flow of her life, which he seemed to dam up, was let loose, and she was free. She was free, she was full of delight. Everything delighted her. She took up the rug and went to shake it in the garden. Patches of snow were on the fields, the air was light. She heard the ducks shouting on the pond, she saw them charge and sail across the water as if they were setting off on an invasion of the world. She watched the rough horses, one of which was clipped smooth on the belly, so that he wore a jacket and long stockings of brown fur, stand kissing each other in the wintry morning by the churchyard wall. Everything delighted her, now he was gone, the insulator, the obstruction removed, the world all hers, in connection with her. (R 156) The contrast between this representation of Anna’s consciousness, interspersed with narratorial report of her actions, and Will’s, is apparent. There are fewer abstract nouns; instead, the passage abounds in concrete nouns designating the animals and places of the landscape that she sees. It is indicative that the abstract nouns which reveal the unconscious strands of Anna’s experience are ‘world’, ‘woes’, ‘life’, ‘delight’, ‘obstruction’. They anchor her experience in the world, which is powerfully indexed through the presence of all the concrete nouns too. The motifs of delight, happiness and freedom, as rooted in the natural

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world, are brought into focus through these lexical choices and the repetition. Whereas in the representation of Will’s consciousness the abstractions dominate the personal experience, this passage abounds in references to Anna as the experiencing consciousness: it is ‘her great woes’ and ‘the flow of her life’ and ‘the world all hers’ that we witness. The ratio of personal and possessive pronouns or references to the characters is as follows: 8 in the passage of 159 words representing Will’s consciousness and 27 in the passage of 208 words representing Anna’s consciousness, 6 of which referring to Will. Thus, the abstract and the personal hold a different balance in the representation of the two characters’ consciousness. The fewer abstractions in the representation of Anna’s internal state and feelings are indicative of a very different sensibility, one where abstraction, if it exists at all, is closely integrated with her concrete existence. Or as Anna thinks on a different occasion: ‘The thought of her soul was intimately mixed up with the thought of her own self. Indeed, her soul and her own self were one and the same in her’ (R 148). It is also significant that the passage representing her consciousness is imbued with represented perception, more so than represented internal state. Thus, her consciousness is orientated outwards towards the world around her, rather than inwards towards her own feelings. Lawrence’s engagement with character consciousness is unique in that through a method of representation that relies more heavily on psychonarration and represented perception, he manages to reveal facets of consciousness that are beneath the surface of conscious awareness. His abstractions, however, do not only serve the purpose of revealing the narrator’s presence in the representation, they root this representation into questions of existence and ontology, not really addressed by other modernist writers depicting consciousness. Thus, the deeper layer of experience that his free indirect style manages to convey is not just concerned with the unconscious or semi-conscious states of a character as psychological states, but with the very ontology of the human. The most significant stylistic achievement of Lawrence’s brand of free indirect style is its dialogicity, which is present at every level of consciousness representation: the level of conscious thought and the level of semi-conscious unreflective feelings and perception. This dialogicity governs not just representations of different characters’ consciousness juxtaposed in immediate proximity, but representations that occur spaced apart, yet reverberating with the dialogical orientedness and difference that are apparent in contiguous passages.

LAWRENCE’S STYLE ‘One way of affirming the uniqueness of Lawrence’s genius’, writes Charles L. Ross, ‘is to point to the diversity of his writing – novels, stories, poems,

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didactic essays, travel sketches, literary criticism, and even biblical exegesis’.48 The close examination of Lawrence’s stylistic techniques in this chapter has shown that ‘the uniqueness of Lawrence’s genius’ is rooted, not in small part, in his mastery of language. The complex and visionary ideas of Lawrence’s works would not have compelled literary critics and readers alike for so long had it not been for the language in which they are expressed. So, I would agree with Ross further on his point that ‘seldom has a writer examined his ideas and techniques so searchingly and from so many vantages’.49 These different vantages are evident not least in the variety of stylistic techniques that Lawrence practises across his oeuvre. Lawrence’s language lives up to his own philosophy about the novel, which in his words ‘is the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered’ (STH 172). This interrelatedness, as I hope to have shown, is manifest both in the masterful use of linguistic varieties to index subtle fluctuations in the characters’ feelings and in the dialogic use of free indirect style to represent character consciousness. His language also succeeds in enacting meaning in very subtle ways, so that it is not just semantically encoded through what the language actually says, but is also iconically inscribed in the structure and grammar of his texts. Or as Charles Burack puts it: ‘As a hierophantic novelist who believed in the unity of body and soul, Lawrence attempted to use language in ways that would touch the reader’s somatic modes of experiencing and responding. He did not merely wish to represent numinous feelings but to evoke them in the reader’.50 The power of these evocations resides in the language of Lawrence’s works.

NOTES 1 Michael Bell, ‘Notes on “Life” in Language: D. H. Lawrence’s Erlebte Rede’, Études Lawrenciennes, 44 (2013): 9–22, 9. 2 Katie Wales, The Language of James Joyce (London: Palgrave, 1992), p. ix. 3 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 25. 4 Allan Ingram, The Language of D. H. Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 136. 5 Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 6 Ludovic De Cuypere, Limiting the Iconic: From the Metatheoretical Foundations to the Creative Possibilities of Language (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008); Christina Ljungberg, ‘Iconicity’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, ed. Violeta Sotirova (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 473–87. 7 Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (London: Routledge, 2007).

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8 Katie Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (London: Longman, 2001), p. 125. 9 On subliminal suggestiveness, see Helen Baron, ‘Disseminated Consciousness in Sons and Lovers’, Essays in Criticism, 48.4 (1998): 357–78. On incantatory prose, see Garrett Stewart, ‘Lawrence, “Being” and the Allotropic Style’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 9.3 (1976): 217–42 and Ronald Sukenick, ‘Henry Miller to Henry James’, in Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation, ed. R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 231–4, 232. 10 Walter Nash, ‘On a Passage from Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums” ’, Nottingham Linguistic Circular, 6.1 (1977): 60–72; Peter Barry, ‘Stylistics and the Logic of Intuition: Or, How Not to Pick a Chrysanthemum’, Critical Quarterly, 27.4 (1985): 51–8. See also David Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice: Ways of Analysing Text (London: Routledge, 1989). 11 Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, Style in Fiction (London: Longman, 2007), pp. 72–7. 12 Peter Stockwell, ‘Chrysanthemums for Bill: On Lawrentian Style and Stylistics’, in Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language: In Memory of Walter (Bill) Nash, ed. Paul Simpson (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019), pp. 37–55, 49. 13 M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edn (London: Arnold, 2004). 14 Nash, ‘On a Passage from Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums” ’, p. 64. 15 Barry, ‘Stylistics and the Logic of Intuition: Or, How Not to Pick a Chrysanthemum’, p. 54. 16 Helen Baron, ‘Aspects of Lawrence’s Style Revealed by “The Back Road” ’, Études Lawrenciennes: Language and Languages, 44 (2013): 143–67. 17 Geoffrey Leech, Meaning and the English Verb (London: Longman, 1971), pp. 14–15. 18 Rodney Huddleston, English Grammar: An Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 74. 19 Ann Banfield, ‘Describing the Unobserved: Events Grouped around an Empty Centre’, in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 265–85; Susan Ehrlich, Point of View: A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style (London: Routledge, 1990); Violeta Sotirova, Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study (London: Palgrave, 2013). 20 Banfield, ‘Describing the Unobserved’; Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996); Violeta Sotirova, ‘The Status of the Narrator in Modernist Fiction’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 49.2 (2020): 75–97. 21 Holly Laird, ‘The Poems of “Piano” ’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 18.2–3 (1985– 6): 183–99, 186. Laird reproduces the notebook version of the poem on p. 188. 22 Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: Poet (Humanities Ebooks, 2007), pp. 104, 105.

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23 Ibid., p. 105. 24 Laird, ‘Poems of “Piano” ’, pp. 190–1. 25 Paul Simpson, Language, Ideology and Point of View (London: Routledge, 1993). 26 Unsigned review in the Morning Post, 17 June 1912. See R. P. Draper, ed., D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 48–9, p. 48. 27 James Douglas in Star, 22 October 1915. Draper, Critical Heritage, pp. 93–5, p. 93. 28 Baron, ‘Disseminated Consciousness’, 357–78, 370; John Swift, ‘Repetition, Consummation, and “This Eternal Unrelief ” ’, in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 121–8, 121. 29 Richard Leith, ‘Dialogue and Dialect in D. H. Lawrence’, Style, 14.3 (1980): 245– 58, 246, 247, 246. 30 Hilary Hillier, Analysing Real Texts: Research Studies in Modern English Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); ‘Matches and Mismatches: Patterns of THOU and YOU in The Merry-Go-Round’, Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (2004–5): 83–102. 31 Sylvia Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 4: 1776–1997, ed. Suzanne Romaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 589–692, 605, 607. 32 Ibid., p. 607. 33 Margery Sabin, The Dialect of the Tribe: Speech and Community in Modern Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 16. 34 Leith, ‘Dialogue and Dialect in D. H. Lawrence’, 246. 35 Ibid., pp. 254, 255. 36 Bell, Language and Being, p. 66. 37 David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 64. 38 Michael Bell, ‘Lawrence and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 179–96, 189, 190. 39 Violeta Sotirova, D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) and Consciousness in Modernist Fiction. 40 Baron, ‘Disseminated Consciousness’, p. 374. 41 Eric Rundquist, Free Indirect Style in Modernism: Representations of Consciousness (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017), p. 97. 42 Baron, ‘Disseminated Consciousness’, p. 370. 43 Bell, Language and Being, p. 53. 44 Rundquist, Free Indirect Style in Modernism, p. 120.

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45 Bell, Language and Being, p. 63. 46 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 161. 47 Rundquist, Free Indirect Style in Modernism, pp. 101, 122–3. 48 Charles L. Ross, ‘Art and “Metaphysic” in D. H. Lawrence’s Novels’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 7.2 (1974): 206–17, 206. 49 Ibid. 50 Charles Burack, D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience: The Transfiguration of the Reader (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), p. 2.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Attachment theory RONALD GRANOFSKY

D. H. Lawrence’s early attachments affected him deeply and lastingly. His abnormally close and ultimately damaging relationship with a narcissistic mother and his correspondingly hostile relationship with his father led to the repeated exploration of the emotional turmoil of his youth in fictional works that delve deeply into the intricacies of human attachment. Although attachment theory developed after his death in 1930, Lawrence’s portrayal of how early attachments affect the individual psyche and relationships between people anticipates many of its principles, and, more to the point, the psychological models developed by attachment researchers are highly illuminating when applied to facets of his work.1 In particular, the often difficult search for a balance between the conflicting demands and attractions of merger and autonomy in Lawrence is brought into sharp relief by attachment models. Margaret S. Mahler’s words about the potentially negative effects on a child of a certain type of caregiving seem quite apt in his case: ‘an omnipresent infantilizing mother who interferes with the child’s innate striving for individuation … may retard the development of the child’s full awareness of self–other differentiation’.2 Attachment concepts are extraordinarily helpful when examining Lawrence’s work, but the healthy, step-by-step progress in childhood from symbiosis to individuation postulated by Mahler3 most often becomes a stumbling journey in Lawrence’s depiction as he explores the genesis and consequences of insecure attachment. John Bowlby, best known for his three volumes on attachment and loss (1969–80), was anxious to claim a continuity between his theories and those of Freud,4 but attachment theory broadly understood grew out of the movement away from the Freudian emphasis on drives and the Oedipus complex. With

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the development of the ‘object relations’ model theorized by Melanie Klein and others, the focus became the pre-Oedipal attachment of the child to its mother. D. W. Winnicott discusses how an adequate balance of attachment is necessary for the formation of what he calls ‘continuity of being’, a sense of the developing self that is a necessary precursor to individuation and ‘the basis of ego strength’.5 When merged with the mother at the beginning of life, the child is dependent on her ‘almost magical understanding of need’.6 However, if the anticipation of need persists beyond the appropriate time for autonomy to begin to replace dependence, the child has only two choices: ‘a permanent state of regression’ in merger with the mother or ‘a total rejection of the mother, even of the seemingly good mother’.7 Leaving aside the question of how good a mother Lydia Lawrence actually was or seemed to be, it is fair to say that many Lawrence characters struggle with such a double bind, caught between the two extremes whereby the attraction to merger and to its relational opposite, autonomy, is shadowed, respectively, by anxiety about re-engulfment and fear of abandonment. In short, while no one model is a perfect template, the theories of Mahler, Winnicot and Bowlby provide us with the means to a deeper understanding of Lawrence’s portrayal of the interdependence of selfhood and interpersonal relations, and they foreground patterns in his work that are hidden in plain sight.

SURETY AND THE WOUNDED MALE Studies of early attachment naturally tend to concentrate on infants and children whereas Lawrence usually focuses on adult relations. But Lawrence did create a number of vivid and persuasive portrayals of children, and in the short story ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ we see an instance of a child, in effect, substituting his own magical thinking for the absent maternal ‘magical understanding of need’ that Winnicott posits. This story has understandably attracted a number of good psychoanalytical readings including those of Barbara Schapiro, James Cowan and Demetria DeLia.8 What I would like to emphasize here, in order to illustrate how saturated Lawrence’s work is with attachment concerns, is the way specific elements in this tale resonate with Lawrence’s exploration of attachment complications in other work. Hester, the mother in the story, is in a marriage where ‘the love turned to dust’; she has ‘bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them’. She can only act ‘as if she loved them very much’ (WWRA 230). The child Paul tries desperately to win her approval by giving her what she has implied she needs in stray remarks about the family’s lack of luck (a pun on lucre) and a consequent need for more money. Paul’s magical thinking leads him to believe that he can divine the winners of various horse races by entering into a kind of trance while riding his rocking-horse. In this tale, written for Lady Cynthia Asquith’s collection

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of ghost stories after she had rejected the originally proffered ‘Glad Ghosts’ (WWRA xxxiii–xxxv), Lawrence allows a child’s magical thinking uncannily to become reality. But there is nothing unrealistic about the emotions explored. DeLia’s pre-Oedipal analysis of the story characterizes Paul as a ‘parentified child, one who fulfills the emotional needs of a parent’9 and who is induced by a lack of adequate emotional support to assume the position of caregiver himself. Indeed, the fact that Paul is very anxious that his mother should not know the source of the family’s new-found money underscores Paul’s parentification. Like an attuned parent, he fulfills Hester’s need: the funds simply appear as if by magic. DeLia’s analysis includes some interesting observations on the gambling motif in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’,10 but the odd and significant thing is that, at its psychological core, this story is centrally about the very opposite of gambling: it is about surety. In fact, the key word in this tale from an attachment perspective is ‘sure’, a word that has a powerful resonance in Lawrence’s writing and often indicates a wished-for security or reassurance in attachment. In the early story ‘The White Stocking’, for example, when Ted Whiston is first married to Elsie, her love ‘gave him a permanent surety and sense of realness in himself … Whatever troubled him, at the bottom was surety’ (PO 158). But now, two years later, as the story opens, the jealous Whiston has a ‘yearning for surety’, and he is ‘kept tense by not getting it’ (PO 149). In The Rainbow, the Ur-Brangwens feel ‘a kind of surety, an expectancy’ (R 9) that allows them to prosper, but when we get to Tom Brangwen’s life, we see that such surety has been lost. Tom lacks secure attachment because he can never live up to his mother’s unrealistic expectations of him, and so he ‘felt that the ground was never sure under his feet’ (R 18). In ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, Paul bets heavily through his ‘partner’, the gardener Bassett, only when he is absolutely sure that his intuition about the race winner is accurately predictive: ‘ “We’re all right when we’re sure,” said Paul. “It’s when we’re not quite sure that we go down” ’ (WWRA 236). Paul’s search for a sure bet represents a quest for the kind of reliable and loving relationship with his mother that he needs in order to feel secure in life and to develop the ‘sense of realness in himself ’ that Whiston in ‘The White Stocking’ feels he is in danger of losing. In effect, Paul is striving for the impossible: to transform uncertainty into certainty and thereby to render dependable Hester’s unreliable maternal support simply through a kind of wishful thinking. Paul and his siblings see through Hester’s pretence of maternal devotion and feel bereft. The emotional logic of Paul’s frenetic rocking for maternal approval, a kind of self-soothing, is that his mother has equated luck with money and money with security. Apparently, if she cannot feel secure financially, neither can her children emotionally. If Paul can tap into the source of luck, turn it into a sure thing, he believes, he can acquire money and, with it, the maternal security he desperately craves. Paul has outgrown the nursery and the rocking-horse he

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acquired as a small child, but he refuses to give it up: ‘since he was emancipated from a nurse and a nursery governess, he had had his rocking-horse removed to his own bedroom at the top of the house’ (WWRA 241). Of course, he needs the toy horse to continue his winning ways, but his reluctance to discard it is a refusal to let go of a childhood that has not yet provided the security of attachment that would allow him to mature into an autonomous individual. Paul is stuck at a regressive stage of development. In Mahler’s scheme, for autonomy to develop in a child and, with that development, the ‘reliance on magic omnipotence’ to recede requires ‘the mother’s continued emotional availability’.11 No such consistent availability exists for Paul, and, consequently, there is no recession of magical thinking in his case. Another attachment thread that Lawrence weaves into other works involves an aspect of Paul’s connection to Bassett. Paul obviously needs an adult to place bets for him, but it is significant that Paul calls Bassett his ‘partner’ (WWRA 234). He is, in effect, Paul’s agent, so that Bassett’s war wound – he had ‘been wounded in the left foot in the war’ (WWRA 233) – can be seen as a displaced wound in Paul himself. Such an Oedipus-like injury places Paul symbolically among other Lawrentian ‘lacerated males’, to use Margaret Storch’s term, wounded by deficits in their attachments.12 In an analysis of Sons and Lovers, John Turner articulates Lawrence’s typical attachment dilemma in a way that glosses the wound imagery in many works: ‘how can a child separate itself from a parent when the lines of their lives are so closely plotted, knotted together, even clotted together, as though the shared wounds of their lives form a single protective scab?’13 This ‘wound’ or ‘scab’, symbol of early-life union and subsequent painful yet necessary separation, is what Lawrence calls ‘the scar of dehiscence’, the navel, the stigma of ‘the first break in continuity’ between mother and child, a constant bodily reminder of both the anguish of separation and the ‘splendor of individuality’ (PFU 21). Other ‘lacerated males’ in Lawrence include Siegmund in The Trespasser (1912), who is wounded on the spur of a rock while swimming, an injury that becomes an emblem of suffering in his relationship with Helena. The day after her rejection of him during their island idyll, the enduring ‘sense of humiliation … bled him secretly like a wound’ (T 144). Clifford Chatterley, wounded in the war, is a lacerated male whose unmet infantile attachment needs are finally fulfilled by his nurse, Mrs Bolton, who becomes a proxy mother for him in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the chapter ‘Water-Party’ in Women in Love, Gerald Crich’s injured hand marks him as another wounded male figure in Lawrence, and his injury is, of course, as much psychological as physical. When Gerald tells Birkin that Gudrun ‘ “burns the pith of my mind’ ” Birkin is prompted to ask ‘ “Why work on an old wound?’ ” (WL 439, 440). Gerald’s efforts at automating his family’s mining works to bring about predictable sameness, ‘repetition ad infinitum’ (WL 228) as Lawrence calls it, is also, emotionally

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speaking, an effort to create surety through predictability. Moreover, his hypervigilance is an ingrained habit from a childhood extreme alertness to any sign of attachment withdrawal from an unreliable mother, the now slightly batty Mrs Crich. Bowlby uses the term ‘anxious attachment’ to describe the situation of a child who experiences inconsistency in care: ‘the child learns that no pattern of response can be automatically assumed but that activation of attachment must always include watchfulness and uncertainty’.14 When Birkin sees Gerald in the train station, he remarks to himself how Gerald ‘must keep a watchful eye on his external surrounding … and he missed nothing’ (WL 53). Later in the novel, Gerald unconsciously engages in a constant surveillance of Gudrun: ‘she saw him in the glass, standing behind her, watching unconsciously, not consciously seeing her, and yet watching’ (WL 414). Like Paul in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, Gerald desires a sure thing after a childhood of uncertain mothering. He tells Birkin in ‘Gladiatorial’ that he is searching for ‘ “something abiding, something that can’t change’ ” (WL 275). Thus, Paul’s partner’s wound in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ would seem, by association, to place Paul himself among the needy, wounded males in Lawrence’s canon, and, like Siegmund and Gerald, he ultimately dies of his unseen attachment wounds.

HOLLOW SELFHOOD The unsure, insecure self is precisely what is at issue in the Lawrence characterizations where attachment theory is most helpful in deepening our understanding. There are a number of characters in Lawrence’s fiction who might be called ‘hollow’ in the sense that he saw Maurice Magnus as having ‘no real middle, no real centre bit to him’ (IR 34). Without adequately attuned caregiving in childhood, a viable selfhood is difficult to establish and maintain: absent external support or mirroring, inner reality or integral selfhood is attenuated. Winnicott maintains that the first mirror for a child, in effect, is the mother’s face reflecting a positive self-image back to it in order to help build its confident sense of self within.15 The narcissistic parent, though, uses the child itself as a mirror the better to stabilize her own shaky sense of self. In a study of ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ (1927), Turner helpfully defines psychological hollowness as a trait of a person who is ‘dedicated to the creation of a false self, and therefore always prone to the haunting sense of its own inner unreality’.16 Such characters are legion in Lawrence’s writing. George Saxton in The White Peacock (1911) muses towards the end of the novel that ‘ “you feel awful, like a vacuum, with a pressure on you … and you yourself – just nothing, a vacuum … all loose in the middle of a space of darkness, that’s pressing on you’ ” (WP 287–8). The captain in ‘The Prussian Officer’ also seems to be such a Lawrentian hollow man. Like Paul in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, he gambles

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compulsively, and, in fact, ‘occasionally he rode one of his horses at the races’ (PO 2). His wagering seems to justify DeLia’s remark (regarding Hester in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’) that acquisitiveness can be an attempted compensation for an internal emptiness.17 Altogether, the captain has ‘the look of a man who fights with life’ (PO 2), an indication of a selfhood inadequate to the external pressures of living. What seems to trigger the officer’s rage and violence in the story is the impending departure of his orderly, Schöner, who has, in the normal course of attending to his duties, cared for the captain’s every physical need like a mother. Schöner is due to leave the captain’s service in three months, and it is an abandonment the captain cannot tolerate. Likewise, the orphaned Anton Skrebensky in The Rainbow is hollow in that he lacks intrinsic integrity, something Ursula eventually discovers: ‘ “It seems to me’ ”, she tells him, ‘ “as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are’ ” (R 289). For Hermione Roddice in Women in Love ‘there was always a secret chink in her armour … It was a lack of robust self, she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her’ (WL 16). In the same novel, at the crisis of his father’s slow demise, Gerald Crich needs to deal with his inner emptiness: ‘something must come with him into the hollow void of death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without’ (WL 322). Many Lawrence characters fear that their loved one will leave them, but it is especially the hollow characters who are terrified of being abandoned and often react violently to being rejected. Indeed, we see this in The White Peacock when George Saxton strikes a milch cow in his anger at Lettie’s seeming desertion when she gets engaged to Leslie Tempest; in ‘The Prussian Officer’ with the captain’s vicious attacks on his soon-to-leave subordinate; in Women in Love when Hermione strikes Birkin on the head with a paperweight when it is obvious their relationship is over and when Gerald strangles Gudrun as her allegiance shifts to Loerke. In Lawrence’s first Australian novel, Kangaroo (1923), the generalized violence portrayed in the chapter ‘A Row in Town’ seems linked to an overall hollowness in the landscape and the culture: ‘the friendliest country in the world … But without a core. There was no heart in it at all, it seemed hollow’ (K 305). The transplanted Cornishman Jaz says to the Lawrence character, Somers, “ ‘Go into the middle of Australia and see how empty it is. You can’t face emptiness long. You have to come back and do something to keep from being frightened at your own emptiness and everything else’s emptiness’ ” (K 204). According to attachment researchers, there is a link between violence in adult relationships and ‘unresolved attachment issues’, which may manifest, among other things, as ‘intense abandonment anxiety’.18 The intolerable prospect for an adult of being forsaken is an apprehension whose power derives ultimately from an unresolved childhood fear of maternal rejection and desertion. In the

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unfinished novel Mr Noon, the narrator evokes a wound image in musing that ‘it is a horrible thing for a man to realise … that his very life, his very being depends upon his connection with another being. … that if this individual, wantonly or by urgency break the adjustment and depart, the soul must bleed to death’ (MN 231). Even in the normal course of a gradually developing autonomy, abandonment anxiety can materialize since, as Mahler writes, for the child, ‘the wish to be autonomous and separate from mother, to leave her, might also mean emotionally that the mother would wish to leave him’.19 While in adequately secure attachments, that fear is contained, ‘kept in bounds by the presence of a confident belief in the attachment figure’s reliable availability’,20 in Lawrence, the attachment often falls short of being secure, the belief in reliable availability is far from confident, and abandonment anxiety is seldom contained. An interesting case in point appears in the often overlooked The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence’s second Australian novel. It is a work built on the foundation of Mollie L. Skinner’s now-lost manuscript called ‘The House of Ellis’, and the protagonist, Jack Grant, is loosely based on her brother John Russell Skinner. But Lawrence made the novel into his own, and there is no doubt that he was channelling emotions from his own life in doing so. He indicated in a letter to Skinner that he felt he needed to change the portrayal of Jack as it appeared in her manuscript and that he was going ‘to make a rather daring development psychologically’ (4L 524). Jack might almost be an adult version of Paul in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ who now rides real horses instead of a rocking-horse and strikes it rich through the risky venture of gold prospecting rather than outright wagering. The maternal deprivation and the unconscious efforts to deal with attachment deficits are very similar. From a very young age, Jack has had to deal not only with the absence of his father and the unpredictable departures of his mother but also with surrogate caregivers (two aunts) who are hostile, even abusive. Moreover, when he is barely grown up and after an expulsion from school, he is shipped off to Australia, a transparent move to get rid of a difficult member of the family and one that inevitably creates a feeling of being unwanted, unsupported. In fact, Jack sees himself as ‘a sinner, a Cain’, ‘born condemned’ (BB 10). While he is taken in kindly by kinfolk of his mother in Australia, the Ellises of Wandoo, Jack’s lifelong, smouldering anger is barely contained: ‘He was used to feeling angry: a steady, almost blithe sort of anger’ (BB 139). As he prepares to ride off with his friend Tom to a sheep station in another town, ‘the strange volcano of anger which slumbered at the bottom of his soul … threw up jets of silent rage, which hardened rapidly into a black, rocky indifference’ (BB 193). Jack is quite possibly the angriest character in Lawrence’s fiction, and that anger is closely related to early attachment problems. According to Bowlby, ‘when children experience separation from parents, and when parents threaten abandonment,

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children feel intense anger’.21 At times, Jack’s chronic, underlying anger explodes into rage. He resorts to violence on several occasions and kills the brutal Easu of the related Red Ellis clan apparently in self-defence but after deliberately goading him into an attack. Jack’s anger originates, as Bowlby’s theory suggests, in an abiding anxiety founded on a lack of basic trust and a fear of abandonment derived from his childhood experience. Bowlby found ‘the most violently angry and dysfunctional’ responses among children ‘who not only experience repeated separations but are constantly subjected to the threat of being abandoned’.22 As a child, Jack never knows when his mother might leave him in order to join his father at various military postings around the world. Her sudden departures mean that his love for her ‘could not but be intermittent’; at times she lived with him in England, but ‘more often she left him and went off with his father to Jamaica or some such place’ (BB 11). He learns that he cannot rely on her: ‘But [his mother] had to leave him. And he loved her, but he did not dream of depending on her’ (BB 12). She is not a rejecting mother but rather the prototypical unreliable mother who prioritizes her own needs in a way similar to Hester in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’. When she is absent, Jack is left with the aunts who, when he is only four years old, resort to disciplining him with threats of a policemen or by dropping him over the fence into the neighbouring field while insisting they might leave him there all night if he did not apologize for naughty behaviour. Jack’s desire for two wives later in life might be explained as an unconscious desire for proxy revenge on the two aunts, or, at the very least, as a manifestation of Jack’s deep desire to control women and the maternal after years of powerless suffering at their hands. The yearning for such control is, as it were, an adult version of Paul’s desperate rocking in ‘The RockingHorse Winner’. It is no coincidence that Jack (like Gerald in Women in Love) attempts to control aspects of the earth, associated as it is with the maternal, and feels that the discovery and extraction of gold from the earth is a matter of willpower: ‘he must master it in the veins of the earth’ (BB 306). As he tells Mary, women are “ ‘not separated out of the earth. They’re like black ore’ ” (BB 328). While Jack may feel an initial exultation at starting a new life in Australia, unaccountably, ‘somewhere in his breast and throat tears were heaving. Why? Why? He didn’t know. Only he wanted to cry till he died’ (BB 43). Jack craves attachment and is highly sensitive to even a hint of abandonment, which he tends to see everywhere. The lambs at Wandoo are ‘motherless’, and the young Ellises, when he first meets them, are ‘waifs lost in this new country’ (BB 52), an obvious projection. ‘Why did these children seem so motherless and fatherless, so much on their own? – It was very much how Jack felt himself ’ (BB 54). The connection to the Wandoo family, consequently, is vital to Jack, and it prompts a full emotional investment. ‘He felt he would never leave the family’ (BB 58). Yet, even here, after years of unreliable mothering in England, he is

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quick to sense betrayal. Sitting at Gran Ellis’s bedside as she is dying, he feels that ‘the family seemed to abandon him as they abandoned Gran’ (BB 171). Jack’s psychological defences include a habitual feigning of a ‘rocky indifference’ to events in order to hide from others and from himself his deep feelings of disappointment. Bowlby writes of detachment as the third stage, following protest and despair, in the sequence of observed responses in children to an unwanted separation initiated by a caregiver.23 Jack’s detachment, however, can keep at bay his true anxieties for only so long: ‘He could go on careless and unheeding … for a while. Then came these fits of reckoning and remembering. … His life was all unhinged’ (BB 215). Due to years of negligent, non-attuned caregiving, he has trouble locating a genuine selfhood, and he deals with that lack by projecting the internal sense of unreality unto his environment, the colonial, make-believe world of Australia. But the inauthenticity he sees around him in truth comes from a hollowness within: ‘was anything quite real? That was what the shadows, the people, the buildings seemed all to be asking’ (BB 180). Jack’s hollowness is masked somewhat by his blustering aggression and his seeming self-sufficiency, a trait he seeks to cultivate in himself from a young age: ‘he knew it as a tiny child: he would never have to depend on anybody’ (BB 12). In addition, he tends to rationalize his feelings of being abandoned as a positive spur to self-sufficiency: ‘his mother was far away – England was far away. He was alone there leaning on the paddock gate, in Australia. After all, perhaps the very best thing was to be alone’ (BB 137). We know from attachment studies that compulsive self-sufficiency can be a defensive pose where individuals ‘deny their need for a loving close relationship to anybody and give self-sufficiency a central place in conducting their lives’.24 Rupert Birkin in Women in Love sometimes resorts to this same psychological defence, while Cathcart in ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ is totally possessed by it. In Jack’s case, at times of crisis his emotional reality, usually repressed, becomes overwhelming, and he feels that ‘the world has caved in on him’ (BB 274), an image suggesting an inner void. His uncontrollable attraction to Monica (whom he marries eventually) is a challenge to his defensive façade of self-sufficiency. He is drawn to her ‘to his own surprise and disgust’ (BB 115), and when he discovers that he needs her, he loathes his own neediness because it threatens to expose how his self-sufficiency is a sham. In truth, Jack Grant is extremely anxious about the prospect of being abandoned, an anxiety that bespeaks a dependency exacerbated by a selfhood undermined by inadequate childhood care. His closest Australian friend, Tom, has never known his mother. He was brought home one day by Jacob Ellis of Wandoo, whose son we presume him to be, and he seems fixated on his absent mother. Superficially, Jack is dismissive of Tom’s obsession with his unknown mother, but Jack’s reaction actually reflects his preoccupation with his own mother. Tom’s stepson status in the Ellis family uncomfortably reminds Jack of his own insecure relation to his parents, and

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he can thus barely tolerate Tom’s naked neediness: it threatens to bring to consciousness his own powerfully repressed emotions. Jack is prone to paranoid and delusional thinking at times, and his mental instability is very much a function of abandonment anxiety. As Lawrence wrote elsewhere, if the individual one depends upon emotionally departs, ‘the soul must bleed to death, not whole, and not quite sane’ (MN 231). Jack’s patron, Mr George, ‘thought [Jack] not normal. The boy had to be put in a category by himself, like a madman in a solitary cell’ (BB 319), and Mary blurts out in exasperation ‘ “There’s something wrong with you’ ” (BB 326). Jack’s successes in the end are brought about by a fairy-tale like fulfilment of wishes as Lawrence builds right into the very structure of his plot the kind of magical wish-fulfilment that is a feature of Paul’s childish thought processes in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’. Jack strikes gold when he is on the point of giving up his mining venture, and Hilda Blessington seems to appear out of nowhere as an improbable dea ex machina to accept the concubine role that Mary had rejected. In the end, ironically, we cannot but assume that, like the wandering parents he so resented for their absence from his life, Jack himself will become a nomadic and absent father to his children back home, creating attachment problems in the next generation.

SECURITY AND RECOGNITION: RETURNING HOME Jack Grant and other hollow figures in Lawrence represent extreme examples of dysfunctional attachment, but there are many other Lawrentian characters who suffer from more mundane attachment insecurity. Their portrayal leads to an important theme that has gone largely unnoticed or, at least, unremarked: homecoming. There are several forms of homecoming in Lawrence’s fiction, but all of them can be seen as adult versions of the ‘rapprochement’ stage of psychic development in childhood maturation that Mahler theorized. In this stage, even as individuation proceeds apace, the child ‘becomes more and more aware of his separateness and employs all kinds of mechanisms in order to resist and undo his actual separateness from mother’.25 The child is testing out its autonomous powers but returning to recharge the security batteries at regular intervals. Lawrentian homecoming often involves a tension between a nostalgia for the known world, with its dependence on maternal care and recognition, and a desire to forge ahead independently and explore the new, notably in early stories such as ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘The Witch à la Mode’. The two feelings are closely related and mutually implicated. The return to the maternal in Lawrence is ultimately in the service of an attempt to attain autonomy, just as it is in the rapprochement stage of attachment that Mahler describes, but at times Lawrence seems to express the sense that he can never escape the pull of maternal power: ‘when you have run a long way from

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Home and Mother, then you realise that the earth is round, and if you keep on running you’ll be back on the same doorstep. Like a fatality’ (SCAL 131). At other times, especially once he was embarked on a life that took him very far from the Eastwood doorstep of his childhood and the beloved Haggs Farm of his youth, Lawrence seems to realize that going back is counterproductive and to be avoided. He even embeds a cautionary metaphor, the pillar of salt, in two chapters of Aaron’s Rod when Aaron Sisson returns to the home he has deserted. The salt metaphor suggests the dangers of looking back by evoking the biblical figure of Lot’s wife, who in defiance of divine sanction during the flight from the destruction of Sodom, turned around to view the spectacle and was transformed into a pillar of salt. Nevertheless, Lawrence could not help looking back from time to time in his fiction as he compulsively revisits the complications of his early attachments and their consequences for his emotional make-up. As late as November 1928, he could write to David Chambers, Jessie’s brother, that ‘whatever else I am, I am somewhere still the same Bert who rushed with such joy to the Haggs’ (6L 618). The urge to come home in Lawrence’s adult characters bespeaks an emotional deficit of one kind or another. There are stories depicting a simple return home in search of a security that has been lacking, as in ‘A Prelude,’ one of Lawrence’s earliest tales, where the orphaned Nellie Wycherley comes back after an extended absence and finds not only love in a relationship but also a substitute mother. She embraces her lover’s family and ‘kissed the little mother’. The story ends with the words ‘already she was at home’ (LAH 15). Both Henry Grenfel in ‘The Fox’ and the eponymous protagonist of ‘Hadrian’ have grown up without a mother. In both stories, the central male character returns home to marry a woman who claims to be old enough to be his mother. While the assertion may be an exaggeration, the considerable age gap seems to be an attraction with its implied promise of motherly care. Although homecoming in Lawrence often reflects the desire in a character to achieve a missing sense of security from the past, the promise of security that is so attractive sometimes proves chimerical or, at the very least, purchased at a dear price. In ‘The Last Straw’ (also known as ‘Fanny and Annie’), the ending is similar to the conclusion of ‘A Prelude’ but within the context of a settling for second best that underscores the deep need for maternal security even at some personal cost. The cost for the protagonist, Fanny, like Nellie Wycherley, an orphan, involves coming back home in humiliating circumstances to marry the foundry worker Harry, after having kept him dangling for a dozen years until her hopes for a more attractive union are definitively dashed: ‘she had come back for good. And her spirit groaned dismally. She doubted if she could bear it’ (EME 153). She is further mortified when Harry is accused by a local woman, Mrs Nixon, of getting her daughter Annie with child. Weldon Thornton intriguingly suggests that Fanny is also pregnant and that this is the reason for her return

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and her determination to marry,26 but there is scant textual evidence to support such a conjecture and little reason for Lawrence to withhold the information if it is part of his scheme. Instead, it may be that, in keeping with Lawrence’s rapprochement theme, Fanny’s homecoming, is, in effect, to find a mother and, with her, security. While Aunt Lizzie is in loco parentis to Fanny, she seems ineffectual and makes only a brief appearance. Instead, we have the working-class Mrs Goodall, Harry’s mother, a strong, outspoken woman between whom and Fanny ‘there was naturally no love lost’ (EME 157). The question for Fanny is whether there is love and, not least, security to be gained. Mrs Goodall is flattered by Fanny’s return to her son but also angry: ‘ “I towd him mysen … ’Er’s held back all this long, let ’er stop as ’er is. ’E’d none ha’ had thee for my tellin’, tha hears” ’ (EME 158). The plot takes an unexpected turn when, after the public denunciation of Harry by Mrs Nixon, everyone expects Fanny to call off the wedding, or, if still determined to marry despite the allegation, to accompany Harry back to chapel for his choir singing. She does neither. Instead, Fanny declares that she will stay with Mrs Goodall: ‘ “I’ll stop with you to-night, Mother”, … “Best you had, my gel”, said Mrs Goodall, flattered and assured’ (EME 166). Thus, Fanny declares her loyalty to her new family and to its class, and it is significant that the surety Mrs Goodall feels here encompasses Fanny as well. We should not be surprised that security wins out in the end for a woman who has no parents alive and who has been jilted. Fanny needs a rapprochement with a caregiving figure, and the very force that formerly characterized Mrs Goodall’s hostility towards Fanny, when converted to an embracing welcome, is enticing. In returning home and wedding Harry, Fanny is gaining a strong and protective mother. Given the relationships depicted in Sons and Lovers, it is no surprise to see Paul Morel long to return home to the succour and security of his mother after suffering a beating at the hands of Baxter Dawes: ‘he wanted to get to his mother, he must get to his mother’ (SL 411). It is somewhat more surprising to see essentially the same homecoming urge in the much later fragment ‘The Flying-Fish’, which starkly registers the yearning for the security of home in the face of threatening circumstances, in this case, serious illness both within the story and in Lawrence’s life. Lawrence reportedly characterized the work as ‘written so near the borderline of death’ (SM xxxv).27 Composed in March 1925, with Lawrence suffering from both malaria and a resurgent tuberculosis, the incomplete story that Ross Parmenter calls ‘almost straight autobiography’28 depicts a deep longing for home but breaks off part way through the homeward voyage. There is a character in ‘The Flying-Fish’ named Lydia, Lawrence’s mother’s given name (and a name Lawrence uses in ‘Love among the Haystacks’ and in The Rainbow). Rather than the mother in this case, she is the sister of the protagonist, Gethin Day, but a sister old enough to be his mother. In effect, Lawrence’s own illness is fused with the memory of his mother’s terminal

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cancer and displaced onto Day’s sister, who dies while he is in transit to get home to her after being informed of her grave condition. Having spent most of his life abroad, Day now ‘felt that home was the place … he wanted to go home’ (SM 210). Relatively insignificant in his body of work as it is, ‘The Flying-Fish’ nevertheless portrays the strong pull that coming home to the security of a mother figure could have in Lawrence’s life and imagination even as he neared the age of forty. A further development, where a homecoming results in a symbolic turn to paternal care, is evident in the uncompleted story ‘The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear’, Lawrence’s last fictional work (VG xliii).29 The protagonist is a wealthy woman with a husband and children who simply announces one day to her seemingly indifferent spouse that she would like to disappear for a year. She then promptly leaves home. She goes back to ‘her mother’s country,’ the place ‘she had known by heart as a child’ (VG 252), so that the homecoming is both spatial and temporal. She discovers that what she is actually searching for is a place ‘where she should become her own rare and magical self – her true self, that nobody knew, least of all herself ’ (VG 252). As we have seen, in attachment theory and equally in Lawrence, without external validation one’s inner sense of self is undeveloped and vulnerable. In this case, we must assume that neither her upbringing nor her marriage has provided the woman with the requisite mirroring confirmation. Her unnamed status is telling. Like The Lost Girl’s Alvina Houghton, she comes to realize the Lawrentian paradox that she must lose herself to find herself, disappear in order to appear or be apparent – to herself and others. The woman ends up in a dark forest that gives her a sense of coming home even as this fragment takes on the characteristics of a fairy tale. Her car breaks down, and she continues her journey on foot. Cold and frightened, she finally finds a forest-keeper’s hut in a clearing. The keeper then appears and invites her into his hut just as it is about to rain. The man lights the fuel in the stove, and the manuscript ends as the woman slowly warms up. Like his character in this truncated story, Lawrence is returning in his mind to his childhood in an attempt to repossess the needed emotional nurturance he once thought his mother provided, but now he imagines it being supplied by a father figure whose associations with darkness and warmth harken back to Lawrence’s own brutal but warm working-class collier father toiling in the dark underground. The caregiving figure is split into Peter, the husband, and the forester: the first is indifferent to the woman’s needs, but the second caters to them, even intuits them with a Winnicottian magical understanding. The contrast represents the difference between an unreliable, narcissistic caregiver and an attuned, mirroring one. The fairy-tale atmosphere merely underscores the wish-fulfilment aspect of the story, which is more subtly presented here than in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’. Instead of the evil, devouring, forest-dwelling

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witch-mother of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, we have the provident, good, forester father who offers shelter and warmth. There are other homecoming stories in Lawrence that illustrate how an attachment deficit can come from a lack of the kind of recognition Jessica Benjamin has shown is so important to the creation of integral selfhood30 and that Winnicott characterizes as maternal mirroring, as we have seen. In the much-admired story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, there is a posthumous homecoming when the corpse of the collier Walter Bates is brought home after a mining accident. Although based on an incident involving Lawrence’s uncle James Lawrence (PO 272 note 181:1), the death here on one level is Lawrence fantasizing his father’s death (the father that becomes a second Walter in Sons and Lovers), something he also does in The White Peacock. Walter Bates’s return home is to the double maternity of his wife and mother, as a manuscript fragment of the end of the story suggests. In that fragment, both wife and mother experience ‘the sense of motherhood’ vis-à-vis Walter, and the wife, Elizabeth, washes his face ‘like a mother does a child’s’ (PO 204), while Walter is ‘more helpless than a baby’ (PO 205). But the story also hints at a barely articulated protest from a child’s point of view, with the presence of the Bates children in the story suggesting that perspective. It is a protest at a lack of recognition in childhood when such acknowledgement is crucially important, the very quest for the ‘realness in himself ’ that Paul in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ so tragically lacks. The emotional crux of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ is the realization by Elizabeth Bates that ‘she had denied [Walter] what he was – she saw it now’ (PO 198). In ‘Samson and Delilah’, we likewise see a lack of recognition that implicitly relates to attachment. Willie Nankervis returns to his home town in Cornwall after having left his wife and daughter sixteen years earlier. Like Gerald Crich, he is wounded. Although in Willie’s case it is a twice-broken collarbone from mining work (EME 114), the injury implies the kind of attachment problem typically suffered by Lawrence’s wounded males. Also, like Gerald, there is a hypervigilance about Willie: he is ‘always watchful with curiosity’ (EME 108), and his face has ‘a strange, watchful alertness’ (EME 114). Willie’s return is to his initially outraged wife, Alice, but there are subtle indications that Lawrence sees Alice as a mother figure. She is ‘motherly’ to the drinkers in her pub (EME 111), and the soldiers billeted there call her ‘Ma’ (EME 110). Crucially, even after she realizes that the ostensible stranger who has entered her pub is, in reality, her wayward husband, Alice withholds recognition: ‘ “He’s no husband of mine. I declare I never set eyes on him before this night’ ” (EME 115). In effect, Willie Nankervis has come home to force a recognition from a maternal figure, and he finally gets it at the end of the tale. In ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’, the ambivalence that always accompanies homecoming is split between the unnamed woman, who wishes to revisit her

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past, and her husband, who opines that ‘ “I should ha’ thought you’d rather go to a fresh place’ ” (PO 123). She is dissatisfied in the marriage and longing for a past lover, the vicar’s son, Archie, while he is hoping for a stronger commitment from her within the marriage. Here too the issue of recognition is central. The husband, Frank, views himself in the mirror as if to compensate for the lack of meaningful acknowledgement from his unnamed wife: ‘she looked apart from him and his world, gazing away to the sea’ (PO 121). For her part, when the woman enters the rose garden and encounters Archie, who she believed was dead, she discovers that he is mad and has no recognition for her: ‘she had to bear his eyes. They gleamed on her, but with no intelligence’ (PO 127). When she returns to her husband, she can barely acknowledge him: ‘she was no more sensible to him than if he did not exist’ (PO 128). Barbara Schapiro astutely sees this story as one of a failure of mutual recognition. The emphasis on eyes and vision both here and elsewhere in Lawrence for Schapiro ‘draws its emotional and psychological force from the eye contact, the subtle but profound attunement play of early mother–child interactions’ that creates the foundation for ‘a sense of subjective self ’.31 * The desperate search for surety, the portrayal of Lawrentian hollowness and the depiction of homecoming are some of the manifestations in Lawrence’s work of his unending exploration of attachment. Other important Lawrentian subjects such as gender identification, marriage and class also yield further significance when viewed through the lens of attachment. His characterizations, plots, themes and even philosophical concepts such as otherness all reflect in one way or another Lawrence’s lifelong struggle to come to terms with a conflict that is intrinsic to maturation but that he experienced in an unusually intense fashion. With his powers of literary embodiment, he was able to portray the struggle in a way that illustrates the theoretical insights of attachment studies and that provides his readers with a powerful understanding of a key component of human development.

NOTES 1 Elements of this chapter are based on material originally published in my D. H. Lawrence and Attachment (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). Permission to use the material is hereby acknowledged with thanks. 2 Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 4. 3 Ibid., pp. 3–5. 4 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Volume I: Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 7–13.

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5 D. W. Winnicott, ‘The Theory of the Parent–Infant Relationship’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 41 (1 January 1960): 593. 6 Ibid., p. 592. 7 Ibid. 8 Barbara Ann Schapiro, D. H. Lawrence and the Paradoxes of Psychic Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 30–2; James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), pp. 122–35; Demetria DeLia, ‘Bridled Rage: Preoedipal Theory and “The RockingHorse Winner,” ’ D. H. Lawrence Review, 41.2 (2016): 128–44. 9 DeLia, ‘Bridled Rage’, p. 133. 10 Ibid., pp. 136–7. 11 Mahler, Pine and Bergman, Psychological Birth, p. 79. 12 Margaret Storch, ‘The Lacerated Male: Ambivalent Images of Women in The White Peacock’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 21.2 (1989): 117–36. Storch refers specifically to the child Sam in the novel as a ‘lacerated male’ in her Kleinian analysis (134), but her article title and her overall argument certainly suggest a broad application of the term. 13 John Turner, D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2020), p. 35. 14 Malcolm L. West and Adrienne E. Sheldon-Keller, Patterns of Relating: An Adult Attachment Perspective (New York: The Guildford Press, 1994), p. 76. 15 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, [1971] 2005), p. 149. 16 John F. Turner, ‘The Capacity to Be Alone and Its Failure in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Loved Islands” ’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 16.3 (1983): 259–89. 17 DeLia, ‘Bridled Rage’, p. 136. 18 Karlen Lyons-Ruth and Deborah Jacobvitz, ‘Attachment Disorganization: Unresolved Loss, Relational Violence, and Lapses in Behavioral and Attentional Strategies’, in Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications, ed. Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), p. 545. 19 Mahler, Pine and Bergman, Psychological Birth, p. 96. 20 West and Sheldon-Keller, Patterns of Relating, p. 81. 21 See Mary Dozier, K. Chase Stovall and Kathleen E. Albus, ‘Attachment and Psychopathology in Adulthood’, in Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications, ed. Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), p. 512. 22 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Volume II: Separation, Anxiety and Anger (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 249. 23 Ibid., p. 6. 24 West and Sheldon-Keller, Patterns of Relating, pp. 72–3. 25 Mahler, Pine and Bergman, Psychological Birth, p. 78.

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26 Weldon Thornton, ‘A Trio from Lawrence’s England, My England and Other Stories: Readings of “Monkey Nuts”, “The Primrose Path”, and “Fanny and Annie” ’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 28.3 (1999): 25. 27 In his introduction to the Cambridge edition of St Mawr and Other Stories, Brian Finney identifies the source of this reported comment as the book by Lawrence’s friends, the Brewsters; see Earl Brewster and Achsah Brewster, D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence (1934), p. 288 (SM xxxv). 28 Ross Parmenter, Lawrence in Oaxaca: A Quest for the Novelist in Mexico (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), p. 332. 29 The editors of the Cambridge University Press edition of The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, in which the fragment appears as Appendix V, have dated the writing of the story as no earlier than January 1929 (VG xliii). 30 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), see especially pp. 11–50. 31 Schapiro, D. H. Lawrence, p. 58.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sustainability and balance FIONA BECKET

D. H. Lawrence’s rejection of the sovereign self and, by implication, the solipsistic orientation of his early work, is examined in Look! We Have Come Through! The constraints of this comprehensive denial of that which is ‘not I’ is examined in the poem ‘New Heaven and Earth’ (1917): I was so weary of the world I was so sick of it everything was tainted with myself, skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy, it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start with because it was all myself (1Poems 210). The speaker’s heuristic awakening to the ‘new earth’ of the title is stimulated by his hand touching his wife’s side, de-sensualized by the description ‘flank’, while they lie together. It is a movement which carries the speaker to ‘new knowledge, a new world of time’: a point where that which is beyond the self becomes open to him (1Poems 213).1 Later, by the time ‘Morality and the Novel’ is written (1925), Lawrence’s discomfort with solipsism has been transformed into a personal philosophy of relatedness and connectivity and he recalls the terms of his poem in a statement of openness to that which is ‘not I’:

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If we think about it, we find that our life consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This is how I ‘save my soul’, by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and other people, me and a nation, me and a race of men, me and the animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon; an infinity of pure relations. (STH 172) The weariness of absorbing everything into the self has been abolished. This simple but important turn to relationality in Lawrence’s development as a writer and a thinker has an ethical as well as a personal dimension. In my opinion, it introduces a notion of care that inflects the work once the creative attention is fully on ‘others’. Imaginatively, from his early writing to his later work, the sovereign self is conceived ‘re-born from the rigidity of fixed ideas’ as he puts it in ‘Climbing Down’, to ‘Become aware as leaves are aware’ (1Poems 576). Sustainability has such powerful contemporary resonance with respect to questions of species survival, biodiversity and climate change that anyone might wonder at its invocation within a study of literary modernism and, even in the light of his abandonment of the sovereign self signalled earlier, with reference to the work of Lawrence. Sustainability is, of necessity, a post-human preoccupation with the conditions of material existence. Conventionally, it deals in matter through the agencies of government and big business, industry, agriculture and finance. In Lawrence’s writing, we are accustomed to a highly idiosyncratic concentration on the immaterial: the abstractions of sense and spirit, of feelings and the transcendent. Lawrence developed a highly metaphorical language which drew on broad areas of understanding such as modernist physics and the natural sciences, contemporary technological advances achieved without a great deal of self-contradiction, although the turn and return of ideas, claims and counterclaims in his work – particularly in the essays – is itself an indication of the creative flux out of which Lawrence’s highly personal ‘metaphysic’ developed. The interrelationships developed in his writing which implicate the materiality of the body (human and non-human), sense and energy and an ethos of care, inform this essay which contributes to a sense of the post-humanism of D. H. Lawrence. While it is common (as we can see in ‘Morality and the Novel’) to identify in his work a pervasive relationality, it is also possible to develop this and identify what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘multi-scalar relationality’ which emphasizes ‘the unity of zoe/geo/techno-mediated material relations and their differential structure’. Drawing on a Deleuzian/Guattarian paradigm, Braidotti asserts that ‘Posthuman subjectivity is a transversal alliance that nowadays involves non-human agents. This means that the posthuman subject

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relates at the same time to Earth – land, water, plants, animals, bacteria – and to technological agents – plastic, wires, cells, codes, algorithms.’2 In the context of this destabilizing of the sovereign self (‘Man’) that we encounter in Lawrence’s work, what is not critically useful is the opportunistic imposition of contemporary values onto the work of either a generation or an individual for whom anthropogenic global warming such as it is now understood, or thought to be understood, was inconceivable as an existential threat. Consequently, such retrofitting is far from the intention here. For governments, sustainability pertains to economic growth and in recent studies of sustainability, as we shall see, economic resilience is a priority alongside consideration of better management of the planet’s resources and diversity. Sustainability has not only been invested with a highly specific meaning in our time within environmentalism, eco-politics, the environmental humanities and anthropology. It is also a regular visitor in the vision statements and strategy plans of institutions worldwide – global corporations, entrepreneurial businesses, educational and cultural organizations and the rest – with, it is fair to say, patchy results. Cynical forms of ‘greenwashing’ persist alongside genuine attempts at changing old destructive habits: a green ethos in the boardroom can, nevertheless, resolve itself into ‘ungreen’ waste at the other end. A small fraction of plastic is recycled globally, and it is predicted that soon the tonnage of waste plastic drifting and sinking in the world’s oceans will outweigh the seas’ collective marine biomass. The impact of human interactions with nonhuman nature are not fully understood and, to the extent that human demand exceeds nature’s supply, a globally sustainable way of life (the only meaningful mode of sustainability) is a long way off. Reflecting on 2021 with its catastrophic forest fires and floods, melting glaciers and continued release of harmful atmospheric gases, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that ‘the last seven years globally were the seven warmest on record by a clear margin’.3 A different document, ‘The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review’, commissioned in 2019 by the UK government and published in 2021, charts the decline in global biodiversity since the 1970s and argues that biodiversity builds nature’s defences and, further, that a healthy biosphere is not separable from economic resilience. Institutional failure is highlighted since governments continue to pay companies to exploit nature rather than to protect it. Supranational responsibility needs to be exercised for shared environments, such as oceans, while for governments Dasgupta outlines the importance of including ‘natural capital’ in global accounting from now on: ‘natural capital’ is not currently included in the measurement of GDP (Gross Domestic Product).4 This snapshot of global (in)action indicates that sustainability has come to signify the identification of alternatives to the universal reliance on non-renewable energy resources and materials to the detriment and depletion of irreplaceable

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environments, including the earth’s fragile atmosphere. If this concept of sustainability cannot usefully be retrofitted to an earlier period – and such an imposition serves the interests of no one – what is the role of historical cultural critique and, given the immediate context, how central is Lawrence’s work in particular, in helping to shape an affirmative ethics of cohabitation? With this question uppermost, this chapter analyses Lawrence’s literary and philosophical contribution to how we currently conceive that which is ‘not I’. That Lawrence could imagine and perhaps even defend an unpeopled planet (unpeopled but otherwise rich in flora and fauna), we shall see. The evidence of the writing, however, denounces the consequences of anthropocentrism (egoism) with respect to the degraded connectivity between human and nonhuman life which is taken to be the principal characteristic of modernity. Lawrence’s fiction and poetry is peopled with those in whom the capacity for sensitivity towards the non-human has been, to use a machinic metaphor, switched off. Lawrence has historically been interpreted as upholding humanist values – in the mid-twentieth century the Cambridge-based critic, F. R. Leavis, was extremely influential in establishing Lawrence as a ‘visionary’, but from 1970 onwards misogyny and racism in his oeuvre were increasingly identified and discussed. More recently, environmentalist critique has seen in Lawrence’s work a post-humanist leaning towards the animal and to non-human nature in contexts that decentre the human subject. This has inflected and influenced the critical reception of his writing with some excellent studies such as those by Carrie Rohman and Rachel Murray.5 Even so, in confronting his vast and often contradictory body of work, we can legitimately ask how ecologically shrewd was Lawrence in fact and, in addition, what messages (if any) we can take from his writing, about living ethically? In the twenty-first century, in the context of acute tensions between the economic priorities of nation states and the imperatives of planetary biodiversity and, interestingly, a resurgence in nature writing, it is not unusual for writers to consider how we renegotiate our relationship with the ‘natural’ (commonly assumed to be the non-human) world. A century ago, however, before a discourse was established about the importance of maintaining ecological balance, biodiversity, the management of finite resources or accelerated rates of species extinction, Lawrence’s writing constituted a unique act of attention to his environments. Today, in a time of anthropogenic climate change and the large-scale destruction of habitats and ecologies, it is possible and necessary to understand such writing as political. This is not to argue uncritically that Lawrence was an early Green. Not only was the political context absent for such an assertion to be meaningful, but also there are many examples in Lawrence’s writing that demonstrate a response to the non-human – and the human – which is difficult to align with current environmental ethical mores. Nevertheless, as

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this chapter shows, Lawrence brought together the attention he paid to the nonhuman world and all-too-human language in ways that are consistently relevant to contemporary thought. His post-humanity is characterized by an affective, connective, ethos that reveals how we have dwelt, and how we should dwell, and which helps to shape an understanding of the importance of managing our relationships with the non-human on a personal and, therefore, planetary scale. After a provincial boyhood, teacher training at University College, Nottingham, and a spell of work in Croydon where his health declined, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley and they left England together. In August 1912, they travelled by bus, train and on foot from Icking in Germany, via Mayrhofen in Austria to Riva on the Austrian-Italian border, and from there by boat to Gargnano, Italy, where they spent the winter. Between Mayrhofen and Sterzing, they hiked in the Tyrol region, heading south. While the non-human world had figured in his writing up to that point, thereafter, and particularly in the poetry and travel writing, Lawrence attended to land and seascapes, land use, flora, fauna, communities and climates with an unparalleled intensity. Short of money and living by writing, his itinerant lifestyle dictated that he lived by what, in our moment, we might consider an ethos of sustainability. He husbanded his resources carefully, travelled relatively light and ate what was available or provided locally at cheap rates. His work, to take Twilight in Italy (1916) as an example, in part examined the regional, rural cultures that he came to know well – agriculture, viticulture, fruit growing, subsistence farming – almost always framed by an unsentimental comparative practice. In those essays a dialogic movement can be perceived that engages north and south, the mechanical and the organic, ‘mechanical selflessness’ and the ‘transcendent Self ’ (TI 122). Later, he tried small-time ranching in New Mexico (on a piece of land gifted to Frieda Lawrence) and found it difficult and debilitating. In this sense – both personal and political – it could be argued that sustainability, by force of circumstance, informed Lawrence’s engagement with the non-human which, as ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ reveals, was far from sentimental.

‘MOUNTAIN LION’ AND MISANTHROPY In Feral (2013), published when Britain was a member state of the European Union, George Monbiot – to the delight of Sam Leith writing in the Spectator (25 May 2013) – is heavily critical of the meaning of conservation as produced by EU subsidies and the Common Agricultural Policy.6 ‘Economically, politically and ecologically’, writes Monbiot, ‘the current subsidy system is unsustainable. Eventually, all over Europe, it will break’. For Monbiot, the land-use regulations which pertained at the time of writing Feral obstructed the possibility of greater diversity of land use including rewilding understood as ‘returning’ ecosystems and the reintroduction of ‘missing’ species.7 In his chapter titled ‘The Beast

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Within (Or How Not to Rewild)’ he invokes the wisdom of Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory and provides examples of fascist and imperialist rewilding ‘by brute force’.8 He aligns the Nazi seizure of the Białowieża Forest, the creation of game reserves by the British in Kenya, the creation of the Yellowstone National Park and the contribution of ‘a British conservation group’ in dispossessing the Maasai from their land in northern Tanzania – all undertakings which involved the oppression, eviction and exclusion of local populations for the purposes of, for want of a better word, rewilding. What is to be made, then, of the inclusion of a fragment from Lawrence’s poem ‘Mountain Lion’ as the epigraph to Monbiot’s chapter? It is a question that Monbiot answers for us: ‘an attraction to large predators often seems to be associated with misanthropy, racism and the far right’.9 The excerpt chosen to represent this point with respect to Lawrence is the perceived misanthropy embedded in the final stanza: And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain    lion. And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or    two of humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-frost face of that slim    yellow mountain lion! (1Poems 352) For context, it is worth mentioning that the poem describes an encounter in January 1923 between the speaker’s hiking party (assumed to be Lawrence and his friend, the artist Knud Merrild) and two Mexican hunters who have trapped and killed a female mountain lion in the Lobo canyon, in the state of New Mexico.10 When the hikers have separated from the trappers and continued their journey, the speaker – implicitly Lawrence – discovers the small cave in rocks higher than the trees where the lion had bedded down. After reflecting on what she has lost (‘she will never leap that way again’; ‘And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more’) he looks out over the desert and the mountains and formulates the thoughts encapsulated in the final stanza. ‘We’ in the third line of that stanza, lacking any culturally specific subject, alludes to the collectivity of human beings. The manuscript variants (which are few) suggest that Lawrence was satisfied with, and did not seek to alter, the verb ‘spare’ with its semantic tensions that stretch oxymoronically between ideas of dispensing with (here, a couple of million humans) and taking pity on, showing mercy to, reprieving and releasing. For Monbiot, however, the ‘million or two of humans’ is too casual, too indifferent, to signify anything other than a refusal to value

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human life in a context in which preserving a wild predator (not, incidentally, of men), a big cat, is the priority. Therefore, Lawrence is aligned in Feral with apparently genuinely misanthropic individuals, John Aspinall and Joy Adamson, whose recorded opinions of human beings (as a species and as individuals) were manifestly intolerant, racist and represent an inhumanity that contrasts disturbingly, as Monbiot emphasizes, with the desire of each to conserve the populations and habitats of the big cats in particular, at the expense of human well-being.11 Despite quoting Schama’s wise counsel to reject any implication ‘that modern environmentalism has any kind of historical kinship with totalitarianism’, Monbiot accepts Bertrand Russell’s view, delivered in Feral second hand from Terry Eagleton, that Lawrence’s political philosophy ‘led straight to Auschwitz’.12 This is a problematic, because unexamined, position in Feral and Monbiot, whose book is timely and important, does not attempt to examine it critically, leaving ‘Mountain Lion’ awkwardly placed between the argument for progressive environmentalism (even rewilding) on the one hand and fascistic inhumanity on the other. If Lawrence’s eulogy for the destroyed mountain lion has the potential to speak to contemporary environmentalists, does the apparent indifference to human beings, anonymous and expendable, make this poem unreadable? The message taken from it by Monbiot, in the context of Feral, centralizes the human and by implication aligns this Lawrence with the Lawrence of The Plumed Serpent (1926). That is a novel in which the already ambiguous notion of ‘blood-consciousness’ – which was developed in Lawrence’s discursive writing of the early 1920s – deviates unambiguously from an unfocused vitalism into the authoritarian ultranationalism of the messianic Don Ramòn Carrasco and his right-hand man, Cipriano Viedma, men united in their oppressive programme to forge a society based on perceived preColumbian spiritual and social values, which include human sacrifice. For defenders of Lawrence, little is gained, it appears, by turning to the ‘serious English’ novels in the hope that the material that fashions Monbiot’s response to ‘Mountain Lion’ is a later manifestation of Lawrentian polemic. The entire chapter called ‘An Island’ in Women in Love (1920) constitutes a model of the broader dialogic structure that shapes this novel’s narrative. In it, Birkin and Ursula fall into a discussion informed by Birkin’s seeming misanthropy. Lawrence’s Foreword to Women in Love tells the reader that ‘the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’ and, crucially, argues that ‘we are now in a period of crisis’ (WL 485–6). The conversation in ‘An Island’, the title of which is a self-conscious reference to Donne’s meditation on the interconnectivity of humanity (‘any man’s death diminishes me, / because I am involved in Mankinde’), remains open-ended and undecided as it must according to the structural logic of the whole. Birkin’s vitalist humanism (not manifested by Aspinall and Adamson) has been deformed by the inhumanity of the Great War into misanthropy which he asserts and reasserts until, for Ursula,

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he weakens his argument in a discussion that establishes the ‘frictional to-andfro’ of the style of the narrative (WL 486). ‘Humanity’, Birkin asserts is ‘dryrotten’ (126); mankind is ‘a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people … balls of bitter dust’ (126); humanity is ‘a huge aggregate lie … far less than the individual’ (126). Stimulated by Ursula’s challenges, he develops his point: ‘If we want hate, let us have it – death, murder, torture, violent destruction – let us have it: but not in the name of love. – But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched’ (WL 127). Lawrence’s principal target here is ‘love’ (universal and individual) as a distorted value that underpins all the strong currents of individual and collective organization such as government, nationalism, capitalism, fascism, socialism, democracy, industrialism, communism and, in the personal sphere, institutions such as marriage. It is a stance that props up his opposition to women’s suffrage, arguing that gaining the vote would enfranchise women within an already degraded and corrupting political culture which is beyond salvation. It is an anarchistic rather than a fascistic Lawrence who perhaps lurks here. The logic of ‘in the name of …’ troubles Birkin and produces the apparently gratifying fantasy of humanity’s total disappearance which he frames with an idiosyncratic reversal of messianic logic: ‘ “I would die like a shot, to know that the earth would really be cleaned of all the people. It is the most beautiful and freeing thought” ’ (WL 127). To Ursula’s rejoinder that ‘ “there would be nothing” ’ (WL 127) he retorts ‘ “there are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. – Man is a mistake, he must go” ’ (WL 128). Ursula’s attraction to, and her recoil from, Birkin’s position develops into the insight that, far from wishing to destroy humanity, he seeks to ‘save the world’ becoming suddenly in her imagination a figure of the Salvator Mundi (WL 128), a figure which she interprets as a negation of her specific and individual importance to him. Birkin is indeed, despite his protestations to the contrary, ‘involved in Mankinde’. For that reason, she brings the discussion back to ‘love’ goading him with the suggestion that his preoccupation with humanity rests on love rather than hate, and she concludes this phase of their interaction with ridicule: ‘ “And if you don’t believe in love, what do you believe in?” she asked, mocking. “Simply in the end of the world, and grass?” ’ (WL 129). Birkin ultimately retreats from the morose generalizations articulated in ‘An Island’ and by the end of Women in Love has forged his connection with Ursula positively but, to her chagrin, is still looking for a further bond with a man to replace the inadequacy of Gerald’s lack of commitment to his, Birkin’s, relational philosophy. The discussion with Ursula in ‘An Island’, however, has an interesting lineage and points to letters written by Lawrence to Waldo Frank in 1917 at a time when Lawrence professed to be working on his studies of

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American transcendentalists. Frank, a novelist and essayist, had also published Lawrence’s short stories ‘The Thimble’ and ‘The Mortal Coil’ in his magazine Seven Arts, and shared with Lawrence a preoccupation with the death of the self and a sense of universal connectedness. In a letter of 27 July 1917, prompted presumably by a query from Frank, Lawrence briefly describes the writing of The Rainbow (1915) saying ‘I knew I was writing a destructive work, otherwise I couldn’t have called it The Rainbow – in reference to the Flood’. He proceeds, ‘in the world of Europe I see no Rainbow. I believe the deluge of iron rain will destroy the world here, utterly: no Ararat will rise above the subsiding iron waters’ (3L 142). ‘Death’ he divides into two categories: ‘consummation’ (which underpins The Rainbow) and ‘extinction’ (at the heart of the then unpublished Women in Love). An elitist, intolerant Lawrence – very much that of Monbiot’s reading – surfaces in this letter in which he rails against humanity as a ‘mass’ and ‘an impure herd’ and draws on his knowledge of the Gospels (Matthew viii, 28–32) to associate this ‘herd’ with the Gadarene swine, ‘rushing possessed to extinction’ (3L 143). On 15 September 1917, he writes again to Frank offering a diatribe that recalls the central image of the earlier letter fantasizing about a second Flood, ‘so long as I could sit in the ark and float to the subsidence. – To me, the thought of the earth all grass and trees – grass, and no works-of-man at all – just a hare listening to the inaudible – that is Paradise’ (3L 160). Just as Lawrence is not part of the ‘impure herd’, neither is he here one of the drowned. There is still salvation in writing. To read these letters is to make connections and to construct a network of positions and counter-positions across the political and wartime contexts that produced the two Brangwen novels, Lawrence’s idiosyncratically expressed catastrophism, the recourse in his work to the non-human, and the poems which included ‘Mountain Lion’. Doubtless, there are other connections. Both the letters to Frank, himself a Jew, conclude with anti-Jewish sentiments, and both speculate on America (‘I don’t believe in Uncle Samdom, of course’ (3L 144)) glossed in the letter of 15 September as ‘the last word of obscene rottenness contained within an entity of mechanical egoistic will’ (3L 160) and echoed in the ‘Machine American’ of ‘The Evening Land’ (1Poems 242). In the letters, and crucially in the example of Birkin at the point discussed in Women in Love, there is a Swiftian logic at work without the Swiftian wit: human systems produce degrading and unsustainable forms of inhabiting the places where humans dwell; therefore, extinguish the human and allow the non-human to flourish, for the non-human has systems uncontaminated by egoistic will and desire. Or, as Lawrence oxymoronically expresses it to Frank, ‘Oh, for a non-human race of man!’ (3L 160). There seems to be a great deal of misanthropic venting (and worse) in these examples of Lawrence’s negative evaluations of mankind. In the letters to

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Frank, there is no audible ‘Ursula’ present to read Lawrence against himself and to discover, therefore, a complex degree of denial lurking in the sound and fury: Lawrence out-Birkins Birkin in this context. Monbiot is right to draw attention to misanthropy in ‘Mountain Lion’ and, clearly, there are many other examples to be adduced from within Lawrence’s oeuvre, of which these examples are the tip of the iceberg. However, the extermination narrative begs to be considered in a more-than-literal context. In ‘Worship’, it is written that All men worship the wonder of life until they collapse into egoism, the mechanical, self-centred system of the    robot. (1Poems 559) The spectacle of the mountain lion trussed and borne by the trappers represents this triumph of egoism. In ‘the world beyond’, the public world invoked in ‘Mountain Lion’, the humans constitute automata motivated by ‘only the mechanical power of self-directed energy’ and deeply threatening to life: ‘full of friction, full of grinding, full of danger to the gentle passengers / of growing life’ (‘Two ways of living and dying’, 1Poems 582–3). The trappers, moving ‘towards the open’, participate in this world beyond of automata. To say so is not to mount a defence of Lawrence’s apparent misanthropy, but to contextualize it as one aspect of his thought that arises from his encounter with over-bearing human will as he aligns himself with the ‘gentle passenger’. In ‘Mountain Lion’, it is impossible to know whether Lawrence means that ‘we’ (who are ‘we’?) can spare 2,000 Americans, Mexicans, Jews, Trappers, men, women or children, and the lack of specificity is suggestive of humankind’s self-directed energy in ‘teeming’ or ‘swarming’: in falling out of sympathy with Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed (1872), Lawrence told John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield that ‘they bore me, these squirming sorts of people: they teem like insects’ (2L 542). It is a sentiment that he adapts in writing to Waldo Frank where Lawrence pronounces himself ‘bored to death by humanism and the human-being altogether’ (3L 160). Elsewhere, as Rachel Murray has discussed with reference to Aaron’s Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923), humanity is characterized both as the threatening ‘swarm’ that jeopardizes Aaron Sisson’s integral singleness of self and, in contrast, a vibrant multiplicity with which Richard Somers, at least in the chapter of Kangaroo called ‘Bits’, seeks to find common purpose.13 In his poem, ‘Fish’, Lawrence balances these opposing ways of relating to the swarm: fish ‘swarm in companies’ yet remain ‘out of contact’; they are ‘Many suspended together, forever apart’ (1Poems 291). The ‘million or two of humans’ invokes the model of the ‘swarm’ which, as Murray has shown, is double-edged: that which is placed under the sign of the swarm in Lawrence’s writing is uncertainty or,

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perhaps, undecidability. It is evident in the oeuvre that the swarm signifies, in different contexts, both a challenge to individual integrity and its opposite, so that (as in ‘Fish’) it can become not a threat, but a model of pacific integrated wholeness. This compels us to look again at ‘Mountain Lion’, whose non-human subject is a solitary animal which, trapped and killed, is primarily a trophy, or bounty.14 The poem’s insistence that the lion is female is not a minor detail. It is January. Although she has been trapped before the start of the usual breeding season (from March), mountain lions can breed throughout the year. There is an implication, therefore, that she might conceivably have young dependent on her for whom her death is a catastrophe. The hunters, who are either inexperienced with, or indifferent to, the ecologies that their actions affect, are at the very least ‘doing wrong’ potentially to her young, who will die, as well as to her species and the vast ecosystem that her activity supports.15 Deer, turkey and rabbit rather than livestock (protection of livestock constituting one reason to cull the mountain lion) are more likely to be her prey. Furthermore, being a mature animal, she would instinctively avoid rather than attack men who, along with large bears, are her main predator. In identifying the lion as female, then, the poem resonates with contemporary concerns about ecocide. The description of the dead creature falls neither unequivocally into the category of aesthetic appreciation, recrimination nor into that of a detached assessment of its purpose as quarry and its pelt as a commodity. It takes the logic of ‘Snake’ a stage further – in ‘Mountain Lion’ the poetic speaker is guiltless of violence against ‘one of the lords / Of life’ and instead fashions a meditative eulogy for one that nevertheless fulfils the description (1Poems 305). This time the encounter is possible only through the violence of other men, ‘strangers’, who emerge out of an actual and symbolic place of darkness to make the animal visible. In ‘Mountain Lion’ and in a great many of the poems that constitute Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the non-human is frequently revealed in the course of disturbing encounters with the human. So, Monbiot’s approach is not only to fail to acknowledge the visibility in Lawrence’s writing of the non-human animal. His deployment of the poem’s final lines is also to fail to acknowledge, or to trouble, the familiar oppositional pattern of Lawrence’s thought that frequently sacrifices the human to reveal both the power of the non-human (here literally trussed) and the tyranny of the ego. Long before rewilding is developed as a concept that underpins environmental and economic sustainability, Lawrence was writing poetry that examined the balance of the competing needs of human and non-human animals, and to interpret ‘Mountain Lion’ as a form of advocacy for ‘the wrong sort of rewilding’ is an oversimplification. While much of Lawrence’s writing about the American south-west is marred by a form of romantic primitivism, in ‘Mountain Lion’ the hunters are not idealized forms of vital or primal masculinity. If anything, they are sheepish, and so they should

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be because by their actions they have thoughtlessly, mechanically, prevented the lion from being a lion.

BALANCE Sustainability is a materialist preoccupation, and Lawrence habitually evokes the material world (matter) in order to locate the non-material within it (energy), sometimes invoked as spirit, sometimes as ‘life’. When he wrote ‘my theme is carbon’ he was employing a material metaphor to describe what is ‘impersonal’ and non-material (2L 183). Howard Mills notices this recourse to the non-material in Lawrence’s description in Twilight in Italy of Paulo and Maria Fiori where Maria is conceptualized as flint and Paolo as steel, but it is the ‘fire’ produced from flint and steel which is ‘a third thing’ that interests Lawrence (just as the rainbow is visible from the conjunction of light and water). He perceives their eldest son, Giovanni, as ‘a perfect spark from the flint and the steel’ in writing that recalls the impersonality of figures in The Rainbow (TI 157). To Mills, ‘one could call this mode of portrayal “materialist” … if he [Lawrence] did not always have such an intensely un-materialist sense of natural objects and forces like ice and avalanches’.16 Earlier, in his discussion of what is transcendent in ‘The Spinner and the Monks’, Mills takes the term to be meaningful only if it signifies ‘ “transcending any distinction between one realm and the other, whether heaven and earth, light and substance, me and not me” ’.17 This sense of transcendence is reached precisely by dismantling unhelpfully rigid distinctions between the material and non-material which is also one of the operations of Lawrence’s language: in the same essay, the ‘transcendent afternoon’ is also ‘pure substance’ and, a few lines further on, the steamer and the mules seen from the distance are ‘pure sun-substance travelling on the surface of the sun-made world’ (with the interior echoes of ‘un-substance’ and ‘unmade’) (TI 111). In these ways, at the level of language, the material and the non-material in the form of matter and energy are constantly in play and speak to the transversal connectivity of all the factors in Lawrence’s process of ‘worlding’. Dualities might be meaningful, but their destabilization is also productive. In ‘San Gaudenzio’, Giovanni is learning English and his intention is one day to leave for America. Stimulated by Giovanni’s intentions, Lawrence writes The household no longer receives its food, oil and wine and maize, from out of the earth in the motion of fate. The earth is annulled, and money takes its place. The landowner, who is the lieutenant of God and of Fate, like Abraham, he, too, is annulled. There is now the order of the rich, which supersedes the order of the Signoria (TI 164–5).

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The difference is also generational. Giovanni and his brother Marco ‘will not spend their lives wringing a little oil and wine out of the rocky soil’ (165) unlike their father, Paolo, whose five years in the gold mines in California, ‘living with a gang of Italians in a town of corrugated iron’ (162) is described by Lawrence as a form of somnambulism: ‘that his body was in California, what did it matter? It was merely for a time, and for the sake of his own earth, his land’ (163). The vine-grafter, Il Duro, has also been in America before returning to his uncle’s house enriched, at least by the standards of the village and the farm at San Gaudenzio. In these essays, Lawrence identifies manual work as a means of producing, establishing and making visible (to the reader) certain ‘transversal’ relationships. The work of the vine-grafter is a case in point. Occupying, as is customary, the position of the outsider, Lawrence describes Il Duro deftly, expertly, cutting the vine shoots and preparing the lime concoction for grafting: ‘He was not a worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world, knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself. Then again he strode over the earth, a gleaming piece of earth himself, moving to the young vines’ (TI 177). ‘Communion’ and ‘relation’ here are the indicators that egoism and selfconscious ‘will’ do not form part of the interconnectivity between the human and non-human in this activity. As is so common in Lawrence’s writing, ‘touch’ supersedes ‘sight’ as the primary human sense because it describes contact and connectivity free of the tyranny of visual-cerebral knowing: ‘it was his senses that were absorbed in the sensible life of the plant, and the lime and the cowdung he handled’ (TI 177). Just as Maria and Paolo Fiori are conceptualized as flint and steel, with fire as the third term, so Il Duro (formerly referred to sculpturally as ‘stone’ and ‘stony’) is here identified with ‘earth’: the additional term is the life of the shoots he cuts and grafts onto the main stem ‘like God’, writes Lawrence, ‘intimately, conjuring with his own flesh’ in the creation of Adam (TI 177). The connectivity and the care evident in the actions of Il Duro bespeak an ethical relation between ‘that soft matter and the matter of ’ the man that would be absent from a more mechanical process. There is no opening here for a different, more mechanized process – the temporality of the vines is seasonal and centuries old: ‘in spring [he] made good money as a vine-grafter’ (TI 175). It is because the visitors hail from industrial-mechanical-imperial England that a different form of connectivity is implicated in the relationship of Il Duro to the English newcomers, one which is cast in the language of mechanical attraction: ‘they seemed to exercise a sort of magnetic attraction over him. It was something of the purely physical world, as a magnetised needle swings towards soft iron’ (TI 178). Rather than regarding the organic and the machinic as self-cancelling, or the one displacing the other in a hierarchy of

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transversal relations (where ‘hierarchy’ and ‘transversal’ are terms that threaten to negate each other), Lawrence seems to be in the process of de-humanizing what is human-all-too-human to establish a new order of connectivity, one that is detached (in this episode with the English visitors) from social and economic distinctions. In ‘Morality and the Novel’, Lawrence calls the connectivity that is exemplified in the manual work of ‘Il Duro’, defined as it is by care, ‘the subtle, perfected relation between me and my whole circumambient universe’ (STH 172). Here the key term of relevance to the present discussion is ‘morality’. Morality in the essay is not expressed as rigid distinctions that determine institutions such as the law or justice, or religion. Morality is presented as relational. It is ‘that delicate, forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness’ (STH 172). With respect to art – Lawrence invokes Van Gogh’s sunflowers, the stone lion of Babylon and the image of the falcon-headed god Horus – the essay attends to the affective response, the underlying experience of feeling, produced in the encounter with art as a form of autonomic sympathetic relationality (where ‘autonomic’ responsiveness pulls in the opposite direction from ‘sovereign’ selfhood). In ‘The Lemon Gardens’, the second essay in On the Lago di Garda, the Signore cuts a melancholy figure. His land no longer produces the returns that once it had, the market is being undercut by cheaper Sicilian lemons and, when he shows the narrator the lemon gardens on his property, the overriding feeling is one of decrepitude. Not for the first time, the narrator takes up a position high on the mountainside – sitting on the roof of a section of the lemon-house – looking down over the lake and a ‘bygone’ landscape (TI 131). Their conversation gives rise to a crude contrast: Italy and the sun, England and the machine. The padrone is perceived as covetous for ‘machines, machineproduction, money, and human power. He wanted to know the joy of man who has got the earth in his grip, bound it up with railways … subdued it’ (TI 131). The England of this meditation constitutes a nightmarish undifferentiated collective, ‘the great inhuman Not-Self ’ whose inhumanness is vested in unliving machines created ‘out of the active forces of nature that existed before flesh’ (TI 131). The essay could have ended with this uncomplicated comparison – Italy on the side of nature but also a bolthole to America for the young, and England a faceless mechanism, ‘conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of natural life’ (TI 132). Lawrence, to a small degree (and not without irony), leaves the way open for an alternative based on a phased model of historical change: ‘if [England] still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great structure of truth’ (TI 132). While this suggests conditions for renewal, the final image of the essay remains apocalyptic with its ‘teeming swarms of disintegrated human beings’ and a world ‘left covered

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with huge ruins, and scored by strange devices of industry, and quite dead’ (TI 132). The equilibrium that precedes and accompanies a sustaining, caring, relationality is absent. The emphasis here is on the ‘inhuman’ as distinct from the non-human. World and spirit, matter and the non-material, are out of balance.

‘THE GIGANTIC TREE OF DOLLARS’ At the beginning of his introduction to Edward Dahlberg’s first semiautobiographical novel, Bottom Dogs (1929), Lawrence draws attention to phases of cultural change in the American west. He does so through the prism of loss – loss rather than nostalgia – and existential defeat. From the outset Lawrence positions himself, as is common in the travel writing, as an engaged outsider and an informed cultural critic. ‘It is not till you live in America’, he announces, ‘and go a little under the surface, that you begin to see how terrible and brutal is the mass of failure that nourishes the roots of the gigantic tree of dollars’ (IR 119). His sympathies in this piece of writing appear to lie with the first European settlers, pioneers, represented as ultimately defeated actors in the ‘brute fight with savage conditions of the western continent’ (119). Their exertions are perceived as laudable but futile in their struggle against ‘the American wilderness’ (119), which remains an abstraction in the essay. In the wake of pioneers’ enduring difficulties with the harsh unforgiving land, and their failure to do more than subsist, modern industrial America moves in. In the west, states Lawrence, ‘you see how many small ranches have gone broke in despair, before the big ranches scoop them up and profit by all the back-breaking, profitless, grim labour of the pioneer’. Buoyed up with capital, this ‘second wave’ can ‘reap the harvest’ (119) and in so doing minimizes the harmful trauma that underpins its economic success. This recoil from the experience of the tough settler communities is the reason ‘pioneer literature’, argues Lawrence, is thin on the ground ‘except in small sentimentalised doses’ (119). The victory of self-interest nourished by a survivalist egoism which displaces something better than itself is a common attribute of Lawrence’s thought. In New Mexico, Lawrence positions himself as someone who is able to go ‘a little under the surface’ which has the effect of setting him apart and to invest his commentary, therefore, with a degree of credibility in front of his audience. Not everybody finds this convincing. With respect to Lawrence’s essay ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, Carey Snyder unpicks ‘the ethnological pretensions of Lawrence’s writings’ by attending to various strategies in the essay where Lawrence appears to assign to himself the role of an ethnologist in the field and also, thereby, sets himself apart from the ethnological tourists who have crowded into Hotevilla in great numbers to witness the ritual dances.18 Just

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as George Monbiot is troubled by Lawrence’s perceived misanthropy and its implicit consequences, Snyder is troubled (but not surprised by) the ways in which, in describing the dances of the pueblo Indians, Lawrence inhabits the position of the cultural spectator that he also seeks to destabilize. Snyder is not alone in referring to a different essay – ‘Indians and an Englishman’ – in which Lawrence’s description of adopting ‘Indian disguise’ so that he might gain access to spaces otherwise denied him (as a tourist) is represented as an achievement rather than what is, as Snyder demonstrates, an act of voyeurism that also characterized contemporary anthropological practice.19 Complicated as it is, Lawrence had a deep-seated interest in anthropology – which he deployed to develop often crude points of contrast between perceived non-modern ways of life and the degradations of industrialized modernity – but his actions underline the difficulties, shared by ethnologists, that underpin attempts to represent the ‘other’ which is also human. However problematically, then, Lawrence speaks from the stance of the engaged outsider. His ‘American’ essays begin to include elements derived from the ‘little half-abandoned ranch’ where he lived in New Mexico but his outsider status is consistently held up as a necessary aspect of his relational philosophy of connection (RDP 354). Far from seeking to integrate into the diverse communities that Lawrence takes in, the essays draw attention to the need to impersonate, to adopt a role (rancher; artist), in order to maintain the critical distance that the more polemical writing requires. In ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ he takes on the responsibilities of a small-time rancher but effectively communicates the ways in which it remains strange to him. The description of his inexpertly shooting (and then clubbing to death) the verminous porcupine which, like its kind, destroys the young pine trees, is perhaps the most cited event in the essay which it names. The shooting itself, or its veracity as an account, is not the point. It serves the narrative of responsibility at that point which is to assert, ‘one must be able to shoot. I, myself, must be able to shoot, and to kill’ (RDP 353). If this seems to run counter to the sentiments of ‘Mountain Lion’, the explanation lies in Lawrence’s efforts at this time to distinguish between ‘existence’ and ‘life’. The reflections that arise from the death of the porcupine are more ontological than ecological. In a dogmatic vein, the ‘law of life’ outlined in the essay as it draws to a conclusion remembers relationality, but anchors it in a notion of the naturalness of species-based conflict and asserts that if one species destroys another, ‘then the destroyer is of a more vital cycle of existence than the one destroyed’, and belongs to a ‘higher creation’, which is not a sentiment likely to win over environmentalists (RDP 358–9). It is tempered by the ontological distinction that informs the ‘vitalist’ philosophy associated with Lawrence, but which constitutes an eco-Gordian knot: ‘when speaking of existence we always speak in types, species, not of individuals. Species exist. But even an

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individual dandelion has being’ (RDP 358). It has being, it could be argued, until its species is destroyed by a species of ‘a higher creation’, but perhaps this response is glib. The concept of a species-relativity is a persistent one: it occurs in a much lighter vein in Lawrence’s essay, ‘Man is a Hunter’ (1926), a piece of ironic travelogue which mocks Italian men and their perceived love of shooting whatever moves. Lawrence attaches this love of shooting to shows of ‘virilissimo’ but assures the reader that ‘Man, being a hunter, is, fortunately for the rest of creation, a very bad shot’ (EP 220). Later, offered ‘game’ and hoping for a partridge or wild rabbit, he is unimpressed to be offered robins, finches, hedge-sparrows and starlings, ‘all the small heads rolling limp’ (EP 221). He concludes that the question of hunting is a matter of relativity – that, compared to a flea a robin is ‘big game’ – but that does not diminish the tone of raillery directed at ‘Nimrod, in velveteen corduroys … gun in hand’ (EP 220) revived in the English Midlands, without irony and without risk to small birds, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This chapter began with reflections on solipsism, and Lawrence’s realization in ‘New Heaven and Earth’, developed in the subsequent work and discussed in ‘Morality and the Novel’, of a new way of participating in the world which he describes as ‘relational’. This produces, I have argued, an ethics of care – not separable from a poetics of responsiveness and responsibility – which traverses the substance of his writing. The examples in this discussion have tended to come from Lawrence’s travels, travelogues and writings where he is selfpositioned as external and transient. The relationality that he represents as a fragile, ‘trembling’, balance is propagated and nourished by an ethos of care – care for the ‘other’ – without mawkish sentiment, solipsism or the egoism of assumed custodianship.

NOTES 1 ‘New Heaven and Earth’ was first printed as ‘Terra Nuova’ in Some Imagist Poets: An Annual Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917). 2 Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019), p. 46. 3 Copernicus Climate Change Service press release, dated 10 January 2022: https:// climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-globally-seven-hottest-years-record-were-lastseven. 4 An independent review commissioned by the UK government and authored by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, ‘The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review’ (London: HM Treasury, February 2021): https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review. 5 See, in particular, Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Rachel Murray, The Modernist

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Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 6 The Spectator is a politically conservative and Eurosceptic British weekly magazine. Past editors include Boris Johnson. Sam Leith’s review of George Monbiot’s book is available here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/feral-by-geoge-monbiot-review/. 7 George Monbiot, Feral. Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (London: Penguin, 2014), pp. 296–7. 8 Monbiot, Feral, p. 323. 9 Ibid., p. 329. 10 There is an account of this episode in Knud Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters: A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence (London: Routledge, 1938). 11 Monbiot, Feral, pp. 330–2. 12 Monbiot quotes Schama and Eagleton in Feral, pp. 336, 330. 13 Murray, The Modernist Exoskeleton, pp. 165–76. 14 Lion meat as ‘game’ is considered acceptable for human consumption, or it can be fed to dogs. Hunters frequently pursue mountain lion (cougar; puma concolor) with dogs. 15 A mountain lion population requires a vast amount of territory and so conservation of this animal results in the conservation of multiple species (flora and fauna) and ecosystems. By extension, over-hunting damages and destroys the balance of these ecosystems in unsustainable ways. 16 Howard Mills, ‘ “Full of Philosophising and Trying to Show Things Real”: Twilight in Italy’, in D. H. Lawrence’s Non-fiction: Art, Thought and Genre, ed. David Ellis and Howard Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, reprinted 1990), p. 52. 17 Ellis and Mills, D. H. Lawrence’s Non-fiction: Art, Thought and Genre, p. 47. 18 Carey Snyder, ‘ “When the Indian Was in Vogue”: D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53. 4 (Winter 2007): 662–97; 67. 19 Snyder, ‘ “When the Indian Was in Vogue” ’, 672.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Animality and the paintings CARRIE ROHMAN

While the current awareness of the Anthropocene and of ecological precarity means that writers and other artists are now considering ideas about animals as more fundamental to their work, aesthetic practices nevertheless continue to be understood through the lens of human exceptionalism. Yet a genuinely environmental (post)humanities expands the concept of ‘human’ making, to include our entanglement with other sentient, agential beings. As D. H. Lawrence repeatedly stressed, humans are only able to flourish in connection with other creatural, geo and cosmic beings and forces. Such a shift away from a traditional anthropocentrism should apply to the aesthetic impulse itself: we must recognize artistic impulses and activities as predating human making and as profoundly trans-species. Once we understand that artistic impulses are part of our evolutionary inheritance – borrowed, in some sense, from animals and the natural world – we can take up the study of literature, culture and the arts with a bioaesthetic view.1 In this connection, human creativity is only the most recent iteration of an artistic impulse that belongs to the living in general, and we should therefore begin to reframe aesthetics as a long, durational coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in a broad range of creative practices. Moreover, we ought to turn towards animals to revise and revivify our understanding of aesthetic capacities. Such a viewpoint radically suggests that all human artistic propensities have some fundamental connection to animality that is based in strategies of excess, display and intensification that are not primarily cognitive.

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Reading D. H. Lawrence’s work through a bioaesthetic frame helps us to reconceive our artistic drives as more than human, re-envisioning the aesthetic domain itself as trans-species in scope. This revisioning is also ethically charged because we must acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most revered and formerly ‘exceptional’ activities.2 Lawrence’s driving philosophies have always been recognized as circulating around the need for contemporary humans to regain balance by resuscitating a vital force connected to their embodied, sexual, spontaneous energies. As I have often noted over the course of my scholarly investigations, animals or animalities tend to serve as models in his work for a reanimated human creature, with an emphasis on the anima there. In this chapter, I am interested in Lawrence’s paintings, primarily, and in how they render bioaesthetic becomings that regularly privilege movement and animalities. Lawrence’s painted scenes often feature ‘dandy’ becomings-elaborate and becomings-animal of the human. The prominence of these features in the paintings not only argues for an ecologically expansive, horizontally positioned human being, but also reveals a latent envy of the embodied becomings-artistic of non-human animals, in their extravagant creative-sexual morphologies. My earlier work3 has shown how modernism represents a privileged site for the eruption of animality in artistic and cultural texts in the postEnlightenment era. Modernism should be understood as a charged site of animality’s ‘homecoming’ in cultural, artistic and psychic discourses after Darwin. The decades after Darwin’s work became widely circulated mark of one of the most extreme upheavals in humanism vis-à-vis animals that human history has witnessed. What is more, modernism’s insistence on ‘making it new’ resulted in a particularly resonant moment for bioaesthetics in literature and culture. That is, the coincidence of scientific and cultural acknowledgements of humans’ animality with the explicit desire to innovate and refigure forms of artistic practice helps explain the recurrence of bioaesthetic themes in this period. Modernism is itself a kind of aesthetic ‘becoming-other’, and thus the bioaesthetic is especially prominent in this period, as Lawrence’s work makes so plain. Lawrence as a painter has recently been considered on powerful imaginative and thematic terrain in the biofictional novel, Second Place (2021) by Rachel Cusk, a work that is not my focus here, but which nonetheless signals a kind of slant contemporary interest in Lawrence’s painting. While Lawrence did not begin painting until he was about forty, and while his technical abilities were somewhat limited, his paintings continue to be a point of interest as a component of his artistic production writ large. Somewhat characteristically, Lawrence insisted that his deliberate refusal of standard or accepted technique in painting was an advantage of his work on the canvas, a position that rehearses some of his acrid refusals of modernist literary form. ‘I have learnt now not to work

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from objects, not to have models, not to have a technique’ (LEA 231), he claims in ‘Making Pictures’. One of his more well-known statements regarding the question of proper technique eschews its rigours for a kind of blood-conscious engagement: ‘the knowing eye watches sharp as a needle: but the picture comes clean out of instinct, intuition, and sheer physical action. Once the instinct and intuition get into the brush-tip, the picture happens, if it is to be a picture at all’ (LEA 228). While it might be an overstatement to call this a bioaesthetic claim on Lawrence’s part, there are ways in which his privileging of corporeal, affective forces over the humanized ‘eye’ and its implied sense of control nicely align with the embodied elaborative forces that I have argued are at the root of a creatural bioaesthetics. Before turning to a discussion of Lawrence’s paintings, I will outline some basic frameworks of a bioaesthetic approach. Theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz have provided mechanisms for understanding the origins of the artistic within the strivings of life itself. Their work suggests that artistic practice has its roots in the excesses of evolution and in the showy extravagance of sexual selection, where qualities and forces are elaborated in the name of attraction, innovation and a becoming-other. For these thinkers, art is not a primarily conceptual or representational activity, but is rather to be understood in terms of affects, embodied elaborations and, as I have emphasized, creatural engagements with inhuman forces. For instance, building on many of Deleuze’s concepts, Grosz claims that the intersection of life itself with earthly or cosmic forces serves as the occasion for what is fundamentally an aesthetic emergence. In her 2008 book, Chaos, Territory, Art, Grosz describes the productive explosion of the arts from the provocations posed by the forces of the earth … with the forces of living bodies, by no means exclusively human, which … slow down chaos enough to extract from it something not so much useful as intensifying, a performance, a refrain, an organization of color or movement that eventually, transformed, enables and induces art.4 Just as compelling is Grosz’s further claim that sexual difference lies at the heart of aesthetics. This idea is especially fascinating given Grosz’s well-known work in the areas of feminist and queer theory, disciplines that have tended to resist most biological framings of sexuality and gender. Pivotal to her position is understanding nature as dynamic rather than static, as something that is always opening towards the new and the future in a process of becoming. She observes that, because animals attract mates through various ‘vibratory’ forces, through colour and through dance, through song and cadences, the aesthetic is linked to the workings of sexual difference in evolution. In her discussion of music and sex, for instance, Grosz makes much of Darwin’s claims that mammals use their voices to attract mates. For Darwin, music is ‘seductive’ and ‘dangerous’;

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it ‘intensifies and excites’, in Grosz’s words.5 Thus, there is ‘something about vibration’, or resonance, or rhythm, ‘even in the most primitive of creatures, that generates pleasurable or intensifying passions, excites organs, and invests movements with greater force or energy’.6 Birdsong, for instance, exists at a crossroads between sexuality and creativity. Grosz goes on to note that ‘sexuality itself needs to function artistically to be adequately sexual, adequately creative, that sexuality … needs to harness excessiveness and invention to function at all’.7 Referencing the work of Alphonso Lingis, Grosz discusses the forces of sexual selection and the bodily manifestations of those forces as creatures invest in enhancing ‘the body’s sexual appeal’: ‘This calling to attention, this making of one’s own body into a spectacle, this highly elaborate display of attractors, involves intensification. Not only are organs on display engorged, intensified, puffed up, but the organs that perceive them – ears, eyes, nose – are also filled with intensity, resonating with colors, sounds, smells, shapes, rhythms.’8 Thus taste, pleasure, performance and staging all enter into the aestheticization of the body in sexual selection and evolution: ‘Art is of the animal precisely to the degree that sexuality is artistic.’9 It is important to clarify how Grosz suggests that reproduction does not have to be viewed as the primary telos of these processes. Rather, Grosz speculates that [perhaps] sexuality is not so much to be explained in terms of its ends or goals (which in sociobiological terms are assumed to be the [competitive] reproduction of maximum numbers of [surviving] offspring, where sexual selection is ultimately reduced to natural selection) as in terms of its forces, its effects … which are forms of bodily intensification. Vibrations, waves, oscillations, resonances affect living bodies, not for any higher purpose but for pleasure alone.10 We need not see sexuality as biologically ‘determined’ or rigidly heteronormative, but rather as a fluid process of becoming that emphasizes pleasure. At the same time, Grosz aligns herself with Irigaray who cautions that we must take the existence of sexual dimorphism seriously, even if we understand sexuality as highly fluid and historically contingent. Lawrence’s artistic engagement with other animals – and with humans’ own creatural natures – is a hallmark of his writing. His paintings also repeatedly render bioaesthetic connections. In earlier studies, I have suggested that Lawrence is the British modernist most engaged with the species question and have elaborated upon the tensions in Lawrence’s writings between the desire to acknowledge and revere the radical alterity or otherness of animals and the desire to dominate and destroy non-human creatures.11 Lawrence’s work

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also tends to engage with living beings at extremity and in connection with what we might call evolutionary excesses and intensities. His limited number of paintings, which of course do not represent the fuller artistic range that his writings do, are best described as figuring animals and animalities as exemplars of a bioaesthetic force that is virtuous and virtuosic in terms of ‘right living’, either in contradistinction to human figures or occasionally in a euphoric dance of inter-species creatural becoming-other. The roles of movement and dance are central to most of the significant paintings that overtly incorporate animal figures.12 Moreover, Lawrence’s well-known emphases on ‘liberated’ sexualities need to be contextualized within the thesis that sexuality requires creativity to be itself. My discussion here of hybrid dandy bodies, dancerly becomings and creatural vitalisms in Lawrence’s visual oeuvre confirms that his work continues to provide fresh and especially productive points of inquiry within current ecologically inflected inquiries in the arts and humanities. I would like to first consider one of Lawrence’s more successful paintings that does not include non-human animals proper: Red Willow Trees (January 1927, oil on canvas). Robert W. Millett, in his study of Lawrence’s paintings, remarks that ‘the landscape feature of Red Willow Trees commands attention. It is a pleasing picture; in terms of composition and technique, it is fairly successful.’13 Given Lawrence’s strong opinion that human beings were the only fitting subjects for painting, and that English landscapes were therefore always missing something essential,14 it is notable that this work presents an interesting and attractive earth scape. The oranges and greens of the hills and fields are placed in a compelling juxtaposition, one of curving oblong forms from the left side, opposed to linear receding variegations in the middle and upper right portions. While the central line of the water source, in the middle of the canvas and receding to the back, is too narrow to be convincing, the positioning of the land and water does make use of the ‘rule of thirds’ in visual art, in a way that results in a successful compositional dynamic. As Lawrence’s human figures go, the bathers are acceptably rendered, and their positioning – with their backs to the viewer – tends to reinforce a feeling of their immersion in the natural world. Intimacy and entanglement with the natural world are, of course, some of Lawrence’s great themes as a writer. The painting has additional interest from a bioaesthetic perspective, moreover. The puffed and blooming forms of the trees (above their standard looking trunks) are sufficiently ‘strange’ as to call for our particular attention. These trees have a near-Seussian, surreal quality, as if the tops are great plumes rather than individuated branches with leaves. While massing leaves together is not an unusual technique in landscape painting, these particular ‘puffs’ are peculiarly animated. The two in the far upper right corner suggest the foliage patterns of the Salix flame willow tree, but the large tree in the left foreground is especially important for thinking about Lawrence’s creatural bioaesthetics.

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First, the longest branch, coming out from the right of the tree, and which the closest figure grasps with his right hand, appears at its far-most right and upper point like the head of a bird. There is a small rectangular ‘beak’ shape that is darkened at the right-most point of the branch, and to the left of this, a kind of highlight – with a white circle and a dark inner dot – that resembles an eye. While it seems quite certain that this was not intentional on Lawrence’s part, the effect is rather clear. Thus, in that case the particular branch appears to have bright orange ‘feathers’ sprouting from its ‘head’. But what is more, this suggestion of head plumage or adornment is echoed in an even more ‘obvious’ (if half-conscious) way with one of the human figures. Keith Sagar comments on this fact: ‘the figure on the left is positioned in such a way that the boughs of the willow seem to be branching from his head’.15 Sagar rightly points to Lawrence’s poem, ‘A Doe at Evening’, in which the speaker, watching a female deer, describes himself as antlered and as knowing her through a masculine perspective (1Poems 180–1). Sagar considers this as a kind of companion piece to the painting. But the ‘branching of horns’ in this painting must also be connected to the elaborate bioaesthetic scene in Women in Love, when Gudrun dances before the Highland cattle. This pivotal scene links creativity to inhuman sexuality, as Gudrun accesses a vibratory energy connecting living beings with cosmic capacities. Gudrun’s rhapsodic dancing performs a bioaesthetic transfer of forces: Gudrun, looking as if some invisible chain weighed on her hands and feet, began slowly to dance in the eurythmic manner, pulsing and fluttering rhythmically with her feet, making slower, regular gestures with her hands and arms, now spreading her arms wide, now raising them above her head, now flinging them softly apart, and lifting her face, her feet all the time beating and running to the measure of the song, as if it were some strange incantation, her white, rapt form drifting here and there in a strange impulsive rhapsody, seeming to be lifted on a breeze of incantation, shuddering with strange little runs. (WL 166) Lawrence describes a terrestrial, rhythmic method here, as Gudrun’s feet pulse, flutter, beat, run and make her body shudder. The rhythmic ‘stampeding’ highlights the colocation of earthly forces and human shudderings, as Gudrun seems to become-animal and become-artistic. Lawrence also represents the Highland cattle in this scene through bioaesthetic frameworks. The cattle are ‘vividly coloured and fleecy in the evening light, their horns branching into the sky, pushing forward their muzzles inquisitively, to know what it was all about. Their eyes glittered through their tangle of hair, their naked nostrils were full of shadow’ (WL 167). Vivid

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colouring is a central element of animals’ bodily excess within the lexicon of sexual selection. Moreover, the image of horns ‘branching into the sky’ directly links with Lawrence’s image in Red Willow Trees, emphasizing the aesthetic nature of secondary sexual characteristics in their precise sexual role within the dynamics of enticement. In other words, the horns in Women in Love and in Red Willow Trees demonstrate the idea that sexuality must be creative to be itself. The rather wonderful plurisignificance of the image in the painting is that human, plant and implied animalities (both bird with orange feathers and cattle) all coalesce in this rather weird bio-animated becoming-other. It is a picture of transgressive and highly entangled liveliness. Lawrence’s technical flaws reinforce the bioaesthetic colocation of man and tree-horn-bird in the painting, as the man’s head is not well distinguished from the tree branches. So too, Lawrence paints a short horizontal tree branch beneath the man’s buttocks, as if he is half-sitting on that branch. Again, the somewhat awkward crafting of that specific element bolsters the suggestion of a fusion between the man and this animated tree-creature. As I have noted elsewhere, such creatural images in the performing arts may suggest a desire to enhance the secondary sexual characteristics of the comparably drab human figure. Visually enhancing human performers with animal colorations and plumages can be understood to signal an attendant jealousy of animals’ ‘superior’ embodied, aesthetic flourishes.16 When Gudrun suggests in Women in Love that the cattle are ‘charming’, therefore, the charm is not merely sexual. Or rather, it is sexual in a much more elaborated register than is typically asserted in critical discussions of Lawrence and sexuality. The cattle are not primarily metaphorical stand-ins for men or male sexuality. Rather, they are charming because they invite Gudrun into an embodiment of a ‘mating’ dance that is not only about sexuality, to be sure, but also is as much about the becoming-artistic of the human through vibrational excess and the harnessing of inhuman forces. Gudrun’s desire to perform a dance with and for cattle is clearly linked to all the characters’ experiments in living and in being, to their attempts to experience themselves as selfovercoming. We ought to see this figure in Red Willow Trees as performing just such an experiment, recalling Lawrence’s lifelong ecocritical artistic and philosophical commitments. The charm of the ‘tree-horned man’ in Red Willow Trees and of the cattle with Gudrun also recall the dandy, whose aim is to impress and inspire, and whose wardrobe has been described as a ‘more virile style for men’.17 It is the prosthetic use of the willow trees here that affords this dandification of the man. Thus, the branch-horns evoke what I have called ‘strange prosthetics’, where certain substitutions in connection to appendages mark the porous boundaries between human and animal modes of being and acting.18 I will return to the question of the dandy and bioaesthetics in Lawrence’s paintings and writing shortly.

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In theorizing the prosthetic, David Wills reminds us that prosthesis in a broad sense ‘treats of whatever arises out of that relation, and of the relation itself, of the sense and functioning of articulations between matters of two putatively distinct orders: father/son, flesh/steel, theory/fiction, translation/quotation … nature/artifice, public/private, straight/limping, and so on’.19 In this case, the ostensibly distinct orders are animal and human. The tree-horned man’s becomings-inhuman trouble our established ideas about the unbreachability of the species barrier as they collapse the three becomings of human, animal, plant in a living sculptural and pigmented gesture (pigmented referring more to the trees’ colourations than the literal painting, but which the paint pigments certainly re-enact). Moreover, Wills’s discussion of both the grammatical and anatomical prosthetic and its emphasis on transfer gives us a way to further understand the multiple becomings of this image: The significance and effect of transfer is not something subsequent to a given prosthesis but rather what occurs at its beginning, as its beginning. Prosthesis occurs as a rapid transfer … One could posit for it another type of beginning in the conjugational disjunction – the dysfunctional syntagmatic transfer – of a peculiarly irregular Latin verb, ferre (to bear; past participle latum), doing double duty in a hermeneutic gesture that relates and refers everything back to a series of shifts, bringing discourse back to a fact of being borne, to a point of weight transfer … from leg of flesh to leg of steel, it is necessarily a transfer into otherness, articulated through the radical alterity of ablation as loss of integrity. And this otherness is mediated through the body, works through the operation of a transitive verb – movere, ferre – signifying first of all something carried by the body.20 I would suggest that Lawrence’s image helps us think about the prosthetics of creativity itself. This creative prosthetics involves the human being reaching ‘beyond’ itself, across the species barrier, and here, into the plant realm as well. This kind of creative entanglement of human and non-human powers again resonates with Lawrence’s broader environmental understanding of human embeddedness in non-human forces. In thinking further about the power of trees for Lawrence, Millett is helpful in his own discussion of Red Willow Trees and the painting Boccaccio Story, where he observes that trees ‘convey a great deal to Lawrence’.21 Millett reminds us of various excerpts that reinforce Lawrence’s notion that all living things possess a god within them. In Phoenix Lawrence writes, ‘Empedokles says trees were the first living creatures to grow up out of the earth’, and in Sea and Sardinia, ‘Another naked tree I would paint is the gleaming mauve-silver fig, which burns its cold incandescence, tangled like some sensitive creature emerged from the rock.’22 Note that trees are described with the language

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of the creatural in both of these excerpts. Lawrence’s poem ‘Bare Fig-Trees’ evinces a similar creatural animation of trees that we can connect to the ‘plumed’ willows in Lawrence’s painting. In this poem, Lawrence repeatedly uses the word ‘nude’ (in addition to ‘naked’) to describe the ‘limbs’ of the fig tree, and goes on to write of the Great, complicated, nude fig-tree, stemless flower-mesh, Flowerily naked in flesh, and giving off hues of life. Rather like an octopus, but strange and sweet-myriad-limbed octopus; Like a nude, like a rock-living, sweet-fleshed sea anemone Flourishing from the rock in a mysterious arrogance. (1Poems 251) These sea-creature images, combined with those at the poem’s end, where he uses the comparison of ‘snakes on Medusa’s head’ to describe the tree, point to a similarly heightened bio and creatural aliveness in Lawrence’s view of trees. Lawrence’s late novella, The Escaped Cock, also includes intense bioaesthetic connections between trees and birds, in particular. This highly provocative story, in which a Jesus ­figure – after his resurrection – is imagined to renounce his original vocation and instead choose a life of creatural and earthbound joys, begins with an explicitly bioaesthetic portrait of the titular game-cock. Lawrence’s initial description of the bird evokes a cross-species notion of art as rooted in the excesses of sexual difference and display. The story’s first sentence makes an explicit connection between the bird’s plumage and the ‘plumage’ of fig trees: the bird puts on ‘brave feathers as spring advanced, and was resplendent with an arched and orange neck, by the time the fig-trees were letting out leaves from their end-tips’ (VG 123). Moreover, the creature grows ‘to a certain splendour. By some freak of destiny he was a dandy rooster, in that dirty little yard with three patchy hens’ (VG 123; my emphasis). The bird also ‘learned to crane his neck and give shrill answers to the crowing of other cocks, beyond the walls, in a world he knew nothing of. But there was a special fiery colour to his crow, and the distant calling of other cocks roused him to unexpected outbursts’ (VG 123). The fiery colour is easily linked to the orange hues of the trees in Red Willow Trees. As is usually the case in non-human sexual dimorphism, the male is ‘tasked’ with the goals of corporeal refinement and excess, which are all meant to engage and attract discerning females through aesthetic feats. To repeat, we need not see sexuality as biologically ‘determined’ or rigidly heteronormative here, but rather as a fluid process of becoming that emphasizes pleasure. Again, such extreme colouration as the game-cock and the ‘tree-horned man’ in the painting display would be understood as a particularly incisive

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example of the way that sexuality itself requires creativity: ‘sexuality needs to harness excessiveness and invention to function at all’.23 A bioaesthetic understanding of creatural, embodied intensities during sexual spectacle therefore applies precisely to Lawrence’s painted ‘tree-horned man’, just as it would to the ‘saucy flamboyant bird’ who seems ‘good for twenty hens’ (VG 123). The descriptive phrase ‘dandy rooster’ and the idea of an eco-dandy horned man have a particular salience for bioaesthetic readings of Lawrence’s work. The dandy has a long and complex history. Proto-dandies have been traced back even to Julius Caesar’s time, but the paradigmatic British dandy, George Brummell, made his mark in the early 1800s in London. While there is a good deal of critical work on the cultural significance of dandyism, here I want to emphasize the charm, splendour, independence and anti-utilitarianism that typified ideas of the dandy in Victorian and modernist milieus. As Elisa Glick notes, the dandy exemplifies art’s ‘uselessness’ in the era of ‘art for art’s sake’.24 Nigel Rodgers also confirms the dandy’s anti-utilitarianism, as the dandy is renowned for ‘doing nothing’.25 This aspect of dandyism overlaps in provocative ways with Grosz’s insistence on the non-utilitarian pleasures of sexual becomings. The charm and visual splendour of the dandy are clearly analogous to the insouciance and ‘flamboyance’ that Lawrence attributes to his bird, and these qualities also seem germane to the becoming-vivid of the man in his willow painting. The game-cock is also noted for his ‘shrill answers’ to the crowing he hears from distant cocks in Lawrence’s tale. ‘How he sings!’ the peasant notes (VG 123). Here, it is useful to recall the relationship between birds, birdsong, music and art in Grosz’s readings of Darwin, where both thinkers insist that music functions in evolutionary terms by creating pleasure and attracting one creature to another. In this sense, for Darwin, ‘it is perhaps birdsong that most clearly reveals the sexual nature of song, the productive role of sexual selection in the elaboration of the arts, and the mutual entwinement of the arts of decoration, performance, staging, and so on, with each other’.26 Birdsong marks territory, highlights skills in the singer, attracts and mesmerises other birds and creatures of other species. It also emphasizes emotion and marks the cultural acquisition of skills that are not reducible to instinct.27 Grosz makes an important clarification when she explains, my claim is not that the bird influences the human, but that the songbird (and the songs of whales) accomplishes something new in its oratory, a new art, a new coupling of (sonorous) qualities and milieus that isn’t just the production of new musical elements … but the opening up of the world itself to the force of taste, appeal, the bodily, pleasure, desire – the very impulses behind all art.28

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Lawrence’s vocalizing game-cock thus sets out his ‘notice’ to other creatures that his territory is marked off for the resplendent and performative songs and dances of seduction, activities that we can understand as participating in the bio-impulse at the root of all artistic endeavours. And he defends this territory throughout the story. The bird’s painterly vitality and vibrational enmeshment with earthly and cosmic life forces is at the centre of Lawrence’s depictions in the story, and make for a pointed contrast with the blunted, drained lifelessness of the human figures. The ‘dead-white’ face (VG 127) of the man who died, his ‘thin, waxy hands’ (VG 128) and the grey tunics of the peasants are all contrasted with the brilliant intensities of creatural and vegetal life: he [the man] was roused by the shrill, wild crowing of a cock just near him, a sound which made him shiver as if electricity had touched him. He saw a black and orange cock on a bough above the road, then running through the olives of the upper level, a peasant in a grey woollen shirt-tunic. Leaping out of greenness came the black and orange cock with the red comb, his tailfeathers streaming lustrous. (VG 126) The emphasis on movement (‘leaping out of greenness’) is also frequent in this story, and resonates with Lawrence’s use of dance as a bioaesthetic framework in his paintings and his written works.29 Such contrasts saturate the story, especially in the sections where the man is learning how to come back to an experience of living. While the pale, bleak face of the Christ figure in Lawrence’s painting Resurrection (May 1927, oil on canvas) is regularly compared to the protagonist in The Escaped Cock, the Mother Mary figure in the right portion of that painting, helping Jesus out of the tomb, has a garment with black and orange stripes. One cannot help connecting this rendering to the black and orange feathers in the story, even though the bird is insistently male in the text. The creatural, life-giving forces of the story’s bird and Isis figure are similarly rendered in the painting’s figuration of Mother Mary. Moreover, the watercolours in reds and shades of black and grey that Lawrence made for the Black Sun Press edition of The Escaped Cock feature an Isis figure in a flowing, striped skirt and a separate bird whose tail feathers mimic the movement of the female figure’s skirt. Both of the figures seem clearly to be dancing. The women’s costumes (in both Resurrection and the watercolours) are made dandy in order to signal bioaesthetic forces, the inherently sexual-creative powers that can rekindle the life-flame of the deadened deity. Lawrence returns to the significance of the game-cock’s singing again, early in the story, where the narrator explains that despite the ‘diminished, pinched cry’ of the re-shackled bird,

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there was that in the voice of the bird stronger than chagrin. It was the necessity to live, and even to cry out the triumph of life. The man who had died stood and watched the cock who had escaped and been caught ruffling himself up, rising forward on his toes, throwing up his head and parting his beak in another challenge from life to death. The brave sounds rang out and … [the man] saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a black and orange cock, or the green flame tongues of the extremes of the fig-tree. (VG 129) Here a specific creatural bioaesthetic force (a black and orange cock) is situated in the broader environmental dynamism of earth’s atmospherics and plant becomings. Again, the trees become creatural and even limbic in Lawrence’s comparison, with the rhythmic force of the ‘green flame tongues of the extremes of the fig-tree’. It is the embeddedness in the drifting forces of earth’s liveliness in the man who died that propels his journey to a ‘new’ form of existence in the novella, just as the ‘horned man’ in Red Willow Trees becomes new and other, through a more literal connection to geo-forces. These are, writ large, the creative movements of all creatural, organic and cosmic life-forces that Lawrence champions. Jack Stewart has addressed a kind of pan-vitalism in Lawrence’s thinking. Stewart describes Lawrence’s vision as ‘pastoral rather than primitivist, ecological rather than mythological’, and he attends to the vibratory and rhythmic powers of colour in Lawrence’s painterly manner of perceiving and describing.30 In addition to marking Stewart’s emphasis on synaesthetic, participatory animism, it is useful to note that Lawrence’s painterly attraction to colour also underscores the creatural way in which animal bodies become artistic and creative in a bioaesthetic self-transformation. Again, this helps explain the wonderful overlap between the cock’s black and orange feathers and the mother figure’s black and orange garment in the painting Resurrection. A fluid and movement-oriented creatural liveliness is seen in Lawrence’s oil painting Dance Sketch (before July 1928, oil on canvas), which is widely considered one of his most successful visual works. Here, Lawrence claimed to have painted Adam and Eve with ‘God Almighty disappearing in a dudgeon, and the animals skipping’ (5L 639). Keith Sagar calls this painting’s paradise ‘Lawrence’s version of what we now call Gaia, or deep ecology’.31 Such deep ecological commitments are evidenced in claims like the one from Apocalypse, where Lawrence writes the following, which Stewart calls a ‘manifesto of vital awareness and relationship’:32 For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. … We ought to dance with rapture that

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we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. (A 149) (my emphasis) Millett pays particular attention to the way that ‘truly spontaneous dancing seems to have had a profound and lasting effect upon Lawrence. On several occasions he described the impressions he took away with him after viewing native dancers.’33 So too, Millett notes that dancing is connected to a variety of religious or spiritual traditions and states that dancing, ‘like drinking the essence of the god in Dionysiac worship, is ritualistic in origin and magic in character’.34 Millett goes on to note that the male and female figures in Dance Sketch are influenced by Lawrence’s attraction to paintings of dancers in Etruscan tombs. Of these images Lawrence writes, in Sketches of Etruscan Places, ‘And how lovely these have been, and still are! The band of dancing figures that go round the room still is bright in colour, fresh … Wildly the bacchic woman throws back her head … while the broad-bodied young man turns round to her … They are dancing in the open, past little trees.’35 Dance Sketch includes a particular Dionysian element that connects Lawrence’s renderings to another powerful figure in modernism who celebrated the wisdom and value of embodied becomings: Isadora Duncan. This element is the throwing back of the head that was central to Duncan’s own innovations in dance, largely drawn from her ideas about Greek art’s connections to nature and her own experiments in movement. In her essay ‘Terpsichore’, Duncan emphasizes bioaesthetic commitments in which music serves as a bedrock for our understanding of inhuman artistic emergence: ‘all movement on earth is governed by the law of gravitation, by attraction and repulsion, resistance and yielding; it is that which makes up the rhythm of the dance. To discover this rhythm, we must listen to the pulsations of the earth. The great composers – Bach, Beethoven, Wagner – have in their works combined with absolute perfection terrestrial and human rhythm’ (my emphasis).36 In an invective against ballet, Duncan discusses the ‘undulating line’ that she sees as emblematic of Attic poses on vases, claiming she has almost never seen a Greek representation of dance ‘in which the foot is raised to a line perpendicular to the body. Even on the vases with figures expressing Bacchic frenzy, this movement is unknown.’37 Bacchic frenzy is then explicitly allied with animality through a specific physiological gesture: One of the commonest figures in the Bacchic dances is that with the head turned backward. In this movement one senses immediately the Bacchic frenzy possessing the entire body. The motive underlying this gesture is in all nature. The animals, in Bacchic movement, turn back the head: in tropic

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countries, at night, the elephants turn their heads; dogs baying at the moon, lions, tigers. It is the universal Dionysiac movement.38 This Dionysian movement is featured prominently in a number of Duncan’s dances, and in iconic photographs of Duncan, and of the dancers in her choreographic legacy, all the way to the present day.39 In the ‘Terpsichore’ segment on Bacchic frenzy, she also notes that in the figures on Greek vases ‘one senses that the movement goes on: there is in this movement an eternal element – one which follows the undulating line of the great forces of Nature, on which I have based all the movements of my dance’.40 Moreover, in ‘The Dancer and Nature’, Duncan suggests that women will attain knowledge of beauty not through analysis and conceptual regimens, but rather through the lived body: ‘Shall she find this knowledge in the gymnasium examining her muscles, in the museum regarding the sculptured forms, or by the continual contemplation of beautiful objects, and the reflection of them in the mind? These are all ways, but the chief thing is, she must live this beauty, and her body must be the living exponent of it.’41 Thus, Duncan is a figure who ought to be more regularly considered alongside Lawrence, as they are influential modernists with partly overlapping philosophies. And Dance Sketch allows just such a fruitful consideration. While the female figure in the painting does not have an overly exaggerated Bacchic movement backwards of the head, she does have enough of the movement to be recognizable, especially in contrast to the male figure who is significantly bent forward (with his face looking straight down at the ground). The woman’s position could be described in ballet terminology as a small cambré, as the upper back arches slightly, indicated by the raised and pulledback right shoulder, and by her open thoracic and throat regions. It is notable that a similar movement is rendered for both the male and female figures in Lawrence’s painting Yawning (March 1928, watercolour). Indeed, in Yawning, the male figure presents the more open and physically exaggerated Bacchic posture. The dancing goat on hind legs in Dance Sketch is regularly commented upon, as in Millett’s point that the ‘he-goat in the painting is a very appropriate companion for the male and female dancers’.42 Millett connects Lawrence’s interests in rebirth and dancing to the ancient god Pan, who is a hybrid goatman typically represented with goat legs, loins and horns, and who is associated with fertility, shepherding, wooded glens and springtime. In addition to the further connections with the god Tammuz, that Millett outlines, the myth of the pan flute has a particular bioaesthetic power. When the wood-nymph Syrinx flees from Pan’s advances, she runs to her sisters as he pursues her, but they immediately turn her into a reed that then makes a plaintive sound when the wind blows. Upon hearing this note, Pan cuts the reed into segments that

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he connects, and thus fashions his musical instrument named Syrinx. Like so many myths, this one is grounded in unwanted male sexual advances, and the fashioning of the flute disturbingly suggests a kind of dismembering of the female body. I do not want to minimize the gendered violence that so often centres these founding narratives, but I do want to acknowledge this as a bioaesthetic story, with scorned sexuality transmuted into a musical ‘organ’, with a horned man as symbol once again of male sexuality, yes, and of a particular bioaesthetic becoming-artistic that the horns as a ‘branching’ secondary sexual characteristic signal. Just as the feathers on the flamboyant cock and its shrill cry reveal the bird’s aesthetic becoming-brilliant, Pan is doubly dandy because he not only has horns, but he also has a fluted prosthetic ‘voice’ of seduction. Thus, we can see the goat in Lawrence’s painting as reinforcing in multiple ways the human figures’ bioaesthetic dances of rapture. The painting that can provide a summative conclusion here, The Lizard (March 1928, watercolour), is one that also has a seemingly direct poetic corollary. Millett connects this painting quite usefully to Lawrence’s poem, ‘Lizard’: A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening no doubt to the sounding of the spheres. And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you and swirl of a tail! If men were as much men as lizards are lizards they’d be worth looking at. (1Poems 455) The watercolour painting shows the same ‘haughtiness’, according to Millett, that the reptile in the poem exhibits, and this ‘vitality’ of the lizard is in marked contrast to the human figures in the painting, who are ‘remarkably lethargiclooking’.43 The overt description in the poem of the lizard as a ‘dandy fellow’, alongside the particular emphasis on the lizard’s swirled tail, clearly indicate a bioaesthetic extravagance, a becoming-artistic of a dandy creature, whose independent charm and visual splendour are counterposed to humans’ lesser capacities to accept and enact embodied flourishing. While Lawrence’s technique proper is lacking, he does usefully engage the greens of the lizard elsewhere in the painting (both in the landscape elements and in the human bodies) to achieve at least a moderately successful ‘colour harmony’.44 Moreover, his decision to keep the left foot of the male ­figure – which is placed close to the lizard – very pale successfully emphasizes the creature’s vitalist power, as opposed to the human’s ‘ghostly’ lack of power. The fluid lines of the lizard convey movement well, reinforcing the ‘dance

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of rapture’ that Lawrence so often uses to signal a healthy retreat from the strictures of overly mental consciousness. Moreover, the poem’s insouciant final line suggests a bioaesthetic emphasis on aesthetic taste and discernment. Reading Lawrence’s paintings through a bioaesthetic framework, with particular attention to animalities and becomings-animal, gives a piquing supplemental frisson to his own claim in ‘Making Pictures’ that ‘a picture lives with the life you put into it. If you put no life into it – no thrill, no concentration of delight or exaltation of visual discovery – then the picture is dead’ (LEA 229). Furthermore, this framework of entangled human and non-human creativity and enlivenment helps us to understand Lawrence’s ecological value in our current era: the richness and vitality of the human world in his paintings is often located in its interimbrication with creatural and non-human forces. It is the embodied extravagance, self-othering and dandy flourishings that Lawrence is after. His paintings are sometimes a powerful dance of interspecies forces, and when his human figures do not partake in the bioaesthetic sway, he often provides a swell or graceful little creature, to show us what we are missing.

NOTES 1 See Carrie Rohman, Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). I first used the term bioaesthetic in a 2014 publication to signal a cross-species concept of the aesthetic impulse (Carrie Rohman, ‘No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Modern Fiction Studies, 60.3: 562–78). My usage of this term counters trends in ‘neuroaesthetics’ that regard all artistic capacities as exclusively human. 2 Here it is important to note a companionate ethics with Susan McHugh’s incisive work in her book, Animal Stories. As McHugh explains, ‘stories might be seen as key points of ethical negotiation across artistic and scientific models of species and social life’ (p. 14). The implications of a bioaesthetic framework resonate with McHugh’s claims: aesthetic impulses themselves are a point of contact or exchange between human and animal life-worlds. See Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 3 See Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 4 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 2. 5 Ibid., p. 32. 6 Ibid., p. 33. 7 Ibid., pp. 64–5. 8 Ibid., p. 66. 9 Ibid., p. 70.

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10 Ibid., p. 33. 11 See Rohman, Stalking. 12 For recent work on Lawrence and dance, movement and painting see Susan Jones, ‘Dance’, The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020); and Rohman, Chapter 2 in Choreographies; and Carrie Rohman, ‘Modernist Animals and Bioaesthetics’, Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 385–96; and Jeff Wallace, ‘Practitioner Criticism: Painting’, The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) wherein Wallace discusses Lawrence’s analysis of Botticelli’s ‘Nativity of the Saviour’ in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. There, Lawrence writes about ‘an outburst of movement from the source of motion. The Infant Christ is a centre, a radiating spark of movement, the Virgin is bowed in Absolute Movement’ (qtd. in Wallace p. 309). 13 Robert W. Millett, Vultures and the Phoenix: A Study of the Mandrake Press Edition of the Paintings of D. H. Lawrence (Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1983), p. 46. 14 See Lawrence’s discussion of English landscapes in ‘Introduction to These Paintings’, especially pp. 194–5 (LEA). 15 Keith Sagar, Introduction to D. H. Lawrence’s Paintings (London: Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 36. Henceforth cited in the text as Paintings. 16 See Rohman, Choreographies, pp. 127–33 on the dancer Merce Cunningham’s comparisons of the ‘ravishing’ beauty of birds as opposed to the ‘ungainly’ plodding human, and the ways he used technology to ‘enfeather’ his dancers on stage. 17 Nigel Rodgers, The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma? (London: Bene Factum, 2012), p. 10. 18 See especially Chapter 4 in Rohman, Choreographies. 19 David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 10. 20 Wills, Prosthesis, pp. 12–13. 21 Millett, Vultures, p. 47. 22 Cited in Millett, Vultures, p. 47. 23 Grosz, Chaos, p. 64. 24 Elise Glick, ‘Turn-of-the-Century Decadence and Aestheticism’, in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 332. 25 Rodgers, Dandy, p. 9. 26 Grosz, Chaos, p. 36. 27 Ibid., pp. 37–8. 28 Ibid., p. 39. 29 This description in Lawrence’s story seems an apt moment for biographical context: Andrew Harrison reminds us in his biography that Lawrence’s father,

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Arthur, ‘loved dancing’ and was known as a lively, expressive fellow who also enjoyed singing. See Andrew Harrison, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), p. 5. 30 Jack Stewart, ‘Flowers and Flesh: Color, Place, and Animism in St. Mawr and “Flowery Tuscany” ’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 36.1 (Spring 2011): 92–113, 100. 31 Sagar, Paintings, p. 63. 32 Stewart, ‘Flowers and Flesh’, p. 92. 33 Millett, Vultures, p. 91. 34 Ibid. 35 Cited in Millett, Vultures, p. 101. 36 Isadora Duncan, ‘Terpsichore’, in Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1969), p. 90. 37 Ibid., p. 91. Thus, Duncan addresses the arabesque, a movement/position absolutely central to ballet history and aesthetics, as ultimately unnatural and to be avoided. 38 Ibid. 39 For a detailed discussion of the Dionysian movement in Duncan’s work, see Chapter 1, Rohman, Choreographies. For additional photographs and video of contemporary dancers in the Bacchic position, see Carrie Rohman, ‘Nude Vibrations: Isadora Duncan’s Creatural Aesthetic’, Modernism/Modernity, 2.3 (September 2017): https://mod​erni​smmo​dern​ity.org/artic​les/nude-vib​rati​ons. 40 Duncan, ‘Terpsichore’, p. 91. 41 Ibid., p. 67. 42 Millett, Vultures, p. 100. 43 Ibid., p. 136. 44 In my own view, as an amateur painter with some formal training, the use of green in the lower landscape is simply too saturated and similar to that used for the reptile, and thus it somewhat overpowers the hues of the lizard. Perhaps a more trained Lawrence would have mixed that green with a bit of brown from the landscape, so that the thematic centrality of the lizard would have been reinforced by its own colour being the most prominent green. The colour harmony is there, but it is perhaps not executed to its greatest potential.

PART IV

Material cultures

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A material poetry HOLLY A. LAIRD

Why is it that the go-to major poets of the period known as ‘modernism’ (stretching, broadly, from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War) rarely included D. H. Lawrence for twentieth-century scholars and teachers of modernism and modernity? This is the case particularly in the United States, when the reverse effect was evident among contemporary poets, for whom Lawrence was proving as profoundly and extensively inspirational as he was neglected in academia. Lawrence challenged the dogmas of his day so vigorously as, to borrow phrasing from William York Tindall, to have left ‘absurd raw materials, remaining raw and absurd’.1 At the same time that he was being acclaimed for writing prose that attacked the modern age as an era of mindless machines and ravenous materialism, he was writing poetry that viewed the ‘raw’ material earth and human beings as radically entwined and embedded in each other. In his pioneering re-visioning of the relationships between ‘I’ and the ‘other’ – ‘I’ as in, and of, both matter and space – Lawrence was writing what can now be understood as a posthumanist, new materialist verse. It is no surprise, then, that towards the end of the twentieth century, with the rise of ‘new’ modernisms and new generations of scholars, we began to witness a gradual rise (now well underway) in scholarly revaluations of Lawrence’s poetry. Moreover, with the twenty-first-century publication in 2013–18 of the authoritative Cambridge University Press Poems edited by Christopher Pollnitz, Lawrence’s verse has received the reliable textual editing that his modernist peers have been accorded for decades. Although this is not a variorum edition and thus necessarily incomplete, reconsideration of his poetry can now proceed with accurate textual versions and apparatus.

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My focus in this chapter will be not only the poetry’s posthumanist re-worlding of the I–other relationship, but its grounding in Lawrence’s prior revisioning of gender relations. The earliest new materialist theory was appropriately critiqued for its erasure of human-to-human social marginalizations,2 and beginning with Kate Millett’s famous assessment in Sexual Politics (1970), Lawrence’s work was often viewed as sexist. My research here seeks to address both issues by reconsidering the genealogy of one of his best-known poems, ‘The Wild Common’. I begin with a condensed explanation of why Lawrence’s poetry has been relatively neglected by scholars and of how the scholarship is now evolving, noting especially relevant prior readings of Lawrence’s poetry, before looking at the curve of these themes over the course of his career. Unlike several poets whose lives overlapped with Lawrence’s, including H. D., Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and William Carlos Williams, Lawrence did not live to see or survive the Second World War. If he had, he would probably have become a recurrent presence in anthologies of post-war contemporary and postmodern poetry. He nonetheless proved as great an influence on contemporary poets. Although within the university system, R. P. Blackmur’s ‘D. H. Lawrence and Expressive Form’ (1935) proved hugely influential in its denigration of Lawrence’s poetry as fragmented autobiography, insufficiently rational and imperfectly crafted, numerous poets and, increasingly, critics have corrected its formalist assumptions and have drawn attention to the richly various aesthetic modes of Lawrence’s verse.3 Those modernist poets’ names indicate what may well have been the greater obstacle to its scholarly reception, for unlike them, Lawrence did not pick a single genre in which to write; the same is true for fiction writers who, like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton, became renowned for a single genre. In the early decades of the twentieth century, to be a poet still represented for many writers the greatest literary ambition, echoing a centuries-long valuation of poetry as the ‘highest’ genre; Lawrence’s own earliest choice, as he told his friend Jessie Chambers, was poetry – ‘the very greatest thing’.4 None of the modernist poets mentioned earlier rode the dramatic shift (especially following the Second World War) to the novel as the most aspirational genre for writers. In 1925, Lawrence wrote essays elaborating on what might make the novel the ‘supreme’, or as he describes it in ‘Why the Novel Matters’, ‘the one bright book of life’ (STH 195). Lawrence’s corpus was ready for this shift, and so he became a canonical novelist in the university for the decades that followed. Yet, throughout his career Lawrence continued to write poetry, short stories, plays and creative non-fiction (including travel literature) alongside novels; he completed some of his most impressive work in poetry and non-fictional prose in his last five years. Ultimately, Lawrence embraced multiple genres, crossing generic borders as agilely as he did the more material borders mapped by posthumanism.

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Post-Second-World-War poets were keenly attuned to Lawrence’s verse, and scholars of those contemporary poets have long been aware of Lawrence’s extensive influences (including A. Alvarez, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, Ted Hughes, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton and Gary Snyder, among numerous others). But though a few Lawrence scholars took note of this fact, the poetry remained marginalized within Lawrence studies. Some of the relevant landmarks in the gradual scholarly reassessment of the poetry include the re-publication in a 1990 paperback edition of the renowned feminist critic Sandra Gilbert’s first book, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1972): this edition included a new introduction explaining why women and feminist readers and critics have taken an interest in Lawrence’s works. Two years earlier, I published a study, Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (1988), which was the first archive-based examination of the entire poetic career. In 2003, Amit Chaudhuri published D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, which showed how Lawrence wrote against the grain of the ‘English’ canon, deconstructing it. Carrie Rohman published an influential book on animal studies in 2009, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal, which foregrounds Lawrence’s poetry, and M. M. Mahood devoted a book chapter to Lawrence in her study of The Poet as Botanist. The year 2010 witnessed the first full-length study on just one segment of his career when Bethan Jones published a monograph on The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style; and in 2021, Annalise Grice developed the first full-length consideration of Lawrence’s work in a cultural materialist context: this book D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings demonstrates the centrality of the poetry in launching and shaping his early career. The steady climb in the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (first published in 1987), which took Lawrence’s work as a touchstone, and the posthumous publication of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1 (2001–2), which highlighted Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’, are resituating Lawrence’s place more broadly in the scholarly world as a posthumanist writer. In 2005, Jeff Wallace published a booklength study of Lawrence’s posthumanism, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, and though this touches only briefly on the poetry, it shows precisely how profoundly Lawrence thought about the ‘kinship’ of the human with ‘inorganic matter’.5 Lawrence influenced numerous major movements in post-war verse, including the Black Mountain poets, Confessionalism, ‘Open’ verse proponents and eco-poetics. Lawrence even attracted post-war poets’ interest in what Olson referred to as cultural ‘states of being & geography divers from the modern’,6 thus anticipating Chaudhuri’s understanding of the poetry’s ‘postcoloniality’. Following Lawrence’s precedent, Olson gravitated to indigenous mythologies that were ‘divers’ not merely from ‘the modern’ but that had been lost in

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the gaps between the Hindu, Chinese and ancient Greek. As Gilbert argues, moreover, in both editions of her influential study, ‘the author of Birds, Beasts and Flowers occupies [a ‘crucial’ place] in a tradition of radically revisionary underground poetry that has been of major importance not only in the lives and works of the best contemporary poets in English but also in the lives and thoughts of most contemporary feminists’.7 Fiona Becket has recently addressed the question of sexism in Lawrence’s verse in direct relation to his concern with the material and non-human in ‘Green Lawrence? Consciousness, Ecology, and Poetry’: We are accustomed to aligning observations in ‘Figs’, ‘Medlars and SorbApples’, and ‘Pomegranate’ [in Birds, Beasts and Flowers] with misogynistic positions in Lawrence. It might be tempting to read the celebration of the ‘heavy globule’ (1Poems 232) of the peach as of a piece with the ‘swung breasts’ of ‘Gloire de Dijon’ (1Poems 176), and it could be argued that the ‘bivalve roundnesses’ of ‘Peach’ (1Poems 232) open out the field of reference more erotically … However, it is the botanical understanding of the peach’s structure (its ‘lovely, bivalve roundnesses’ [ibid.]) that ultimately undercuts the rather obvious androcentric suggestiveness and points to a serious project around ‘making’ – a notion which encompasses “natural” organic growth and manufacture … in ‘Peach’ our attention is drawn first to the form of the fruit and then to more profound questions of how physical forms emerge from what Lawrence calls in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious ‘the first fused nucleus … the creative-productive centre’ (PFU 19), a process which is the antithesis of industrial production.8 The general question of Lawrence’s sexism has been usefully complicated by prior feminist scholars, too numerous to recapitulate here: Lawrence’s well-known endeavour in his prose to celebrate men’s ‘phallic’ sexualities (which Millett critiqued), and his concerns with both Victorian and modern gender paradigms were not simplistically misogynistic. Still, any attempt to find a precursor who is equitable by contemporary standards must hit limits throughout Lawrence’s opus, and I will mark at least one such limit in the reading that follows. In 1974, contemporary poet Charles Olson argued for Lawrence’s pivotal role in breaking ‘the spell’ to ‘put men forward into the post-modern, the post-humanist, the post-historic, the going live present’.9 When Olson termed Lawrence’s verse not only ‘post-modern’ but also ‘post-human’, one might imagine a narrower definition of the posthuman than intended by new materialist theorists: in an important early essay in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence (1990), Alan Golding argued that, when Lawrence speaks of breaking ‘the spell’ of ‘what we are’, he was targeting secular humanism.10

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Nonetheless, Lawrence’s additional phrase, ‘and what we are in’, concerned Olson (and Lawrence) equally: for both poets, to attend to ‘what we are in’ was to attend to our environments, their animals and objects – the world of things in which people are inextricably interrelated things in themselves.11 As Leo Hamalian emphasized in another early essay, in D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors (1991), Olson further explained that Western thought constructed a specialized, superiorized niche for the human mind, ‘between what he is as a creature of nature … and those other creations of nature which we … call objects’, but, he continued, ‘man is himself an object’.12 In addition to analysing the posthumanism and gender construction in Lawrence’s verse, my critical contribution in this chapter is to focus on what can be learned from attending to the ‘surfaces’ of what (and how) Lawrence writes in a poem, in its antecedent versions and in related poems, rather than reading the poems ‘symptomatically’ for originating ideas, psychological depths or sociological subtexts. In this regard, my approach follows the type of reading first outlined by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus,13 except that my focus here is on poetry rather than on prose, and thus my approach must also be distinguished from the old ‘new critical’ approach to close reading, which sought unity and closure in a poem, presupposing the poem’s self-contained ‘organicism’ and excluding its historical and biographical contexts from consideration. I understand the poem here as a register of interaction between a writer and the surrounding world and as something ‘made’, a material technology in itself – here again, suggesting the theories of new materialists like Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman in ‘defin[ing] the human, nonhuman, technological, and natural as agents that jointly construct the parameters of our common world’.14 If the interactions registered by ‘The Wild Common’ can be characterized as ‘posthuman’, this is because of what it says and how it says it, rather than due to any deeper analysis. What greets contemporary readers of Lawrence’s poems when they turn to the first poem in the Cambridge University Press edition of the Poems is ‘The Wild Common’, which appears first in every anthology of his collected verse since 1927–8 when Lawrence developed his own Collected Poems (1Poems 5–6). In D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, ‘The Wild Common’ is one of just two poems that Wallace discusses: in his succinct analysis of this poem and its earlier published version in Amores (1916), he concludes that the ‘more robust and exclamatory [revised] version presents substance as ineradicable and not to be confused with ideas of an immortal soul – ‘ “all that is God takes substance!” ’.15 (Note that Wallace refers to the 1971 Complete Poems for these versions since the Cambridge University Press edition was not yet available; I will be referring to the 1908–9 as well as 1916 and 1927–8 versions later in the chapter). Wallace further shows how Lawrence’s use of the term ‘substance’ parallels its conceptualization by Ernst Haeckel, ‘whose The

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Riddle of the Universe (1899) was a part of Lawrence’s formative materialist reading’.16 With an eye to the evolution of Lawrence’s ‘posthuman’ ideas, Wallace turns quickly from the poem to the treatise, dedicating the rest of this section of his book to Haeckel. As groundbreaking as Wallace’s work is, it leaves room, I think, for considering the poetry itself as thinking through and verbally enacting the posthuman. We see Lawrence striving in both versions of this poem against an allegorical and anthropomorphic understanding of the world to develop an anti-allegorical rhetoric and synesthetic poetics of intimate relationship between and among things, including the ‘I’. In the context of this poem’s language, each word marks a space or place that is continually split, both destructively and creatively, by plural, shapeshifting meaning, and that word’s meanings interact fertilely with the various polymorphic words around it, resisting a single reading and singular referentiality. This is not to argue that the poem excludes the ideational, the psychological, or the sociological; on the contrary, all those dimensions are embedded in the language of the poetry and in the world which ‘I’ inhabits. The title itself oxymoronically conjoins the human and the non-human when it calls ‘the common’, which is a land area meant for public use, ‘wild’ (1Poems 5). The word ‘common’ exfoliates to allude, first, to numerous conventionally ‘ordinary’ non-human creatures, which quickly become extraordinary in this poem in their defiance of human norms and, second, to the commonality of these creatures as they congregate in this place, amid all their incongruities and repulsions, in inextricably interrelated intersection. What greets the reader in its first lines? Not the daffodils, lilies, roses or violets of nineteenth-century verse, but gorse: a common plant (which flowers every day of the year) whose guttural sound grates against ears honed by traditional poetic diction. ‘Gorse’ instantly sets readerly expectation and convention ajar to form a hub for an alt-world of the material and the ‘wild’. Yet Lawrence also deploys the fluid sounds of poetic alliteration to evince how live – how ‘quick’ – this plant is in his first two lines: ‘The quick sparks on the gorse-bushes are leaping / Little jets of sunlight texture imitating flame’. ‘Quick’ is an ancient word for the ‘alive’ and a touchstone for Lawrence; it is, simultaneously, a word for dynamic, rapid movement through time and space. Long before writing his famous manifesto for a ‘Poetry of the Present’ (1920), he was situating the worlds of his verse in the ongoing present conveyed here also by simple present participles ‘leaping’. It is Lawrence’s observational skill, not sheerly imagination, at work in this description since from the midst of the clustered yellow flowers of gorse bushes, the gorse seeds explode from their pods (ranging up to two metres distance): its seeds are, nearly literally, ‘quick sparks’ that ‘leap’ in ‘jets of sunlight texture’, looking like ‘flame’. The gorse is notoriously flammable when dry, but only the dried-out pods can emit the gorse’s fertile charge through the air.

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This poem’s opening lines launch the reader into a three-dimensional synesthetic recreation of earth, ‘The quick sparks on the gorse-bushes are leaping / Little jets of sunlight texture imitating flame; / Above them, exultant, the pee-wits are sweeping’ (ll. 1–3). It would be a mistake to think that Lawrence’s primary intention was anthropomorphism of the ‘sparks’ or ‘jets’ in the phrase ‘imitating flame’. The world in which the ‘I’ finds itself in this poem is profoundly analogical, its similarities and differences continually both echoing and at odds with one another. This is a world whose things repeat, mirror and resonate with each other, even while continually varying from and countering one another, in a ceaseless play of synchronicities and disconnections. The ‘I’ is as subject to those echoes and deflections as any of the poem’s creatures, as will be seen. Thus, when in the fourth line of this poem, Lawrence does not hesitate to attribute to planetary elements and animals what is conventionally considered a human propensity, to ‘triumph’, one may pause to wonder if that is exclusively human. Lawrence is indeed thinking (as the pee-wits cannot), not only in terms of the all-too-human preoccupation with territorial conquest, but also of the age-old history of supersession. He uses ‘triumph’ and ‘proclaim’ (in the following lines) ironically to bracket that human history with an ahuman primordial prehistory and potential future: the ‘little jets of sunlight’ and the ‘pee-wits’ – despite their elusiveness, their ‘little[ness]’ – ‘have triumphed again o’er the ages, their screamings proclaim’. The ants may, in the end, survive us all. As Alan Gillis has argued about the poetry of Kathleen Jamie, the problem is that such imaginative manipulation [through the lyric strategy of personification], when it comes to the environment, fauna, and flora, can hardly fail to seem dubious. Here, any potential anthropomorphization can seem like interference and possibly violation … it seems imperative to respect the otherness of nonhuman life and to refrain from co-opting it into an imaginary harmony … But what might be instructive for ecopoetic discourse generally is the way Jamie does not seem at all anxious about anthropomorphization. Her imagery freely uses human life to come imaginatively closer to nonhuman life and vice versa.17 Writing at a time when ‘ecopoetry’ was not yet a verse genre, Lawrence’s poetry nonetheless continually exhibits not just ‘respect’ for ‘the otherness of nonhuman life’, nor only an impulse to ‘come imaginatively closer to nonhuman life and vice versa’, but also its intrinsic disharmonies alongside its harmonies. The ‘gorse-bushes’ that form the principal subject of these lines are vividly recreated and geographically and botanically specific; to many readers they would be otherwise unknown. This guttural word rings none of the usual lyric bells – none of the conventional loveliness associated with traditional poetic

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diction, as would ‘dove’ or ‘lilac’, ‘nightingale’ or ‘goldenrod’. ‘Gorse’ echoes more approximately with ‘gross’, ‘gore’, or ‘grubs’, in English vocabularies, conventionally ‘ugly’ imagery. But much as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ revalued the ‘pied’, the ‘gorse’ is transformed into a dynamic hub of lyric consonance and assonance and of contrastive nouns, verbs and adjectives, as the ‘sparks’ go ‘leaping’ on and off the bushes, and the ‘pee-wits are sweeping’ above. ‘Rabbits’ seem less lucky than those ‘gorse-bushes’, at first glance, as the second stanza begins with ‘Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie / Low-rounded on the mournful turf they have bitten down to the quick’ (ll. 5–6). As the poet Ted Hughes (among others) noted, Lawrence does not romanticize the landscape or its creatures. The erosions, the barren spots, the mould, the violence are all there. Yet so also are the counterbalances, the dynamism, the cyclicity. So here, the rabbits are forced into dormancy, forced even to become ‘handfuls of brown earth’, after they have nibbled all the grass down ‘to the quick’. So dead the quick earth seems that the normally fertile ‘turf ’ appears ‘mournful’ at the loss. But are they dead and gone: ‘Are they asleep? – are they living? – ’ (l. 7). Is it only to be mourned now, if not by the rabbits, then by the people, the gamekeepers, who let this happen? The word ‘mournful’ is such a common adjective to apply to something that looks barren or dead that it has practically lost its reflexive power to personify an observer’s feeling, but when applied to ‘turf ’, its signification doubles to encompass the grave mounds of the rabbits, ‘handfuls of brown earth’. A wilted landscape lies self-suspended, parched, caught in the jaws of its self-demolition, yet still possibly ‘feeling’ something – a state of being that a poet can do no more than approximate in English. The ‘I’ enters the poem explicitly here – in the middle of the second stanza’s seventh line, following its two questions – as if in response or in conversation: ‘Now see, when I / Lift my arms, the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick!’ (ll. 7–8). By positioning the ‘I’ at the end of the line, breaking it from its action verb, ‘Lift’, Lawrence highlights but also postpones and suspends that privileged signifier, and in the multitudinously detailed imagery and sound texture of these lines, they instantly enact what the poet writes: the reader rises with ‘I’ at line’s end, lofted, caught up, to swing again with ‘Lift my arms’ (starting line 8) and, along with the hill, ‘bursts and heaves under their spurting kick!’ The ‘I’ and the reader become things tossed and swayed, feeling and hearing the wild common. In the third stanza, Lawrence at last deliberately invokes this poem’s title, opening line 9 by calling this place – not ‘earth’ or ‘world’ – but ‘The common’. By ending this stanza’s opening clause, mid-line, with ‘The common flaunts bravely’, Lawrence might seem to denigrate the ‘flaunt[ing]’, ‘brave’ collective, analogizing it to a showman. As noted earlier in the chapter, ‘the common’ is typically associated with human abstractions of the ordinary, the collective or communal

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and with quiet meadows that make walking easy for pedestrians rather than with gathering places for busy, energetic non-human creatures. Here again, he upends the habits of the androcentric mind, by observing the actual conflicts occurring in and on earth: ‘but below, from the rushes / Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes’. Plants vie for space, and in this scene, the king-cups effectively out-blossom as well as out-glitter the bushes. Nouns seem to morph into verbs with the ‘rushes’, ‘Crowds’ and ‘surge’ of flowers. It is in this third stanza too that the earth’s fourth element, water, finally makes an appearance, counteracting the agonistic contest depicted in lines 9 and 10 with its ‘mild’ manner and unexpectedly belying the dry state of the gorse-bushes, their flammability and parched, rabbity terrain: for ‘There the lazy streamlet pushes / His bent course mildly’ (ll. 11–12). Then again, the purportedly ‘lazy’ streamlet is belied, in ‘his’ turn, mid-line and mid-sentence, by abruptly unleashed energies: ‘here wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes’. It ‘gushes’ at the end of this enjambed line, as if over a cliff, into the fourth stanza – ‘Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip’ (l. 13) – where the reader (like an old sheep) is immersed in yet another sensually textured scene evoked by the following long-lingering line, ‘Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow’ (l. 14). Note too the closing stop of that line: its unabashed retraction from the grammatically correct, adverbial polysyllable ‘slowly’ into a blunted, adjectival monosyllable in its last word, ‘slow’. With ‘Naked on the steep, soft lip / Of the turf ’, in lines 15 and 16, the referent could be a sheep or a pee-wit or even a gorse-bush, but it is a humbled, unheroic ‘I’ that returns, after the first comma of line 16, now ‘watching’ another version of itself, imitating the ‘I’: ‘I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro’. There is no problem with the ‘shadow’ itself in the pool, either metaphysical or physical: it is just there to be noticed and watched, ‘quivering’ like the human body itself if dunked in a cool dip or like the other breeze-swayed things mirrored in the ripples or, then again, like the bow of a string after its arrow has been launched. As the next stanza unfolds, the problem is with the evanescence of the non-human and the human, of the lyric ‘waters’ and ‘marigolds’ and of the ‘shrivelled’ ‘gorseflowers’ and the fishbait ‘gudgeon’, all alike: What if the gorse-flowers shrivelled, and I were gone? What if the waters ceased, where were the marigolds then, and the gudgeon? What is this thing that I look down upon? White on the water wimples my shadow, strains like a dog on a string, to run on. (ll. 17–20)

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The first question seems not merely to place the ‘shrivelling’ of the gorseflowers and the ‘gone-ness’ of the ‘I’ on the same plane in conjunction with each other, but to suggest a radical reframing of the philosophic question of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in a forest with no human present to hear it: the structure of Lawrence’s question seems to presume instead that, if the ‘gorse-flowers’ no longer existed, neither would ‘I’. Or, as he implies in the simpler scientific point of the next question, if ‘the waters ceased’, so also would the earth’s creatures, the flowers and the fish. With these questions’ reformulation of that philosophic acorn, he appears to presuppose a material ‘ontos’ rather than the foundational subjectivity of Berkeleyan metaphysics. When he asks, then, ‘What is this thing I look down upon?’, in reference to his ‘own white shadow’, ‘quivering’, this question seems to recontextualize Plato’s earlier question and allegory of the shadow in the cave, which argued for an opposition between absolute, real ideas, or an immaterial ‘ontos’, beyond the illusory forms of this world. Lawrence does not fully answer this third question in this stanza, but even in the ‘shadow’s’ seeming – its illusory looks ‘like a dog on a string’ – he remains focused on analogical observation of its movement, its ‘strain[ed]’ stretch, its thin tie as if with a ‘string’ to himself, and the way, with and like the streamlet itself, it seems to ‘run on’. Yet in the context also of the first two questions, it makes sense to read this stanza as a moment in which he has been brought to the brink of the unseeable and the not-to-be-seen – what lies beyond life. Metaphysical questions, so often understood as abstract, ‘take substance’ in these questions at the site of a sheep-dip, where even appearances are not opposed to ‘reality’ but rather take shape from within, upon and between material things. The ‘shadow’ in the water looks, not only like an evanescent extension of the human, but ‘like a dog on a string’, which ‘strains’ at its leash, ‘to run on’ as insouciantly as water, ‘imitating flame’. As Becket argues of the verse in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, ‘Lawrence’s writing destabilizes and subverts the expectation[s]‌’ for both the ‘romantic pastoral’ he inherited and the environmentalist ethics that came later, but he does emphasize the ways ‘the scale and diversity of non-human life far exceeds the human’.18 In a poem like ‘The Wild Common’, Lawrence also admits the diverse dimensions of human consciousness, not merely through personification, but subtly through language play. In the secondary associations of the words ‘gudgeon’ and ‘wimples’, for example, he hints at the human opposites of the ‘fool’ and a nun’s veil, respectively. Prior readers of this poem, including Gilbert and Wallace, assiduously note that the earlier version of this poem which appeared in his 1916 book, Amores, allegorized the ‘shadow’ predictably as ‘soul’ and that Lawrence deliberately substituted ‘substance’ for ‘soul’ (3Poems 1660–1). Even without cognizance of that version, the common Christian association of ‘shadows’ with ‘symbols’ would call a theological interpretation to mind, where the ‘shadow’ is also associated, however, with the demonic.

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But Lawrence’s own answer to these questions, in stanza 6, rejects all three sets of associations, Platonic, Christian and Berkeleyan: it is here that the poet declares ‘I’ to be ‘all substance’. No less ontologically, his ‘shadow’ is ‘all shadow’: ‘I on the bank all substance, my shadow all shadow looking up to me, looking back!’ (l. 22). Material I, mirror-effect shadow. That mirror effect in the water is, of course, as mobile, changeable and live as life itself, which like a ‘white dog dances and quivers’ (l. 24). But it is also at this juncture, though less graphically than in his depiction of Gerald’s bloody taming of a horse in Women in Love, that Lawrence departs sharply from contemporary animal ethics to take the master–animal relationship as a material given: ‘How it looks back, like a white dog to its master!’ (l. 21). As the shadow ‘strains’ and ‘runs’ abreast the ripples, and as ‘the water runs, and runs faster’, Lawrence writes, ‘I am holding his cord quite slack’. In stanzas 5 and 6, the ‘I’ has wondered aloud about, then responded to, some weighty questions, evoking a metaphysical note, letting in the cognitive and ideational operations of our minds without missing a beat, slipping these in among the graphic, polyvalent images and narrative of encounter, fluidly, lucidly. ‘But’, for Lawrence (stanza 7 begins with ‘But’), thought is itself animate (as he stressed in developing his version of ‘pensées’ in the prefaces to his 1929 verse book, Pansies (2Poems 1299, 1307)), and it is inextricably interwound with feeling. Thus, at this juncture of recognition of the material relation between himself and his shadow, both of which are dependent on, constituted by and yet agential within the material world, his mood lifts and expands – rising, much as in the first and second stanzas – with subjective feeling and celebration, not unlike the ‘triumph’ attributed earlier to the ‘screaming’ pee-wits and little slips of sunlight: ‘But how splendid it is to be substance, here! / My shadow is neither here nor there; but I, I am royally here! / I am here!’ (ll. 25–6). The observation that the shadow ‘is neither here nor there’ because it is rippling ‘here and there’ enables Lawrence not only to note his own stability and materiality in relative contrast with his shadow’s ephemerality, but then also to proclaim himself ‘master’ (much as a man may materially leash and morally underrate a dog). The ‘I’ proclaims the sovereignty and here-ness of ‘I’ – not in its autonomy or its individuality, as in the Western tradition of the ‘sovereign individual’ – but in its substance, among other substances, which re-enter the poem on the pivot of that same sentence. After repeating ‘I am here’ at the end of line 26 and the start of line 27, he attributes this utterance (without a pause) to the pee-wits, to the rabbits, to the gorse and to insects: ‘I am here! I am here! screams the pee-wit; the may-blobs burst out in a laugh as they hear! / Here! flick the rabbits. Here! pants the gorse. Here! say the insects far and near’. Note too how the sound-pun of ‘here’ and ‘hear’ connects place to perception and substance to sound. There is such a thing as a ‘may-blob’ too (it is not just an exuberant burst of word play): ‘may-blobs’ are marsh marigolds and also kin to ‘king cups’,

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with which ‘the common’ ‘triumphed’ in contest with the flowering gorsebushes. In this metamorphic earthscape, pee-wit cries acquire speech; motion among the ‘may-blobs’ generates the sound of laughter; and action denotes being ‘Here!’ What Mahood points out about Lawrence’s ‘may-blobs’ is their likely origin in his father’s extensive knowledge of wild plants and herbal medicines: ‘Lawrence would first have heard many local and country names for plants. Alongside of “may-blobs” and the bookish “marigold” (“marsh marigold” in the pocket guide), kingcups figure in Lawrence’s poetry as “waterblobs” and “buttercups”, both of them names used by another Midlander, John Clare.’19 Mahood contextualizes this information in an argument Lawrence had with Jessie Chambers when she questioned his knowledge of plants – ‘ “I know because I know”, he replied, “How dare you ask me how I know?” ’20 Among the possible sources Mahood finds for this ‘adolescent rage’ (which she considers also simply ‘baffling’) are his unwillingness to acknowledge what he learned from his father and his possibly embarrassing attempt, the previous summer, to identify wildflowers with a school friend by comparing them to the pictures in a pocket guide.21 Probable as these reasons are, those of us who recall our adolescences may sympathize with someone else’s sudden scepticism about what we ‘know’, especially if we got the question in a moment of companionable enjoyment of the what and how of wildflowers. ‘The Wild Common’ is responsive, nonetheless, to its literary and botanical heritages and to the aesthetic figures and nomenclature of its times, as well as to an experience of the outdoors that Lawrence had in his youth. This polyvalence does not undermine what it has to say about material substance; rather, it helps complete a picture of this poem as the ‘material’ writ large – not confined narrowly to what can be physically touched and seen. Lawrence condenses a mighty, bustling thinginess in these seven stanzas, yet there remain three more, and those additional stanzas bring no less important developments. The eighth stanza brings, first, reaffirmation of the ‘I’s’ substance by its sensual immersion in its surroundings, all acting directly through their own agencies on the ‘I’. ‘Over my skin in the sunshine, the warm, clinging air … You are here! You are here! We have found you! Everywhere / We sought you substantial, you touchstone of caresses, you naked lad!’ (ll. 29–32). Second, these lines express wishes come true for a naked boy – to be loved, sought and caressed by others in, and as, a naked body – as well as an articulation of what things might feel like to a young, naked body in this landscape. The second line of this stanza (elided earlier) also hints at something symbolic in the number seven – ‘Flushed with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad’ – a line in which Lawrence merges the skin’s capacity for blushing when heated with the effects of birdsong on a listener. Moreover, we realize with the next stanza that this has also been a processive poem in which the speaker is articulating what is happening in the course of an experience as it happens: we

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learn, in the ninth stanza, that the ‘I’ has at some point – possibly during stanza 8 after he is ‘flushed’, possibly between that stanza and this one – stepped into the water and is as engrossed in materiality as ever: ‘Oh but the water loves me and folds me, / Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me, murmurs: Oh marvellous stuff!’ (ll. 33–4). Once in the water, he is ‘No longer shadow!’ (l. 35) and no harm has come; nothing has died – on the contrary, ‘it [the water] holds me / Close, and it rolls me, enfolds me, touches me, as if never it could touch me enough’ (ll. 35–6). In how many poems have we encountered an exultation of oneself as ‘stuff ’? That phrase ‘marvellous stuff ’ strikes me as one of the poem’s most effective descriptions; it is unexpected, yet positioned and articulated just right, and written in surprise at the sheer wonder of it all. We learn further, in Mahood’s one explicit mention of ‘The Wild Common’, that ‘Readers of “The Wild Common” are expected to know that when gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of fashion’.22 This is something of an overstatement since Lawrence would not have ‘expected’ either his London or his international readers to know this, but it does add yet another touch of sociocultural signification to this poem’s polyvalence. While it was not ‘fashionable’ at that time for a lad to celebrate his ‘nakedness’ in the outdoors, Lawrence chose a season for this poem when ‘kissing’ was expected, and this poem emerged, as I will discuss, in part, through figuration of physical intercourse with a woman. Still there remains the last stanza, and this stanza too brings important developments, first, through its reiteration, not merely of the ‘I’, but of all things, materially intertwined: ‘Sun, but in substance, yellow water-blobs!’ (l. 37). Second, in its explicit inclusion of the symbolic, mystic, and the moral, in ‘Wings and feathers on the crying, mysterious ages … / All that is right, all that is good, all that is God takes substance!’ (ll. 38–9). Third, in its reiteration of that mythologically, philosophically, folkloric and Christian number seven – the Pythagorean number for spirituality. In the poem’s last line, ‘In confirmation, I hear seven-fold lark-songs pealing’ (l. 40), one finds yet another of Lawrence’s numerous rewritings of Christian symbols and rites. A sudden dip in a meadow by a yearning lad becomes the poet’s most meaningful and memorable ‘confirmation’ in a new religion of the body. But what this stanza has emphasized is neither ‘I’ nor his body: as the poem affirms, the larks’ songs enact a ‘confirmation’ more specifically of the sun become-substance, of the wings and feathers carried by ‘the crying, mysterious ages’, of ‘all that is God’ and, not least, of the ‘pee-wits wheeling’ and ‘rabbit lob[bing]’. In the syntactical proximity of the poem’s last lines, it is, most nearly and literally, the rabbit’s ‘lob’ that is confirmed by the seven lark songs’ ‘pealing’. Yet by also highlighting the seven larks’ songs – through the ‘seven larks singing’ amid the ‘warm, clinging air’s’ ‘kisses’ in the eight stanza and the ‘confirmation’ of the poem’s ‘seven-fold lark songs’ in the poem’s last line – Lawrence leaves us (human readers) puzzling over the symbolism of the number seven, still

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wondering what it might mean rather than feeling wholly ‘confirmed’ in any final meaning. As he did repeatedly, increasingly over time, in ever-varying ways (in his prose and poems alike), this ending with the ‘seven-fold lark songs’ suggests something still unknown and not quite knowable. The number seven has meant so many things in so many different socio-religious contexts over time that it becomes mystically undecidable here. It was gendered relationships, however – the ‘other’ as a woman – that set the stage for the Lawrence of the 1927 version of ‘The Wild Common’ and for the poems most loved by later, contemporary poets in Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) and in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). Indicating the longevity of Lawrence’s transfiguration of gendered and Christian oppositions, the earliest draft of ‘The Wild Common’, though only a fragment which dates to 1908–9 (not included in Poems), contains the metaphor of the ‘shadow’ and an allegorization of the ‘soul’. Even in the earliest version, Lawrence has reversed the allegorical direction to allegorize ‘the soul’ as a ‘passionate woman’. First, the ‘shadow’ teases him, ‘Restless … as if it would leave me, / Then quick slips back’, and to clarify this image, he uses a simile to compare it with the ‘soul’: ‘Then quick slips back to my feet, as my fond and fluctuant soul / After pretending ’twere good to bereave me’ (ll. 17–19).23 This ‘shadow’ or ‘soul’ ‘cleaves to [his] flesh as shaken wine clings in its bowl’ – as if, all substance, ‘soul’ itself clings to flesh (l. 20).24 Then, still more dramatically, he follows up this materializing conceit with the following epic simile: ‘So my soul like a passionate woman turns / Filled with remorseful terror, to the man she scorned’ (ll. 25–6).25 The most obvious way in which Lawrence sought to revise traditional gender constructions was in the transmutation of the woman as ‘angel’ and the man as worshipful ‘brute’: the woman is passionate, and the man is her touchstone, fluctuant, repelled and desired, left, then returned to. Moreover, in both the 1908–9 and the 1916 versions, the ‘soul’ does not belong exclusively to the human, for ‘the soul of the wind and my blood compare / Their wandering happiness’ (ll. 31–2).26 The term ‘compare’ in those lines anticipates the still more analogical developments of the 1927 version. There is also a final moral to the story in the two earlier versions: a conclusion in which the gender reversal extends to encompass the question of ownership: ‘Blood of a heaving woman, who holds me / Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good’ (ll. 35–6). With these lines, flesh consummates flesh, and Lawrence expresses this in reversed imagery, with ‘blood’ ‘hold[ing]’ and ‘Owning’ the ‘body’ rather than ‘body’ ‘holding’ ‘blood’. If (as the earliest version indicates) Lawrence was reversing gender binaries and reimagining relationships with the earth as well as with a woman as made entirely of matter, in the next stage of his writing, in poems written in 1912–14 and revised for his 1917 collection Look! We Have Come Through!, Lawrence took the next step of recognizing this relationship as one of mutual recognition

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between ‘I’ and ‘other’. Rather than following the hint in the earliest versions of ‘The Wild Common’ that they might merge – as equally substantial dimensions of a single body and blood – he emphasizes their borders. By 1917, he is writing in the long poem ‘New Heaven and Earth’ of ‘her’ as a mysterious ‘other’. He situates this recognition in the context of the ultimate unknowability of earth’s otherness, ‘beyond knowledge or endurance’: Green streams that flow from the innermost continent of the new world, what are they? Green and illumined and travelling for ever dissolved with the mystery of the innermost heart of the continent mystery beyond knowledge or endurance, so sumptuous out of the well-heads of the new world. – The other, she too has strange green eyes! (1Poems 214) The mystic note of ‘The Wild Common’ reappears here in ‘the innermost heart of the continent’, which Lawrence heralds as ‘the new world’ – imagery overtly revising both biblical genesis and European conquest. The analogical is as alive as ever, as ‘she too has strange green eyes’ echoing the ‘green streams’ and the world’s ‘well-heads’, recalling in world-making terms the more local ‘sheepdip’ of ‘The Wild Common’. He heralds a woman as ‘The other’ and ‘strange’. Then, in ‘Manifesto’, the next poem in this verse sequence, he asks for the favour of respectful admiration to be returned, making explicit his rejection of the Christian notion that they should or could become ‘one’ in body and mind: ‘She has not realised yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, / she thinks we are all of one piece’ (1Poems 219). At first mention, I read the word ‘fearful’ as how she affects him – as worthy to be feared; the next line supports its other application, less positively, as her fear of their differences from one another, but a third reading is equally and simultaneously probable: ‘that fearful thing’ denotes the appropriately fearful actuality of the ‘I / other’ relationship. She still ‘thinks we are all of one piece’. But as he reemphasizes in the following lines, they may press up against each other and even pass away through the ‘little death’ of sex or through death itself, yet in both this life and any other, they will also remain apart: when she passes away as I have passed away being pressed up against the other, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver. (1Poems 220) The key phrase ‘pressed up against’ articulates exactly where each person is – not inside and not alienated – but touching oxymoronically ‘up against’.

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As Diana Leong has written of ‘the promise of the new materialisms’, a ‘post-humanist’ reconceives matter as ‘lively, self-directed, agential, creative, and always in the process of becoming’.27 Having reconceived ‘green’, planetary interiority, not only as flowing from an indelibly unknown source, but as analogically echoed in the attentive green eyes of the woman ‘as other’, pressed up against him, Lawrence does indeed anticipate the posthumanist ‘turn’ of contemporary theory in these 1917 poems, and he moved next to populating his poetry and its ‘green streams’ with numerous ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’. As he puts it at the start of ‘New Heaven and Earth’, ‘And so I cross into another world / shyly and in homage linger for an invitation / from this unknown that I would trespass on’ (1Poems 210). The poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers have received more scrutiny by scholars than any other poems, and those readings have revealed how variously and overtly the poems work with their ‘matter’. What I would emphasize, more briefly here, are their unabashedly argumentative voices, on the one hand, and their attention, on the other hand, not only to plants and animals but to the seemingly inert: this Lawrence sees everything, including himself, as ‘alive beyond life’ (1Poems 212). Extending the processes we saw in ‘The Wild Common’ of reverseallegorization, analogical thinking and the inclusion of varieties of human consciousness, we see in Birds, Beasts and Flowers a steep rise of the speaker’s voice, energetically engaged, explicitly, in an ‘I/other’ relationship with a reader as well as with the animals and things of this world, in all the pronomial forms of ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘they’ and ‘we’ – letting consciousness flow among, bounce off and respond, always in relation to the things of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Or, as he says in one of his last poems of 1929, ‘Terra incognita’: ‘There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of / vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps, / we know nothing of, within us’ (1Poems 575).28 In conclusion, always ‘becoming’, Lawrence’s re-worlding engages both reader and thing in a never quite concluded process of interaction and change. From his earliest verse through the plant and animal studies of Birds, Beasts and Flowers to his last poems, the ‘posthuman’ world he seeks and sees is neither stable nor static. Even movement is diverse, as he says in ‘Fidelity’ (1928–9): ‘All flows, and every flow is related to every other flow. / Flowers and sapphires and us, diversely streaming’ (1Poems 413). Lawrence embeds himself in speech acts and in medias res, in an interaction already occurring, inviting action as well as new speech from others, at the same time that he is drawing attention to both the whatness of a thing and its inscrutability, as in ‘Peach’, which begins, ‘Would you like to throw a stone at me? / Here, take all that’s left of my peach. // Bloodred, deep; / Heaven knows how it came to pass’ (1Poems 232). The world he inhabits is, as Becket has stressed, also populated by the manmade – one in which the ‘manufactured’ and the organic are

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inextricably interrelated.29 While Lawrence wrote against ‘mechanical’ thinking and destructive, organizational industrialism, he did not devalue the manmade: anticipating the new materialists, he understood the various human and non-human ways of making and taking substance as inextricable from a world premised on vital interconnectivity. The inert and the animate, the metallic and the organic, as Lawrence reminds us in ‘Almond Blossom’, operate as vital sources for each other: Even iron can put forth, Even iron. This is the iron age, But let us take heart Seeing iron break and bud Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom. (1Poems 259) Even while observing and affected by these others that he can never entirely ‘know’, he addresses the reader, ‘let us take heart’ (1Poems 259) – stretching towards both the reader and material things by analogy and an empathetic gaze: ‘red at the core with the last sore-heartedness, / Sore-hearted-looking’ (1Poems 262). ‘The end cracks open with the beginning’, Lawrence wrote in ‘Pomegranate’, the opening poem of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and he asks, ‘Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?’ to which he responds, ‘For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack’ (1Poems 231). To stay open to what is out there, not presuming to know it absolutely, was, for Lawrence, to embrace the conflicts and fissures that also come, in wonder, and then begin again.

NOTES 1 William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 181. 2 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 68, 54; Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, ‘Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory’, in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), pp. 5–6. 3 R. P. Blackmur, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Expressive Form’ [1935] collected in Blackmur’s Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952). 4 Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 57.

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5 Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 6. 6 Charles Olson, Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, [1950] 1966), p. 128. 7 Sandra Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, [1972] 1990), pp. 326–7. 8 Fiona Becket, ‘Green Lawrence? Consciousness, Ecology, and Poetry’, in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste (New York: Bloomsbury, [2019] 2020), p. 157. 9 Charles Olson, Additional Prose: A Bibliography on America, Proprioception & Other Notes & Essays, ed. George F. Butterick (Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, [1961] 1974), p. 40. 10 Ibid. Alan Golding, ‘Lawrence and Recent American Poetry’, in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 201. 11 Olson, Additional Prose, p. 40. 12 Olson, Selected Writings, p. 24; qtd by Leo Hamalian, ‘ “A Whole Climate of Opinion”: Lawrence at Black Mountain’, in D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors, ed. Keith Cushman and Dennis Jackson (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 233. 13 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108.1 (Fall 2009): 1–21. 14 Alaimo and Hekman, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 15 Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, pp. 80–1. 16 Ibid., p. 81. 17 Alan Gillis, ‘Late Negotiations: Ecopoetry and Kathleen Jamie’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 14.2–3 (July-November, 2020): 251–2. 18 Becket, ‘Green Lawrence’, p. 151, p. 150. 19 M. M. Mahood, The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 186. Kindle Edition. 20 Ibid., pp. 185–6. 21 Ibid., p. 186. 22 Ibid. 23 Carole Ferrier, ‘The Earlier Poetry of D. H. Lawrence: A Variorum Text, Comprising All Extant Incunabula and Published Poems up to and Including the Year 1919’, Dissertation, University of Auckland, 1991, Poem 1. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.

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27 Diana Leong, ‘The Mattering of Black Lives: Octavia Butler’s Hyperempathy and the Promise of the New Materialisms’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2.2 (2016): 1–35, 7. 28 See also Becket’s discussion of ‘consciousness’ in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in ‘Green Consciousness’, pp. 152–4. 29 Becket, ‘Green Consciousness’, pp. 152, 157, 159.

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Poetry in the magazines CHRISTOPHER POLLNITZ

Four poems, which the undogmatically left-wing Ford Madox Hueffer accepted for the November 1909 English Review, formed the auspicious opening bracket of Lawrence’s career as a magazine poet. Two poems, posthumously published by the conservative J. C. Squire in the March and June 1930 numbers of the London Mercury, served as the closing bracket to Lawrence’s two-decade engagement with English and American literary magazines.1 The engagement had paradoxical features. An all-but-incessant reviser of his work, Lawrence offered magazines poems which were rich in variants from the versions published in his collections. The versional Lawrence was a restless ‘thought-adventurer’ (K 279). By contrast, the young Lawrence who bewailed his lot to Jessie Chambers, ‘a collier’s son a poet!’, had a fear of rejection that made him unwilling to send his verse to a London magazine; Chambers had to do it for him.2 A residue of this anxiety seemed to linger as late as 1929. In the February of that year, Lawrence sent Marianne Moore a typescript of Pansies, after Mabel Luhan had ascertained that Moore would indeed like to look at some verse pensées for the Dial; ‘but’, Lawrence wrote shyly, ‘if they don’t seem … suitable, don’t bother about them’ (7L 173). That Lawrence’s engagement with magazine culture shaped his poetic output is indisputable. If Ridgely Torrence, poetry editor at the New Republic, had not written asking for some verse – a letter which caught up with Lawrence in September 1920 (3L 596 n. 2), when he was staying near an orchard, in a villa outside Florence (2Poems 724) – he might never have begun writing those poems about pomegranates, peaches and medlars which were collected in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Most poets accept that nothing comes of waiting

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for a magazine (or e-zine) editor to ask for their poems. Once Lawrence had made his name, he did receive invitations like Torrence’s, but before 1909 it seemed as if his fear of humiliating rejection might doom him to becoming a mute, inglorious Milton. In early 1908, Lawrence and Jessie Chambers were reading and enjoying G. K. Chesterton’s weekly essay in the Daily News and, without telling Jessie, Lawrence plucked up courage to send Chesterton a specimen of his own writing, almost certainly an essay.3 Annalise Grice points out that the essay Lawrence sent was almost as certainly a version of a paper which he gave to a March 1908 meeting of the Eastwood Debating Society.4 The improved version, ‘Art and the Individual: A Paper for Socialists’ (STH 135–42), was redrafted in the hope that it might prove publishable in the New Age, a socialist magazine relaunched in January 1908 with A. R. Orage as its sole editor. Orage’s credo, that changes in literature and the arts should promote social change, would have attracted the author of ‘Art and the Individual’,5 and a Chesterton essay carried in the New Age in January, ‘Why I Am Not a Socialist’, might have induced Lawrence to send his ‘… Paper for Socialists’ to Chesterton for an opinion.6 Lawrence’s essay was better calculated to appeal to Orage than to Chesterton. As demonstrated in his collection All Things Considered (1908), Chesterton had lifted the familiar essay to a dazzling literary form, replete with paradox, aphorism and contrarian shifts of position. ‘Art and the Individual’, apart from a paragraph on parallel evolution in plants and animals, remains a dutiful essay on education and aesthetics.7 Lawrence might have written to Chesterton, Grice suggests, to avoid having his work buried in a ‘press office’ or on a busy magazine editor’s desk.8 In the event, Chesterton had his wife return the essay without passing an opinion on it, and Lawrence, dispirited by his failure to attract the cosmopolitan essayist’s attention, exclaimed to Chambers he would ‘try no more’; he didn’t care if he never had ‘a line published’.9 Was Lawrence’s fear of rejection irrational and hypersensitive, or were there London magazine editors who would be prejudiced against his writing because of his region, class and educational background? Some of these questions may be answered with reference to the literary editor of the Daily News, R. A. ScottJames, whose desk Lawrence’s essay probably traversed en route to Chesterton. On the weekend of 18–19 November 1911, Lawrence visited his friend and adviser, Edward Garnett, at his home in Kent, the Cearne. Lawrence took the three long dialect ballads which would become the capstone of Love Poems and Others (1913) to give to Garnett (3Poems xciv). On the Saturday evening, he was introduced to Scott-James, whom Garnett had invited in the hope that he would do the young writer ‘some good’ (1L 324, 327). Whether Lawrence read any of his ballads that evening is unclear (1Poems 653). What is clear is that Scott-James had not come to the Cearne to do Lawrence any favours. Scott-James would have read and might have written the unrelentingly negative

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review of The White Peacock in the Daily News.10 His predisposition towards Lawrence in 1911 is revealed in a memoir of Garnett which Scott-James recorded in 1937. It includes a droll recollection of an evening when Garnett extolled Lawrence’s ‘distinctive “genius” ’, while Scott-James listened in silent, ironical amusement.11 Scott-James’s opinion in 1911 was that Lawrence had produced nothing of note, and what he produced in the decades that followed did not alter that opinion. Lawrence’s anxiety about how some conservative editors would receive his writing was not unreasonable. In December 1908, Lawrence introduced the Chambers family to the first issue of the English Review, and Jessie Chambers discovered that this London magazine had an editor who ‘was prepared to welcome new talent’. By June 1909, Chambers won Lawrence’s assent to her sending his poems to the Review.12 In the first five months of 1909, Lawrence had written verse unlike any he had composed before, and by June he, like Chambers, must have been wanting a second opinion, this time on his Croydon poems. Chambers’s narrative of sending the poems is more reliable than Lawrence’s memories, in the ‘Foreword to Collected Poems’ (1Poems 653) and ‘Myself Revealed’, but the prominence which Lawrence gives the editor is a difference worth noticing in his accounts: ‘Hueffer was most kind … and asked me to come and see him’ (LEA 178). After Hueffer, Lawrence would seek out editors with whom he could gossip on friendly terms and share literary insights. Rather than look again at Hueffer’s advice to Lawrence and how the younger poet revised ‘Dreams Old and Nascent’,13 I shall start with Lawrence’s second offering to the English Review. In December 1909, Hueffer, a brilliant editor but ‘a disaster at business’, was forced to sell the magazine he had founded to Alfred Mond, who installed Austin Harrison as the new editor.14 In January 1910, Harrison invited previous contributors to ‘continue to submit … work to him’ (1L 152). Lawrence did so, sending more than the five ‘Night Songs’ which Harrison selected.15 What Harrison chose was a test of his expertise as an editor of poetry, and how Lawrence revised a test of his powers of self-criticism. ‘At the Window [2]‌’ is a measure of how well poet and editor could get on without Hueffer: The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters Something that sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter – As slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters. The pallid assembly of tomb-stones fades down the darkening valley, And timid ghosts, like lovers come faltering up the hill To hover disconsolate at the end of the lamp-lit alley. Is it leaves in haste along the pavement, that rise and whisper as they go Past the window-pane, a word from the sibilant night’s strange mouth

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To the one who sits in the two-roomed darkness behind the eye’s window? Whispering of words, and the sound of manifold footsteps, which veer And brush the house – ? Leaves in the wind’s procession, and light Blown mistily from the lamps on the pine-trees gasping for fear – ? (ll. 1–12)16 All versions of ‘At the Window’ start with a stanza in which pines bend and listen, black poplars shake with laughter and daylight fades. Version [2]‌is the only one in which ghosts materialize, and the poem’s strongest line – ‘The street lamps in the twilight have suddenly started to bleed’ (1Poems 67) – is dispensed with. The recurrence of lights and mists, whisperings and footsteps, makes for clatter and confusion in the last stanzas of version [2], as does the experiment with interrogative syntax. Revision and selection reveal how much Lawrence and Harrison would have gained from Hueffer’s advice. ‘At the Window [2]‌’ is nonetheless a thought-adventure, the work of a novice trying out techniques for creating ambiguity in images. The magazine text contributes to the versional riches of ‘At the Window’, of which seven versions are extant, all, from the first College notebook to Collected Poems, exhibiting authorial revision. In The Work and the Reader, Paul Eggert has described an online Critical Archive he has set up for the oeuvre of a nineteenth-century Australian poet, Charles Harpur. Eggert then proposes that Lawrence’s writings are, like Harpur’s, suited for representation in a digital archive,17 beginning (I would suggest) with his poetry. A digital archive would make it possible to conceive of a Lawrence poem as the process of its textual becoming rather than a succession of preliminary versions leading up to the ultimate Collected Poems text. Later in 1910, Harrison took three more poems for the English Review, one a short but promising ‘Sigh No More’.18 In January 1911, Lawrence sent another three poems, from which Harrison kept ‘Sorrow [2]‌’ and ‘A Husband Dead’ (later ‘A Man Who Died’), feeling that he ‘ought to publish’ them (1L 254 n. 3); then he did not publish them. Harrison’s proficiency as an editor of verse was not matching Lawrence’s as a poet. For twenty months, the English Review carried no poem by Lawrence. When at last ‘Snap-Dragon [2]’ appeared, the editor had caught up with the poet.19 Harrison’s bold choice was vindicated in December 1912, when Edward Marsh published ‘Snap-Dragon [2]’ in the first Georgian Poetry anthology.20 Having found an editor he could trust, Lawrence might, left to his own devices, have looked no further, but in mid-1913, Ezra Pound, impressed by Love Poems and Others,21 directed Lawrence’s attention to American magazines. Lawrence sent two poems, ‘Violets [1]‌’ and ‘Kisses in the Train [1]’, to the recently appointed editor of New York’s Smart Set, Willard Huntington Wright.22 A third poem, ‘The Mowers’, was forwarded to Wright by Pound

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himself. Pound, who advised James Joyce that Wright ‘says he wants and does want realism’,23 probably passed on similar information to Lawrence. The three poems Smart Set carried – on a premarital affair, love-making in a railway carriage and an unmarried pregnancy – treat sexual manners more or less realistically. The woman in ‘The Mowers’, who comes to tell her young man of her predicament and his – The first man out o’ the four that’s mowin’ Is mine: I mun claim him once for all; – But I’m sorry for him, on his young feet, knowin’ None o’ the trouble he’s led to stall. (ll. 5–8)24 – thinks and speaks in a Midlands dialect, one respect in which ‘The Mowers’ is superior to the version Lawrence reworked for Look! We Have Come Through!, ‘A Youth Mowing’. The Look! version is located in Bavaria from the first line: ‘There’s four men mowing down by the Isar’. It is easy to construe the woman’s Bavarian dialect as being rendered in a regional English dialect. In ‘A Youth Mowing’, however, the woman thinks in standard English yet speaks, in lines 14 to 16, in dialect: ‘Lad, thou hast gotten a child in me’ (1Poems 178). The more influential magazine to which Pound, acting as the London agent, introduced Lawrence was Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Shortly before Lawrence returned to the Isartal, on 7 August 1913, he posted a manuscript of nine poems to a typist with instructions to copy-type and forward the verse to Pound’s London address (2L 55–6).25 Pound took ‘The Mowers’ from the typescript and mailed it to Wright for Smart Set; then, after a delay of some weeks,26 he mailed the remaining poems to Poetry. He expressed his reservations about Lawrence’s poetry by recommending that Monroe ‘accept his work without reading it’,27 but Monroe of course read the poems and formed her own opinion of them. That opinion can be recovered, first, from her publishing all eight of the poems, and second, from her review of Lawrence’s Collected Poems in 1930, which looked back to the poems she had read in 1913. These, she felt, Lawrence had ‘never surpassed for beauty and poignancy’. She deplored his later revisions as ‘a desecration, almost a crime’.28 Some fifteen months after he first left for Metz with Frieda, Lawrence was still writing verse that was ‘formless’, or free in form, and ‘truthful’, or dramatically transparent in diction (1L 405–6; 3Poems xcix). Those features, and the fact that half of the eight poems have woman speakers, were attractive to Monroe, and continue to give a freshness to these versions. The simple language of ‘A Woman and Her Dead Husband’ keeps the heightened monologue from toppling into declamation or sentimentality: ‘all this time you were / Like this when I lived with you. / … I am frightened of you / And of everything. / Oh God! – God too / Has deceived me in everything’ (ll. 58–64).29 The poem’s tale, one Lawrence

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often told, bears up well against ‘A Man Who Died’, the versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd. In ‘Fireflies in the Corn [1]‌’ the woman proclaims how much she prefers the ‘questing brilliant things’ to her companion’s ‘gloom’ and ‘doubt’. In this version the man is given right of reply, but the woman has the last word: You’re a fool, woman. I love you, and you know I do!     – Lord, take his love away, it makes him whine. And I give you everything that you want me to.     – Lord, dear Lord, do you think he ever can shine? (ll. 26–9)30 Unlike the ‘mauve-red’ roses in ‘All of Roses’, unconditionally present on the breakfast table,31 the roses which the son would like to lay on the mother’s grave in ‘Birthday’ are, alas, fantasy blooms. On 4 August 1913, shortly before Lawrence produced these versions, he attended his sister Ada’s wedding, without Frieda,32 and was reminded how little prospect he had of ever being ‘well-to-do’:     If I were well-to-do I would put roses on roses, and cover your grave With multitude of white roses, and just a few     Red ones, a bloody-white flag over you. (ll. 1–4)33 Lawrence had copies made of the versions sent to Poetry but seems to have kept none for himself. In January 1924, he wrote to Arthur McLeod exclaiming at the ‘fabulously’ bountiful ‘cheque for £20’ which had come from a magazine ‘published in Chicago’ (2L 138). Another letter to McLeod – complaining that ‘in England people have got that loathsome superior knack of refusing to consider me a poet at all … In America they are not so priggish conceited’ (2L 146) – is an early instance of Lawrence looking to the United States for his readership. Lawrence carefully selected the ‘second set of verses’ for Poetry (2L 170). Of the six chosen for publication, ‘Weariness’ (later ‘Sorrow’) and ‘Service of All the Dead’ (later ‘Giorno dei Morti’) are among his finest poems. The elegy ‘Memories’ (later ‘The End’) is a version Lawrence never bettered – And oh, that you had never, never been Some of your selves, my love; I would that some Of your several faces I had never seen! For still the night through will they come and go One after each, and show me what they mean. (ll. 6–10)34

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– but of which, again, he kept no copy. When they appeared in the December number of Poetry, the six poems established him as a regular international contributor.35 Lawrence met with Edward Marsh in 1913, and in 1914 with Amy Lowell, anthology editors who helped to make his name known in Britain and the United States. In October 1912, Marsh had written, asking to include ‘SnapDragon [2]‌’ in Georgian Poetry 1911–1912 (1L 461), and on 20 July 1913, Lawrence and Frieda met Marsh at Broadstairs in Kent (2L 41).36 Thereafter, Lawrence and Marsh corresponded about Georgian poets and verse rhythm, and Lawrence sent him a dozen manuscript poems (2L 94, 106). One of these, ‘Service of All the Dead’, Marsh placed in the New Statesman,37 a political and literary magazine recently founded with the support of Fabians like George Bernard Shaw. Having the poem appear in the magazine ensured Marsh could include it in his second Georgian anthology.38 During Amy Lowell’s stay in London, Marsh arranged for her to meet with Lawrence, H. D. and Richard Aldington on 30 July 1914.39 Lowell was collecting poets rather than poems, to assemble an anthology which would establish her, not Pound, as the arbiter of Imagism. Anthology editors fall outside my brief, but a digression about Monroe and Lowell explains how ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia [3]‌’ eluded magazine publication. Monroe rejected the ballad from the second ‘set of verses’ sent to Poetry (2L 170), although she expressed a willingness to publish its truncated first half (2L 203), whereupon Lawrence turned to Lowell, who accepted the whole poem for the Imagist anthology (2L 209).40 Exactly why the ballad displeased Monroe remains unclear, but she was not the only editor to reject it (2L 150, 384). What Lawrence called its ‘dream symbolism’ (2L 203) seems to have repelled editors. For the magazine culture of 1914, the imagistic logic of ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia [3]’ made it a difficult poem. In December 1913, Lawrence was informed about a new magazine, the Egoist, which had grown out of Dora Marsden’s Freewoman and New Freewoman. As Marsden’s focus shifted to individual (or egoistic) creative practice,41 she allowed Pound to take over some editorial prerogatives. Pound appointed Richard Aldington as subeditor as well as asking Lawrence to contribute verse to the Egoist. Lawrence answered that he would ‘look up some poetry’ (2L 132–3) and went to his first College notebook. Four of the five poems he revised and sent to Pound were early work, and his revisions failed to hide their inexperience.42 They made a poor showing against other magazine poems of Lawrence’s which appeared in 1913 and 1914, and likewise against the American poets – Robert Frost, H. D., William Carlos Williams and Amy Lowell – whose work Pound showcased in the Egoist from January to May 1914.

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Lawrence’s next appearance in the magazine, in 1915, was the confronting ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’, the first of his war poems to be published. In October 1914, Lawrence had opted not to enter a poem for the War Poems Prize issue of Poetry (2L 219). When he was sent a copy, he was outraged by the ‘irreverence’ of the poems, first and foremost by Lowell’s ‘The Bombardment’, in which, he complained, the horror of shelling a city was reduced to damaged wine goblets and ‘stalks of flame’.43 On 17 November, Lawrence sent Monroe ‘Ecce Homo’ (2L 232–3), a war poem in which hand-to-hand combat with bayonets takes the place of Lowell’s bric-a-brac imagery. Monroe was interested in ‘Ecce Homo’,44 but was unable to place it in Poetry so soon after the war issue. Invited by Aldington to contribute to the special imagist number of the Egoist in 1915, Lawrence reworked ‘Ecce Homo’ as ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ and sent it to Aldington early in April. Aldington complained to Lowell, who had offered to distribute the imagist number among readers of Imagist Poets, that the poem might be too long for the number,45 but space was found and the war poem published.46 When Lowell received her copy, it was her turn to be outraged, at the ‘farfetched indecency’ of Lawrence’s poem, and on 19 May, she wrote to Aldington reneging on her offer to distribute the Imagist number.47 In July 1914, Lawrence asked J. B. Pinker to act as his agent (2L 189) but continued to make direct contact with magazine editors who contacted him. In April 1917, having been asked by Harrison for some poetry, Lawrence asked Pinker to extract six ‘impersonal poems’ from the typescript the agent held of Look! We Have Come Through! (3L 115).48 Pinker forwarded them to Harrison, who published three in the English Review.49 The magazine texts of the three poems exhibit twelve substantive variants, of which a revision in l. 36 of ‘Frost Flowers’, of ‘frost-cold’ in the English Review to ‘thaw-cold’ in Look!, is the best alteration. Variants in the magazine versions of ‘The Sea’, ‘Constancy of a Sort’ and ‘Frost Flowers’ amount to little more than adjustments nudging the typescript texts towards their form in Look! From the Tagebuch, in which Lawrence entered his early poems to Frieda, to the typescripts, in which he prepared setting-copy for the volume, so many Look! documents have gone missing (2Poems 700–7) that any grain of detail which can be gleaned from a magazine version has added significance. Lawrence began composing poems for the sections of Birds, Beasts and Flowers in mid-September 1920. Until late October, he mailed poems as he completed them to his American agent, Robert Mountsier, who had them typed and circulated the copies mostly to New York magazines. This process, which is termed the first phase of composition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, came to a close on 4 November, by which date Lawrence revised the twenty-four poems that he had written for the volume and sent a manuscript of twenty-three to Ruth Wheelock for copy-typing (3Poems cvii–cxiii). Texts of some first-phase poems are not extant; some survive in Mountsier’s copy-typings and some are

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witnessed in published magazine verse. An example from the third group is the earliest-published poem in the New Republic, ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples [1]‌’,50 and another is ‘The Revolutionary [1]’, in which ‘blinded Samson’ is ‘Chained to … slaves, pale-faces, pillars of humanity’ (ll. 13–15). In version [1], Samson commiserates with the slaves: ‘I have every sympathy with you. / The weight of your responsibility, holding up this ideal civilization, / Must be excruciating’; but he knows their shared plight will not last: ‘you feel pretty rocky, you pillars’ (ll. 16–18, 20).51 Revising ‘The Revolutionary [1]’ in November, Lawrence made Samson into a solitary prisoner with no fellow feeling for his unfeeling captors. The last poem placed with the New Republic, ‘Humming-Bird [1]’, has only one substantive variant and appears to be the last first-phase manuscript mailed to New York.52 Although Ridgely Torrence had asked Lawrence to send verse to the New Republic, Mountsier gave first choice of the ‘Fruit Studies’ to Scofield Thayer, in hope the editor of the Dial would notice the variety of Lawrence’s writing. Thayer accepted only one of the poems but added to his acceptance, ‘I hope this will not discourage you from sending us something else by D. H. Lawrence’.53 ‘Pomegranate [1]‌ ’, the first of the ‘Fruit Studies’, was Lawrence’s third publication but his first poem in the Dial. The typescript of ‘Pomegranate [1]’ is extant and was setting-copy for the Dial, probably marked up by Thayer.54 Version [1] has lines in which Lawrence was still searching for the exact phrase, and settled for ‘The last day fissured open with to-morrow, / Rosy, tender, glittering within there’ (ll. 25–6).55 When the next completed section from the first phase of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, ‘The Apostolic Beasts’ (later ‘The Evangelistic Beasts’) crossed Mountsier’s desk, he forwarded it to Thayer with the stipulation that the four ‘Beasts’ should be published together. Once this condition was waived,56 Thayer – an editor who demanded the right to exercise his own discretion as he built the Dial into the major modernist magazine in the United States – refused ‘Saint Matthew’ and published the last three ‘Apostolic Beasts’.57 In all collected versions of ‘St John’, line 61 regrets the dwindling significance of the Phoenix – ‘You are only known to us now as the badge of an insurance Company’ (1Poems 284) – but Mountsier, bizarrely, had this line omitted from his typescript of ‘Saint John’,58 in an act of what might be termed ‘patriotic censorship’. According to Mountsier, American companies should be free to advertise their products as they saw fit. Because ‘St John’ was set from a Wheelock typescript, line 61 was restored in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. The fifth Lawrence poem published in the Dial under Thayer’s editorship was ‘Snake’,59 a coup which Mountsier allowed Thayer, and which would benefit Lawrence when he submitted his pensées to the Dial in 1929. Lawrence broke his ties with J. B. Pinker on 27 December 1919 (3L 439), and it was not until 4 April 1921 that he asked Curtis Brown to become his English agent (3L 700). In the interim nothing from Birds, Beasts and

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Flowers appeared in an English magazine. Once Brown had been enlisted as Lawrence’s agent, ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’ and ‘Pomegranate’ appeared in the August 1921 English Review, seven months after ‘Medlars and SorbApples [1]‌’ came out in the New Republic and five months after ‘Pomegranate [1]’ came out in the Dial.60 Some American editors seemed to lose interest in the longer poems Lawrence composed after ‘Snake’, but Austin Harrison showed himself attuned to the best of Lawrence’s ‘very free verse’ (3L 702). In 1922, he published ‘Almond Blossom’, ‘Fish’, ‘Bat’ and ‘Baby Tortoise’, and in April 1923 ‘Elephant’.61 In May 1923, Harrison retired and, for most of its remaining history, the English Review ceased being a literary magazine.62 It was a happy coincidence that a poem as filled with energy as ‘Elephant’ should farewell an editor who, for thirteen years, had energetically promoted Lawrence’s magazine verse. In July 1922, Harriet Monroe initiated a correspondence with Mountsier during which she informed Lawrence’s agent that Poetry was edited in Chicago, not New York, and was ‘of course … in the market for poems by Lawrence’. Mountsier sent her twelve poems, from which Monroe, while not thinking any ‘in the poet’s best style’, chose three, ‘The Evening Land’, ‘Turkey-Cock’ and ‘Saint Matthew’.63 Two weeks after arriving in Taos, Lawrence learnt that he had two poems due to appear in Poetry (4L 307). He failed to notice that Mountsier, in his typescript of Monroe’s first choice, ‘The Evening Land’, had perpetrated another act of patriotic censorship: the couplet – ‘This may be a withering tree, this Europe, / But here, even a customs-official is still vulnerable’ (ll. 40–1) – found in other published versions of ‘The Evening Land’ (1Poems 242), is omitted from the version in Poetry.64 The last of Monroe’s three choices, the first-phase typescript of ‘Saint Matthew’, was perhaps the very typescript which Mountsier had sent Thayer in 1921 and Thayer had returned, while keeping the other three ‘Apostolic Beasts’ for the Dial. The main variant from ‘St Matthew’ in ‘Saint Matthew’ is the threeword first line – ‘The apostolic beasts, / They are not all beasts’ (ll. 1–2) – a line necessarily omitted from publications of ‘The Evangelistic Beasts’.65 ‘Saint Matthew’ became the last poem by Lawrence published in Poetry (4L 381 n. 1). In June 1923, John Middleton Murry founded a new magazine, the Adelphi, at a time when he and Lawrence were patching up their friendship. Lawrence suggested Murry should go to Curtis Brown’s and choose poems for the Adelphi from the English proofs of Birds, Beasts and Flowers held in his agent’s office (4L 481). One of the three poems Murry chose, ‘Cypresses’, had in it a freeverse stanza: Among the cypresses To sit with pure, slim, long-nosed,

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Evil-called, sensitive Etruscans, naked except for their boots; To be able to smile back at them And exchange the lost kiss And come to dark connection. (ll. 55–60)66 Though published in Murry’s Adelphi, the stanza was omitted from English and American editions of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Lawrence’s friendly suggestion ensured the censored lines could be restored (1Poems 250). Lawrence’s rapid composition of Pansies restricted opportunities for placing pensées in magazines. Worse, the Home Office seized two copies of the first typing of Pansies which Lawrence mailed to Curtis Brown’s London office. The prospect of the collection being banned for indecency was likely to deter magazine editors from accepting any pensées (2Poems 760–1). In February 1929, Lawrence circumvented such threats in the United States by posting a second typing of Pansies to Marianne Moore, who was now editing the Dial. After Moore had made her choice from the collection, she was asked to forward the typescript to Curtis Brown’s New York office (7L 173–4). Eight years before, writing to Robert McAlmon in July 1921, Moore announced, ‘Lawrence has a magnificent poem on a snake in the July Dial’.67 Animal poems by Lawrence exerted an influence on Moore’s poetic practice in the 1920s, as they did on the pensées she selected for the Dial, the first being ‘When I went to the circus—’.68 Moore saved another ten pensées to head the July Dial, where they were prefaced by a Pablo Picasso self-portrait. Disturbed by the note of ‘hurt’ and ‘reprisal’ she detected in Pansies, Moore confined her selection of pensées to those which gave her pure ‘enjoyment’ (7L 257–8 n. 3). She ordered her selection to begin with an eschatological pensée and end, with ‘November by the sea—’, in elegiac mode, so reflecting her consciousness that the Dial – relaunched by Thayer in 1920 to fly the flag of modernism – was shutting down with this, the July 1929 number.69 J. C. Squire, though he refused versions of ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers [?1]’, ‘Purple Anemones [?1]’ and ‘Pomegranate [?1]’ which Lawrence sent him in March 1921 (3L 681), shortly after snared first English publication rights to ‘Snake’.70 In the fusillade of insult and disparagement Squire flung at Lawrence, the man and his work, it is easy to overlook the exception, his respect for Lawrence the poet. The poet of Birds, Beasts and Flowers was, for Squire, a ‘passionate, brooding, glowering, worshipping man’, ‘fiery enough to eat a dozen of his merely clever contemporaries’; he seemed ‘to have penetrated to the essence … of Snakes, Bats, Kangaroos, Rabbits, Fish, Tortoises, as no man ever did before’.71 On 3 December 1929, Lawrence sent Nancy Pearn, his trusted collaborator in the magazine department of Curtis Brown’s London office, four poems, one of which was to be chosen for Faber’s Ariel Poems series (7L 585). Pearn asked permission to ‘have a go with those four poems … with a

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view to magazine publication’. By 3 February 1930, a month before Lawrence’s death, she reported, ‘ “The Mercury” here wants to publish “The Bells” ’.72 After requesting ‘Bells’ for the London Mercury a month before Lawrence’s death, Squire asked for the right to publish ‘The Triumph of the Machine [2]‌’ probably after Lawrence’s death. The posthumous appearance of Lawrence’s second and third poems in the London Mercury nevertheless distinguishes Squire from the arrière-garde of conservative editors.73 For Squire, there were Lawrence poems the editor of a respectable magazine could accept. In May 1929, Lawrence wrote to John Middleton Murry: ‘the animal that I am you instinctively dislike – just as all the Lynds and Squires and Eliots and Goulds instinctively dislike it’ (7L 294). These middle-class magazine editors and reviewers made up a list of those who did not ‘get’ Lawrence and did not publish him, those for whom literature was a gentlemen’s club, admission to which they dutifully screened. By 1929, Murry had established himself as an exemplary club member. Lawrence had forgotten, if he ever knew, that the magazine editor who came to dinner at the Cearne on 18 November 1911, R. A. Scott-James, was a life member with an entrenched dislike of Lawrence’s work. But is the list an angry denunciation or a resigned sigh? Ridiculing litterateurs and middle-class assumptions in Pansies did not shake the club’s complacency, about class or literature. As Lawrence recognized in this, his last letter to Murry, it was a state of affairs no one writer could change in a lifetime. Compiling a list of the magazine editors who did ‘get’ Lawrence – Harrison in the English Review first, then Monroe in Poetry – can give the impression that middle-of-the-road editors were best disposed towards Lawrence’s verse. Yet, modernist editors at the Egoist and Dial carried his verse, and even the conservative Squire included three Lawrence poems in the London Mercury. As for the conservative in religion and politics but experimentalist in poetry, T. S. Eliot, who published three Lawrence short stories in the Criterion, Lawrence seemed to resent being published in that ‘expensive and stewed … quarterly’ (7L 170). Closer inspection reveals that the range of Lawrence’s poetry found acceptance in a range of modernist, cautiously modernist and usually conservative magazines. This has been a necessarily selective survey of magazines in which Lawrence’s verse was published, a survey in which little magazines like Idella Purnell’s Palms and Spud Johnson’s Laughing Horse, for example, have not been considered, and in which the selection of variant versions has been limited. Lawrence’s magazine poetry is certainly a field which would repay more comprehensive cultivation.

NOTES 1 Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 452 (C2), 495 (C197, C200).

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2 Jessie Chambers (‘E. T.’), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1935] 1980), pp. 57, 156–9. 3 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 190; and Chambers, Personal Record, pp. 155–6. 4 Annalise Grice, D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 34, 49–50, 59–60, 65–70. For the Society paper, see ‘ “Art and the Individual”, First Version’, STH 222–9. 5 Alvin Sullivan, ‘The New Age’, British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 250–6. 6 Grice, Literary Marketplace, p. 58. 7 Compare G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908), and the paragraph beginning ‘Example number 2’, STH 137–8. 8 Grice, Literary Marketplace, p. 29. 9 Chambers, Personal Record, p. 156. 10 Daily News (14 February 1911), p. 3; see R. P. Draper, ed., D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 40–1. 11 R. A. Scott-James, ‘Edward Garnett’, Spectator, 158 (26 February 1937), pp. 362–4. For an extract from Scott-James’s memoir, see 1L 324, n. 5. 12 Chambers, Personal Record, pp. 156–9. 13 For earlier discussion of Lawrence’s first publication in the English Review, see 3Poems lxxxvi–lxxxix; and Christopher Pollnitz, ‘D. H. Lawrence: Croydon Poet’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5.3 (2020): 119–46, 131–3. 14 Bruce A. White, ‘The English Review’, in British Literary Magazines, ed. Sullivan, pp. 125–9. 15 See Lawrence’s complaint that Harrison chose ‘the verses I don’t want him to put in’ (1L 156). 16 ‘At the Window [2]‌’, English Review, 5 (April 1910), pp. 7–8. The four ‘Night Songs’ preceding ‘At the Window’ were ‘Workday Evenings / i. Yesternight’ and ‘ii. To-Morrow Night’ (later ‘Hyde Park at Night, Before the War / Clerks’ and ‘Piccadilly Circus at Night / Street-Walkers’), ‘Rebuked’ and ‘Awakened’ (later ‘Dream-Confused’), pp. 4–7. 17 Paul Eggert, The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 100–7, 150–4. 18 ‘Tired of the Boat’ (later ‘In a Boat’), ‘Sigh No More’ and ‘Ah, Muriel!’, English Review, 6 (October 1910), pp. 377–9. ‘Sigh No More’ is nineteen lines in the Review, twenty-four lines in New Poems (1918). 19 ‘Snap-Dragon [2]’, English Review, 11 (June 1912), pp. 345–8. 20 Georgian Poetry 1911–1912 (London: Poetry Bookshop, 1912), pp. 113–16. English Review and Georgian Poetry versions of ‘Snap-Dragon [2]’ exhibit seventeen

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substantive variants from Amores ‘Snap-Dragon [3]’ and Collected Poems ‘SnapDragon’ versions, at ll. 15, 28, 30, 33, 36, 43, 48, 55, 56, 72, 75, 79, 86, 87, 96, 109–10/109 and 115/114. 21 Ezra Pound, ‘[Review of] Love Poems and Others’, Poetry, 2 (July 1913): 49–51. 22 ‘Violets’, Smart Set, 41.1 (September 1913): 130; ‘Kisses in the Train’, Smart Set, 41.2 (October 1913): 62. 23 Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce, The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce (New York: New Directions, 1967), p. 17. 24 ‘The Mowers’, Smart Set, 41.3 (November 1913): 12. 25 For MS28b and TS29a, see ‘Manuscript Listing’, 3Poems xxxvi, and E318, Roberts and Poplawski, Bibliography, p. 651. MS28b consists of nine poems: ‘The Mowers’, ‘Green’, ‘All of Roses’ (a four-part sequence, later ‘River Roses’, ‘Gloire de Dijon’ and ‘Roses on the Breakfast Table’), ‘Fireflies in the Corn [1]’, ‘A Woman and Her Dead Husband’ (later ‘A Man Who Died’), ‘The Wind, the Rascal [2]’, ‘Illicit’ (later ‘On the Balcony’), ‘Birthday’ (later ‘On That Day’) and ‘The Mother of Sons’ (later ‘Monologue of a Mother’). 26 Ellen Williams explains the delay in Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of ‘Poetry’, 1912–22 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 74–6. 27 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber, 1971), p. 22. 28 Harriet Monroe, ‘[Review of] Collected Poems’, Poetry, 35 (February 1930): 273–9. 29 ‘A Woman and Her Dead Husband’, Poetry, 3 (January 1914): 119–21. 30 ‘Fireflies in the Corn [1]’, Poetry, 3 (January 1914): 117–19. 31 ‘All of Roses’, Poetry, 3 (January 1914): 117; or see 3Poems 1502. 32 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 88. 33 ‘Birthday’, Poetry, 3 (January 1914): 125. 34 ‘Memories’, Poetry, 5 (December 1914): 102–3. 35 The poems were published in the order Lawrence specified (2L 202): ‘Grief ’ (later ‘Grey Evening’, ‘Firelight and Nightfall’), ‘Memories’ (later ‘The End’), ‘Weariness’ (later ‘Sorrow’), ‘Service of All the Dead’ (later ‘Giorno dei Morti’), ‘Don Juan’, ‘Song’ (later ‘Flapper’). See Poetry, 5 (December 1914), pp. 102–5. Payment was £8 (2L 132). 36 See Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, pp. 84–8. 37 ‘Service of All the Dead’, New Statesman, 2 (15 November 1913): 178. 38 Georgian Poetry 1913–1915 (London: Poetry Bookshop, 1915), p. 153. 39 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Triumph to Exile, 135; Christopher Hassall, A Biography of Edward Marsh (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), p. 289.

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40 Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), pp. 67–8. Lowell obtained the text of ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia [3]’ by writing to Monroe on 19 November 1914; see MS35a and TS36b, ‘Manuscript Listing’, 3Poems xxxvii. 41 Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 1–4, pp. 105–9. 42 ‘Song’ (later ‘Flapper’); ‘Early Spring’ (later ‘Autumn Sunshine’); ‘Honeymoon [2]’ (later ‘Excursion Train’); ‘Fooled’ (later ‘Turned Down’); ‘A Winter’s Tale [1]’, Egoist, 1 (1 April 1914): 134–5. ‘Honeymoon [2]’, a version revised c. December 1913, is the one relatively mature poem from MS1. Payment was £3/3/- for two columns of verse (2L 156), less than for an equivalent number of lines in Poetry. 43 Amy Lowell, ‘The Bombardment’, Poetry, 5 (November 1914): 60–3; see also 2L 232, 234. 44 The evidence for Monroe’s interest in ‘Ecce Homo’ is her copying extracts from the poem: see TS37b and MS37c, ‘Manuscript Listing’, 3Poems xxxvii. See also 3Poems ciii and 1515–16. 45 Norman T. Gates, ed., Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 12. 46 ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’, Egoist, 2 (1 May 1915): 75–6. 47 S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966), p. 307. 48 Probably TS55b; see ‘Manuscript Listing’, 3Poems xli. 49 ‘The Sea’, ‘Constancy of a Sort’ (later ‘Hymn to Priapus’) and ‘Frost Flowers’, English Review, 25 (September 1917): 193–7. 50 New Republic, 25 (5 January 1921): 169. See 3Poems 1543 and 1841. 51 ‘The Revolutionary [1]’, New Republic 25 (19 January 1921), 231. Payment was $20 for each of the two poems (about £10 for both); see New Republic to Robert Mountsier, 6 January 1921 and 19 January 1921, Curtis Brown Papers, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter CBP, TxU). 52 ‘Humming-Bird [1]’, New Republic, 26 (11 May 1921), p. 325. 53 Scofield Thayer to Robert Mountsier, 25 October 1920, CBP, TxU. 54 See TS84a, ‘Manuscript Listing’, 3Poems xlvii. 55 ‘Pomegranate [1]’, Dial, 70 (March 1921): 317–18. Compare ‘The end cracks open with the beginning: / Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure’ (1Poems 231). 56 Scofield Thayer to Robert Mountsier, 21 February 1921 and 25 February 1921, CBP, TxU. 57 ‘The Apostolic Beasts’: ‘Saint Mark’, Saint Luke’, ‘Saint John’, Dial, 70 (April 1921): 410–16. 58 ‘Saint John’, Dial, 70 (April 1921): 414–16. For the typescript, see TS92a, ‘Manuscript Listing’, 3Poems xlix. 59 ‘Snake’, Dial, 71 (July 1921): 19–21.

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60 ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’ and ‘Pomegranate’, English Review, 33 (August 1921): 81–3. 61 ‘Almond Blossom’, English Review, 34 (February 1922): 101–4; ‘Fish’, English Review, 34 (June 1922): 505–10; ‘Bat’ and ‘Baby Tortoise’, English Review, 35 (November 1922): 381–5; ‘Elephant’, English Review, 36 (April 1923): 297–302. 62 White, ‘The English Review’, British Literary Magazines, ed. Sullivan, pp. 126–9. 63 Harriet Monroe to Robert Mountsier, 20 July 1922 and 16 September 1922, CBP, TxU. For typescripts Mountsier sent to Monroe, see TS92b and TS109, and for proofs Monroe sent to Lawrence, see P110 and P120, ‘Manuscript Listing’, 3Poems xlix, li–lii and liv. Payment was $80 (about £20) for the three poems. 64 ‘The Evening Land’, Poetry, 21 (November 1922): 59–63; see also ‘Turkey-Cock’, Poetry, 21 (November 1922): 64–7. 65 ‘Saint Matthew’, Poetry, 22 (April 1923): 27–31. Compare 1Poems 275. 66 ‘Cypresses’, Adelphi, 1 (October 1923): 368–70; see also ‘St Matthew’ and ‘Spirits Summoned West’, Adelphi, 1 (October 1923): 371–7. 67 Bonnie Costello, ed., The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), pp. 167–9. 68 Dial, 86 (May 1929): 383–4. 69 ‘To let go or to hold on—?’, ‘Things men have made—’, ‘Whatever man makes—’, ‘Work’, ‘What would you fight for?’, ‘Attila’, ‘Sea-weed’, ‘Lizard’, ‘Censors’, ‘November by the sea—’, Dial, 86 (July 1929): 543–8. Payment for all 11 pensées was $160 (about £40). 70 London Mercury, 2 (October 1921): 575–7. 71 For Squire’s review of Collected Poems and his obituary of Lawrence in the Observer, see Draper, ed., Critical Heritage, pp. 299, 334. 72 Nancy Pearn to Lawrence, 13 December 1929 and 3 February 1930, CBP, TxU. 73 ‘Bells’, London Mercury, 21 (March 1930): 393; and ‘The Triumph of the Machine [2]’, London Mercury, 22 (June 1930): 106–7.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Modernity and new media: 1920s journalism, cinema, radio ANNALISE GRICE

The interwar period, specifically the 1920s, witnessed a rapid expansion of the media industry which both reflected social changes and shaped society. Current scholarship on modernism and modernity recognizes the context in which authors operated and the various ways in which their literary approaches, methods and concerns intersect with broader cultural studies. Ann Ardis surveys the field’s ‘foregrounding [of] the methodological convergences of periodical studies, book history, media history, and material culture studies that are enriching our understanding of modernism’s complex relationship to the media ecology of modernity’, and a line of twenty-first-century scholarship has contextualized and theorized media including journalism, cinema and radio, reading writers’ engagements with these forms to distinguish their responses and contributions to cultural production.1 D. H. Lawrence studies has been slow to react to such dialogues, despite the author’s notoriety as a stimulating controversialist figure for the rebellious ‘Roaring Twenties’. This chapter examines Lawrence’s contribution and response to new media – primarily journalism (which was by no means a ‘new’ medium, though its markets expanded with the development of the ‘New Journalism’ associated with American press methods at the fin de siècle), but also cinema and radio – in order to gauge his interest in reaching the ‘Great British Public’, or ‘G. B. P.’, as he termed it.2 Given the ‘feminization’

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of mass culture and the urgency of debates in the 1920s about the roles of women and their enfranchisement, my focus will be on exploring Lawrence’s provocative stances on gender and relationships in the articles he published in mass-produced magazines and newspapers such as Vanity Fair, the London Evening News, the Daily Express and the Sunday Dispatch and his reactions to Hollywood ‘love-films’ late in his career. While Lawrence never wrote for radio (unlike T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Ezra Pound) and did not participate in radio broadcasts, he wrote sporadically about radio transmission, and I analyse his representation of the uncanny ‘radio voice’ as it infiltrates domestic spaces in his short fiction.3 The chapter contextualizes Lawrence’s critical engagement with his contemporary media moment in order to bring into critical discussion the extent of his portrayal of the effects of new media on the modern consciousness. Through their engagements with new media, modernist authors were available to the mass public in the 1920s like never before, contributing to the noise of modernity, attempting to make sense of multivalent cultural anxieties and using popular rhetorical forms as effective creative strategies. The new media opened up lucrative markets for these authors: Lawrence noted on 24 November 1928 that it was no good writing books any longer, since ‘in England the government now takes 20% of all royalties of persons living abroad’; his agent Curtis Brown would take a further ten per cent. So, it paid him ‘far, far better to write little newspaper articles, and the papers want them now’ (7L 26).

VULGARIZED EMOTION Late poems such as ‘Cry of the masses’, published by Faber & Faber in the ‘pamphlet-booklet’ Nettles (1930), capture Lawrence’s cynicism about the dehumanizing effects of modern media (7L 606). His syncopated use of punctuation and repetition depicts the deathly modern body as an unfeeling machine and the citizen as possessing a herd mentality, programmed by the media to engage superficially with cultural production. Crucially, however, rather than the ‘masses’ being at fault for their mindless sensual immersion in films, radio programmes and newspapers, they are depicted as being coerced into passive consumption and they call for the restoration of their bodies: Stare, stare, stare, corpse-body, at the film. Listen, listen, listen, corpse-body, to the wireless. Talk, talk, talk, corpse-body, newspaper talk. … Corpse-anatomies with ready-made sensations! … give us back our bodies for one day. (1Poems 511–12)

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Even ‘a first-class modern writer’ such as Clifford Chatterley and his milieu in Lady Chatterley’s Lover are ‘mental’ beings who produce but do not create (LCL 21). Clifford, who is rendered impotent by his maiming in the war, now desires only to ‘prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess Success’ like the Irish playwright Michaelis (21), but Michaelis is disillusioned by the popularity of his plays, finding ‘nothing in the public’ (23). A symbol of paralysed intellectual self-enclosure, Clifford listens ‘with vacant face to the emotional idiocy of the radio’ and believes that ‘ “the modern world has only vulgarised emotion by letting it loose” ’ (139), while Tommy Dukes, decrying the parlous state of modern love ‘ “with little jazz girls” ’, acknowledges his ‘ “numb” ’ heart and droopy penis and declares, ‘ “I’m only a mental-lifer” ’ (39). Given examples such as these, it is little wonder that Lawrence has traditionally been perceived as having a deeply sceptical attitude towards the public and being phobic of ‘modernity’. The very word ‘modernity’ became for Lawrence something of a dirty word, but at the same time he was fascinated by all it entailed. In Pornography and Obscenity (1929), he is deeply critical of the ‘Vox Populi, vox Dei’, who shou[t]‌with praise over movie-pictures and books and newspaper accounts that seem, to a sinful nature like mine, completely disgusting and obscene. Like a real prude and Puritan, I have to look the other way. When obscenity becomes mawkish, which is its palatable form for the public, and when the Vox populi, vox Dei is hoarse with sentimental indecency, then I have to steer away, like a Pharisee, afraid of being contaminated. (LEA 237) The popular imagination valourizes excessive emotion and it is the forced and exaggerated depiction of love and desire as promoted by new media that Lawrence finds ‘obscene’, cloying, even polluting, for its inauthenticity. As the leisure market grew, so demand rose, particularly among upper-workingclass female readerships, for ‘sex novels’, and Elinor Glyn, Ethel M. Dell and Ruby M. Ayres became household names for their passionate, sometimes sadomasochistic, purple prose; E. M. Hull’s bestselling ‘desert romance’ The Sheik (1919), which Lawrence discussed as an archetype of the ‘popular’ novel in his essay ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’ (1923), was adapted in America in 1921 as a silent film starring Rudolph Valentino, but it was heavily censored, omitting the rape of Lady Diana Mayo by Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan and neutralizing the original racial and sexual controversies that made the novel a bestseller. The Sheik school of sex novels was successful in raising consciousness of important questions about gender relations, desire (often across ethnic categories) and power, and this was a project Lawrence also shared, if he did so largely in terms of the daring nature of the themes, rather than the aesthetics, in troubling fabular stories such as ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’

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(written in 1924) and ‘None of That!’ (written in 1927). Laura Frost observes that ‘the language that Lawrence uses when he writes about eroticism makes use of the same clichés and stereotypes that he condemns in popular genre fiction’; in novels such as The Plumed Serpent (1926) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he borrows tropes from popular romance but thwarts a pleasurable response in his readers by turning his narratives ‘toward antierotic purposes’.4 In 1927, Lawrence repeatedly told correspondents of his astonishment at his acquaintance Michael Arlen’s phenomenal success with his sensational novel The Green Hat (1924), which was adapted for screen and stage. Lawrence detailed in his private ‘Memoranda’ what Arlen had told him about his income; the novel ‘brought him 5,650 dollars one week’ which prompted comparisons with his own meagre earnings and a renewed resolve, ‘definitely I hate the whole money-making world … But I won’t be done by them either’ (6L 9). In Pornography and Obscenity, Lawrence sets up a dichotomy which might distract us from taking his considered engagements with the marketplace and popular media culture too seriously: ‘you perform your antics to please the vast public, Deus ex machina, or you refuse to perform for the public at all, unless now and then to pull its elephantine and ignominious leg’ (LEA 237). Rather than merely performing antics, or avoiding the public altogether, his works of the 1920s betray a shifting and nuanced, rather than bitterly entrenched, attitude towards the ‘G. B. P.’. He realizes that there is a minority of the public that will not be fooled because it ‘has its own dynamic ideas’ (LEA 252) and it may have been to such a public that his late journalism was addressed in order to introduce them to the ideas about modernity and gender relations he professed in his latest novel and in ‘Two Blue Birds’ and ‘In Love’, two wry short stories he wrote in 1926 specifically for the magazine market. On one level the articles satirize the ‘pathetic silliness of the modern youth’ (LEA 249), but Lawrence also genuinely relished the opportunity to reach a mass audience that was becoming, in some quarters, more attuned and resistant to the ‘doom of self-enclosure’ facing modern civilization (250), and more confident about discussing matters of sex and gender. While Pornography and Obscenity is oppositional and defensive (‘biting through their skin, as I intended it should’ (7L 568)), the late journalism is far lighter in tone, expressed in an everyman mode that did not seek to alienate but rather to extend debates on gender relations that were, by late in the decade, well established, yet continually in vogue and sought after by newspaper and magazine editors.

JOURNALISM: ON THE ‘JEUNE FILLE’ It was largely through the efforts of Nancy Pearn (born Annie Ross Pearn, 1892–1950) that Lawrence began writing his late journalistic articles and found success in getting them into print. Since 1922, Pearn had been responsible for

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periodical publications at the London office of Lawrence’s literary agent, Curtis Brown, and she did much to facilitate the placement of his work in appropriate outlets, advise him on productive allegiances and handle his fees with editors. They got on well since Pearn flattered Lawrence without fawning, and she anticipated and offset any resistance he might have to engaging with journalism, commenting, ‘I have been looking forward to the opening up of some of these new newspaper markets for you – if only you can bear to tackle just those sorts of subjects which the Press adores’ (LEA xxi); she also reminded him that press coverage often led to increased book sales. The literary editor of the Evening News, Arthur E. Olley, approached Pearn on 25 April 1928 requesting a submission from Lawrence, who dutifully responded with a typescript entitled ‘The Bogey between the Generations’. The piece was published as ‘When She Asks “Why?” ’ on 8 May 1928; it was printed (under Lawrence’s original title) in the Virginia Quarterly Review the following January, and a poem, ‘The jeune fille’, pithily outlining a similar argument, was to appear in Pansies (1Poems 491–2).5 Lawrence deconstructs the ‘ “jeune fille” ’ of twenty-two, pointing out that she has been used as a figurative persona (rather like journalistic constructions of the ‘New Woman’ at the fin de siècle, or the ‘Modern Girl’ of the 1920s) ‘who is the excuse for the great Hush! Hush! in print’ but is ‘no fool’: she is interrogatory and knowing (LEA 71). It is her stuffy father, still ‘Victorian’, who ‘winces and bridles and trembles in his study’, while ‘the innocent maiden knocks you flat with her outspokenness in the conservatory’. Lawrence makes use of his skills in presenting witty dialogue to dramatize the exchange between the narrator and the jeune fille about her ‘daddy’, who is ‘ “like a baby ostrich with its head in the sand! It only makes his rear so much the more conspicuous” ’ (72). The girl is ‘a deadly shot: Billy the Kid is nothing to her’, because she has more courage to ask ‘why’ than the ‘anaemic maidens’ of thirty years prior. But she fails to see that ‘Wickedness in other people is an idée fixe of the elderly’ (73) – and this perception of widespread wickedness, and the sense that there is harm around every corner, is the bogey that the younger generation must be shielded from. This imbues the parents with a ‘great sense’ of ‘authority, importance and justification’, while frustrating their offspring who ‘will question everything out of existence, so that nothing is left’ (73–4). For Lawrence’s narrator, the questioning is no bad thing since some ‘old lies’ might be disposed of, but the situation is paradoxical for the writer, who must struggle against censorship to put ‘the right things back’. Lawrence light-heartedly gives the lie to the idea that the jeune fille needs safeguarding and suggests that the cushioning is a matter of her parents’ tender and attenuated sensibilities. Lawrence had already explored the jeune fille in April 1927 when he wrote ‘Laura Philippine’, describing a wealthy American girl of twenty years old. She was modelled on Mary Christine Hughes, whom he had met (with her

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mother Christine) in New Mexico in 1924; he delighted in mocking their philistinism as ‘partly affectation, but it’s such a complete one that it’s effectual’ (6L 79; see also 5L 158; 600). Pearn offered ‘Laura Philippine’ to T. P.’s & Cassell’s Weekly, which was known as a middlebrow literary weekly, trying to be intellectual. Lawrence, typically, dismissed it as ‘a rag of a paper’, yet his article was published there on 7 July 1928; he considered it attractive to ‘the Americans … Vanity Fair might have done it’ (6L 460–1). ‘Laura Philippine’ is a character sketch which describes, with some fascination and even affection on Lawrence’s part, the girl’s very modern state of ennui. Laura’s ‘wonderful blue eyes’ are ‘asleep rather than sleepy’, she foregoes food while smoking and drinking alcohol incessantly, ‘turn[s]‌over a periodical without looking at it’ and looks ‘as if she might possibly be drifting out of doors to commit suicide in some half-delicious fashion’ (LEA 77). She goes to ‘ “meet some of the boys” … with a completeness that makes it seem impossible she will ever come back’ (77) and she has no interest in travel or the plentiful cultural pursuits on offer to a girl of her means, going into ‘a special void of her own’ (79). The only activities she pursues are dancing the Charleston, listening to jazz and writing conventional poems ‘like little sighs’ (79). When the narrator asks if she is happy, she replies, ‘ “I say to mother: show me somebody happy … I’m not happy, thank God, because I’m not anything. Why should I be?” ’ (80). Laura seems well adapted to the modern world: she is another jeune fille with the courage to ask ‘why’, and she is insouciant, which for Lawrence were appealing qualities. His narrator, like the girl’s mother, tries to determine the reasons for her languor and to prescribe a cure in finding ‘some guy’, to which she replies, ‘what are boys for, ‘xcept to jazz with’ (80, 79). The generational divide is also explored in ‘Over-Earnest Ladies’ (entitled ‘Insouciance’ in Assorted Articles and Late Essays and Articles), which was published in the Evening News on 12 July 1928, and then by Atlantic Monthly (unsigned) in November. The events described were based on a scenario Lawrence had experienced while staying at the Grand Hotel, Chexbres, Switzerland. The narrator of the article is in a hotel room next to ‘two little white-haired English ladies’; to his dismay, since he intended to sit on the balcony ‘serenely contemplating the world’, they begin talking to him about ‘the troubled ether of international politics’ and so he is ‘not allowed to sit like a dandelion on my own stem’ (LEA 95–6). It is perhaps significant that these women are English, and therefore representative of a certain kind of straitlaced, if altruistic, seriousness, unlike the frivolous American flapper-like jeune fille. But like Laura Philippine, they fail to see ‘the things that were actually there’ (two men mowing, the mountains, cherry-trees and lake) (96). However, while Laura has no intellectual interests in evidence, and proclaims that she cares for and is nothing, these older women are ‘over-earnest’; they ‘never live on the spot where they are’ so that they represent a ‘deadly breach between

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actual living and this abstract caring’ (97). By contrast the mindful narrator has trained himself to develop ‘a direct, sensuous contact’ with his surroundings (97). One wonders if the narrator is threatened by the extent of the pair’s political knowledge (presumably gleaned from reading broadsheet newspapers and periodicals) and if he would have reacted with such impatience if they were male. Perhaps he would, since in Fantasia it is men whom Lawrence addresses when he writes about how to live a more fulfilling life: ‘I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fulness of life’ (PFU 141). While the older women are ‘eaten up with caring’ (LEA 97), in another poem from Nettles, ‘The Great Newspaper Editor to his subordinate’, Lawrence locates the blame for the malaise among modern young women on the figure of the popular newspaper editor, who tells his ‘subordinate’, ‘Mr Smith’, to ‘take the pith / and marrow and substance out of all / the articles passing beneath your scrawl’. Smith’s articles have told his readers that ‘life isn’t really much fun, / when you know that they’ve got to think that they’re happy’ (1Poems 510). The editor detests single women, telling his subordinate that for the sake of sales they need to ‘be kith / and kin with Miss Jupson, whose guts are narrow / and can’t pass such things as substance and marrow’ (511). He considers that ‘Miss Harrison’ needs to be told ‘she’s a marv’lous, delicious, high-spirited feller’ (510). The editor’s diatribe is pointedly directed towards the spinster, masculinized as a ‘feller’, who had begun to contest rigid gender stereotypes by pursuing a career in lieu of marriage (according to the 1921 census there was a ‘surplus’ of 1.75 million unmarried women following the deaths of British soldiers during the First World War); in the absence of a husband the patrician editor steps in to guide her consumption instead.6 The misogyny belongs to the editor rather than to Lawrence, who, as we have seen, was as frustrated as the young women his writing addresses at the delimitations and conservatism of sections of the popular newspaper press that proliferated false and damaging notions of the jeune fille. Yet on the other hand, better quality publications that inform readers about political events – such as the rise of fascism – give caring older women so much to worry about that their lives become abstract. These articles capture Lawrence’s sense of the overstimulation of modernity due to the explosion of new media and the relational struggle (by writers, editors, consumers) to navigate the shifting and ambivalent moral codes of a turbulent, anxiety-laden interwar period.

WOMAN IN MAN’S IMAGE Since media such as journalism leaves fewer traces than other kinds of print publication, it is not often possible to gauge readers’ responses to articles, except

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for in newspaper correspondence pages. However, a contemporary response to one of Lawrence’s least progressive articles was discovered and published in 2008. This is an ‘Open Letter to D. H. Lawrence’, dated 13 June 1929. The signatories are ‘four normal business women’ living in New York – Louise Carey, Helen Wakelin, D. L. Kent and G. N. Walsh – who write in ‘protest’ against Lawrence’s article ‘Woman in Man’s Image’ (later entitled ‘Give Her a Pattern’) which was published in Vanity Fair in May 1929, and then in the Daily Express on 19 June the same year. On 1 July, Lawrence sent the ‘Open Letter’ to Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair from 1914 to 1936, and included a riposte on the verso. The controversial opening paragraph of Lawrence’s Vanity Fair article reads as follows: The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is thoroughly herself she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to. (LEA 162) To this, the businesswomen justifiably write that they ‘believe that women, like men, have independent personalities, and can have independent existences completely happy and useful without benefit of masculine thought or influence’.7 The signatories consider Lawrence’s perspective to be outdated: ‘we want to point out to you and to the persons you might mistakenly have influenced that male whims do not affect modern women’. To this end, they designated 16 June as ‘No Man’s Sunday’ in their all-female residence, The Irvin (West Thirtieth Street), ‘where 195 business women live quite amicably and contentedly’. James T. Boulton’s note explains that the New York Times had reported on 21 February 1916 that a charitable organization had purchased a site to build a hotel ‘where self-supporting girls and women with small incomes could be accommodated’.8 The ‘Open Letter’ was never printed in Vanity Fair; Boulton speculates that at some point a secretary removed it from the office file and took it home, where it was located and sold after her death. The fact that Lawrence sent the letter to Crowninshield, who could very well have printed it, indicates that he was not averse to its publication. He is amused by it, describing the signatories as ‘tightly-shut ladies’ who ‘protest too much’.9 Calling them ‘tightly-shut’ might be coarse innuendo, or it remind us of the newspaper editor’s misogynistic comments about excising articles for ‘narrow’ gutted ‘Miss Jupson’; similarly, the comment about their protestation might recall the life-denying ‘over-earnest ladies’ who talk ‘too much’ about politics. By these accounts, women should neither be narrowly non-intellectual, nor excessively informed; they should not say or be nothing (like Laura Philippine), but neither should they say too much.

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The remainder of Lawrence’s article does, however, note that men ‘run to type’, and that ‘young men are definitely frightened of the real female’, so they wish the modern woman to be ‘a boyish little thing, it’s safer’ (LEA 162). Women look to live up to a ‘pattern’ to satisfy men: such ‘abominable patterns’ as ‘child-wives, little-boy-baby-face girls, perfect secretaries, noble spouses, self-sacrificing mothers, pure women who bring forth children in virgin coldness, prostitutes who just make themselves low … patterns all perverted from any real natural fulness of a human being’ (LEA 163). Men do not know what kind of woman they want and they do not give women a ‘decent, satisfying idea of womanhood’ because men are ‘fools’ (165). Lawrence does at least acknowledge that women’s lives have traditionally been fashioned and restricted (by patriarchal constructs, by inequalities of opportunity in the law, education, science, economy and by literary and media representations, for example) in such a way as to lock them in to dependence, marriage or subordinate positions, which has provided them with only ‘a stock of ready-made, worn-out, idiotic patterns to live up to’ (165). He affirms that these types or patterns are not fulfilling, and that men should not ask women to be anything less than a ‘real human being of the feminine sex’ (163). Where he misfires, however, is in statements like it is a ‘fact of life’ that ‘women must play up to man’s pattern’, and that they ‘can’t exist’ otherwise, and in the suggestion that men (and more broadly, patriarchal structures) should be outlining any kind of pattern in the first place (165, 164). We know that the young Lawrence (when he precipitously rushed to assist with what he saw as Frieda’s liberation from her conventionally respectable middle-class marriage and motherhood in 1912) believed that ‘all women in their natures are like giantesses. They will break through everything and go on with their own lives’ (1L 392). Such a stance opposes the notion that men can provide satisfactory patterns for women. The extent to which these articles derive wholeheartedly from the perspective of Lawrence himself is difficult to judge, since he needed to adopt narratorial positions to fulfil editorial briefs. He was writing ephemera for newspapers that had a prescribed idea of what they were after and were looking to commission copy from him under contract using suggested titles and themes: titles Olley gave, such as ‘Man Must Be Master Again’, gave Lawrence a sure sense of the flavour of the subject matter he was willing to print along with the newspaper’s gender politics.10 To help him gain a sense of the appropriate journalistic writing style, Pearn had sent Lawrence a cutting which had been forwarded to her by the editor of the broadsheet Daily Express, owned by Lord Beaverbrook. It was ‘on AND WE MARRY THESE WOMEN! from one of the American magazines’; the editor asked if Lawrence would be ‘willing to write a special article conveying some of these comments in a manner to suit yourself ’; accordingly, Lawrence’s original title for ‘Give Her a Pattern’ was ‘Oh these

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Women!’ (LEA 160). So, Lawrence was writing within the limits of what was expected of him, and given that the articles were subtly addressed to men (or invited women readers to see themselves through men’s eyes), calling men ‘fools’ and asking them to see their spouses anew as having the ‘real natural fulness of a human being’ was actually quite a refreshing rebellion. Nevertheless, the businesswomen writing to Lawrence to inform him of their own independence enjoying lives apart from men shows that the modern world was opening up for women and that female friendship, cohabitation and collaboration could be a fine substitute for the conventional male–female relationship, and his caustic riposte to their letter ironically fails to give them credit for radically remaking a pattern and breaking free. Had they been able to read ‘– And If Women Were Supreme …’ printed in the Evening News on 5 October 1928, they might have written an earlier letter.11 This article argues that England is now under the control of a matriarchy, ‘Woman cracks the whip, and the poor trained dog of a man jumps through the hoop. Nightmare!’ (LEA 104), but such a situation could, looked at another way, benefit men: ‘Give woman her full independence, and with it, the full responsibility of her independence’. In other words, men could then abscond from the domestic scene and focus on developing their ‘social cravings’ (106) in male-only settings (a mode of same-sex communality actually achieved by the New York businesswomen). Lawrence uses ‘delicate irony’ to mimic popular discourse on fears of female supremacy, but the article would nevertheless have rankled with supporters of the Women’s Cause; the Equal Franchise Act had been passed just three months earlier.12 A far more enlightened Lawrence can be seen in another recent discovery by Andrew Harrison among the papers of John Middleton Murry. This is the manuscript of a letter Lawrence wrote sometime between December 1923 and March 1924 in response to an opinion piece that had been submitted to Murry’s monthly journal, the Adelphi, which he had become involved in (alongside S. S. Koteliansky) during his return to Europe from Mexico. The piece, published in the number for April 1924, was entitled ‘The Ugliness of Women’ and evasively initialled by ‘J. H. R.’, who describes his hatred of beautiful women, asserting that ‘in every woman born there is a seed of terrible, unmentionable evil; evil such as man – a simple creature for all his passions and lusts – could never dream of in the most horrible of nightmares’, and ‘only a beautiful face can transmit it’.13 J. H. R. asked his fellow readers of the Adelphi to help him understand his recoil from beautiful women, and Lawrence felt compelled to respond, charging J. H. R. with having ‘obscene desires’ that make him react to women viscerally like a coyote howling at the smell of fresh meat: the hideousness he feels is really self-hatred and disgust at his own lust. Lawrence ends by stating that ‘even the most “beautiful” woman is still a human creature. If he approached her as such, as a being instead of as a piece of lurid meat, he

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would have no horrors afterwards.’14 Harrison notes that Lawrence’s response was originally earmarked for publication in the April number (presumably to be placed directly after ‘The Ugliness of Women’) but in the end Murry did not publish it, fearing it might libel J. H. R., or be too ‘crude or savage’ for the tame Adelphi.15 This is unfortunate since such a bizarre, sexist submission called for the kind of cutting and insightful castigation Lawrence offered.

HOLLYWOOD, ‘SEX APPEAL’ AND THE MODERN MIND Lawrence extended his thoughts on beauty when he wrote the article ‘Sex Appeal’, published as ‘Sex Locked Out’ on 25 November 1928 in Viscount Rothermere’s right-wing Sunday Dispatch (part of the same group of papers as the Evening News), which had commissioned a series of articles on the fashionable subject ‘What is sex appeal?’ So pleased was the editor, Bernard Falk, with Lawrence’s submission that he had the text privately reprinted as a booklet for Christmas 1928 and raised his fee from 15 to 25 guineas. Vanity Fair paid $75 to print the article in July 1929 and in December that year it was retitled ‘Men and Peacocks’ and published by the New York Golden Book Magazine.16 The Sunday Dispatch version was accompanied by photographic illustrations of film stars Lilian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino and the courtesan Diane de Poitiers, all of whom Lawrence names within his article as he compares popular assessments of their ‘sex appeal’ or otherwise: ‘there is a greater essential beauty in Charlie Chaplin’s odd face, than ever there was in Valentino’s’ (LEA 146). Chaplin was an unusual figure in operating across the ‘great divide’, attractive to both a mass audience as ‘Charlie’ the movie star, and to young intellectuals, as ‘Charles’, the urbane reader of Kant and Schopenhauer, which probably helped rescue him from Lawrence’s opprobrium.17 Laura Marcus explains that the Hollywood ‘sex appeal’ film ‘was a machine for arousing sexual desire … The “stars” of American film were represented as entirely manufactured by the machinery of the film industry, trained, like robots, to act out the mechanics of desire in endlessly recycled sexual plots’.18 Naturally this automaticity was a red flag for Lawrence, whose 1927–8 painting Close-Up (Kiss) of a man and woman pursing their lips in a near-embrace satirizes the kind of filmic close-ups and counterfeit emotions that he describes in his pansy ‘When I went to the film –’ (1Poems 385): in the painting the woman’s lips seem less than eager to receive the kiss, and the man’s bored eyes look away into the distance. The pansy ‘Film Passion’ describes the ways in which female disciples of Valentino (who had died suddenly of a ruptured ulcer, in 1926, aged thirty-one) objectified the star and loathed his ‘male substance’, engaging in a kind of willed collective manslaughter: ‘All the women who adored the shadow of the man on the screen / helped to kill him in the flesh’ (1Poems 467). In ‘Sex Appeal’ he tempers his acerbity, arguing that

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Hollywood provides ‘blatantly obvious’ beauty, ‘which only pleases because it satisfies some ready-made notion of handsomeness’, but the ‘plainest person can look beautiful … It only needs the fire of sex to rise delicately, to change an ugly face to a lovely one. That is really sex appeal: the communicating of a sense of beauty’, which can belong to a woman of any age (LEA 146). To be a ‘lovely’ woman is far better, for Lawrence, than to be a ‘beautiful’ woman (or one who has ‘the stereotyped attributes of beauty’) since loveliness is rare: it occurs when ‘the sex fire glows through’, which will ‘kindle an answer somewhere … a glow, that makes the world look kindlier, and life feel better’ (147). But alas, the ‘deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased condition of the atrophied intuitive faculties’, caused by our post-Freudian ‘morbid hatred of sex’ and denial of ‘ “alive” beauty’ (145). Press debates about sex appeal abounded following the publication of Elinor Glyn’s immensely influential and scandalous novel It (1927), which signalled the Hollywood version of sex appeal: the magnetism of the ‘vamp’ (Glyn had been a scriptwriter for the silent movies in the mid-1920s). As an indication of how quickly culture and moral codes were changing in relation to female sexuality, Lawrence suggests that by 1928, sex appeal was ‘not nearly so dangerous as it was’ since men have ‘grown canny. They fight shy even of the emotional vamp … they smell a rat the moment they feel the touch of feminine sex appeal today’ (LEA 148). Connie Chatterley’s appeal for Mellors is her attractively ‘womanly’ ingénue quality, which he finds preferable to the sexually equivocal flapper or vampish femme fatale: he notes her difference from ‘the celluloid women of today’; ‘she wasn’t all tough rubber-goods-and-platinum, like the modern girl’ (LCL 119). Early writers on film such as Rudolf Messel identified in This Film Business (1928) the ‘celluloid man’ who embodied an impersonal and mechanistic form of sexual desire, indicating how swiftly Lawrence absorbed and creatively repurposed the critique of transatlantic media culture, resisting the melding of technology and visually oriented desire in favour of a return to nature and touch between realistic (rather than Hollywood-glamorous) bodies.19 Pearn informed Lawrence that Film Weekly were keen for him to write about the sort of film he would ‘write or produce if there were no censor’, reminding him on 28 November that they had asked for an article ‘under some such title as MY UNCENSORED FILM’, but Lawrence expressed ‘doubt if I could write about my uncensored Film – feel I haven’t got one’ (6L 601 n. 4). But back in June 1920, he had written to his agent Robert Mountsier asking him to follow up on an enquiry from a film agent, Maurice S. Revnes in New York, who represents ‘clients who are willing to purchase the film rights of English novels’ (3L 546 n. 1); Lawrence would ‘order Duckworth to send [Mountsier] all my books’ with a view to letting Revnes ‘have them, if you agree with him’ (3L 547). In January 1923, Thomas Seltzer travelled to California to explore the

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possibility of selling the film rights for Women in Love to Warner Brothers for up to $10,000 (Seltzer had in September 1922 defended the novel from an attempt by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to have it banned); their approach was ultimately unsuccessful, but it indicates that Lawrence pursued means of exploiting the modern media market even while he critiqued it (4L 558, 589).20 And critique it he did: not least in The Lost Girl (1920), in which colliers are criticized for their onanistic manner of approaching the cinema screen: ‘they can spread themselves over a film … It’s all themselves to them, all the time’ (LG 186). Lawrence considered ‘cinema people … so undistinguished, so common’ (4L 287) and Brewster Ghiselin recalled the ‘humorous relish’ with which Lawrence described his attendance at a ‘ “tea” in Hollywood’; he mocked the excess and performativity of the male actor and his son both ‘wearing white riding breeches and carrying a riding crop’.21 During one of his several documented visits to the cinema, he saw Ben Hur in Strasbourg in October 1928 and left after half an hour, sickened by its ‘falsity’ and ‘the way the open-mouthed public in the cinema accepted it all as true’.22 His views were notorious even among wider literary circles. Dorothy Richardson wrote to Bryher (co-editor, with Kenneth Macpherson, of Close Up [1927–33], the international magazine devoted to films as an art form) that Lawrence might be approached for an article: ‘you know Lawrence loathes films? Foams about them. I’m sure he’d foam for you.’23 Lawrence’s reactionary nature prevented him from discriminating between avant-garde and commercial cinema, and it was cinemagoing as a habit and the way it had supposedly detrimentally influenced the perceptiveness of the modern mind and cheapened human contact that really repelled him. Just as Lawrence critically adapted narratives from popular ‘sex novels’ and effectively mimicked the journalistic voice, he also experimented with a poetic form that reflected modern consciousness. The aphoristic Pansies, a ‘bunch of fragments … little thoughts trotting down the page like so many separate creatures’ were written to ‘sui[t]‌the modern mind’ (draft Introduction to Pansies, 1Poems 657) as ‘casual thoughts that are true while they are true and irrelevant when the mood and circumstance changes’, and which, ‘fleeting as pansies’, also have their ‘varied faces’ (Foreword to Pansies, 1Poems 671). In 1921, the avant-garde writer and film-maker Jean Epstein had argued that, as in cinema, in modern literature (and particularly in poetry) ‘everything moves’, resulting in an aesthetic of ‘mental rapidity’ or momentary seeing. He predicted that ‘within five years people will be writing cinematographic poems … The film like contemporary literature accelerates unstable metamorphoses’.24 In his 1927 review of John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), Lawrence remarks on the novel’s ‘disconnected scenes and scraps, a breathless confusion of isolated moments … It is like a movie picture with an intricacy of different stories … The book becomes, what life is, a stream of different things and different faces

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rushing along in the consciousness’ (IR 310). The interrelatedness of filmic vision, poetry and transience seems akin to Lawrence’s formal experimentation with Pansies – and Nettles – which share something of the ‘fleeting’, mercurial aesthetic Epstein had anticipated. The ‘modern mind’ is suited to reading and thinking at speed as perceptions continually shift to keep up with the mood of the moment generated by the screaming headlines of sensational journalism, wireless broadcasts and the first film ‘talkies’ (which appeared in 1927 with the American musical drama The Jazz Singer). Michael Bell has noted that ‘chatter’ is a major feature of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Lawrence ‘encapsulates this society summatively in its forms of talk’ both thematically and within his own narrative language.25 The satirical late poetry has a similarly vernacular dialogic form; Frieda termed the Pansies ‘doggerel’ in celebration of their burlesque radicalism (7L 64).

THE RADIO VOICE Beyond a potentially cinematographic, or even radiogenic, poetic form, the uncanny nature of the broadcast voice infiltrating private spaces makes its way into stories such as ‘The Last Laugh’ (1924), ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ (1926) and ‘The Lovely Lady’ (1927), all of which feature a bizarre, disembodied presence. In stories such as these, Lawrence anticipates the critique of Theodor Adorno, who, sometime between 1938 and 1941, wrote about the phenomenon of the personal yet anonymous ‘radio voice’, which supernaturally permeates domestic spaces: ‘the deeper this voice is involved within his own privacy, the more it appears to pour out of the cells of his most intimate life … he gets the impression that his own cupboard, his own phonograph, his own bedroom speaks to him in a personal way’.26 In ‘The Last Laugh’, one of Lawrence’s oddest stories, a laugh is detected by the Dorothy Brett figure, Miss James, using her ‘Marconi listening machine’ while out on a wintry walk on Hampstead Heath; she is prompted to operate the machine to hear the laughter which is initially discerned only by Marchbanks, the ‘man in the bowler hat’ accompanying her, who looks like a ‘satanic young priest’ (WWRA 123). ‘She opened the lid and attached the wires, putting the band over her head and the receivers at her ears, like a wireless operator’ (124). A male presence among the holly bushes seems to be associated with the laughter. Miss James becomes emboldened by the presence of a policeman she feels a sudden attraction to, who remains with her as Marchbanks enters a Jewish woman’s house for a sexual liaison. Miss James hears ‘several voices, calling and whistling, as if many people were hallooing through the air: “He’s come back. Aha! He’s come back” … the dark, laughing face was near her face’ (129), but far from alarming her, this sensation intensifies the ‘flame of delight’ she feels for the ‘animal’ policeman, who looks at her ‘like a frightened dog

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that sees something uncanny’ (130). They enter a church, through which the ‘voices were blowing in a wild career’ (130) and suddenly ‘a white thing’ – the altar cloth – ‘soar[s]‌like a crazy bird’ on the wind whilst the organ pipes play ‘wild, gay, trilling music, and bursts of the naked low laughter’ (131). The two of them go to Miss James’s house where the policeman, who now appears lame, stays overnight in the sitting room. Miss James asks aloud the question of whether love is ‘really so absurd’ and is answered in the affirmative by the ‘deep, laughing voice’ now appearing in her bedroom (133). The disembodied voice appears to act in Miss James’s interests in ridding her of the promiscuous Marchbanks, who at the end of the story is uncannily struck down, leaving her free to pursue her interest in the lamed policeman. In ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, a haunting whisper of ‘ “there must be more money” ’ emanates from the house and ‘from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse’. The children ‘hear it all the time, though nobody ever said it aloud’; the sentient rocking-horse, the doll (who ‘seemed to be smirking all the more self-consciously because of it’) and the puppy hear it too: ‘the whisper was everywhere, and therefore no-one spoke it’ (WWRA 230–1). As in ‘The Last Laugh’, the disembodied voice acts as the return of what has been repressed, and what is apparent but left unsaid – for Miss James, her sexuality, and for Paul, the obsessive need to make ‘filthy lucre’ (231) to fuel his mother Hester’s materialistic desires and win her affection. As the family’s finances dwindle, the ‘voices in the house’ become louder, emanating from ‘behind the sprays of mimosa and almond blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions’, in a ghastly cacophony they ‘trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: “There must be more money! Oh-h-h! … Oh now, now-w! now-w-w!” ’ (239). As with Marchbanks, Paul dies at the end of the story, himself screaming ‘in a powerful strange voice’, as if possessed (242). ‘The Lovely Lady’, too, ends with the death of the emotionally vampiric Pauline Attenborough, whose repressed son, Robert, ‘was always on the qui vive to attend to her’ and acts in a ‘priestlike’ manner towards his cousin, Ciss, despite her best efforts to attract him (WWRA 248). Pauline is ‘the lioness in her den’, keeping them apart: ‘he could never shake off his mother’ (249, 250). Ciss overhears Pauline’s guilty thoughts while she is sun-bathing: ‘she could feel her hair creeping up on her head’, as she hears ‘a voice … very softly, musingly in her ear … It had a strange, void whisper, as if it spoke out of nowhere’ (252). The sounds were very uneven, sometimes quite inaudible, sometimes only a brushing sort of noise. … It was a sighing out of the inner air: worse than any ventriloquism. It was some sort of thought transference, that registered as sound. … Thought broadcasting itself, and no escaping it, once you were in key. … Those were her thoughts, broadcasting themselves. But how horrible

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to have to listen! How horrible, to have got on to the same wave-length, and to have to hear! Not able to switch off! (254) Ciss realizes that Pauline’s voice is emanating from the rain-pipe, and she thereby finds a useful if unexpected mode of eavesdropping, gathering Pauline’s secrets which she uses to hasten her relationship with Robert. The animist ‘horror’ felt by Ciss and Paul, and enjoyed at a visceral level by Miss James, provides the basis for the uncanniness of these libidinous stories and registers Lawrence’s fascination with the new phenomenon of the affective power of radio. Lawrence told Nancy Pearn in September 1928, ‘the thought of broadcasting makes my blood run cold’ (6L 552). She had received a request from the BBC for him to make radio programmes along the same lines as his successful Evening News articles, but his distaste for radio transmission, combined with his reluctance to return to England from Europe, put paid to this. It was left to others, such as E. M. Forster, to speak of Lawrence to audiences in their millions. On 24 March 1933, the Radio Times reported that over five million licences were in use, with the number of potential listeners reaching around 20 million – a figure that had doubled in five years.27 In his ‘Talk on D. H. Lawrence’, broadcast on Wednesday 16 April 1930 at 7.25 p.m., just six weeks after Lawrence’s death, Forster downplayed controversy over the sexual content of Lawrence’s works discussed in obituaries and press reports by arguing that he was not being read ‘in the right way’. He has two unsatisfactory publics, one ‘general … who think of him as improper and scarcely read him at all’, and a ‘special’ public who read him in a ‘narrow and fanatical way’, holding him ‘as a sort of god’. Forster ‘regard[s]‌him myself as one of the glories of our twentieth century literature’ and selects The Plumed Serpent for discussion as his favourite of the novels; he aimed ‘to persuade [the listener] to share this opinion’.28 Forster attempts to raise the aspirations of his audience, navigating the corporation’s desire to educate the general public while upholding respectability within the domestic setting. * Richard Lovatt Somers, the Lawrence figure in Kangaroo (1923), describes the ‘horrible stuffiness of English newspapers … they had the same effect on him as fish-balls in a restaurant, loathsome’; the Sydney Bulletin ‘was the only periodical in the world that really amused him’, since it was ‘a lively creature. He liked its straightforwardness and the kick in some of its tantrums’. This paper did not beat the drum, nor was it over-earnest – ‘it was just stoical, and spitefully humorous’ (K 269). Lawrence’s own late journalism is lively, witty and ‘delicately ironic’ in its commentary on issues such as gender and intergenerational relations, sex appeal, the jeune fille and cultivating insouciance. It is keenly attuned to the zeitgeist and outlines a clear – often provocative – perspective while

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avoiding dogma and shrewdly remaining within the bounds of acceptability to fulfil editorial briefs. Lawrence’s ‘foaming’ about new media such as cinema was not unusual: rather, it was symptomatic of broader cultural anxieties witnessed whenever there are technological innovations. Ever the pragmatist, though, and in need of money, if he could have sold the film rights of his works to Warner Brothers then he likely would have done; it is unlikely, however, that he would ever have participated in radio broadcasts, even if he had lived into the 1930s when writers were heard over the airwaves more frequently. He did not have ‘The oxford voice’ (1Poems 376) nor the Bloomsbury burr, and the high-minded BBC might have balked at offering a platform to such a notoriously controversial author. But he understood his position in relation to his profession, knowing full well that ‘you perform your antics to please the vast public, Deus ex machina, or you refuse to perform for the public at all’, and at heart he revelled in performance, utilizing the discourses of modernity to experiment with a variety of voices and narrative forms. We can no longer view Lawrence as straightforwardly dismissive of modernity and new media when the evidence is that his engagement was critical and reactionary but also deeply, creatively productive.

NOTES 1 Ann Ardis, ‘Editor’s Introduction – Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic/Transnational Public Sphere(s)’, Modernism/Modernity, 19.3 (September 2012): v–vii, v. See studies such as Patrick Collier’s Modernism on Fleet Street (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006); David Rando’s Modernist Fiction and News (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Todd Avery’s Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006); Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty, eds, Broadcasting Modernism (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2009); Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead, eds, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); and foundational work by Laura Marcus, including The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and David Trotter, including Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 2 W. T. Stead’s radical editing of the Pall Mall Gazette between 1883 and 1889 is often considered to exemplify the ‘New Journalism’ in its first phase. See Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature, in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). Lawrence’s late poem ‘Broadcasting to the G. B. P.’ satirizes the censorious nature of the BBC, which had taken to the airwaves for the first time on 14 November 1922, by inferring that even nursery rhymes would be rendered obscene (1Poems 577–8). 3 A recent critical account observes in Lawrence’s writing between 1918 and 1926 a radio poetics, a vocabulary of wireless communication ‘as metaphors for bodily,

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affective communication’. See Aleksandr Prigozhin, ‘Listening In: D. H. Lawrence and the Wireless’, Modern Fiction Studies, 64.2 (Summer 2018): 264–85, 265. In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence likens the ‘blood-bonds’ of ‘family connections’ to ‘Marconi-stations’: ‘a family, if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the same, or very much the same vibration’ (PFU 77). 4 Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 27, 30. 5 The article is entitled ‘The “Jeune Fille” Wants to Know’ in Assorted Articles and the Cambridge edition of Late Essays and Articles. 6 About the ‘problem’ of ‘Surplus Women’, see Virginia Nicolson, Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men after the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xi. 7 James T. Boulton, ‘Further Letters of D. H. Lawrence’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 1.3 (2008): 7–13, 8. 8 Ibid., p. 9. 9 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 10 Olley hoped to contract Lawrence to write between four and six articles for the Evening News, suggesting on 12 June 1928 the titles ‘Man Must Be Master Again’; ‘I Do Not Like London Life (and Why)’, and ‘Women Are Cocksure but Never Quite Sure’ (LEA xxiii). 11 The article is entitled ‘Matriarchy’ in Assorted Articles and in LEA. 12 Olley added a blurb to the article, along with a photograph of Lawrence, stating that he writes ‘in the mood of delicate irony of which he is master’ (LEA 102). 13 Cited by Andrew Harrison, ‘Meat-Lust’, Times Literary Supplement, 5739, 29 (March 2013): 15. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 In Assorted Articles, it is given the title ‘Sex Versus Loveliness’ (LEA 143). 17 For more on Chaplin, see Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18 Marcus, Tenth Muse, p. 40. 19 Rudolf Messel, This Film Business (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), cited by Marcus in Tenth Muse, p. 40. 20 See also David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 93–4. 21 Edward Nehls, ed., D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–9), Volume III, p. 289. 22 Ellis, Dying Game, p. 440.

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23 Dorothy Richardson, letter to Bryher, in Gloria Fromm, ed., Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 135. 24 Jean Epstein, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui un nouvel état d’intelligence: lettres de Blaise Cendrars (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), pp. 179–80. Cited and translated by Marcus in Tenth Muse, p. 2. 25 On ‘the “talk” theme’, see Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 212. 26 Theodor Adorno, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert HullotKentor (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), p. 114. See also David Jenemann, ‘Flying Solo: The Charms of the Radio Body’, in Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Cohen, Coyle and Lewty, pp. 89–103. 27 L. W. Conolly, Bernard Shaw and the BBC (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 50. 28 Forster’s talk is reproduced in Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, eds, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster 1929–1960 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), pp. 55–61, 55.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

D. H. Lawrence, influence SEAN MATTHEWS

Scrutiny of D. H. Lawrence’s influence is an important element in understanding his achievement but, except for a surge of interest in the late 1980s to early 1990s, it has largely remained a minor or subordinate current within Lawrence studies. In part, this is because influence as a concept is at once unstable, indistinct and capacious, caught up in questions of reception, reputation, legacy and impact – not to mention canon and tradition.1 There is little agreement about the parameters or paradigm for its analysis. At the same time, comprehensive or synoptic accounts of an author’s influence demand improbable levels of knowledge from any one individual – much of the work in this area is therefore necessarily in the form of articles or essays exploring the relationships of individual authors to Lawrence’s example or examining Lawrence’s place in specific social and cultural movements. It is, nonetheless, a commonplace that each new generation reads an author in accordance with its own developing priorities, using that author’s work to define and clarify its own emergent structure of feeling while also revealing new aspects of the author’s work. In Lawrence’s case, it is remarkable that he has remained so relevant, so valuable, so much of a provocation and resource, in varied ways and across generations. Surveying the field one finds, consistently, the impression that his influence is unique in its extent and intensity – and this, of course, exacerbates some of the challenges in giving an account of it. Shortly after the centenary of Lawrence’s birth, Jeffrey Meyers in 1987, introducing the first collection of essays to focus on Lawrence’s influence, declared that Lawrence was ‘the most influential writer of the twentieth century’.2 Raymond Williams began his preface to The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies (1988) with

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the statement, ‘Lawrence needed no centenary. No prompting of a date was required for him to be read and reread and continually discussed.’3 Lawrence’s influence seems to function, to adapt T. S. Eliot’s famous metaphor in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, as a catalyst for further critical and creative change across an unusually wide field.4 This range and significance is one effect of the dynamism and variety of Lawrence’s oeuvre – poet, playwright, novelist, critic, essayist, journalist, travel writer, master of the short story, not to mention tireless correspondent and controversialist – and the particular qualities of what we might call his practice of writing, what Ruth Luckow characterized as its ‘loose, mobile form’, his distinctively exploratory, provisional, improvised and spontaneous mode of expression, a mode which is so centrally allied to a conception of living, of life.5 The enduring force of Lawrence’s influence is also a function of the energy and vitality of his engagement with the central political and social questions of our time, most crucially the debates about the position and experience of women, about region and class and social relations, and about sexual politics. ‘It is possible’, argued Diana Trilling back in 1973, ‘to trace certain of the major developments in culture over the last forty years on the basis of how people have read [Lawrence] or what they have chosen to take from his work’.6 Fifty years later, mapping this continuing influence remains a valuable exercise for understanding both our contemporary moment and the meanings of his work. The history of Lawrence’s influence is inextricably bound up with the history of academic literary and cultural criticism just as much as that of literature or culture itself. One critical development in that half century since Trilling’s comments has been, in fact, the evolution of thinking about the concept of influence itself, and attention to Lawrence’s influence thus emerges alongside the increasing sophistication in the models and theories for such work particularly associated, in its first phase, with Harold Bloom and Julia Kristeva. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Bloom proposed an account of literary influence – predicated on his readings of the Romantic poets and his interest in canon formation – which centred on the poet as an Oedipal agent engaged in a struggle with illustrious predecessors.7 The ‘strong’ or great poets produce ‘strong misreading’ of their antecedents, even a whole ‘map of misreading’ (the title of Bloom’s subsequent monograph). The value of the great poets’ work is precisely in the ways they appropriate and misshape the materials of earlier figures to forge new forms and expressions. At almost the same time, emerging from the very different theoretical and philosophical traditions of structural linguistics and semiotics, Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertexuality’ as a means of framing the complex interrelations between all texts – this conceptualization was not concerned with the individual author nor with canonical succession but with the articulation of interdependencies between works, patterns of shared meaning, an attention in broad ways to the defining

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structures of ‘signifying practices’ across culture or cultures as a whole.8 In contrast with Bloom’s concern to explicate specific relationships, literary lineages and traditions, the ‘family drama’, theories of intertextuality evacuate the figure and agency of the author in favour of (in Roland Barthes’s famous formulation) an understanding of the text as ‘the instance writing’, a conception which demanded and prioritized the role of the reader.9 Understanding of Lawrence’s influence has drawn on both of these theoretical modes. There is, first, important research exploring the ways in which a writer directly negotiates Lawrence’s influence in their own creative work. Within this current, there are a variety of different approaches and perspectives, and there is much diversity across writers’ responses to Lawrence. There is also, then, a further area of cultural and intellectual history which elucidates different discursive patterns, placing Lawrence within the context of wider cultural histories, as of sexuality, class, race, region and so on. In what follows, we review these two primary modes and their intersections, considering some areas which remain underexplored, and reflect on the distinctive characteristics of Lawrence’s influence which appear symptomatic of our own contemporary moment. The initial phase of concerted scholarly attention to Lawrence’s influence begins, as we have seen, around the time of the centenary of the author’s birth and concentrates primarily on the relationships of individual authors to Lawrence. Although there had, of course, been occasional studies of particular cases before this point, it is in the mid–late 1980s, as the theoretical developments discussed earlier gained currency, that academic work concerned with the topic begins to flourish, not least because Lawrence proves such a fertile example.10 If the term ‘relationship’ seems a curious term to employ in this context, it is nonetheless apt for the kinds of intimacy with Lawrence which many writers who never met him have articulated: ‘why do I feel I would have known and loved Lawrence?’ wrote Sylvia Plath.11 ‘It isn’t after all an end with Lawrence’, argued Raymond Williams, ‘it is where in our time we have had to begin’.12 Meyers’s edited collection The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence (1987) comprises six essays broadly surveying Lawrence’s influence on writers in different genres (novel, poetry, travel writing, criticism), with attention divided between English and American examples, and a further piece by Kingsley Widmer assessing ‘Lawrence’s Cultural Impact’.13 The essays are striking for the sheer number of authors tracked who acknowledge a debt to Lawrence – forty-eight writers are discussed with still more mentioned in passing – and for the emergent effort of theorization and categorization; each essay engages the question of what is meant by influence and how it might be examined. The essays on Lawrence and English writers establish many of the terms and approaches which come to characterize this type of criticism. John Bayley argues in ‘Lawrence and the Modern Novel’ that Lawrence’s ‘direct influence’ on the contemporary and near-contemporary novel of his own time was negligible at the level of form

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because ‘Lawrence’s novels are unique’ but strongly evident in the short story where his ‘powerfully satiric undertone … sharp psychological diagnosis [and] characteristic atmosphere’ proved a more compelling model.14 Bayley notes also the ambivalent presence of ‘Lawrencean’ characteristics in writing marked by his influence, in terms of representations of class, sex and gender, of a dogmatic authorial mode, or in relation to moral and spiritual questions. In ‘Lawrence and the Contemporary English Novel’, James Gindin distinguishes between the ‘referential’ and ‘intrinsic’ types of Lawrence’s influence in the novel post1950.15 Referential assimilation of Lawrence tends to be more superficial, an acknowledgement, allusion or gesture towards Lawrence’s example (his provincialism, his attention to sex) which attests to his pervasive presence in the culture without entailing substantive formal or thematic dialogue (Gindin gives the examples of Keith Waterhouse and John Wain). Intrinsic influence – closer to the type of appropriation proposed by Bloom – involves far more serious consideration, ‘the use of Lawrence as a shaping force’, as in the work of Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and Doris Lessing.16 The characteristics of intrinsic influence are delineated in relation to place, plot and action, interiority, patterns of metaphor and description – formal influence – and attention to core themes of provincial experience, class and sexual politics. For Lessing in particular, Lawrence is a key point of reference for the development of ways of representing gender roles, sexuality and sexual experience. William Chace’s ‘Lawrence and English Poetry’, which considers W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, tracks similar elements, whilst also emphasizing the ways in which these poets sought to reproduce the qualities of freedom, spontaneity and provisionality which Lawrence achieved in his poems. Keith Cushman and Dennis Jackson, editors of D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors (1991), praise Meyers’s collection as ‘a book that is attempting to define what is practically a new subject’, and present their own volume as the ‘important next step’, with each of its fourteen essays offering ‘a sustained analysis of Lawrence’s impact on an individual writer’.17 In Gindin’s terms, these pieces track examples of ‘intrinsic’ influence, and again the sheer number of authors involved is remarkable. Essays on Tennessee Williams and Peter Shaffer demonstrate Lawrence’s significance for theatre and drama. Other chapters address the novels and short stories of Sherwood Anderson, Lawrence Durrell, Melvyn Bragg, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, Margaret Drabble, Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates. Poetry is represented in the work of William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, the Black Mountain poets (particularly Charles Olson and Robert Creeley) and Ted Hughes. A pattern emerges of attention to the ways in which themes, tropes, plot structure, imagery and tone are appropriated by Lawrence’s successors, and alongside this, as Langdon Elsbree notes in a telling review of the volume, explorations of the resonance of Lawrence’s personal example. ‘Lawrence’s impact’, writes Elsbree, is seen

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in a number of contributions which explore ‘primary levels of the self where artistic and aesthetic values and ambitions, sexual and gendered tensions and energies, and social and political attitudes are all so intertwined’.18 Elsbree also notes the volume’s important turn towards consideration of Lawrence’s relation to women writers, an area the editors themselves considered significant but previously overlooked. Highlighting Carol Siegel’s essay on Lawrence and Eudora Welty, Elsbree points to the ways ‘critical assumptions of intertexual analysis’ open up ‘another kind of complexity’, wherein ‘Lawrence’s influence emerges as that of a limited perspective, a tactical or hypothetical means of discovering freedom for the woman and/or the self ’, revealed in the shared tropes, codes and themes of Lawrence and Welty’s representations of women and desire. Siegel’s essay in Cushman and Jackson’s volume was one element within her own larger project, a feminist reassessment of Lawrence’s influence. It is important to note Lawrence’s function here within debates about changing priorities and approaches within feminist criticism itself. It is not simply that feminist critics return to Lawrence and re-read his work, but that, intertextually, he is a determinant of the paradigm shift within the scholarly field itself. Siegel’s monograph Lawrence among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions (1991) further demonstrates the value of the intertextual approach, setting Lawrence within a wide discursive field of women writers and exploring his mediating function between an earlier generation (George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë) and later modernists (Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, H. D. and Anais Nin). ‘Lawrence’s participation in women’s literary tradition is not limited to his own writings’, argues Siegel, ‘but, instead, is confirmed and expanded in women writers’ responses to him’.19 Indeed, Siegel’s volume should itself be set alongside Carol Sklenicka’s D. H. Lawrence and the Child (1991), Elaine Feinstein’s Lawrence and the Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence (1993), Linda Ruth Williams’s Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence (1993) and Leo Hamalian’s D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) as elements in what Mark Spilka – in his foreword to Hamalian’s study – characterized as a ‘promising shift in critical attitudes’, a dramatic revision to our understanding of Lawrence’s function within debates on sexual and gender politics.20 Of particular interest for our account of Lawrence’s influence is the distinction that Spilka makes between two modes of feminist criticism. The first, which he associates primarily with cultural criticism and ‘academic and political’ critics, he characterizes as ‘primarily ideological’, engaging Lawrence explicitly at the level of ideas, questioning the terms and frame of the debates in which he figured. The second, which Spilka identifies more with literary criticism and with creative writers, he sees as more directly concerned with Lawrence’s ‘artistic’ influence. This dichotomy, Spilka suggests, is apparent in the fact that

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‘women novelists have not on the whole participated actively in the strong feminist case against Lawrence introduced by Simone de Beauvoir in 1953 and Kate Millett in 1970’.21 Hamalian’s book – along with Siegel’s – lends support to this argument, detailing the ways in which Lawrence’s influence permeates the work of Katherine Mansfield, H. D., Rebecca West, Meridel LeSueur, Anais Nin, Kay Boyle, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Drabble and Joyce Carol Oates. In the epilogue to the volume, Hamalian adds Olivia Moore, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Erika Jong and Gael Greene to this list (an earlier draft of the book had included a chapter on Lessing). Paralleling the contributions to the Meyers and Cushman and Jackson volumes, Hamalian clarifies that Lawrence’s influence is, at one level, related to his radical ideas, and the resource offered by the example of his life – his sensibility as manifested in courage, spontaneity and a commitment to intuition and instinct in contradistinction to moral and conventional restraint – and at another, in the range and possibility suggested by his formal achievements. It is these personal qualities, Lawrence’s experience and articulation of the life of an outsider as well as Lawrence’s ‘superb spontaneous style’ that Hamalian explores in an important further article from this same period which has been too frequently and symptomatically overlooked. ‘D. H. Lawrence and Black Writers’ (1990) establishes Lawrence’s powerful relation to a generation of emergent Black American writers in the United States: ‘Lawrence’s impact on the early careers of five major black writers suggests that a sense of spiritual kinship was possible between writers of very different milieus and very distinctive cultures’.22 Hamalian examines the work of Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, each of whom is shown to have drawn explicitly and gratefully from Lawrence. There is clearly a strong parallel in this group to the experience of the generation of writers and intellectuals emerging from the working class in the 1940s and 1950s who drew inspiration as much as formal direction from Lawrence’s work. McKay, for instance, found Lawrence’s appeal ‘lay instead in his compulsive and impassioned struggle to overcome the psychological traps that threatened to imprison and destroy man’s direct appreciation of life and its mysteries in the modern age’.23 Richard Wright stressed the model of Lawrence’s prose style: ‘my purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression an accomplishment that seemed supremely worth struggling for’.24 As in his chapter concerned with the Black Mountain poets in Cushman and Jackson’s volume, Hamalian’s sense of Lawrence’s influence on a group of authors clarifies a collective pattern and, in some fine instances of close reading, the ways in which the works of these authors constitute an unexpected but potent intertextual field. Study of Lawrence’s direct impact on specific authors has been the dominant form of scholarly attention to his influence in subsequent decades. Notable

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studies have continued within the modes described in the preceding paragraphs, extending our understanding of particular cases and adding new authors to the roll. Doris Lessing, A. S. Byatt and Pat Barker, for instance, have provided rich grounds for analysis, and there has also been attention to writers, such as T. S. Eliot, who himself professed bemusement at the ‘tissue of praise and execration’ which constituted his response to Lawrence.25 At the same time, new perspectives have emerged, further extending the scope of such studies. One such approach is suggested by Maurice Beebe in his essay ‘Lawrence as Fictional Character’ (1988). Beebe notes that Lawrence himself produced ‘distorted self portraits in many of his novels and stories’ and concentrates on cases where authors who had known Lawrence create characters who are recognizable as versions of him. Beebe compares the ‘Lawrence’ characters in works by Gilbert Canaan, Aldous Huxley, Helen Corke and H. D., arguing that there is a tendency to create a ‘Lawrentian type’: a composite of elements of the known Lawrence and the ‘Lawrence Legend’.26 Beebe’s interest, however, is more in assessing the veracity of these portraits in relation to verifiable details of Lawrence’s character and biography. It was in the work of two subsequent critics, Peter Preston and most recently, Lee M. Jenkins, that this category has been more fully developed as a means of understanding Lawrence’s influence. Preston’s ambitious study of Lawrence’s influence was sadly left unfinished at his untimely death in 2011. There is particular poignancy in his remarks in the introduction to a collection of his own essays, published in that year, concerning ‘the next phase’ of his work, ‘that I hope will appear as a monograph … Lawrence after Lawrence: The Author in British Culture 1930–2010’.27 Three pieces relating to that project give some intimation of the breadth of his research.28 He had ‘for some years’ been interested in ‘Lawrence’s continuing presence in British culture’, specifically ‘how “Lawrence” appears as signifier in a variety of literary genres, principally fiction, drama, poetry and memoir; and how “Lawrentian” is applied in a range of contexts, many of which, on investigation, appear to have little to do with Lawrence’. ‘I Am in a Novel: Lawrence in Recent British Fiction’ (2001) extends Beebe’s account, first tracking ‘passing mentions of Lawrence’ which function as either ‘period colour’ or ‘cultural counters, as indicators of unconventionality or sensuality’, through to extended representations which are paradigmatic of ‘class, educational mobility, of the exiled artist, of sexual healing’.29 Preston then offers detailed readings of Pat Barker, Helen Dunmore and A. S. Byatt as writers who demonstrated a ‘sustained engagement with Lawrence – a kind of debate with his literary practice, his imagined personality, of the dangerous allure of his presumed “beliefs” ’.30 In ‘The Afterlives of an Author: Lawrence and British Culture in the 1930s’ (2006), Preston develops his analysis of the uses of Lawrence in that decade across literature, politics and memoirs, arguing that Lawrence becomes an avatar of certain cultural practices (exile, class-mobility, authentic modes of

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being, sexual identity), and that there was, at the same time, a proliferation of ‘versions of “D. H. Lawrence” … cultural manifestations, born of the material and ideological circumstances’.31 Lawrence’s influence was given further impetus by the appearance in this same period of so much hitherto unpublished or inaccessible work. Preston adds further detail to our understanding of how writers of the period ‘appropriated’ Lawrence – including Stella Gibbons, Walter Brierley, Stevie Smith, Ruth Adams and Ethel Mannin.32 A further essay, ‘On Not Being DHL: Lawrence and Local Writers’ (2006), delimits the field of study to review the ways in which Lawrence’s example both legitimizes writing from within the region around Eastwood and Nottingham, but – in a way that echoes Bloom’s suggestion of Oedipal struggle – also ‘established a kind of template for writing about life in the Midlands, one that subsequent writers would have to make a self-conscious effort not to copy’.33 Jenkins reads Lawrence’s influence in the light of contemporary literary and critical developments around biofiction (fictional biography/biographical fiction), autofiction and ‘Autobiografiction’ and life-writing generally. She responds to Max Saunders’s observation that ‘criticism has not adequately described the relations between modernism and life-writing’ and deploys Gerard Genette’s concept of the ‘palimpsest’.34 Her monograph The American Lawrence (2015), although primarily concerned with the influence of America and American writing on Lawrence himself, offers an account of the patterns of mutual influence between Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Dorothy Brett and Georgia O’Keefe, and places Lawrence’s critical account of American literature in relation to subsequent developments in the field.35 Jenkins’s 2018 survey, ‘Lawrence’s Influence on Later Writers’, offers a succinct and up-todate overview of the ‘generative, problematic’ impact of Lawrence’s work, confirming the essential contours of that history and the modes of critical attention to it.36 It is in her two most recent essays, however, that Jenkins shifts our understanding of Lawrence’s influence. In ‘ “Another Bloomsbury Set”: D. H. Lawrence, London and Life-Writing’ (2019), she explores the extraordinary interlinked sequence of five novels: Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923), John Cournos’s Miranda Masters (1926), Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929) and H. D.’s Bid Me to Live (1960), which draw upon the events and experiences of the Lawrences’ brief lodging at 44 Mecklenburgh Square between 20 October and 30 November 1917. Drawing on resources associated with recent conceptualizations of biofiction, or biographical fiction, derived primarily from critical approaches associated with currents in contemporary fiction, Jenkins characterizes this sequence of works as sharing ‘an open and hybrid genre, encompassing autobiography, biography and the imbrication of both with fiction’, arguing that this ‘group of writers attempted to find a new formula for fiction’.37 The effect of this intertextual reading is to revise our sense of Lawrence’s own formal achievement in Aaron’s Rod,

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to replace him in the set of relationships from which that novel was derived, and to return us in new ways to questions about the relations between life and writing, between reality and fiction, which have long been central to Lawrence studies. ‘Lawrence in Biofiction’ (2020) takes this argument beyond modernism, considering several contemporary and near-contemporary writers – C. K. Stead, Helen Dunmore, Anthony Paccito, Annabel Abbs – in relation to this focus. ‘Lawrence himself was instrumental in the twentieth-century instantiation of biofiction’, Jenkins argues.38 His formal experiments in the exploration and representation of his own experience and that of his friends and acquaintances resonate in contemporary biofictional representations of Lawrence himself and in his renewed influence on contemporary authors; works published since Jenkins’s essay went to press include John Worthen’s Young Frieda (2019), Alison MacLeod’s Tenderness (2021) and Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (2021).39 Framing Lawrence’s influence in relation to biofiction returns us to questions around Lawrence’s practice of writing, about the relation between his writing and his life, which have long dominated mainstream Lawrence scholarship and which have been so powerfully served by the immense labour of the Cambridge edition of his work and by the rich, highly varied, sequence of biographies of him. The weight and sheer volume of this work is one measure of the influence of Lawrence’s case, but our approaches both to textual editing and to biography itself have also been transformed as a function of these projects. Two pre-eminent scholars might serve to rehearse the importance of these debates in this context. Paul Eggert, in ‘The Biographical Issue: Lives of Lawrence’ (2001), salutes the achievement of the three-volume, multi-author Cambridge biography, published between 1991 and 1998, in achieving an account of a ‘writing life, a life in writing’, noting the ‘the easy and unrestrained commerce it conducts between Lawrence’s fictional writings, letters and his life: the effect as one reads of writing weaving around writings, weaving in and out of the life’.40 Eggert also reviews previous biographical and critical approaches to Lawrence, making the point that while the dominant discourse of modernist aesthetic theory – deriving from Eliot or Joyce, for instance – celebrates impersonality and the absence of the artist from the work, and that this position is subsequently central to critical orthodoxies around ‘intentional fallacy’ and ‘death of the author’ (which exclude biographical data from the reading of the text itself), Lawrence wrote ‘ “from” his living, and … this matters in the changed cultural climate of today’.41 The Cambridge edition, and the manuscript materials which underpin it, give biographers and critics a new perspective on Lawrence (in relation to other authors of the period), revealing him differently, presenting new facets of his practice of writing. Yet another ‘new’ Lawrence thus emerges with all the implications for new readings and renewed influence that this involves. It is this Lawrence, as Jenkins demonstrates, who is discovered in the recent engagements with his work.

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In line with Jenkins’s perceptions, John Worthen discusses Lawrence’s ‘fictional autobiographies’ in ‘The Life in the Writing’ (2018), arguing that this renewed sense of Lawrence as writer requires us to ask again ‘what Lawrence is doing’.42 Worthen reads a series of Lawrence’s most famous ‘autobiographical figures’ in order to define ‘Lawrence’s autobiographical method’.43 He suggests that this involves the creation of characters who are ‘potential’ Lawrences, Lawrences that might have been, and Lawrences that might still be, as much as Lawrences that have existed – and even in these cases Worthen emphasizes the speculative and provisional quality of the representation as Lawrence’s own sense of who he had been changed. This is, again, the exploratory and provisional Lawrence at work: ‘his life had been an act of writing, he was, truly, self-made by his writing’.44 This perception is a prompt to return us to the disturbing and strange qualities of so much of Lawrence’s work in the moment of its first appearance. Worthen first explores this in an early essay, ‘Sanity, Madness and Women in Love’ (1975), in which he seeks to recover the difficulty and strangeness of that novel, the qualities which provoked so many contemporary readers to recoil at the ‘mad, crazy behaviour of nearly everyone’.45 To understand Women in Love, Worthen maintains, involves retrieving a Lawrence whose work has been neither canonized nor sanitized, but who challenges the form and conventions of the novel in ways which his contemporaries recognized but often struggled to understand and rejected. This Lawrence, as Worthen had argued in ‘Lawrence’s Autobiographies’ (1988), is searching, exploring ‘not for formal or aesthetic perfection, but for what the work would really say’: this is the primary drive, and the great influence, of his writing.46 As Jenkins observes, it is also a quality which resonates with writers of our own period, evident in exploratory, experimental and generically indeterminate work directly engaged with Lawrence such as Catherine Millet’s Aimer Lawrence (2017), Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence (2021) and Lara Feigel’s Look! We Have Come Through! Living With D. H. Lawrence (2022).47 Recent work in modernist studies, book history, genetic criticism and the emergent field of law and literature has extended and enhanced our understanding of a further area in which Lawrence’s influence has been unparalleled: the history and theory of censorship, obscenity and pornography.48 Lawrence scholars have always been alert to ways in which his writing emerged in fraught tension with what Damian Grant characterizes as the concentric circles of constraint and censorship which radiate around an artist – from the author’s own exploratory, self-questioning creative process to the scruples and stipulations of confidants, editors, publishers, circulating libraries, booksellers, journalists and onwards to agents of the state and judiciary.49 Over the past three decades, researchers have developed increasingly nuanced and sophisticated accounts of the meanings and functioning of censorship and Lawrence has been

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central to this process. Such studies, in which Lawrence is a pervasive reference, reveal again and again how his challenges to the conventional formal, legal and social limits to the representation of bodily and sexual experience generated in response not only exemplary, salutary examples of the operations of censorship, but came ultimately, dialectically, to determine and define the very workings and conception of that censorship itself. Lawrence is most famously associated with what are now characterized as ‘theatrical’ expressions of state power, in Britain and around the world, such as the ‘trials’ of The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in the United States in 1959, in Britain in 1960), the interception by the Post Office of manuscripts of Pansies (1929) or the seizing by the Metropolitan Police of the paintings exhibited at the Warren Gallery (1929).50 Further research into these dramatic public events is remarkable in what it reveals, first, about the sheer complexity and extent of the machinery of the hegemonic state and its workings, but also about how Lawrence’s work materially changed the operation of the law in terms of both legal precedent and practical enforcement. Still more striking has been the way in which looking beyond these episodes, placing them in the whole context of Lawrence’s creative process and practice of writing, has driven a shift of focus towards thinking about an ‘aesthetics of censorship’, generative as much as restrictive, intrinsic to much creative work and indeed to the structure of feeling of the period.51 One final aspect of Lawrence’s influence to consider is his role in the development of literary and cultural criticism itself. As we have seen, reading his work has been pivotal to revolutions in the theory and practice of editorial work and biography, and has also provided a powerful stimulus to successive waves of feminist thinking and to the emergence of whole interdisciplinary paradigms for the study of law and literature. To these currents should be added a record of his direct influence on the academic literary criticism and scholarship, and of this a more diffuse but nonetheless determinant impact on the disciplinary formation of Cultural Studies. In the United States, Lawrence’s influence on literary studies is primarily related to his own critical writing. Studies in Classic American Literature is widely acknowledged as establishing the idea of the American Classic, giving initiative and impetus to American letters. In ‘Lawrence and American Fiction’ (1988), Eugene Goodhart argues that what is clear from the critical response to Lawrence’s Studies is that the most thoughtful and perceptive critics of our literature (Wilson, Trilling, Dahlberg, Fiedler, Howe, Kazin among others) have seen the book as representing the deepest penetration ever made into our classic literature. Indeed, critics coming after Lawrence have lived off the capital of this short book.52

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Lee M. Jenkins concurs: ‘the post-war critical reception of Lawrence in the United States, meanwhile, took its bearings not from Leavis but from Lawrence’s own Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), a work of ‘creative criticism’ which gave rise to a vibrant counter-tradition in American criticism and in American responses to Lawrence himself ’.53 In recent years, the value of this influence has been reappraised – Jenkins records concerns about a volume ‘deemed complicit with the now superannuated and ideologically suspect processes of national canon-formation that defined American literary studies in the post-World War I decade of its inception’ – although she concludes that contemporary critics have nevertheless recognized the prescience of Lawrence’s sensitive attentiveness to aboriginal, indigenous people and to ‘the resurgence of an autochthonous spirit of place’.54 Lawrence’s influence on the discipline of English in Britain is rather different. The changing priorities of the subject are inscribed in the dynamics of critical attention to the writer’s work. The course of F. R. Leavis’s battle for the recognition of Lawrence’s qualities has been frequently recounted, both for his insistence on Lawrence’s provincial, non-conformist, working-class background as central to the core traditions of Englishness (‘I am a fellow countryman of D. H. Lawrence’) and for his emphasis on Lawrence’s importance as a novelist, so strongly affirmed in the very title D. H. Lawrence: Novelist.55 This argument involved, necessarily, the formation of methodologies for serious study of the novel form, which had hitherto been marginal to the core concerns of English Studies: Lawrence’s writing becomes a key determinant in the evolution of the theory of fiction.56 Raymond Williams, in his movement away from more formal modes of criticism towards the analysis of cultural change and historical semantics, returned consistently to Lawrence’s example in developing theoretical models for the understanding of the complex interactions of tradition, language and social experience in individual – artistic – expression. Lawrence’s writing, he suggested, ‘is then an innovative response to the very experiences and issues which are made prominent, and general, in the selective interpretations and appropriations’.57 In this characteristically complex gesture of balance, Williams situates Lawrence as a representative of his moment and place, with all the ambiguity of that representative status, at once index and symbol, subject to the forces of his time, and agent, articulating an individual vision and diagnosis of that instance.58 Setting Lawrence at the heart of the tradition of social and cultural critique he delineates in Culture and Society, and which offers the founding terms for the modes of cultural criticism he himself advances, Williams makes the case for Lawrence as a figure acutely sensitive and alive to influence who was also instrumental in the reformulation and transmission of that material – was himself uniquely influential.59 For Williams, Lawrence’s ­ example – as an object of study and a formal and intellectual model – facilitates the cultural materialist reading of Lawrence. The

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eventual establishment of Cultural Studies as academic field, in which Williams played such a defining role, was thus intellectually enabled and determined by his generation’s engagement with Lawrence. Remarkably, the eventual inauguration of academic programmes in Cultural Studies was effectively paid for by Lawrence, in the form of the financial support of Penguin Books for the foundation of Richard Hoggart’s Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham following his testimony at the Chatterley trial.60 * In the opening pages of The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis defines ‘the major novelists’ as those who ‘not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but … are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’.61 The importance of the major novelist is inseparable from their influence, encapsulated in the telling phrase ‘change the possibilities of art for practitioners and readers’. As this survey of Lawrence’s influence demonstrates, Lawrence evidently changed the possibilities of art in unprecedented ways, just as, for so many, he also changed our awareness of the possibilities of life. Any account of his influence can only be partial and suggestive, but the one thing of which we can be certain is that each new generation will surprise us in the ways they engage, adapt and appropriate his example. The current period is marked by just such an intriguing conjunction. Some of the most powerful work in the contemporary moment is emerging from the engagement of women writers – MacLeod, Wilson, Cusk, Abbs, Feigel and others – with Lawrence’s imaginative model, inserting themselves so strongly into narratives of his continuing presence in the culture. Their work in self-reflexive, mixed, palimpsestic and hybrid modes matches Lawrence’s own restless generic and formal experimentation, just as their willingness to expose and explore their own experience captures so much of the highly personal and provisional quality of his writing. These writers also anticipate and prepare, in creative ways, important current developments in Lawrence studies, specifically in terms of the wide reimagining of the ways in which ‘life’ makes its way into Lawrence’s writing. As these currents of work converge and deepen, they reveal how much Lawrence remains – to quote Leavis one last time – ‘a major contemporary fact’.62

NOTES 1 The evolution of Lawrence’s reputation is succinctly and effectively assessed in Chris Baldick, ‘Lawrence’s Critical and Cultural Legacy’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 253–69.

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2 Jeffrey Meyers, ed., The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 1. 3 Raymond Williams, preface, in The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, ed. Gāmini Salgādo and G. K. Das (London: Macmillan, 1988). 4 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), p. 54. 5 Ruth Luckow, ‘Modern Figures of Destiny: D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 3.1 (Spring 1970): 1–30, 13. 6 Diana Trilling, ‘Lawrence and the Movements of Modern Culture’, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed. Stephen Spender (San Francisco: Harper Row, 1973), p. 1. 7 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 8 Julia Kristeva, trans., Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). See particularly ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1967) and ‘The Bounded Text’ (1966). 9 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Roland Barthes, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, [1967] 1977), p. 145. 10 Earlier accounts of Lawrence’s influence on particular writers include: Norman J. Fedder, The Influence of D. H. Lawrence on Tennessee Williams (London: Moulton, 1966); Mark Spilka, ‘Lessing and Lawrence: The Battle of the Sexes’, Contemporary Literature, 16.2 (Spring 1975): 218–40 (an early and detailed account of Lessing’s ‘battle’ with Lawrence) and Charles Sarvan and Liebtraut Sarvan, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing’, Modern Fiction Studies, 25.2 (Winter 1978–9): 533–7. See also, G. B. Crump, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Immediate Present: Kurt Vonnegurt Jr, Ken Kesey and Wright Morris’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 10.2 (Summer 1977): 103–41; Rafael Cancel-Ortiz, ‘The Passion of William Dubin: D. H. Lawrence’s Themes in Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 16.1 (Spring 1983): 83–99. 11 Sylvia Plath, cited by Lee M. Jenkins in ‘Lawrence’s Influence on Later Writers’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 327–33, 332. 12 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 184. 13 Jeffrey Meyers, ed., The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays (London: Macmillan, 1987); Meyers had previously edited a companion volume, examining influences upon Lawrence himself: D. H. Lawrence and Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). 14 John Bayley, ‘Lawrence and the Modern English Novel’, in Jeffrey Meyers, ed., The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 14–29, 19, 20.

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15 James Gindin, ‘Lawrence and the Contemporary English Novel’, in The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 30–53, 30. 16 Ibid., p. 36. 17 Keith Cushman and Dennis Jackson, eds., D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 5. 18 Langdon Elsbree, ‘Review of Keith Cushman and Dennis Jackson, eds, D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 23.2–3 (Summer–Fall 1991): 227. 19 Carol Siegel, Lawrence among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 186. 20 Carol Sklenicka, D. H. Lawrence and the Child (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991); Elaine Feinstein, Lawrence and the Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence (London: HarperCollins, 1993); Linda Ruth Williams, Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993); Leo Hamalian, D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). Mark Spilka, foreword to Hamalian, D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers, p. 9. 21 Spilka, foreword to Hamalian, D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers, p. 11. 22 Leo Hamalian, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Black Writers’, Journal of Modern Literature, 16.4 (Spring, 1990): 579–96, 596. See also Matthew McNees, ‘Langston Hughes Discovers D. H. Lawrence: The Armenian and Other Examples of Influence’, Etudes Lawrenciennes, 41 (2010): 207–33. 23 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Lee Furman, 1937), p. 247, cited by Hamalian in ‘D. H. Lawrence and Black Writers’, p. 582. 24 Richard Wright, American Hunger (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 22, cited by Hamalian in ‘D. H. Lawrence and Black Writers’, p. 592. 25 Jack Stewart, ‘Lawrence through the Lens of A. S. Byatt: The Shadow of the Sun and The Virgin in the Garden’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 38.2 (2013): 21–44 and ‘Lawrence through the Lens of A. S. Byatt II’, D. H. Lawrence Review 43.1/2 (2018): 81–107, see also Peter Preston’s essay cited later in the chapter. Michael Ross, ‘Acts of Revision: Lawrence as Intertext in the Novels of Pat Barker’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 26.1/3 (1995 and 1996): 51–63; Carl Baron, ‘Lawrence’s Influence on Eliot’, Cambridge Quarterly, 5.3 (March 1971): 235–48; Laura R. Severin, ‘Reading T. S. Eliot Reading D. H. Lawrence: The Significance of Gender’, Centennial Review, 37.2 (Spring 1993): 355–68; Sandra Gilbert, ‘On the Road with D. H. Lawrence: Or, D. H. Lawrence as Thought-Adventurer’, Partial Answers: A Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 5.1 (January 2007): 1–15; Sean Matthews, ‘T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and the Structure of Feeling of Modernism’, Japan D. H. Lawrence Studies, 30 (2018): 23–57. 26 Maurice Beebe, ‘Lawrence as Fictional Character’, in Salgādo and Das, eds., Centenary Studies, pp. 295–310, 302, 295.

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27 Peter Preston, Working with Lawrence: Texts, Places, Contexts (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011), p. 31. 28 Several further essays beyond those discussed here testify to the reach of Preston’s research. ‘Receiving Lady Chatterley’s Lover: The Novel in British Culture, 1960– 2008’, in Il corpo, la fiamma, il desiderio: D. H. Lawrence, Firenze e la sfida di Lady Chatterley, ed. Serena Cenni and Nick Ceramella (Fiirenze: Edizioni dell’Assemblea, 2010), pp. 177–211, catalogues the widespread ‘reception, assimilation and appropriation’ of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover following the trial of Penguin Books in 1960. Preston’s essay on Lawrence and Byatt was posthumously published as ‘Myths of Desire: Lawrence, Language and Ethics in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction’, in Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 187–202. 29 Peter Preston, ‘ “I Am in a Novel”: D. H. Lawrence in Recent Fiction’, Etudes Lawrenciennes, 22 (2000/1): 115–34, 119 (repr. in D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl G. Ingersoll (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 25–49). 30 Ibid., p. 31. 31 Peter Preston, ‘The Afterlives of an Author: Lawrence and British Culture in the 1930s’, Archiv, 243, 158.2 (2006): 293–308, 297. 32 For Walter Brierley, see also Macdonald M. Daly, ‘Lawrence and Walter Brierley’, Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society, 4 (1986): 22–9. 33 Peter Preston, ‘On not Being DHL: Lawrence and Local Writers’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 1.1 (2006): 115–38 (repr. in Peter Preston, Working with Lawrence: Texts, Places, Contexts (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011), pp. 266–88, 265. 34 Max Saunders, quoted in Lee M. Jenkins, ‘  “Another Bloomsbury Set”: D. H. Lawrence, London and Life-Writing’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 5.2 (2019): 125–42, 127. Jenkins responds to Saunders’s Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 35 Lee M. Jenkins, The American Lawrence (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2015). 36 Lee M. Jenkins, ‘Lawrence’s Influence on Later Writers’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 327–36, 327. 37 Jenkins, ‘ “Another Bloomsbury Set” ’, pp. 127, 137. 38 Lee M. Jenkins, ‘Lawrence in Biofiction’, in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 385–97, 395. 39 John Worthen, Young Frieda (London: Jetstone, 2019); Alison MacLeod, Tenderness (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Rachel Cusk, Second Place (London: Faber, 2021).

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40 Paul Eggert, ‘The Biographical Issue: Lives of Lawrence’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Fernihough, pp. 157–78, 160. See also Paul Eggert, ‘Reading a Critical Edition with the Grain and against: The Cambridge D. H. Lawrence’, in D. H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author, ed. Charles L. Ross and Dennis Jackson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 27–40. 41 Eggert, ‘The Biographical Issue: Lives of Lawrence’, p. 159. 42 John Worthen, ‘The Life in the Writing’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 25–33, 26. 43 Ibid., p. 29. 44 Ibid., p. 32. 45 John Worthen, ‘Sanity, Madness and Women in Love’, Trivium, 10 (1975): 125– 36, 128. 46 John Worthen, ‘Lawrence’s Autobiographies’, in Salgādo and Das, eds, Centenary Studies, pp. 1–15, p. 2. 47 Catherine Millet, Aimer Lawrence (Paris: Flammarion, 2017); Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Lara Feigel, Look! We Have Come Through! Living With D. H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). This writing has antecedents in some of the earliest ‘personal essay’ accounts of Lawrence, such as Rebecca West’s D. H. Lawrence (London: Martin Secker, 1930); Anais Nin’s D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (Ohio: Ohio University Press, [1932] 1994) and in Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (London: Little, Brown, 1997). 48 See Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williams, On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993); Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins, eds, Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth Century Novel in the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); David Bradshaw and Rachel Potter, eds, Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Rachel Potter, Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment, 1900–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nancy Paxton, ‘Creativity and Censorship Laws: Lessons from the 1920s’, in Law and Literature, ed. Kieran Dolin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 322–37; Christopher Hilliard, A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). There are significant studies setting these questions in an international context, see for instance Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 49 Damian Grant, ‘D. H. Lawrence: A Suitable Case for Censorship’, in Writing and Censorship in Britain, ed. Paul Hyland and Neil Sammels (London: Routledge,

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1992), pp. 200–18; see Nancy Paxton, ‘Censorship’, in D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 263–72. 50 Adam Parkes, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Lisa Z. Sigel, ‘Censorship in Inter-war Britain: Obscenity, Spectacle and the Workings of the Liberal State’, Journal of Social History, 45.1 (2011): 61–83. The literature relating to the trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is voluminous; see C. H. Rolph, The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961); J. M. Coetzee, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover: The Taint of the Pornographic’, in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 48–60; Fiona Becket, ‘The Law and Profits: the Case of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere, ed. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 70–82; Sean Matthews, ‘The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: The Most Thorough and Expensive Seminar on Lawrence’s Work Ever Given’, in New D. H. Lawrence, ed. Howard Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 169–92. Alison MacLeod’s novel, Tenderness, is centrally concerned with the influence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and pays particular attention to the New York trial (1959) as well as the Old Bailey event. For the suppression of The Rainbow, see Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘The Prosecution and Suppression of The Rainbow’, in D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. xlv–l; for Pansies see Christopher Pollnitz, ‘The Censorship and Transmission of D. H. Lawrence’s “Pansies”: The Home Office and the “Foul-Mouthed Fellow” ’, Journal of Modern Literature, 28.3 (Spring 2005): 44–71. See Bethan Jones, ‘Nettling Authority: Lawrence’s Reaction to Censorship in His Late Poetry’, Etudes Lawrenciennes, 41 (2010): 9–26, for an account of how Lawrence responded in verse to the seizing of the paintings. See also Rachel Potter, ‘Obscene Modernism and the Trade in Salacious Books’, Modernism/ Modernity, 16.1 (2009): 87–104. 51 Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 52 Eugene Goodhart, ‘Lawrence and American Fiction’, in The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 135– 55, 136. 53 Jenkins, The American Lawrence, p. 330. 54 Ibid., p. 11. 55 See Christopher Hilliard, English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), for an account of the extraordinary influence of Leavis’s work. 56 F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), p. 306. An indicator of the centrality of Lawrence to the evolution of the discipline is the preponderance of references to his work in accounts of its history; see Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1942 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989); Bernard

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Bergonzi, Exploding English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Antony Easthope, Literary to Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991). 57 Raymond Williams, foreword, in Salgādo and Das, eds, Centenary Essays, p. ix. 58 Another suggestive perspective on these questions is Roland Barthes’s provocative definition of the author-function: ‘Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing’, see Roland Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 145. 59 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), pp. 199–215. For Lawrence’s mediation of influences upon his own work, see Jeffrey Meyers, ed., D. H. Lawrence and Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). 60 See Steve Hare, ed., Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors 1935– 70 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995); Richard Hoggart, An Imagined Life: Life and Times 1959–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 89–90; Sean Matthews, ‘An Interview with Richard Hoggart’, Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 5 (2007–8): 106–29, 108. 61 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), p. 2. 62 F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), p. 9.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

This section provides recommended reading on D. H. Lawrence. Readers can consult journals devoted to the study of the author:

D. H. Lawrence Review (1968–) Études Lawrenciennes (1986–) Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (2006–), formerly The Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (1976–2005).

REFERENCE VOLUMES Becket, Fiona, The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence. London: Routledge, 2002. Draper, R. P., ed., D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Poplawski, Paul, The Works of D. H. Lawrence: A Chronological Checklist. Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence Society, 1995. Poplawski, Paul, D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Preston, Peter, A D. H. Lawrence Chronology. London: Macmillan, 1994. Roberts, Warren, and Poplawski, Paul, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Sagar, Keith, ed., A D. H. Lawrence Handbook. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982. Sargent, M. Elizabeth, and Watson, Garry, eds, Approaches to Teaching the Works of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001.

424Bibliography

SELECTED EDITED COLLECTIONS Balbert, Peter, and Marcus, Phillip L., eds, D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Booth, Howard J., ed., New D. H. Lawrence, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Brown, Catherine, and Reid, Susan, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Brown, Keith, ed., Rethinking Lawrence. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Cushman, Keith, and Ingersoll, Earl, eds, D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Cushman, Keith, and Jackson, Dennis, eds, D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Donaldson, George, and Kalnins, Mara, eds, D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Eggert, Paul, and Worthen, John, eds, Lawrence and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ellis, David, ed., D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ellis, David, and De Zordo, Ornella, eds, D. H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. Mountfield: Helm Information, 1992. Ellis, David, and Mills, Howard, D. H. Lawrence’s Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Fernihough, Anne, ed., The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Harrison, Andrew, ed., D. H. Lawrence in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Heywood, Christopher, ed., D. H. Lawrence: New Studies. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Hyde, Virginia Crosswhite, and Ingersoll, Earl G., eds, ‘Terra Incognita’: D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Iida, Takeo, ed., The Reception of D. H. Lawrence around the World. Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press, 1999. Jansohn, Christa, and Mehl, Dieter, eds, The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe. London: Continuum, 2007. Kalnins, Mara, ed., D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986. Kochis, Matthew J., and Lusty, Heather L., eds, Modernists at Odds: Reconsidering Joyce and Lawrence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. Männiste, Indrek, ed., D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Meyers, Jeffrey, ed., The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Phelps, Jim, and Bell, Nigel, eds, D. H. Lawrence around the World: South African Perspectives. Empangeni: Echoing Green Press, 2007. Poplawski, Paul, ed., Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Preston, Peter, and Hoare, Peter, eds, D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.

Bibliography

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Ross, Charles L., and Jackson, Dennis, eds, Editing D. H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Squires, Michael, and Jackson, Dennis, eds, D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady’: A New Look at Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Squires, Michael, and Cushman, Keith, eds, The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Widdowson, Peter, ed., D. H. Lawrence. London: Longman, 1992. Worthen, John, and Harrison, Andrew, eds, D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

SELECTED BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES Aldington, Richard, Portrait of a Genius, But … . London: Heinemann, 1950. Bailey, Stephen, and Nottingham, Chris, Heartlands: A Guide to D. H. Lawrence’s Midland Roots. Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2013. Boulton, James T., ‘D. H. Lawrence: Letter-Writer’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 29 (1985): 86–100. Burgess, Anthony, Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann, 1985. Byrne, Janet, A Genius for Living: A Biography of Frieda Lawrence. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Chambers, Jessie [‘E.T.’], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Darroch, Robert, D. H. Lawrence in Australia. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981. Davis, Joseph, D. H. Lawrence at Thirroul. Sydney: William Collins, 1989. Delavenay, Emile, D. H. Lawrence: L’Homme et la Genèse de son Oeuvre. Les Années de Formation: 1885–1919, 2 vols. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1969. Published in English as D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work, The Formative Years, 1885– 1919, trans. Katharine M. Delavenay. London: Heinemann, 1972. Ellis, David, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Ellis, David, Death and the Author: How D. H. Lawrence Died, and Was Remembered. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Feinstein, Elaine, Lawrence’s Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Green, Martin, The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love. Else and Frieda von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber, and D. H. Lawrence in the Years 1870–1970. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Hardy, George, and Harris, Nathaniel, A D. H. Lawrence Album. Ashbourne: Moorland Publishing, 1985. Harrison, Andrew, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2016. Kaplan, Sydney Janet, Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lawrence, Frieda, ‘Not I, But the Wind …’. Santa Fe, NM: The Rydal Press, 1934.

426Bibliography

Lucas, Robert, Frieda Lawrence: The Story of Frieda von Richthofen and D. H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann, 1973. Maddox, Brenda, The Married Man: A Life of D. H. Lawrence. London: SinclairStevenson, 1994. Meyers, Jeffrey, D. H. Lawrence: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 1990. Moore, Harry T., The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954. Revised as The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Moore, Harry T., and Roberts, Warren, D. H. Lawrence and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1966. Moore, Harry T., and Montague, Dale B., eds, Frieda Lawrence and Her Circle: Letters from, to and about Frieda Lawrence. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981. Murry, John Middleton, Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence. London: Jonathan Cape, 1931. Nehls, Edward, ed., D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–9. Owen, Richard, Lady Chatterley’s Villa: D. H. Lawrence on the Italian Riviera. London: Haus Publishing, 2014. Parmenter, Ross, Lawrence in Oaxaca: A Quest for the Novelist in Mexico. Salt Lake City, UT: G. M. Smith, 1984. Roberts, Neil, Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016. Sagar, Keith, ed., D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico. Salt Lake City, UT: G. M. Smith, 1982. Sagar, Keith, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, 2nd edn. London: Chaucer Press, 2003. Spencer, Roy, D. H. Lawrence Country: A Portrait of His Early Life and Background with Illustrations, Maps and Guides. London: Cecil Woolf, 1979. Squires, Michael, D. H. Lawrence and Frieda: A Portrait of Love and Loyalty. London: André Deutsch, 2008. Squires, Michael, and Talbot, Lynn K., Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Stevens, C. J., Lawrence at Tregerthen. Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1988. Talbot, Lynn K., ‘From Old Germany to New Mexico: An Overview of Frieda Lawrence’s Letters’, D. H. Lawrence Review 37.2 (2012): 72–249. Tedlock, E. W., ed., Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence. London: Heinemann, 1961. Turner, John, ‘D. H. Lawrence in the Wilkinson Diaries’, D. H. Lawrence Review 30.2 (2002): 5–63. Turner, John, with Rumpf-Worthen, Cornelia, and Jenkins, Ruth, ‘The Otto Gross–Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated, and Annotated’, D. H. Lawrence Review 22.2 (Summer 1990): 137–227. Turner, Jon, Louie: Her Remarkable East Midlands Life, and How the Young D. H. Lawrence Won Her Heart then Jilted Her. Loughborough: Reprint, 2010. Vallero, Silvio, and Ferrari, Pietro, The Bay of Lorenzo: D. H. Lawrence at Fiascherino. La Spezia: Edizioni Cinque Terre, 2012. Wilson, Frances, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Worthen, John, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Bibliography

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Worthen, John, ‘Orts and Slarts: Two Biographical Pieces on D. H. Lawrence’, The Review of English Studies 46.181 (1995): 26–40. Worthen, John, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Worthen, John, Experiments: Lectures on Lawrence. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2012. Worthen, John, D. H. Lawrence: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Zytaruk, George J., ‘The Collected Letters of Jessie Chambers’, D. H. Lawrence Review 12 (1979):1–237

SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES PUBLISHED POST-2000 Adelman, Gary, Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence: Contemporary Writers Speak Out. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Balbert, Peter, D. H. Lawrence and the Marriage Matrix: Intertextual Adventures in Conflict, Renewal and Transcendence. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Beer, John, D. H. Lawrence: Nature, Narrative, Art, Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Black, Michael, Lawrence’s England: The Major Fiction, 1913–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Booth, Howard J., ‘D. H. Lawrence and Male Homosexual Desire’, The Review of English Studies 53.209 (2002): 86–107. Burden, Robert, Radicalizing Lawrence: Critical Interventions in the Reading and Reception of Lawrence’s Narrative Fiction. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2000. Chaudhuri, Amit, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Cowan, James C., D. H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Crossland, Rachel, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Elliott, Brian, Landscape and Labour: Work, Place and the Working Class in Eliot, Hardy and Lawrence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. Ellis, David, Love and Sex in D. H. Lawrence. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2015. Feigel, Lara, Look! We Have Come Through! Living with D. H. Lawrence. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Fernihough, Anne, Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Ferretter, Luke, The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence’s Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Game, David, D. H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Gifford, Terry, D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature. New York: Routledge, 2023. Greiff, Louis K., D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Granofsky, Ronald, D. H. Lawrence and Survival: Darwinism in the Fiction of the Transitional Period. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

428Bibliography

Granofsky, Ronald, D. H. Lawrence and Attachment. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Grice, Annalise, D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Hagen, Benjamin, The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2020. Harrison, Andrew, D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2003. Hillier, Hilary, Talking Lawrence: Patterns of Eastwood Dialect in the Work of D. H. Lawrence. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2008. Jenkins, Lee M., The American Lawrence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. Jones, Bethan, The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Kohno, Tetsuji, ed., The Collected Art Works of D. H. Lawrence. Tokyo: Sogensha, 2004. Krockel, Carl, War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Long, Jonathan, ‘The Achievement of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 3.3 (2014): 129–52. Martin, Kirsty, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Miracky, James J., Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence. New York: Routledge, 2003. Moran, James, The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence: Dramatic Modernist and Theatrical Innovator. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Morsia, Elliott, The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Murray, Rachel, The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Nakabayashi, Masami, The Rhetoric of the Unselfconscious in D. H. Lawrence: Verbalising the Non-verbal in the Lady Chatterley Novels. Lanham, MD: University Presses of America, 2011. Pollnitz, Christopher, ‘The Censorship and Transmission of D. H. Lawrence’s Pansies: The Home Office and the “Foul-Mouthed Fellow” ’, Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (Spring 2005): 44–71. Preston, Peter, ‘On Not Being DHL: Lawrence and Local Writers’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 1.1 (2006): 115–38. Preston, Peter, ‘ “Myths of Desire”: D. H. Lawrence, Language and Ethics in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction’, in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 187–202. Reeve, N. H., Reading Late Lawrence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Reid, Susan, D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Roberts, Neil, D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Rohman, Carrie, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Ruderman, Judith, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Bibliography

429

Simms, William, Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature: Lawrence and Joyce on Trial. Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2022. Smith, Stewart, Nietzsche and Modernism: Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Sotirova, Violeta, D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint. London: Continuum, 2011. Stoltzfus, Ben, D. H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022. Sumner, Rosemary, A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Traficante, Antonio, D. H. Lawrence’s Italian Travel Literature and Translations of Giovanni Verga. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Turner, John, D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2020. Wallace, Jeff, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ward, Jason Mark, The Forgotten Film Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2016. Wright, T. R., D. H. Lawrence and the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

SELECTED EARLIER CRITICISM (PUBLISHED PRE-2000) Alldritt, Keith, The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence. London: Edward Arnold, 1971. Balbert, Peter, D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Becket, Fiona, D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Bell, Michael, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Black, Michael, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works. A Commentary. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Black, Michael, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. Bonds, Diane S., Language and the Self in D. H. Lawrence. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987. Cowan, James C., D. H. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. Clark, L. D., The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980. Clarke, Colin, River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Cushman, Keith, D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence of the ‘Prussian Officer’ Stories. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. Daly, Macdonald, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Labour in the Great War’, The Modern Language Review 89.1 (January 1994): 19–38. Daleski, H. M., The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd edn. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. De Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape, 1953. Delany, Paul, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War. New York: Basic Books, 1978.

430Bibliography

Dix, Carol M., D. H. Lawrence and Women. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980. Ellis, David, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Female Body’, Essays in Criticism 46.2 (April 1996): 136–52. Fernihough, Anne, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Gilbert, Sandra M., Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972. Hamalian, Leo, D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Harris, Janice Hubbard, The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Herzinger, Kim A., D. H. Lawrence in His Time, 1908–1915. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1982. Holderness, Graham, D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982. Hyde, G. M., D. H. Lawrence and the Art of Translation. London: Macmillan, 1981. Hyde, G. M., D. H. Lawrence. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. Hyde, Virginia, The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Ingram, Allan, The Language of D. H. Lawrence. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. Kalnins, Mara, ‘ “Terra Incognita”: Lawrence’s Travel Writings’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 29 (1985): 66–77. Kearney, Martin F., Major Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence: A Handbook. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. Kermode, Frank, Lawrence. London: Fontana, 1973. Kushigian, Nancy, Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre-war Novels of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Laird, Holly A., Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Leavis, F. R., D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1955. Levy, Mervyn, ed., Paintings of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia, Writing Against the Family: Gender in Lawrence and Joyce. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. MacLeod, Sheila, Lawrence’s Men and Women. London: Heinemann, 1985. Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Millett, Robert W., The Vultures and the Phoenix: A Study of the Mandrake Press Edition of the Paintings of D. H. Lawrence. Philadelphia, PA: Art Alliance Press, 1983. Milton, Colin, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987. Montgomery, Robert E., The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Moynahan, Julian, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. Nin, Anaïs, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1932. Pinkney, Tony, D. H. Lawrence. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Poplawski, Paul, Language, Art and Reality in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘St. Mawr’: A Stylistic Study. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. Schapiro, Barbara Ann, D. H. Lawrence and the Paradoxes of Psychic Life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Bibliography

431

Scheckner, Peter, Class, Politics and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D. H. Lawrence. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985. Siegel, Carol, Lawrence among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Simpson, Hilary, D. H. Lawrence and Feminism. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Sklar, Sylvia, The Plays of D. H. Lawrence: A Biographical and Critical Study. London: Vision, 1975. Sklenicka, Carol, D. H. Lawrence and the Child. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Stewart, Jack, The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Storch, Margaret, Sons and Adversaries: Women in William Blake and D. H. Lawrence. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Thornton, Weldon, D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Torgovnick, Marianna, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Vivas, Eliseo, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960. Wexler, Joyce Piell, Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Widmer, Kingsley, The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fictions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Williams, Linda Ruth, Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Worthen, John, D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1979. Worthen, John, D. H. Lawrence. London: Edward Arnold, 1991. Wussow, Helen, The Nightmare of History: The Fictions of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1998.

432

INDEX

Abbs, Annabel 1, 411, 415 Achebe, Chinua 140 The Adelphi 376, 377, 392, 393 Adorno, Theodor 396 Aestheticism 46, 47 Africa/African 23, 119, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 141, 142 AIDS 238 Aldington, Richard 29, 148, 223, 373, 374, 410 American Dream 253 anthropocene 327 anti-Semitism 132, 317 Arlen, Michael 72, 386 Asquith, Cynthia 17, 177, 292 The Athenaeum 223 Atlantic Monthly 388 Auden, W. H. 9, 239, 348, 406 Austen, Jane 178 Australia/Australian 6, 24, 91, 107–26, 137, 296, 297, 298, 299, 370 Austria / Austrian 55, 313 ‘Autobiografiction’ 12, 410 Ayres, Ruby M. 385 Bakhtin, Mikhail 282 Balzac, Honoré de 71, 75 Barber Walker and Co. 154 Barker, Pat 409 Barnes, Djuna 233

Barr, Barbara Weekley 224 Barthes, Roland 405 Baudelaire, Charles 185 Baudrillard, Jean 181 BBC 398, 399 Beardsley, Aubrey 226 Bell, Clive 226 Bennett, Arnold 74 Bernhardt, Sarah 80 Bible/Biblical 124, 181, 231, 287, 301, 361 bisexuality 9, 65, 224, 225, 228, 233 Bishop, Elizabeth 348, 349 Black Lives Matter 143 Black Mountain Poets 349, 406, 408 Black Sun Press 337 Blackmore, R. D. 89 Bloom, Harold 404 Bloomsbury 217, 399 Boldrewood, Rolf (T. A. Brown) 6, 107, 108, 109, 114 Bolshevism 167, 168 Braidotti, Rosi 11, 310 Brett, Dorothy 124, 208, 396, 410 Brewster, Achsah 93 Brontë, Charlotte 407 Jane Eyre 22 Brontë, Emily 43 Wuthering Heights 226 Brontës, The 43, 407

434Index

Brooke, Rupert 17, 237 Brown, Curtis 375, 376, 377, 384, 387 Browning, Robert 113 Bryher 395 Buddhism 122 The Bulletin (Sydney) 119, 120, 398 Burgess, Anthony 239 Burns, Robert 43 Burrow, Trigant 66, 247 Burrows, Louie 75, 133, 190 Bursum Bill 92 Butler, Judith 184, 186, 194 Butler, Samuel 20 Byatt, A. S. 131, 409 Bynner, Witter 24, 97, 139, 225

communism 60, 181, 316 Confessionalism 12, 349 Conrad, Joseph 85 Cooper, James Fenimore 89, 103, 108, 137 Corke, Helen 223, 409 Cornwall / Cornish 6, 22, 117, 224, 225, 239, 296, 304 COVID-19 pandemic 5, 248 Crawford, Grace 159 Crèvecœur, Hector St John 253 Crichton, Kyle 72, 73, 74, 85, 86 Criterion 19, 378 Crowninshield, Frank 390 Cultural Studies 12, 383, 413, 415 Cusk, Rachel 1, 328, 411, 415

Canada 111, 178, 233, 238 Cannan, Mary 116 Cambridge Edition 3, 12, 19, 148, 411 capitalism 7, 167, 176, 237, 316 Carpenter, Edward 223 Carswell, Catherine 75, 116, 172, 180 Cather, Willa 72 Catholicism 83, 98, 217 Celticism 117, 224 censorship 1, 12, 375, 376, 387, 412, 413 Ceylon 118, 122, 135, 137 Chambers family 20, 301, 369 Haggs Farm 20, 301 Chambers, David 301 Chambers, Jessie 20, 75, 78, 89, 107, 348, 358, 367, 368, 369 Chapala 97, 98, 104, 143 Chaplin, Charlie 393 Charleston 388 Chaucer, Geoffrey 43 charades 189 Chesterton, G. K. 368 childbirth 135, 153, 154, 258 Chilchui 49, 103, 104, 105 China/Chinese 121, 129, 256, 350 Christian/Christianity 36, 58, 90, 93, 133, 151, 208, 224, 356, 357, 359, 360, 361 cinema see film Close Up (magazine) 395 clothing / costume 22, 23, 35, 43, 44, 114, 149, 184, 185, 191, 337 colonialism 7, 130, 134, 135

Dahlberg, Edward 323 Daily Express 384, 390, 391 Daily News 368, 369 Daily Telegraph 232 dandy 328, 331, 333, 335, 336, 337, 341, 342 Darwin, Charles 112, 129, 170, 328, 329, 336 de Beauvoir, Simone 408 decadence 59, 60, 65, 226 Delaney, Shelagh 150 Delavenay, Emile 71, 223 Deleuze, Gilles 11, 49, 237, 329, 349 Dell, Ethel M. 385 depression 10, 56, 61, 90, 202, 204, 211 Derbyshire 22 Derrida, Jacques 349 The Dial 25, 27, 73, 94, 367, 375, 376, 377 dialect 8, 10, 156, 157, 158, 185, 266, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284, 368, 371 dialogism 10, 276, 282, 283, 286, 287, 313, 315, 396 Dickens, Charles 38, 107, 108, 113, 277 disability 1, 3 divorce 71, 124, 171, 172, 188, 248 domesticity 19, 20, 29, 81, 153, 154, 160, 175, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 230, 238, 248, 384, 392, 396, 398 Dos Passos, John 395 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 318 Duckworth, Gerald 394

Index

Duncan, Isadora 339, 340 Dunmore, Helen 409, 411 Eagleton, Terry 315 Eastwood 17, 25, 72, 75, 154, 159, 174, 175, 277, 301, 368, 410 Mechanics’ Institute Library 159 ecology 5, 10, 11, 49, 312, 313, 319, 324, 327, 328, 331, 338, 342, 350 ecopoetics 353 The Egoist 232, 373, 374, 378 Eliot, George 17, 38, 78, 277, 407 Eliot, T. S. 4, 36, 39, 42, 132, 378, 384, 404, 409, 411 Epstein, Jean 395, 396 Empire 6, 7, 27, 84, 107, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 143 English Review 19, 367, 369, 370, 374, 376, 378 English Studies 2, 414 Enlightenment 36, 40, 328 eroticism 9, 43, 44, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 73, 183, 184, 193, 205, 217–40, 350, 386 ethnicity 4, 6, 7, 26, 130, 233, 385 eugenics 138, 139 European Union 311, 313 Evening News 384, 387, 388, 392, 393, 398 exile 2, 5, 18, 20, 225, 235, 240, 409 existentialism 170, 194, 311, 323 Faber & Faber 377, 384 Falk, Bernard 393 Fanon, Frantz 136, 138 Fascism 104, 116, 117, 131, 132, 314, 315, 316, 389 Faulkner, William 348 feminism 1, 2, 55, 66, 237, 329, 349, 350, 407, 408, 413 femininity 8, 21, 22, 198, 211, 234, 391, 394, 407 Feigel, Lara 2, 13, 412, 415 Fielding, Henry 38, 43, 78 film 12, 25, 238, 239, 272, 383, 384, 385, 393, 394, 395, 396, 399, 407 Ben Hur 395 Film Weekly 394 flapper 12, 388, 394 Flaubert, Gustave 73, 74, 75

435

fin-de-siècle 383, 387 Forster, E. M. 219, 220, 226, 239, 240, 384, 398 Freewoman/New Freewoman 373 Freud, Sigmund 40, 41, 57, 59, 62, 219, 233, 237, 247, 254, 291, 394 Frick, Ernst 7, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63 Frost, Robert 373 Galsworthy, John 178, 179 Gargnano 19, 20, 313 Garnett, David (‘Bunny’) 56, 66, 236 Garnett, Edward 48, 54, 58, 59, 63, 65, 67, 72, 73, 85, 108, 147, 229, 368, 369 The Cearne 65, 368, 378 Ghiselin, Brewster 395 Gill, Peter 149, 186 Gissing, George 71, 74 Glyn, Elinor 385, 394 Goethe, J. W. von 37, 43, 47 Golden Book Magazine 393 gothic 122, 176, 179, 222 Gøtzsche, Kai 97, 99 Greece / Greek 28, 40, 218, 339, 340, 350 Greene, Graham 239 Gross, Otto 7, 55–66 Gross, Frieda 58, 60–2 Guattari, Félix 237, 310, 349 Haeckel, Ernst 351, 352 Haraway, Donna 184 Hardy, Thomas 107, 108, 171, 172, 178 Harlem Renaissance 142, 144 Harpur, Charles 370 Harrison, Austin 369, 370, 374, 376, 378 Harrison, Jane 28 Hauptmann, Gerhart 8, 53, 147, 150–61 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 12, 348, 373, 407, 408, 409, 410 Heidegger, Martin 198 Hemingway, Ernest 348 Heseltine, Philip 112 Hocking, William Henry 224, 225 Hodgson, Ralph 169 Hoggart, Richard 415 Holbrook, May 110, 111 Hollywood 384, 393, 394, 395 Home Office 377

436Index

Homer, Odyssey 21 homosexuality 9, 65, 66, 183, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240 Hopkin, Sallie 63 Hopkin Hilton, Enid 159 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 354 Hueffer, Ford Madox (Ford) 39, 72, 74, 367, 369, 370 Hughes, Langston 7, 141, 142, 408 Hughes, Mary Christine 387 Hughes, Ted 349, 354, 406 Hull, E. M. 385 The Sheik 385 Hunt, Violet 72 Huxley, Aldous 30, 235, 409 Ibsen, Henrik 58, 85, 158, 159 Imagism 373, 374 Ireland/Irish 19, 98, 116, 138, 147, 150, 154, 155, 156, 157, 385 Isherwood, Christopher 9, 239, 240 Italy 6, 19, 20, 23, 27, 29, 37, 112, 116, 170, 180, 188, 313, 322 Jaffe, Edgar 55, 60 Jaffe, Elsa 7, 57, 61 Jameson, Fredric 197 Jamie, Kathleen 353 Jazz 142, 385, 388, 396 Jennings, Blanche 186, 187 Jew / Jewish 41, 131, 132, 228, 317, 318, 396 J. H. R., ‘The Ugliness of Women’ 392, 393 John Bull 3, 4 Johnson, Willard (‘Spud’) 97, 225, 378 Jonathan Cape 20 Joyce, James 8, 39, 46, 75, 141, 147–61, 223, 265, 266, 282, 348, 371, 411 Ulysses 39, 46, 141, 159, 160, 223, 265 Jung, Carl 59, 62 Juta, Jan 23, 25 Kant, Immanuel 37, 40, 44, 47, 393 Keats, John 43, 175 Keynes, John Maynard 236, 237 Kiowa ranch 20, 24, 27, 28, 29, 72 Kitchen Sink drama 150

Klein, Melanie 292 Koteliansky, S. S. 108, 116, 117, 118, 392 Kristeva, Julia 404 Laughing Horse 32, 378 Lawrence, D. H. ‘Blutbrüderschaft’ 65, 223, 231 centenaries of 3, 13, 403, 404, 405 ‘Englishness’ 17, 53, 54, 123, 414 illness and 20, 190, 192, 207, 222, 230, 302 ‘leadership novels’ of 132, 220 ‘Memoranda’ of 386 working class 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 408 Works of Essays, Articles and other Non-Fiction ‘ – And if Women Were Supreme…’ 392 Apocalypse 258, 338 A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ 179 ‘Aristocracy’ 124 ‘Art and the Individual’ 368 Assorted Articles 388 ‘The Bogey Between the Generations’ 387 ‘Climbing Down Pisgah’ 28, 170 ‘The Crown’ 9, 29, 192, 193, 218, 229 ‘Democracy’ 117, 118, 175 ‘Enslaved by Civilisation’ 197 Fantasia of the Unconscious 41, 116, 184, 245, 251, 255, 389 ‘Foreword’ to Pansies 395 ‘Foreword’ to Women in Love 101, 227, 315 ‘Goats and Compasses’ 219 ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’ 36 ‘Introduction to These Paintings’ 43 ‘John Galsworthy’ 178, 179, 254 ‘Laura Philippine’ 387, 388, 390 ‘Making Pictures’ 329, 342 ‘Man is a Hunter’ 325 ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’ 180, 211 ‘Morality and the Novel’ 189, 249, 309, 310, 322, 325 Movements in European History 129 ‘Myself Revealed’ 171, 181, 369 ‘Nobody Loves Me’ 198, 203 ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ 197, 198, 248

Index

‘On Being a Man’ 130, 135, 138, 211 ‘Over-Earnest Ladies’ (‘Insouciance’) 388, 390 Phoenix 334 ‘Poetry of the Present’ 352 Pornography and Obscenity 43, 177, 179, 385, 386 ‘Prologue’ to Women in Love 225, 228 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 41, 219, 254, 350 ‘The Real Thing’ 48 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine 29, 129, 313, 324 ‘Sex Appeal’ (‘Men and Peacocks’) 393, 394, 398 ‘The State of Funk’ 197, 249 Studies in Classic American Literature 8, 12, 22, 26, 27, 89, 90, 93, 97, 108, 119, 121, 130, 136, 137, 413, 414 ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ 40, 170, 175, 258 ‘Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb’ 385 ‘When She Asks “Why?” ’ 387 ‘Why the Novel Matters’ 252, 348 ‘Woman in Man’s Image’ (‘Give Her a Pattern’) 390, 391 Novels Aaron’s Rod 6, 7, 22, 116, 119, 132, 141, 166, 222, 223, 230, 301, 318, 410 The Boy in the Bush 6, 10, 108, 109, 121, 123, 297 Kangaroo 4, 6, 109, 113, 115–24, 132, 225, 231, 296, 318, 398, 410 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 23, 29, 49, 119, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 174, 179, 198, 202, 220, 252, 277, 278, 294, 325, 385, 386, 396, 413 The Lost Girl 6, 67, 103, 110, 114, 121, 171, 303, 395 Mr Noon 7, 53, 55, 64, 65, 110, 297 Paul Morel 250 The Plumed Serpent 6, 8, 26, 50, 98, 103, 104, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 171, 231, 315, 386, 398 Quetzalcoatl 98, 104, 136, 138, 139, 140

437

The Rainbow 2, 7, 48, 59, 71, 73, 75, 76, 83, 84, 103, 114, 130, 133, 134, 135, 191, 226, 232, 247, 248, 249, 256, 259, 276, 278, 282, 283, 285, 293, 296, 302, 317, 320, 413 Sons and Lovers 7, 8, 19, 25, 36, 71, 73, 79, 81, 84, 85, 93, 99, 100, 142, 165, 172, 173, 175, 176, 191, 198, 205, 209, 226, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 258, 278, 294, 302, 304 The Trespasser 71, 79, 159, 294 The White Peacock 73, 79, 83, 110, 171, 172, 226, 295, 296, 304, 369 Women in Love 7, 8, 9, 24, 40, 42, 59, 60, 65, 71, 76, 84, 86, 100, 101, 114, 130, 133, 135, 151, 166, 170, 178, 191, 193, 198, 199, 203, 205, 208, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 233, 234, 235, 236, 238, 246, 294, 296, 298, 299, 315, 316, 317, 332, 333, 357, 395, 412 Paintings Boccaccio Story 334 Close-Up (Kiss) 393 Dance Sketch 338, 339, 340 The Lizard 341 Red Willow Trees 331, 333, 334, 335, 338 Resurrection 337, 338 Yawning 340 Plays A Collier’s Friday Night 8, 149, 158, 183, 185, 186, 187 The Daughter-in-Law 110, 111, 112, 113, 149, 153, 154, 155, 158, 183 David 9, 149, 231 The Fight for Barbara 64, 183, 187, 188 The Married Man 64, 183, 190 The Merry-Go-Round 183, 190 Touch and Go 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 183, 193 The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd 148, 149, 156, 172, 183, 187, 372 Poems ‘A Doe at Evening’ 332 ‘A Husband Dead’ (‘A Man Who Died’) 370 ‘All of Roses’ 372 ‘Almond Blossom’ 363, 376

438Index

Amores 351, 356 ‘The Apostolic Beasts’ (‘The Evangelistic Beasts’) 375, 376 ‘At the Window’ 369, 370 ‘A Woman and her Dead Husband’ 371 ‘A Youth Mowing’ 371 ‘Baby Tortoise’ 376 ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia’ 373 ‘Bare Fig-Trees’ 335 ‘Bat’ 376 ‘Bells’ 378 Birds, Beasts and Flowers 319, 350, 356, 360, 362, 363, 367, 374, 375, 376, 377 ‘Birthday’ 372 ‘The Bride’ 93 ‘Broadcasting to the G. B. P.’ 399 ‘Climbing Down’ 310 Complete Poems 351 ‘Constancy of a Sort’ 374 ‘Cry of the masses’ 384 ‘Cypresses’ 376 ‘Dreams Old and Nascent’ 369 ‘Ecce Homo’ 374 ‘Ego-bound women –’ 231 ‘Elephant’ 376 ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ 187, 232, 374 ‘The Evening Land’ 317, 376 ‘Fidelity’ 362 ‘Fig’ 350 ‘Film Passion’ 393 ‘Fireflies in the Corn’ 372 ‘Fish’ 318, 319, 376 ‘For the Heroes Are Dipped in Scarlet’ 231 ‘Frost Flowers’ 374 ‘Gloire de Dijon’ 350 ‘The Great Newspaper Editor to his subordinate’ 389 ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’ 377 ‘Humming-Bird’ 375 ‘The jeune fille’ 387 ‘Kisses in the Train’ 370 ‘Lizard’ 341, 382 Look! We Have Come Through! 309, 360, 371, 374 Love Poems and Others 368, 370 ‘Manifesto’ 361

‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’ 375 ‘Memories’ (‘The End’) 372 ‘Mountain Lion’ 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 324 ‘The Mowers’ 370, 371 Nettles 193, 384, 389, 396 ‘New Heaven and Earth’ 309, 325, 361, 362 ‘Night Songs’ 369 ‘November by the sea –’ 377 ‘O start a revolution –’ 168 ‘The oxford voice’ 399 Pansies 2, 8, 167, 168, 169, 231, 357, 367, 377, 378, 387, 395, 396, 413 ‘Peach’ 350, 362 ‘Piano’ 35, 272, 273, 275 ‘Pomegranate’ 350, 363, 375, 376, 377 ‘Purple Anemones’ 377 ‘The Revolutionary’ 375 ‘Riches’ 168 ‘The root of our evil –’ 181 ‘St. John’ (‘Saint John’) 375 ‘Saint Matthew’ 375, 376 ‘The Sea’ 374 ‘Service of All the Dead’ (‘Giorno dei Morti’) 372, 373 ‘The Ship of Death’ 193, 194 ‘Sigh No More’ 370 ‘Snake’ 319, 349, 375, 376, 377 ‘Snap-Dragon’ 370 ‘Sorrow’ 370 ‘To let go or to hold on –?’ 181, 382 ‘The Triumph of the Machine’ 378 ‘Turkey-Cock’ 376 ‘Violets’ 370 ‘The Virgin Mother’ 93 ‘Virgin Youth’ 231 ‘Wages’ 168 ‘Weariness’ (‘Sorrow’) 372 ‘When I went to the circus –’ 377 ‘When I went to the film –’ 393 ‘The Wild Common’ 11, 231, 348, 351, 356, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362 ‘Worship’ 318 -Short Fiction and Novellas ‘A Modern Lover’ 300 ‘A Prelude’ 301 ‘The Blind Man’ 220, 221 ‘The Captain’s Doll’ 160, 192

Index

‘Daughters of the Vicar’ 177, 178 The Escaped Cock 335, 337 ‘The Flying-Fish’ 302, 303 ‘The Fox’ 48, 49, 192, 221, 233, 238, 301 ‘Glad Ghosts’ 293 ‘Hadrian’ 301 ‘In Love’ 386 ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’ 229 ‘The Ladybird’ 191 ‘The Last Laugh’ 396, 397 ‘The Last Straw’ (‘Fanny and Annie’) 301 ‘Lessford’s Rabbits’ 8, 173 ‘Love Among the Haystacks’ 302 ‘The Lovely Lady’/ The Lovely Lady (volume) 142, 396, 397 ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ 295, 299 ‘Monkey Nuts’ 191 ‘The Mortal Coil’ 317 ‘None of That!’ 386 ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ 267, 271, 272, 304, 372 ‘Once – !’ 55 ‘The Primrose Path’ 110, 111, 112, 113 ‘The Princess’ 85, 99, 103 ‘The Prussian Officer’ / The Prussian Officer (volume) 7, 73, 82, 83, 84, 193, 220, 231, 295, 296 ‘Two Blue Birds’ 386 ‘Strike-Pay’ 173, 175 ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ 10, 142, 165, 176, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 303, 304, 396, 397 ‘Samson and Delilah’ 304 ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ 304 St Mawr 6, 8, 97, 99, 103, 119 ‘The Thimble’ 317 ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’ 82, 83 ‘Tickets Please’ 191 ‘The Vicar’s Garden’ 110 The Virgin and the Gipsy 177, 178 ‘The White Stocking’ 293 ‘The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear’ 303 ‘The Wilful Woman’ 97 ‘The Witch à la Mode’ 300 ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ 6, 49, 99, 102, 103, 171, 385 Travel Writing ‘Certain Americans and an Englishman’ 92

439

‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ 92 Sketches of Etruscan Places 29, 30, 339 ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ 27, 28, 92, 99, 101, 323 ‘Indians and an Englishman’ 27, 92, 94, 324 ‘Indians and Entertainment’ 27, 95, 96, 99, 104 ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance’ 101 ‘The Lemon Gardens’ 19, 20, 322 Mornings in Mexico 6, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 101, 140 ‘Pueblos and an Englishman’ 92, 94, 96 ‘San Gaudenzio’ 320, 321 Sea and Sardinia 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 334 ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ 20, 320 ‘Taos’ 92, 94 Twilight in Italy 7, 19, 20, 26, 27, 29, 65, 66, 313, 320 Lawrence, Ada 174, 372 Lawrence, Arthur 344 Lawrence, Frieda (Weekley) 1, 7, 20, 21, 24, 25, 53, 54–67, 72, 97, 98, 99, 110, 111, 117, 121, 171, 222, 224, 313, 371, 372, 373, 374, 391, 396 Lawrence, Lydia 174, 292, 302 League of Nations 23 Leavis, F. R. 2, 5, 17, 223, 265, 266, 274, 312, 414, 415 lesbianism see also homosexuality 9, 191, 192, 219, 231, 232, 233, 238 Lessing, Doris 67, 406, 408, 409 Lewis, C. Day 239 Lewis, Wyndham 25, 26 London 23, 72, 110, 113, 115, 117, 133, 148, 149, 180, 190, 230, 336, 359, 367, 368, 369, 371, 373, 377, 384, 387 -Croydon 171, 190, 313, 369 London Mercury 367, 378 Lowell, Amy 12, 172, 373, 374, 381 Luhan, Mabel Dodge 1, 25, 90, 91, 94, 96, 102, 105, 121, 137, 138, 140, 145, 224, 367, 410 Luhan, Tony 91, 121, 137 McAlmon, Robert 377 McKay, Claude 7, 141, 408

440Index

Mackenzie, Compton 72 MacLeod, Alison 1, 411, 415 McLeod, Arthur 372 MacNeice, Louis 239 Magnus, Maurice 180, 181, 211, 217, 295 Mahler, Margaret S. 291, 292, 294, 297, 300 Mailer, Norman 224, 406 Malamud, Bernard 246, 252, 254, 263 Manchester Guardian 4, 149 Mann, Thomas 75, 217 Mansfield, Katherine 72, 239, 245, 318, 348, 407, 408 Marsden, Dora 373 Marsh, Edward 169, 172, 370, 373 Georgian Poetry 169, 370, 373, 379 Marx, Karl (Marxism) 175, 176, 179, 224 masculinity 8, 20, 49, 180, 189, 197, 202, 205, 206, 208, 319 matriarchy 57, 59, 66, 190, 392 Maupassant, Guy de 75, 85, 86 Melville, Herman 22, 89, 91, 108, 137, 223 Messel, Rudolf 394 Methuen 171 Metz 53, 60, 61, 83, 371 Merrild, Knud 97, 314 Middleton, Richard 218 Miller, Henry 224, 237, 406 Millett, Kate 2, 103, 131, 224, 237, 348, 350, 408 misogyny 49, 103, 135, 154, 224, 312, 350, 389, 390 Modern Girl 387, 394 Mohr, Max 147 Monbiot, George 313, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 324 Mond, Alfred 369 Monroe, Harriet 371, 373, 374, 376, 378, 381, 382 Moore, George 71, 73, 74 Moore, Harry T. 223 Moore, Marianne 12, 367, 377 Morrell, Ottoline 17, 18, 237 Morrison, Arthur 74 Mountsier, Robert 117, 123, 374, 375, 376, 381, 382, 394 Murry, John Middleton 72, 137, 140, 222, 223, 224, 245, 318, 376, 377, 378, 392, 393

The Nation 223 Naturalism 46, 71, 73, 75, 83 Nazism 132, 314 The New Age 175, 368 New Journalism 383 new materialism 11, 347, 348, 350, 351, 362, 363 New Republic 367, 375, 376, 381 The New Statesman 226, 373 New Woman 387 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice 395 New York Times 390 New York Times Magazine 27 New York World 72 New Zealand 113 Nietzsche, Friedrich 40, 41, 46, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 199, 204, 234 Nin, Anais 407, 408, 419 Nordau, Max 219 Nottingham 8, 19, 25, 56, 57, 58, 59, 80, 112, 113, 159, 190, 313, 410 nurse/nursing 115, 186, 190, 204, 206, 227, 294 Oaxaca 25, 26, 27, 104 O’Casey, Sean 157, 158 obscenity 1, 12, 73, 237, 317, 385, 392, 399, 412 Obscene Publications Act 2, 73 The Observer 149 Oedipus complex 57, 237, 291, 294 Olley, Arthur E. 387, 391, 400 Olson, Charles 349, 350, 351, 406 Orage, A. R. 368 Orioli, Giuseppe 166 Osborne, John 150 ‘Otherness’ 11, 19, 20, 31, 49, 90, 105, 114, 119, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 305, 324, 325, 330, 334, 347, 353, 360, 361 Owusu, Derek 8 Palms 378 Paris 2, 3, 85, 133, 141, 148 patriarchy 7, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 65, 173, 205, 207, 224, 391 Pearn, Nancy 12, 377, 386, 387, 388, 391, 394, 398

Index

phallicism 224, 231, 350 Pinker, J. B. 171, 374, 375 Pinter, Harold 149 Plath, Sylvia 235, 349, 405, 408 Plato/Platonic 230, 236, 356, 357 Poe, Edgar Allan 86 Poetry 371, 372, 373, 374, 376, 378 polygamy 124 postcolonialism 132, 140, 144, 349 posthumanism 5, 11, 49, 310, 312, 313, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 362 Potter, Stephen 234 Pound, Ezra 12, 39, 131, 148, 158, 160, 370, 371, 373, 384 poverty 43, 60, 74, 157, 172, 174, 178 primitivism 23, 28, 31, 130, 133, 134, 135, 319, 338 Proust, Marcel 35, 36, 75, 237 Pueblo Indian 25, 28, 29, 92, 102, 104, 324 Purnell, Idella 378 Queer 9, 191, 219, 220, 223, 226, 229, 239, 240, 329 racism 8, 91, 104, 120, 122, 130, 131, 134, 135, 312, 314, 315 radio 12, 29, 251, 383, 384, 385, 396, 398, 399–400 Rananim 67, 111, 117, 123 Rancière, Jacques 220 regionalism 5, 8, 17, 19, 31, 154, 156, 158, 159, 161, 277, 313, 371 repression 35, 41, 57, 60, 80, 93, 174, 176, 178, 197, 198, 204, 205, 220, 221, 222, 237, 254, 278, 299, 300, 397 Revnes, Maurice S. 394 Rhys, Jean 348 Rich, Adrienne 349 Richards, I. A. 274 Richardson, Dorothy 75, 395 Richardson, Samuel 37, 38, 43, 44, 45 Rilke, Rainer Maria 197 Romanticism 38, 39, 45, 57, 404 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 37, 38, 40, 44, 47, 253 Royal Literary Fund 172 Russell, Bertrand 115, 132, 236, 245, 315

441

Russell, Ken 238 Rydell, Mark 238 Santa Fe 24, 28, 91, 100 Savage, Henry 204, 214, 218 Schloffer, Frieda 7, 57 Schopenhauer, Arthur 53, 62, 393 Scotland / Scotch 116, 121, 155, 156, 221 Scott-James, R. A. 368, 369, 378, 379 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 184, 240 Seltzer, Thomas 394, 395 Seven Arts 317 sexism see also misogyny 348, 350, 393 sex novels 385, 395 Sexton, Anne 349 Shakespeare, William 190, 265 As You Like It 190 Hamlet 27, 42 Macbeth 45 Shaw, George Bernard 158, 373 Shelley, Percy B. 43, 66 Shorter, Clement 73 Sicily 19, 21, 23, 24 Sillitoe, Alan 25, 406 Sinclair, May 72 Skinner, Mollie 119, 123, 126, 297 Smart Set 370, 371, 380 Snyder, Gary 93, 349 socialism 77, 78, 116, 117, 118, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 168, 181, 193, 316, 368 Socratic 211, 212 Sontag, Susan 9, 237 Spectator 45, 313, 326 Spender, Stephen 236, 239 spinster 120, 184, 389 Squire, J. C. 367, 377, 378, 382 Stage Society 148, 149, 163 Stein, Gertrude 233 Sterne, Laurence 37, 43 Stevenson, Robert Louis 89, 108 Storey, David 406 Strachey, Lytton 226 strike (mining industry) 75, 76, 153, 154, 155, 156, 166, 173, 175, 189, 193 Strindberg, August 85 Stylistics 10, 265, 266, 267, 269, 271, 277, 278, 281, 282, 284, 286, 287 suffragism 63, 316, 384, 392

442Index

Equal Franchise Act 392 suicide 39, 61, 84, 151, 159, 180, 245, 388 Sunday Dispatch 384, 393 Susan the cow 29 Swinburne, Algernon 43 Switzerland/Swiss 60, 67, 388 Symonds, John Addington 225 Synge, J. M. 147 Sydney 108, 109, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 398 Taormina 19 Taos 19, 24, 25, 27, 29, 72, 90, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 105, 146, 376 Taylor, Rachel Annand 190 The Times 86, 149, 172 Thayer, Scofield 375, 376, 377 Thomas, Dylan 406 Tolstoy, Leo 38 Torrence, Ridgely 367, 368, 375 T. P.’s & Cassell’s Weekly 388 unemployment 184, 188, 189, 190, 192 utopia 9, 76, 98, 109, 111, 123, 124, 140, 219 Valentino, Rudolph 385, 393 van Gogh, Vincent 322 Vanity Fair 12, 384, 388, 390, 393 Van Vechten, Carl 136 Victorian 38, 39, 240, 336, 350, 387 Virginia Quarterly Review 387 virginity 83, 93, 120, 124, 210, 232, 343, 391 Vizetelly, Henry 73 von Richthofen family 54, 56 Wagner, Richard 53, 339 Wain, John 406

Wales/Welsh 116, 155 War, First World 17, 19, 29, 35, 148, 171, 223, 224, 227, 232, 237, 315, 389, 414 War, Second World see also Nazism 132 Warner Brothers 395, 399 Waterhouse, Keith 406 Weber, Alfred 55, 57, 58, 61 Weber, Max 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62 Weekley, Ernest 59, 64 Wells, H. G. 74, 120, 126 West, Rebecca 408, 419 Wheelock, Ruth 374, 375 White, Walter 136 Whitman, Walt 22, 89, 217, 225 widow 174, 184, 188 Wilson, Charles 166, 167, 176, 180 Wilde, Oscar 39, 43, 236 Williams, Raymond 158, 403, 405, 414, 415 Williams, Tennessee 406 Williams, William Carlos 93, 348, 373, 406 Wilson, Frances 1, 4, 412, 415, 419 wireless see radio Woolf, Virginia 252, 282, 348, 384, 407 The Word 117 Wordsworth, William 43, 45 Workers’ Educational Association 166 Worthen, John 1, 3, 56, 62, 111, 131, 154, 155, 174, 175, 411, 412 Wright, Richard 7, 141, 142, 143, 146 Wright, Willard Huntington 370, 371 Yeats, W. B. 147, 158, 197 Zola, Émile 6, 7, 71–82, 84, 85, 86 Germinal 71, 75, 76, 77, 81, 84 L’Assommoir 75, 77 #MeToo 143